That's silly. DVD manufacturers do not have the same regulatory requirements as a pharmaceutical company. Having worked at big pharma until recently, and having been involved in this very aspect of their operations, I can say that the concern is not as much over "omg your product sux" as it is over things like adverse event reporting. That's not to say they want an open forum for people to bitch about their products - there's a lot of medical misinformation out there and they like to not provide a mouthpiece for that.
But adverse event reporting ("bad side effects") is something which a company has a specific regulated requirement to respond to in a particular way. This is what happens: a doctor gives product X to a patient. Maybe it was on-label application of the product and maybe it wasn't. Maybe the patient is in a risk group which is recommended against receiving the product. Doesn't matter. That patient has either a related or an unrelated event occur as a result. The doctor comes seeking advice on how to proceed.
In an "open forum" several things can happen as a result. First, someone who doesn't represent the company can respond and give advice which is incorrect and not based in medical fact, but the doctor could act on that advice, worsening the patient's condition. Second, the event could be very time critical, and the report could potentially not be seen right away, or could get missed in a deluge of other noise (sometimes the writings of these doctors is not any better than average Internet noise, and even if you're looking for it, you might miss that this is an adverse event report). In the mean time the patient needs medical care, and their doctor is waiting on a response.
This is part of the problem, but not the entire problem. What I do with my personal game time is my own business, and the game company has no business trying to set up requirements surrounding that. They shouldn't get to know when I'm playing and when I'm not, that's information I own and which they have no right to.
But most importantly in 5 or 10 years, when their online presence servers have gone away and my game no longer works at all, they shouldn't be allowed to have thus deprived me of something I paid for. I still play Diablo II and StarCraft to this day.
I understand the stated reasons for the always-on requirement, and I agree that there's some value to it. But let me choose whether I want to participate in that value or not. Let me play single player offline, and let that character be unavailable for online play since it's an offline-only character. Maybe I choose to play single player online so that I can use that character for multiplayer and everyone can be assured there's no cheating involved. Maybe I don't. The choice should be mine, not theirs.
CDN stands for Content Distribution Network. The basic idea is they locate a variety of servers topologically close to you so that hop count goes down (reduced latency), and potential bottlenecks or core route disruptions have little or not affect on you.
And if you're going to dispose of an enemy, why do so in a manner that the government is sure to investigate?
Two things come to mind:
Doesn't the government investigate most unexpected deaths? Seems like there ought to be quite a few ways you could sabotage a plane which would not be evident due to the severity of the wreckage.
One of the major players in this case was the attorney general of that state. The same person who ultimately bears responsibility for investigating that incident
It says that they were set up to be a fallback authority with complete control to be able to modify votes in case the primary systems failed. Those who were responsible for overseeing the systems were sent home by agents of Blackwell, and during that time, control was sent to these fallback servers even though there was no evidence there had been any failed systems to spur it.
They could only steal votes if they were granted the failover scenario, and the architecture made it easy to do so should that have happened - so easy in fact that it appears evident that it was designed with this purpose in mind. Then, private contractors take control of things late in the evening of the election, transfer control to the fully-falsifiable system, then transfer control back, all without any evidence that there had been failures to trigger the transfer of control.
They had motive and opportunity, and the design of the system is such that any actual proof against tampering could be falsified without means of detection. You're right, it doesn't say "votes were tampered with," but the only remaining possible evidence would be a confession. The one man who began to disclose more details died in a mysterious plane crash shortly after.
I put myself through college without any outside assistance. I worked for 2 years as a janitor after high school, saving every penny I could before entering school, and continued working full time while in college to cover the costs. I graduated college 3.5 years later, magna cum laude, with a BS in Computer Science, and only around $1,700 in debt. None of my schooling was supported by grants or scholarships.
You don't have to come from money to succeed in college, you just have to have a greater than average level of determination. I can say since I was working so hard for my degree, I treated it with a lot more respect than I would have if I'd been getting a free ride from my parents; I think that helped me keep my GPA up, and certainly being a janitor taught me the meaning of hard work (I have never worked so hard prior or since, nor been looked down on by so many people in the process).
it automatically uploads any photos & videos to G+ as soon as you take them
What could possibly go wrong?
Not much, you opt into the feature, use settings to control when it will and won't upload (eg, wifi only, non-roaming only, while charging only, etc), and they are added to your profile in an unshared state by default (private to just yourself). Maybe you're thinking of something I haven't, but it seems like they covered the bases pretty well here.
As many as you allow it to, it's an option you have to opt-in to. There are options to control when you want to allow it to upload: * Only photos via mobile networks * Photos & videos via mobile networks * Photos & videos via wi-fi only
Plus there are other options for whether to allow upload when roaming, and whether to wait for the phone to be charging before doing an upload. There is a status message in Settings which tells you, for example, "Paused: waiting for WiFi".
The Android app is really nice in particular with respect to photos & videos - if you set the option for it, it automatically uploads any photos & videos to G+ as soon as you take them (you just use the native camera app, you don't even have to launch the G+ app, though you can do it that way too). They upload in an unshared state, you can then share them either through the G+ app or on the G+ website.
The integration is really nice, I shot a few photos of my daughter playing at the playground, and when I got home I reviewed and shared them on my desktop without having to even think about getting the photos off my phone.
I doubt they will be able to provide the same level of integration on iOS though, that sort of integration is something Apple will only allow for their own products.
especially if it would be difficult for a layperson to understand
See, here's the problem with the Skype arrangement. It talks about vestment in stock options, which is a pretty simple term most people who would be considering working at least in part for options can easily understand. Then in exactly a single sentence, mentions a different document, not presented with the contract, which document basically says, "Know that stuff about vestment? Just kidding, we take it back."
So on the surface it looks like the kind of contract a lay person can understand, and subtly under the surface is a single sentence which completely changes the meaning of the entire contract. You could hire a lawyer, but possibly even (s)he would miss this.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was struck down if challenged in court, but this investment firm just scored several billion dollars, even for a relatively hefty options exercise, they can probably sap that value out of you in legal fees.
Agreed, and in addition, the destruction or attempted destruction of civilian video of law enforcement activity by any interested party (including government agents or subjects of the police activity) should be considered destruction of evidence, and treated accordingly. It should also be possible to subpoena the contents of this video by any interested party.
Patrol car video should continue recording for at least 10 minutes after the stop recording event happens (no turning the camera off and on during a stop), and it should be illegal for a police officer to intentionally attempt to prevent the recording via any means.
In sort, recordings on both sides should be used to protect either party of a police action, not just the police officer.
Lack of genetic diversity is a bad thing, whether it's from the GM process or traditional breeding techniques. The thing with traditional breeding techniques is that for the most part it happens on a small scale. Farmers individually select the most productive seeds from their own fields for planting next year. Perhaps it's simply a matter of scale, but nothing you have said suggests to me that GM processes as they exist today produce genetic variation on par with or greater than traditional techniques. GM practices as they typically exist today promote genetic monoculture more strongly than traditional techniques to. This is not an inherent flaw with GM practices, but it is an outcome nonetheless.
I'm going to shut down the whole discussion WRT niche plants entirely even though I have plenty more to say on the subject; I never claimed anything about niche plants with relation to GM products. Those are your words, not mine, and I perceive this tangent to be a red herring or a straw man, maybe both, so I don't believe it advances the conversation in the least.
GURT isn't in place to protect against cross-pollination, it's in place to protect GM companies from having their product grown without someone paying for a license. Distributing GURT seeds absolutely increases reliance on the GM company, which is incredibly damaging to the populations which need improved crops the most - third world farmers. GM companies backed away from it only in a public sense; as cited by me earlier, they still advance the technology internally. It's a matter of time before they feel the public has been sufficiently worn down such that they are able to get away with introducing it on a commercial level.
What I'm saying is that a lot of this stuff isn't even related to the technology
Absolutely true. And what I'm saying that at least in the current GM culture it's impossible to separate the technology from the abuses of that technology in any practical manner. When the GM companies clean up their act, people will be a lot more receptive to the things they have to say. Unfortunately they've given the entire class of technology an enormous black eye, and it will probably be a long time before people are willing to believe what those companies have to say.
I trust those companies about as much as I trust the tobacco industry (a parallel I drew earlier in this conversation). I don't believe the public is well equipped to make evaluations as to the dangers or safety of GMO's, because I believe there is bias in the research, and I believe dissenting research is never published. I do believe they are not all as safe as the GM companies claim they are, and I think people are right to tread cautiously and demand additional oversight, as well as a right to choose whether they consume products with a GM component.
It all boils down to this: There's nothing wrong with genetic modification as a class of technology. But I don't trust the scientists and companies behind it to be honest about the dangers, not even with themselves. I think there's far too much hubris involved in thinking that we can produce a better species than the millions of years of evolution has produced. Sure in specific observable ways these GMO's will be superior, but in other unobserved ways they may be inferior. The characteristics we select for advancement will only sometimes be based on survivability (such as the potatoes in the article); they will also be selected for non-survivable characteristics such as yield or cosmetics (redder tomatoes, thinner orange skins, smaller grape leaves, etc). This may shut down gene lines which would have thrived in the wild, simply because the fruit is not the right shade of the right color.
You wouldn't blame conventional breeding for it, so why would you blame an old problem on new technology?
I wouldn't presume too much about what someone else would or wouldn't do if I were you. If traditional breeding techniques produced genetic monoculture, I certainly would blame them. But they don't. In fact, traditional breeding techniques produce widely varied genetic lines. Two major distinctions are: 1) a monolithic company pushing very hard to have as many farmers as possible producing crops from a single genetic line (one they happen to hold exclusive legal rights to produce), and 2) those plants typically are sterile, so no further advancement of the species is possible except that the owning company chooses to advance it. There's no longer any natural selection occurring in the wild, all selection is unnatural. GM products and GM companies absolutely are dramatically more likely to shut down gene lines than traditional techniques which promote genetic diversity. I don't trust humans to have this as figured out in terms of long term survivability of a species as I do the tried and true Darwinian method.
You'll notice that the problem I have here is not as much about GM products themselves as they are about the companies and techniques typically behind GM products. Unfortunately it's very difficult to separate the two in actual practice in the modern era. It's not the act of GM itself, it's the nearly 1.0 correlated actions surrounding typical GM product marketing & ownership enforcement techniques.
How often do you see salak, yacon, jujube, tef, marula, yellowhorn, chaya, ensete, jaboticaba, pawpaw, oca, fonio, agretti, kutjera, or garambullo? I'm guessing never, and genetic engineering isn't the reason why. It isn't technology, it's people.
I wouldn't presumed to have said so; you presume far too much. Each of these are not produced commercially not because they lack proper marketing, but because of various reasons from producing low yields per acre, requiring fairly specific growing environments and so being limited in where they can be grown, producing food which is not particularly appetizing, producing a fruit with very low shelf life, and so forth. The foods which are most popular to grow today are that way because they are tasty, simple to grow, have a large tolerance for growing environment, keep well, and produce a high yield per growing area.
Just to pluck one fruit out of your list, (I chose it because it's one we grew in my yard), the Paw Paw tree: the fruit does not keep well at all; it'd be essentially impossible to grow this crop for commercial reasons since it begins decaying almost immediately after picking. Traditional preservation techniques such as canning don't help much, and in fact you're recommended against it because canning Paw Paw has a high risk of botulism. It's also difficult to eat or prepare because it has a large number of inedible seeds all throughout the fruit, pitting it is difficult. Personally I never really cared for the taste; the peach and cherry trees growing nearby were much better targets for us as kids.
And I've never heard of any company selling sterile seed to third world countries... Again, old issue being blamed on a new technology for some reason.
Not being blamed on the technology, being blamed on the companies who couple them together with the technology. "Genetic Use Restriction Technology" does exist even if it is not being used commercially. It's something I think the big GM companies have backed away from solely because of public outrage, not because they recognize the many dangers associated with it. Monsanto, for example, continues to advance research in this area: "We’ve continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We’re on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off" (Terminator Technology Not
I agree that there's a lot of inappropriate FUD surrounding GM products, but there are also very good reasons for people to be concerned. GM products tend to be genetically homogenous, and that is very weak from an evolutionary context. It suggests that a new fungus, virus, insect, or other form of danger may arise which can destroy the entire plant line. Over-dependence on GM plants is a monumental leap backwards in terms of survivability to new threats.
Also GM companies have a pretty shady history and a lot of very dark actions in their past, and I don't trust them to make decisions which are good for anyone in the world other than their stockholders. For example, selling the third world seeds which will grow only sterile plants (removing their ability to be self sufficient). Suing farmers whose plants end up being fertilized with GM products from a neighboring field, and so forth. I trust GM companies to be honest about GM plants and livestock about as much as I trust tobacco companies to be honest about cigarettes in the late 80's and early 90's.
I think there's nowhere near enough regulation over GM products. I don't think any private entity should be allowed to commercially produce sterile plants or livestock, and I think they should be required to provide funding for genetic seed banks to protect against the damage they do to genetic diversity (I think they should not be allowed to run those seed banks themselves). I think there's a lot of value to GM products, but I think there's a lot of potential danger too, and I don't trust any private entity to honestly tell me about the dangers along with the benefits.
You could still save a lot of bandwidth, and protect against phoneme exposure by having fixed packet size transmission happen for a short interval after speaking occurred (perhaps randomly between 0.5 and 2 seconds). You'd be able to tell when people were speaking, but lose visibility into the cadence of the words. That shouldn't be that large an impact on the overall bandwidth consumption but should pretty much shut down this side channel.
But Apple hasn't covered devs at all, they have only put out a press release saying that in their opinion, covering devs is unnecessary, because they think Apple's license covers the devs. That may bear out in court, but it may not. But either way, those devs who have been sued stand to lose a lot of money in legal fees unless Apple gives them a legal tool to shift the burden.
what I meant was no devs have paid lodsys yet, so there's no need for Apple to comepnsate.
Apple can offer indemnity before people have experienced losses (that's the whole business model of insurance companies which offer property indemnity). They don't have to wait for someone to have to pay Lodsys. By not offering proactive indemnity, they require individual developers to make the decision whether to fight at substantial expense, or just pay out for much less money.
Unless and until Apple offers indemnity, it puts individual developers at substantial financial risk, and offers them no alternative (it's not like you can write your own version of this function that sidesteps the patent, Apple will reject your application if you try).
they can't leave the devs to pay - that's bad PR and bad business because the devs used the API in good faith
I agree, but Apple has not said they intend to do anything other than letting devs pay, and since it's devs who are receiving the lawsuits, that is who would have to pay by default.
It seems like Apple has had a hard time lately commanding the same sort of media attention they have enjoyed in years past; I wonder how much of this is just a ploy to keep their name in the news while getting a dig in on the competition.
So if the comparison is mostly based on the software, why would Samsung have to show Apple 5 upcoming hardware models? As GP points out, square, black, touchscreen isn't exactly an incredibly novel design.
Offering developers indemnity doesn't mean Apple paying Lodsys, it means that Apple tells developers they'll adopt any damages the developers would have incurred. It also means that it's easy to shift any lawsuits from individual developers to Apple themselves. So Lodsys sues MacAppmaker, Inc., because of the indemnity, MacAppmaker, Inc. is able to move to have the defendant renamed as Apple; Lodsys can either accept that or risk having the case summarily dismissed.
It means that quickly it becomes a legal battle exclusively between Lodsys and Apple, as it should be. If Apple doesn't indemnify the developers, that means they each have to defend themselves independently, incurring substantial legal expenses even if the defense is successful, of which there is no guarantee.
Apple does not say it "thinks", their letter boldly states "Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license,"
And of what use is that to a small time developer who's being sued? In Apple's opinion is you're ok. They're certainly not going to phrase it that way, "Nah, you're probably fine, don't worry about it." The best this does is give developers an opportunity to claim good faith when the court is deciding whether to award punitive damages.
If Apple truly is as convinced as they claim they are, they'll indemnify their developers. The fact that they're not doing this suggests they're not as confident as they sound, and realize the suits will pass the summary judgment phase.
Actually I don't see this being as clear cut as that. Apple merely says it thinks developers are included in Apple's license. Apple does not offer to indemnify developers.
So depending on how clearly defined the licensing agreement is between Apple and Lodsys, developers may be protected, may not be protected, or maybe worse yet, could questionably be protected (causing a developer to have to defend themselves at great personal expense, with no guarantee of success).
Apple should indemnify developers as the EFF requested. Unless and until that happens, Lodsys is free to pursue suits against individual developers, and let the courts decide whether Apple's license covers the developer or not. Like defending yourself against an RIAA lawsuit, even if you win, it probably would have been cheaper to just pay them off.
If this wasn't possible, I have no idea what anyone would use a 32Gbyte or 64Gbyte SD-card for, it is an insane amount of storage for most digital cameras
Are you serious? If I'm out shooting for a day, it's not uncommon for me to pop off 1,200-1,500 photos. Storing RAW+JPEG on my Nikon D300, I can easily fill up a 32gb card (somewhere around the 1200 mark). My camera shoots 9 frames per second, so assuming I just shoot in 1 second bursts and make only one attempt at a given subject, that's only 133 subjects. I'm not even pro. If you're shooting a wedding, good luck taking less than 3,000 shots.
Cameras with larger sensors are out there. Maybe 64gb is overkill for a little point & shoot that can only take 1 shot per second tops, with a 5mp sensor, but those of us who are actually into photography may even still find it a little constraining.
To exceed reasonable doubt, they have to prove he faked the call, they can't just leave it hypothetical or they would just say, "You could've pulled the trigger," and be done with it.
I'm curious how that went for you after they found out it was tea in the bottle. As I understand it, the fact that you had an open alcohol container (regardless of what it's filled with - even if it's empty) could be considered to be a violation of the statute at least in some states. Of course a good cop would say, "Dude, think twice about that in the future, ok?" while a bad cop would probably haul you in just for the inconvenience.
The transaction tuples are fetched twice. Once to determine the correct max tuple, and a second time to actually get the tuple. This is a limitation of SQL itself.
Actually this probably doesn't happen for any modern RDBMS; the execution planner should be more intelligent than that. It certainly shouldn't happen if you do it as a join instead of a subselect, and with the benefit of an index, execution on even extremely large data sets should be trivial. If that's still too much, you can get closer to metal with stored procedures and control exactly what gets fetched and when.
My single biggest problem with SQL is that it is confused about who it's intended audience is. It is not clear if it is targeting programmers, DBAs or end users and it fails to serve any of these audiences particularly well.
I'm pretty sure that it's clear that it wants to target people who wish to query or manipulate the database, whomever that may be; I'm not sure I understand why it would matter what your job title is if you're attempting to perform the same task. That said, it probably is not meant for end users any more than Java or C++ or a Map/Reduce task are.
My next biggest problem with SQL is that relationships are not strongly typed/enforced
The rules are different for different database engines, but column types absolutely are enforced for joins (though of course you can use cast operations to bypass that). Complaining that you can join any two columns of the same or relatable type is silly. You can also pass an account balance into a procedural function which expects to receive a customer ID if there is a compatible prototype available as well. It's not the database's responsibility to enforce data semantics any more than it's a programming language's responsibility. Both will try to aid you when you're doing something which looks suspicious (joining varchar against int, for example), but it should never profess to be more knowledgeable about your data than the human (except when explicitly instructed to do so such as with constraints - which also are created by a human).
I won't profess that SQL is a perfect query language (I actually rather like XQuery myself), but it is the most powerful general purpose query language available, and any time it does fall short (there are such scenarios - you haven't mentioned any though), stored procedures can basically always make up the gap. There are things I dislike about it as well, and I am by no means an expert at it, but what frustrates me the most is when the NoSQL crowd makes bogus claims about reasons K/V stores are better when their claims are demonstrably false. K/V stores do have advantages, it'd be nice to have a meaningful conversation about those without having to wade through a sea of misunderstandings.
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I'm happy that big pharma is losing this option
That's silly. DVD manufacturers do not have the same regulatory requirements as a pharmaceutical company. Having worked at big pharma until recently, and having been involved in this very aspect of their operations, I can say that the concern is not as much over "omg your product sux" as it is over things like adverse event reporting. That's not to say they want an open forum for people to bitch about their products - there's a lot of medical misinformation out there and they like to not provide a mouthpiece for that.
But adverse event reporting ("bad side effects") is something which a company has a specific regulated requirement to respond to in a particular way. This is what happens: a doctor gives product X to a patient. Maybe it was on-label application of the product and maybe it wasn't. Maybe the patient is in a risk group which is recommended against receiving the product. Doesn't matter. That patient has either a related or an unrelated event occur as a result. The doctor comes seeking advice on how to proceed.
In an "open forum" several things can happen as a result. First, someone who doesn't represent the company can respond and give advice which is incorrect and not based in medical fact, but the doctor could act on that advice, worsening the patient's condition. Second, the event could be very time critical, and the report could potentially not be seen right away, or could get missed in a deluge of other noise (sometimes the writings of these doctors is not any better than average Internet noise, and even if you're looking for it, you might miss that this is an adverse event report). In the mean time the patient needs medical care, and their doctor is waiting on a response.
This is part of the problem, but not the entire problem. What I do with my personal game time is my own business, and the game company has no business trying to set up requirements surrounding that. They shouldn't get to know when I'm playing and when I'm not, that's information I own and which they have no right to.
But most importantly in 5 or 10 years, when their online presence servers have gone away and my game no longer works at all, they shouldn't be allowed to have thus deprived me of something I paid for. I still play Diablo II and StarCraft to this day.
I understand the stated reasons for the always-on requirement, and I agree that there's some value to it. But let me choose whether I want to participate in that value or not. Let me play single player offline, and let that character be unavailable for online play since it's an offline-only character. Maybe I choose to play single player online so that I can use that character for multiplayer and everyone can be assured there's no cheating involved. Maybe I don't. The choice should be mine, not theirs.
CDN stands for Content Distribution Network. The basic idea is they locate a variety of servers topologically close to you so that hop count goes down (reduced latency), and potential bottlenecks or core route disruptions have little or not affect on you.
And if you're going to dispose of an enemy, why do so in a manner that the government is sure to investigate?
Two things come to mind:
It says that they were set up to be a fallback authority with complete control to be able to modify votes in case the primary systems failed. Those who were responsible for overseeing the systems were sent home by agents of Blackwell, and during that time, control was sent to these fallback servers even though there was no evidence there had been any failed systems to spur it.
They could only steal votes if they were granted the failover scenario, and the architecture made it easy to do so should that have happened - so easy in fact that it appears evident that it was designed with this purpose in mind. Then, private contractors take control of things late in the evening of the election, transfer control to the fully-falsifiable system, then transfer control back, all without any evidence that there had been failures to trigger the transfer of control.
They had motive and opportunity, and the design of the system is such that any actual proof against tampering could be falsified without means of detection. You're right, it doesn't say "votes were tampered with," but the only remaining possible evidence would be a confession. The one man who began to disclose more details died in a mysterious plane crash shortly after.
I put myself through college without any outside assistance. I worked for 2 years as a janitor after high school, saving every penny I could before entering school, and continued working full time while in college to cover the costs. I graduated college 3.5 years later, magna cum laude, with a BS in Computer Science, and only around $1,700 in debt. None of my schooling was supported by grants or scholarships.
You don't have to come from money to succeed in college, you just have to have a greater than average level of determination. I can say since I was working so hard for my degree, I treated it with a lot more respect than I would have if I'd been getting a free ride from my parents; I think that helped me keep my GPA up, and certainly being a janitor taught me the meaning of hard work (I have never worked so hard prior or since, nor been looked down on by so many people in the process).
it automatically uploads any photos & videos to G+ as soon as you take them
What could possibly go wrong?
Not much, you opt into the feature, use settings to control when it will and won't upload (eg, wifi only, non-roaming only, while charging only, etc), and they are added to your profile in an unshared state by default (private to just yourself). Maybe you're thinking of something I haven't, but it seems like they covered the bases pretty well here.
As many as you allow it to, it's an option you have to opt-in to. There are options to control when you want to allow it to upload:
* Only photos via mobile networks
* Photos & videos via mobile networks
* Photos & videos via wi-fi only
Plus there are other options for whether to allow upload when roaming, and whether to wait for the phone to be charging before doing an upload. There is a status message in Settings which tells you, for example, "Paused: waiting for WiFi".
The Android app is really nice in particular with respect to photos & videos - if you set the option for it, it automatically uploads any photos & videos to G+ as soon as you take them (you just use the native camera app, you don't even have to launch the G+ app, though you can do it that way too). They upload in an unshared state, you can then share them either through the G+ app or on the G+ website.
The integration is really nice, I shot a few photos of my daughter playing at the playground, and when I got home I reviewed and shared them on my desktop without having to even think about getting the photos off my phone.
I doubt they will be able to provide the same level of integration on iOS though, that sort of integration is something Apple will only allow for their own products.
especially if it would be difficult for a layperson to understand
See, here's the problem with the Skype arrangement. It talks about vestment in stock options, which is a pretty simple term most people who would be considering working at least in part for options can easily understand. Then in exactly a single sentence, mentions a different document, not presented with the contract, which document basically says, "Know that stuff about vestment? Just kidding, we take it back."
So on the surface it looks like the kind of contract a lay person can understand, and subtly under the surface is a single sentence which completely changes the meaning of the entire contract. You could hire a lawyer, but possibly even (s)he would miss this.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was struck down if challenged in court, but this investment firm just scored several billion dollars, even for a relatively hefty options exercise, they can probably sap that value out of you in legal fees.
Agreed, and in addition, the destruction or attempted destruction of civilian video of law enforcement activity by any interested party (including government agents or subjects of the police activity) should be considered destruction of evidence, and treated accordingly. It should also be possible to subpoena the contents of this video by any interested party.
Patrol car video should continue recording for at least 10 minutes after the stop recording event happens (no turning the camera off and on during a stop), and it should be illegal for a police officer to intentionally attempt to prevent the recording via any means.
In sort, recordings on both sides should be used to protect either party of a police action, not just the police officer.
I feel you're trying to divert my points.
Lack of genetic diversity is a bad thing, whether it's from the GM process or traditional breeding techniques. The thing with traditional breeding techniques is that for the most part it happens on a small scale. Farmers individually select the most productive seeds from their own fields for planting next year. Perhaps it's simply a matter of scale, but nothing you have said suggests to me that GM processes as they exist today produce genetic variation on par with or greater than traditional techniques. GM practices as they typically exist today promote genetic monoculture more strongly than traditional techniques to. This is not an inherent flaw with GM practices, but it is an outcome nonetheless.
I'm going to shut down the whole discussion WRT niche plants entirely even though I have plenty more to say on the subject; I never claimed anything about niche plants with relation to GM products. Those are your words, not mine, and I perceive this tangent to be a red herring or a straw man, maybe both, so I don't believe it advances the conversation in the least.
GURT isn't in place to protect against cross-pollination, it's in place to protect GM companies from having their product grown without someone paying for a license. Distributing GURT seeds absolutely increases reliance on the GM company, which is incredibly damaging to the populations which need improved crops the most - third world farmers. GM companies backed away from it only in a public sense; as cited by me earlier, they still advance the technology internally. It's a matter of time before they feel the public has been sufficiently worn down such that they are able to get away with introducing it on a commercial level.
What I'm saying is that a lot of this stuff isn't even related to the technology
Absolutely true. And what I'm saying that at least in the current GM culture it's impossible to separate the technology from the abuses of that technology in any practical manner. When the GM companies clean up their act, people will be a lot more receptive to the things they have to say. Unfortunately they've given the entire class of technology an enormous black eye, and it will probably be a long time before people are willing to believe what those companies have to say.
I trust those companies about as much as I trust the tobacco industry (a parallel I drew earlier in this conversation). I don't believe the public is well equipped to make evaluations as to the dangers or safety of GMO's, because I believe there is bias in the research, and I believe dissenting research is never published. I do believe they are not all as safe as the GM companies claim they are, and I think people are right to tread cautiously and demand additional oversight, as well as a right to choose whether they consume products with a GM component.
It all boils down to this: There's nothing wrong with genetic modification as a class of technology. But I don't trust the scientists and companies behind it to be honest about the dangers, not even with themselves. I think there's far too much hubris involved in thinking that we can produce a better species than the millions of years of evolution has produced. Sure in specific observable ways these GMO's will be superior, but in other unobserved ways they may be inferior. The characteristics we select for advancement will only sometimes be based on survivability (such as the potatoes in the article); they will also be selected for non-survivable characteristics such as yield or cosmetics (redder tomatoes, thinner orange skins, smaller grape leaves, etc). This may shut down gene lines which would have thrived in the wild, simply because the fruit is not the right shade of the right color.
You wouldn't blame conventional breeding for it, so why would you blame an old problem on new technology?
I wouldn't presume too much about what someone else would or wouldn't do if I were you. If traditional breeding techniques produced genetic monoculture, I certainly would blame them. But they don't. In fact, traditional breeding techniques produce widely varied genetic lines. Two major distinctions are: 1) a monolithic company pushing very hard to have as many farmers as possible producing crops from a single genetic line (one they happen to hold exclusive legal rights to produce), and 2) those plants typically are sterile, so no further advancement of the species is possible except that the owning company chooses to advance it. There's no longer any natural selection occurring in the wild, all selection is unnatural. GM products and GM companies absolutely are dramatically more likely to shut down gene lines than traditional techniques which promote genetic diversity. I don't trust humans to have this as figured out in terms of long term survivability of a species as I do the tried and true Darwinian method.
You'll notice that the problem I have here is not as much about GM products themselves as they are about the companies and techniques typically behind GM products. Unfortunately it's very difficult to separate the two in actual practice in the modern era. It's not the act of GM itself, it's the nearly 1.0 correlated actions surrounding typical GM product marketing & ownership enforcement techniques.
How often do you see salak, yacon, jujube, tef, marula, yellowhorn, chaya, ensete, jaboticaba, pawpaw, oca, fonio, agretti, kutjera, or garambullo? I'm guessing never, and genetic engineering isn't the reason why. It isn't technology, it's people.
I wouldn't presumed to have said so; you presume far too much. Each of these are not produced commercially not because they lack proper marketing, but because of various reasons from producing low yields per acre, requiring fairly specific growing environments and so being limited in where they can be grown, producing food which is not particularly appetizing, producing a fruit with very low shelf life, and so forth. The foods which are most popular to grow today are that way because they are tasty, simple to grow, have a large tolerance for growing environment, keep well, and produce a high yield per growing area.
Just to pluck one fruit out of your list, (I chose it because it's one we grew in my yard), the Paw Paw tree: the fruit does not keep well at all; it'd be essentially impossible to grow this crop for commercial reasons since it begins decaying almost immediately after picking. Traditional preservation techniques such as canning don't help much, and in fact you're recommended against it because canning Paw Paw has a high risk of botulism. It's also difficult to eat or prepare because it has a large number of inedible seeds all throughout the fruit, pitting it is difficult. Personally I never really cared for the taste; the peach and cherry trees growing nearby were much better targets for us as kids.
And I've never heard of any company selling sterile seed to third world countries... Again, old issue being blamed on a new technology for some reason.
Not being blamed on the technology, being blamed on the companies who couple them together with the technology. "Genetic Use Restriction Technology" does exist even if it is not being used commercially. It's something I think the big GM companies have backed away from solely because of public outrage, not because they recognize the many dangers associated with it. Monsanto, for example, continues to advance research in this area: "We’ve continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We’re on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off" (Terminator Technology Not
I agree that there's a lot of inappropriate FUD surrounding GM products, but there are also very good reasons for people to be concerned. GM products tend to be genetically homogenous, and that is very weak from an evolutionary context. It suggests that a new fungus, virus, insect, or other form of danger may arise which can destroy the entire plant line. Over-dependence on GM plants is a monumental leap backwards in terms of survivability to new threats.
Also GM companies have a pretty shady history and a lot of very dark actions in their past, and I don't trust them to make decisions which are good for anyone in the world other than their stockholders. For example, selling the third world seeds which will grow only sterile plants (removing their ability to be self sufficient). Suing farmers whose plants end up being fertilized with GM products from a neighboring field, and so forth. I trust GM companies to be honest about GM plants and livestock about as much as I trust tobacco companies to be honest about cigarettes in the late 80's and early 90's.
I think there's nowhere near enough regulation over GM products. I don't think any private entity should be allowed to commercially produce sterile plants or livestock, and I think they should be required to provide funding for genetic seed banks to protect against the damage they do to genetic diversity (I think they should not be allowed to run those seed banks themselves). I think there's a lot of value to GM products, but I think there's a lot of potential danger too, and I don't trust any private entity to honestly tell me about the dangers along with the benefits.
You could still save a lot of bandwidth, and protect against phoneme exposure by having fixed packet size transmission happen for a short interval after speaking occurred (perhaps randomly between 0.5 and 2 seconds). You'd be able to tell when people were speaking, but lose visibility into the cadence of the words. That shouldn't be that large an impact on the overall bandwidth consumption but should pretty much shut down this side channel.
But Apple hasn't covered devs at all, they have only put out a press release saying that in their opinion, covering devs is unnecessary, because they think Apple's license covers the devs. That may bear out in court, but it may not. But either way, those devs who have been sued stand to lose a lot of money in legal fees unless Apple gives them a legal tool to shift the burden.
what I meant was no devs have paid lodsys yet, so there's no need for Apple to comepnsate.
Apple can offer indemnity before people have experienced losses (that's the whole business model of insurance companies which offer property indemnity). They don't have to wait for someone to have to pay Lodsys. By not offering proactive indemnity, they require individual developers to make the decision whether to fight at substantial expense, or just pay out for much less money.
Unless and until Apple offers indemnity, it puts individual developers at substantial financial risk, and offers them no alternative (it's not like you can write your own version of this function that sidesteps the patent, Apple will reject your application if you try).
they can't leave the devs to pay - that's bad PR and bad business because the devs used the API in good faith
I agree, but Apple has not said they intend to do anything other than letting devs pay, and since it's devs who are receiving the lawsuits, that is who would have to pay by default.
It seems like Apple has had a hard time lately commanding the same sort of media attention they have enjoyed in years past; I wonder how much of this is just a ploy to keep their name in the news while getting a dig in on the competition.
So if the comparison is mostly based on the software, why would Samsung have to show Apple 5 upcoming hardware models? As GP points out, square, black, touchscreen isn't exactly an incredibly novel design.
Offering developers indemnity doesn't mean Apple paying Lodsys, it means that Apple tells developers they'll adopt any damages the developers would have incurred. It also means that it's easy to shift any lawsuits from individual developers to Apple themselves. So Lodsys sues MacAppmaker, Inc., because of the indemnity, MacAppmaker, Inc. is able to move to have the defendant renamed as Apple; Lodsys can either accept that or risk having the case summarily dismissed.
It means that quickly it becomes a legal battle exclusively between Lodsys and Apple, as it should be. If Apple doesn't indemnify the developers, that means they each have to defend themselves independently, incurring substantial legal expenses even if the defense is successful, of which there is no guarantee.
Apple does not say it "thinks", their letter boldly states "Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license,"
And of what use is that to a small time developer who's being sued? In Apple's opinion is you're ok. They're certainly not going to phrase it that way, "Nah, you're probably fine, don't worry about it." The best this does is give developers an opportunity to claim good faith when the court is deciding whether to award punitive damages.
If Apple truly is as convinced as they claim they are, they'll indemnify their developers. The fact that they're not doing this suggests they're not as confident as they sound, and realize the suits will pass the summary judgment phase.
So, Apple developers are protected.
Actually I don't see this being as clear cut as that. Apple merely says it thinks developers are included in Apple's license. Apple does not offer to indemnify developers.
So depending on how clearly defined the licensing agreement is between Apple and Lodsys, developers may be protected, may not be protected, or maybe worse yet, could questionably be protected (causing a developer to have to defend themselves at great personal expense, with no guarantee of success).
Apple should indemnify developers as the EFF requested. Unless and until that happens, Lodsys is free to pursue suits against individual developers, and let the courts decide whether Apple's license covers the developer or not. Like defending yourself against an RIAA lawsuit, even if you win, it probably would have been cheaper to just pay them off.
If this wasn't possible, I have no idea what anyone would use a 32Gbyte or 64Gbyte SD-card for, it is an insane amount of storage for most digital cameras
Are you serious? If I'm out shooting for a day, it's not uncommon for me to pop off 1,200-1,500 photos. Storing RAW+JPEG on my Nikon D300, I can easily fill up a 32gb card (somewhere around the 1200 mark). My camera shoots 9 frames per second, so assuming I just shoot in 1 second bursts and make only one attempt at a given subject, that's only 133 subjects. I'm not even pro. If you're shooting a wedding, good luck taking less than 3,000 shots.
Cameras with larger sensors are out there. Maybe 64gb is overkill for a little point & shoot that can only take 1 shot per second tops, with a 5mp sensor, but those of us who are actually into photography may even still find it a little constraining.
you could've faked that call
To exceed reasonable doubt, they have to prove he faked the call, they can't just leave it hypothetical or they would just say, "You could've pulled the trigger," and be done with it.
I'm curious how that went for you after they found out it was tea in the bottle. As I understand it, the fact that you had an open alcohol container (regardless of what it's filled with - even if it's empty) could be considered to be a violation of the statute at least in some states. Of course a good cop would say, "Dude, think twice about that in the future, ok?" while a bad cop would probably haul you in just for the inconvenience.
Actually this probably doesn't happen for any modern RDBMS; the execution planner should be more intelligent than that. It certainly shouldn't happen if you do it as a join instead of a subselect, and with the benefit of an index, execution on even extremely large data sets should be trivial. If that's still too much, you can get closer to metal with stored procedures and control exactly what gets fetched and when.
I'm pretty sure that it's clear that it wants to target people who wish to query or manipulate the database, whomever that may be; I'm not sure I understand why it would matter what your job title is if you're attempting to perform the same task. That said, it probably is not meant for end users any more than Java or C++ or a Map/Reduce task are.
The rules are different for different database engines, but column types absolutely are enforced for joins (though of course you can use cast operations to bypass that). Complaining that you can join any two columns of the same or relatable type is silly. You can also pass an account balance into a procedural function which expects to receive a customer ID if there is a compatible prototype available as well. It's not the database's responsibility to enforce data semantics any more than it's a programming language's responsibility. Both will try to aid you when you're doing something which looks suspicious (joining varchar against int, for example), but it should never profess to be more knowledgeable about your data than the human (except when explicitly instructed to do so such as with constraints - which also are created by a human).
I won't profess that SQL is a perfect query language (I actually rather like XQuery myself), but it is the most powerful general purpose query language available, and any time it does fall short (there are such scenarios - you haven't mentioned any though), stored procedures can basically always make up the gap. There are things I dislike about it as well, and I am by no means an expert at it, but what frustrates me the most is when the NoSQL crowd makes bogus claims about reasons K/V stores are better when their claims are demonstrably false. K/V stores do have advantages, it'd be nice to have a meaningful conversation about those without having to wade through a sea of misunderstandings.