The problem with this, as I see it, is that it cuts both ways. If search results imply that Glen Beck did something unsavory to a young girl in 1990, Google could find that they have to clean up those results as soon as someone complains about it. Even more so for autocomplete suggestions. This is an awkward and dangerous path for Google to try and walk. I really think they're better off by washing their hands of any editiorial culpability and hiding behind the shield of "proceedurally generated content".
Still, I really hope that Mr. Volokh gets nominated to the Supreme Court some day. There are some other members of the Volokh Conspiracy that I'd be happy to see on the court as well.
I don't know why you would. If you've been to a big box hardware store lately, you'd see that there are quite a few LED bulbs available now (rated at 20-30 years) for half that price.
Also, generally speaking, LED bulbs don't burn out, but they do burn down. Heat damages them over time (that's why they've got giant heat-sinks) and they produce less light. The 20-25 year life on the bulb is when they predict it will be down to 70% brightness. And that's why I'm installing 75W or 90W equivilents instead of 60W. Also, if it costs me less to light a room, I want it brighter. Most rooms in my house are on dimmer switches, so there's really now downside to installing a brighter bulb.
Apparently you don't work in product development or technical support. First of all, all of the OEMs who build home computers don't want those extra features in the home version. The reason is that a lot of unqualified customers will start experimenting and causing problems. Those features won't be set up or used correctly. And when the problems start, that means more angry customers calling tech support. This is expensive and time consuming for the manufacturer (who is expected to provide the front line support due to the pricing they receive from Microsoft).
Frankly, Microsoft is learning to simplify. Windows 7 came in 6 different versions for the x86 platform. This is 2. It also makes sense. Why should the home users be subsidizing the development of buisness class features that they don't want or need? This really is about as good as we can expect from Microsoft.
If someone is tampering with their meter, they are a criminal and should be prosecuted. Everyone who tampers with their meter raises the rates for honest customers, like me. Most utilities are natural monopolies and their pricing is tightly regulated. Yes, whoever built meters that are so easily tampered with should be sued out of existance as well.
Lastly, having pricing that more accurately reflects the cost of the power supplied potentially creates more efficient usage. While some power plants can be spun up and down very easily, others (like nuclear) have a fairly static output. So if you can shift some things from high demand times to low demand times, power becomes cheaper for everyone. I run my dishwasher in the middle of the night (it has a delayed start option, so I can set it and forget it). For responsible people, this is a win all around.
Their point is that the arrangement of items that are public domain or otherwise free can still be protected by copyright. However, this is a very narrow protection. If Boundless is using their textbook to create a 'free' clone, it's quite possible that they're crossing the line of infringement. This is very much a gray area of copyright.
The first place I worked had an enclosure decorated with strands of randomly blinking christmas lights. It was a piece of equipment that I didn't know what it was used for. I think I was there a year before someone explained to me that it wasn't functional and had not been in operation for almost a decade.
They have.jp domain names that could potentially be siezed. That would be highly disruptive. I'm sure that they also have assets in Japanese banks and do business inside the country. In short, they have plenty of assets under the jurisdiction of Japanese courts should they fail to comply with the court's order. Not being an expert on the local laws of Japan, I can't tell you how relevant the location of the physical server is, but I'd bet it's not that important to the case at hand.
According to my dad, it was quite common in the 1960s for him and his buddies to skip out to the local pizza joint over the lunch hour and down the thing with a pitcher of beer. Dad wasn't really the scholarly sort, though.
I also brew beer. I would say that the biggest danger in brewing is just the risk in injuring your back from lifting 60 pound carboys full of beer. The second biggest problem is the dilema of wether or not to drink some of your ill advised creations.
Some people have money that they don't know what to do with. My Camry is 13 years old and running just fine. Burns a bit of oil, but 2 quarts a month is cheaper than a replacing the head and much cheaper than a new car. My previous car (a Plymouth Breeze) had issues. Things on that broke frequently. Engine was worked on twice while under warranty. It had several leaks and a broken AC when I finally said FU and donated it to an automotive repair school. I expect to keep driving the Camry for a few more years before replacing it. Gotta choose carefully: when a car lasts for 15 years, it's a lot like getting married.
Regulated would probably have been a better choice of words than licensed. Whatever. I didn't mod myself up. The point being, that a 15' parabolic dish does have passive effects (I've seen a 18 inch dish cause undesired intereference to a WiFi hotspot a few feet away), and apparently it is signifigant enough that the FCC requires public notice.
First of all, these are 15 feet across. That's huge. They also generate passive effects. The dish itself is a parabloic reflector, and for a unit of this size, can have unintended consequences on equipment located nearby. I don't understand quite how it all works, but the FCC requires permits for antennas above a certain db gain, and these would definately qualify for that.
Actually, an unsubscribe link has a greater than 99% probability of belonging to spam.
I wrote my own spam filter. A few of them actually. The current incarnation has a few nice things going for it. It starts with a SMTP proxy which relays things to the mail server. Does white/black/gray listing and statistical filtering. It couples with an Outlook add in for the ongoing bayesian training. It needs a bit more polishing, but I eventually intend to release it public domain.
A few other notes on filtering: spam is primarily identified by the text in the body of the email. Ham is primarily identified by the header information. Certainly they both get used, but the Ham headers are nearly impossible to duplicate. There are a surprising number of header tokens that are also unique to spam (certain encodings, etc.) Things that get incorrectly identified tend to be new sources of ham and spam advertising something new. In any event, about once a month, I'll get a burst of spam from some new unidentified source, but other than that, there's nothing that hits my inbox. Once in a while, someone who hasn't been whitelisted will get a bounce, but I'm satisfied with the system performance.
What kind of business plan would that be? It's certainly not going to maximize their network infrastructure investment.
I'm really not surprised by this at all. No one, not Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint can produce the infrastructure to match the data demands of all the smart phones out there. You've got people streaming music and videos all day long. You've got people using their phones as the internet connection for their computer. There simply isn't enough over the air bandwidth available to meet these demands. So either you've got to go to throttlling or tiered pricing. And I think most people are going to find throttling to be more palatable.
If you'd read the article, you'd see that there has been some back-and-forth with the patent office. Most of his claims were invalidated and some were then later reinstated. He had semi-successfully sued Microsoft, had the judgement overturned, and then later reached a settlement (undisclosed, but estimated to be in the realm of $100 million). Worth noting is that Microsoft was not allowed to present evidence of prior art at trial. Why that would be, I have no idea - I'm not a patent lawyer. In any event, in terms of this guy not acting on his claims, that's just an indictment of how slow the legal and patent processes move.
Certainly, there's no question that by the time his patent application was publicly published, much less granted, everything in there was in common use. Frankly, if you strip out all of the buzzwords like hypermedia, it boils down to something as simple as downloading and running a script. That's it. And there's plenty of prior art that existed in 1994 for all of the claims listed in the application.
By decrypting the drive, the defendant is demonstrating that she knows the password. That makes her a witness against herself. The judge is trying to dance around this one by saying that they can't use that fact in court, which is an admission that this is an otherwise unconstitutional order. This flat out stinks and should not be tolerated.
There's nothing suspicious. Zynga is fairly straightforward about what they do: take existing popular games and clone them. Zynga has the R&D muscle to polish up the graphics and get them out the door in a fairly expeditious fashion. Now, at times, they will simply buy out these games. They tried to buy Tiny Tower before cloning it. Frankly, there's no shortage of earlier games that Tiny Tower is imitating either. All this is right now, is free publicity for both Tiny Tower and Dream Heights. As long as this battle is fought in the media and not the courts, they both win.
The police will have the authority to pull over an autonomous vehicle. Even in a perfect libertarian utopia, the police will have the authority to pull over an autonomous vehicle.
Liability insurance on the first generations of autonomous vehicles will be insanely expensive.
These things might work great when they're new, but I shudder to think of what the ongoing certification process will requrie as they age. Cars are mechanical things. They break down. They fail in unexpected ways. My wife is a fine driver under ideal conditions, but she's been in several fender benders. The other driver has always been at fault, but they're the kind of things a better driver would recognize and avoid. There's a lot of stupid on the road that I've managed to avoid over the years and I just can't see a self driving car doing that. On the other hand, the self driving car would (hopefully) be doing fewer stupid things as well. It's nice that it can drive on sunny california roads. How well will it do in a Minnesota blizzard?
It's a temporary situation. All the manufacturing demand is already creating a rise in wages in China and other countries. Long term, wages in the US will fall and they'll rise in China until they eventually meet in the middle.
Or you could also take the reverse view that the US and western Europe are the abberation. Most of the world lives in deplorable conditions. Working in a factory in China would be a step up for them. And if you took these manufacturing jobs out of China, what would those people do? They work in these factories because that's the best option they have.
If you really wanted to change things, here's what you do: start a social security type program that gives everyone an investment account. Can't take out capital, but you can receive dividends. You won't see results immediately, but after 50 years, you'll have an entirely different social and economic landscape.
I don't want to get out of the switch block. I want to continue to the following case. See the snippet below. I run into this type of situation a lot, only instead of 3 scenarios, I might be working with 20 and the alternative is a bunch of very awkward if statements. It's kind of sad that I've been working in C# for a decade and am just learning this, but you get so used to being told "don't use goto" and doing things a certain way that you overlook an option that is a bettery way of doing things.
switch (x) {
case 1:// do something then do case 2
goto case 2;
case 2:// do something different
break;
case 3:// do case 3...
break; }
OMG, someone is trying to take a tedious job and make it just the tiniest bit more fun. And they might even help us learn something in the process. Microsoft certainly isn't forcing you to install this little add-on. It's coming out of Channel 9, which is targeted more towards amature and hobby programmers. One of their main sections is Coding4Fun. Don't be a hater.
Actually, I wasn't even aware (until today) that C# had a goto statement. And I've also found a legitimate use for it as well: In a switch statement, control can not implicitly fall through from one case to the following case. Adding a goto statement deals with that problem. This can fix some awkward code I've written recently (using a lot of if statements).
You say that your developers are MS guys at heart? Then go with the MS stack to develop this. Your developers are your biggest expense, and Microsoft licensing for nonprofits is completely reasonable. As much as you might want to do everything open source, sometimes it's more important to get the job done in a timely fashion.
The last 2 failed TVs I've personally seen have been failed electrolytic caps on the power supply card. Look for a cap with the lid bowed up a bit, find a replacement part from DigiKey or Mouser, and take a soldering iron to it. The manufacturer of one wanted over $300 for a replacement board for an older 42" plasma. Fixed it with a $4 part, and a bit of bravery. Remember, electrolytics are polarity sensitive (look at the old cap for reference; the PCB should have markings as well)
I completely disagree. A modern TV requries enough processing power to decode and display HDTV. It's all handled in firmware. It's really not a big step to add a NIC and stream media from any arbitrary network source.
The problems that I see: Standards - or lack thereof. There seem to be only a few common platforms out there such that you don't have to rewrite your app to work on 20 different platforms, however, I expect this to get worse before it gets better. Games - building a standard environment for games will be problematic (see standards above and the whole PC gaming industry). Also requires a lot more processing power than simply decoding video. Early adoption - we're still in the infancy here and anyone buying a smart TV in the next 2-3 years is likely to get bit on the ass as technology changes and their system is no longer supported. The upside is that you then turn it back to a dumb set and use a set-top box.
In any event, if I were buying a TV right now, I'd probably insist on something that can run Netflix and stream files from my PC. It's one fewer remote control and device to add to the living room. And with as cheap as sets are getting these days, I'm not that worried about replacing it after 5 years.
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The problem with this, as I see it, is that it cuts both ways. If search results imply that Glen Beck did something unsavory to a young girl in 1990, Google could find that they have to clean up those results as soon as someone complains about it. Even more so for autocomplete suggestions. This is an awkward and dangerous path for Google to try and walk. I really think they're better off by washing their hands of any editiorial culpability and hiding behind the shield of "proceedurally generated content".
Still, I really hope that Mr. Volokh gets nominated to the Supreme Court some day. There are some other members of the Volokh Conspiracy that I'd be happy to see on the court as well.
I don't know why you would. If you've been to a big box hardware store lately, you'd see that there are quite a few LED bulbs available now (rated at 20-30 years) for half that price.
Also, generally speaking, LED bulbs don't burn out, but they do burn down. Heat damages them over time (that's why they've got giant heat-sinks) and they produce less light. The 20-25 year life on the bulb is when they predict it will be down to 70% brightness. And that's why I'm installing 75W or 90W equivilents instead of 60W. Also, if it costs me less to light a room, I want it brighter. Most rooms in my house are on dimmer switches, so there's really now downside to installing a brighter bulb.
Apparently you don't work in product development or technical support. First of all, all of the OEMs who build home computers don't want those extra features in the home version. The reason is that a lot of unqualified customers will start experimenting and causing problems. Those features won't be set up or used correctly. And when the problems start, that means more angry customers calling tech support. This is expensive and time consuming for the manufacturer (who is expected to provide the front line support due to the pricing they receive from Microsoft).
Frankly, Microsoft is learning to simplify. Windows 7 came in 6 different versions for the x86 platform. This is 2. It also makes sense. Why should the home users be subsidizing the development of buisness class features that they don't want or need? This really is about as good as we can expect from Microsoft.
If someone is tampering with their meter, they are a criminal and should be prosecuted. Everyone who tampers with their meter raises the rates for honest customers, like me. Most utilities are natural monopolies and their pricing is tightly regulated. Yes, whoever built meters that are so easily tampered with should be sued out of existance as well.
Lastly, having pricing that more accurately reflects the cost of the power supplied potentially creates more efficient usage. While some power plants can be spun up and down very easily, others (like nuclear) have a fairly static output. So if you can shift some things from high demand times to low demand times, power becomes cheaper for everyone. I run my dishwasher in the middle of the night (it has a delayed start option, so I can set it and forget it). For responsible people, this is a win all around.
Their point is that the arrangement of items that are public domain or otherwise free can still be protected by copyright. However, this is a very narrow protection. If Boundless is using their textbook to create a 'free' clone, it's quite possible that they're crossing the line of infringement. This is very much a gray area of copyright.
The first place I worked had an enclosure decorated with strands of randomly blinking christmas lights. It was a piece of equipment that I didn't know what it was used for. I think I was there a year before someone explained to me that it wasn't functional and had not been in operation for almost a decade.
They have .jp domain names that could potentially be siezed. That would be highly disruptive. I'm sure that they also have assets in Japanese banks and do business inside the country. In short, they have plenty of assets under the jurisdiction of Japanese courts should they fail to comply with the court's order. Not being an expert on the local laws of Japan, I can't tell you how relevant the location of the physical server is, but I'd bet it's not that important to the case at hand.
According to my dad, it was quite common in the 1960s for him and his buddies to skip out to the local pizza joint over the lunch hour and down the thing with a pitcher of beer. Dad wasn't really the scholarly sort, though.
I also brew beer. I would say that the biggest danger in brewing is just the risk in injuring your back from lifting 60 pound carboys full of beer. The second biggest problem is the dilema of wether or not to drink some of your ill advised creations.
Some people have money that they don't know what to do with. My Camry is 13 years old and running just fine. Burns a bit of oil, but 2 quarts a month is cheaper than a replacing the head and much cheaper than a new car. My previous car (a Plymouth Breeze) had issues. Things on that broke frequently. Engine was worked on twice while under warranty. It had several leaks and a broken AC when I finally said FU and donated it to an automotive repair school. I expect to keep driving the Camry for a few more years before replacing it. Gotta choose carefully: when a car lasts for 15 years, it's a lot like getting married.
Regulated would probably have been a better choice of words than licensed. Whatever. I didn't mod myself up. The point being, that a 15' parabolic dish does have passive effects (I've seen a 18 inch dish cause undesired intereference to a WiFi hotspot a few feet away), and apparently it is signifigant enough that the FCC requires public notice.
First of all, these are 15 feet across. That's huge. They also generate passive effects. The dish itself is a parabloic reflector, and for a unit of this size, can have unintended consequences on equipment located nearby. I don't understand quite how it all works, but the FCC requires permits for antennas above a certain db gain, and these would definately qualify for that.
Actually, an unsubscribe link has a greater than 99% probability of belonging to spam.
I wrote my own spam filter. A few of them actually. The current incarnation has a few nice things going for it. It starts with a SMTP proxy which relays things to the mail server. Does white/black/gray listing and statistical filtering. It couples with an Outlook add in for the ongoing bayesian training. It needs a bit more polishing, but I eventually intend to release it public domain.
A few other notes on filtering: spam is primarily identified by the text in the body of the email. Ham is primarily identified by the header information. Certainly they both get used, but the Ham headers are nearly impossible to duplicate. There are a surprising number of header tokens that are also unique to spam (certain encodings, etc.) Things that get incorrectly identified tend to be new sources of ham and spam advertising something new. In any event, about once a month, I'll get a burst of spam from some new unidentified source, but other than that, there's nothing that hits my inbox. Once in a while, someone who hasn't been whitelisted will get a bounce, but I'm satisfied with the system performance.
What kind of business plan would that be? It's certainly not going to maximize their network infrastructure investment.
I'm really not surprised by this at all. No one, not Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint can produce the infrastructure to match the data demands of all the smart phones out there. You've got people streaming music and videos all day long. You've got people using their phones as the internet connection for their computer. There simply isn't enough over the air bandwidth available to meet these demands. So either you've got to go to throttlling or tiered pricing. And I think most people are going to find throttling to be more palatable.
If you'd read the article, you'd see that there has been some back-and-forth with the patent office. Most of his claims were invalidated and some were then later reinstated. He had semi-successfully sued Microsoft, had the judgement overturned, and then later reached a settlement (undisclosed, but estimated to be in the realm of $100 million). Worth noting is that Microsoft was not allowed to present evidence of prior art at trial. Why that would be, I have no idea - I'm not a patent lawyer. In any event, in terms of this guy not acting on his claims, that's just an indictment of how slow the legal and patent processes move.
Certainly, there's no question that by the time his patent application was publicly published, much less granted, everything in there was in common use. Frankly, if you strip out all of the buzzwords like hypermedia, it boils down to something as simple as downloading and running a script. That's it. And there's plenty of prior art that existed in 1994 for all of the claims listed in the application.
By decrypting the drive, the defendant is demonstrating that she knows the password. That makes her a witness against herself. The judge is trying to dance around this one by saying that they can't use that fact in court, which is an admission that this is an otherwise unconstitutional order. This flat out stinks and should not be tolerated.
Me can mock Muslims also. The Hindu joke just worked better. Also, Hindus are better able to take a joke without resorting to violence.
There's nothing suspicious. Zynga is fairly straightforward about what they do: take existing popular games and clone them. Zynga has the R&D muscle to polish up the graphics and get them out the door in a fairly expeditious fashion. Now, at times, they will simply buy out these games. They tried to buy Tiny Tower before cloning it. Frankly, there's no shortage of earlier games that Tiny Tower is imitating either. All this is right now, is free publicity for both Tiny Tower and Dream Heights. As long as this battle is fought in the media and not the courts, they both win.
Let's be clear about a few things here:
The police will have the authority to pull over an autonomous vehicle. Even in a perfect libertarian utopia, the police will have the authority to pull over an autonomous vehicle.
Liability insurance on the first generations of autonomous vehicles will be insanely expensive.
These things might work great when they're new, but I shudder to think of what the ongoing certification process will requrie as they age. Cars are mechanical things. They break down. They fail in unexpected ways. My wife is a fine driver under ideal conditions, but she's been in several fender benders. The other driver has always been at fault, but they're the kind of things a better driver would recognize and avoid. There's a lot of stupid on the road that I've managed to avoid over the years and I just can't see a self driving car doing that. On the other hand, the self driving car would (hopefully) be doing fewer stupid things as well. It's nice that it can drive on sunny california roads. How well will it do in a Minnesota blizzard?
It's a temporary situation. All the manufacturing demand is already creating a rise in wages in China and other countries. Long term, wages in the US will fall and they'll rise in China until they eventually meet in the middle.
Or you could also take the reverse view that the US and western Europe are the abberation. Most of the world lives in deplorable conditions. Working in a factory in China would be a step up for them. And if you took these manufacturing jobs out of China, what would those people do? They work in these factories because that's the best option they have.
If you really wanted to change things, here's what you do: start a social security type program that gives everyone an investment account. Can't take out capital, but you can receive dividends. You won't see results immediately, but after 50 years, you'll have an entirely different social and economic landscape.
I don't want to get out of the switch block. I want to continue to the following case. See the snippet below. I run into this type of situation a lot, only instead of 3 scenarios, I might be working with 20 and the alternative is a bunch of very awkward if statements. It's kind of sad that I've been working in C# for a decade and am just learning this, but you get so used to being told "don't use goto" and doing things a certain way that you overlook an option that is a bettery way of doing things.
switch (x) // do something then do case 2 // do something different // do case 3...
{
case 1:
goto case 2;
case 2:
break;
case 3:
break;
}
OMG, someone is trying to take a tedious job and make it just the tiniest bit more fun. And they might even help us learn something in the process. Microsoft certainly isn't forcing you to install this little add-on. It's coming out of Channel 9, which is targeted more towards amature and hobby programmers. One of their main sections is Coding4Fun. Don't be a hater.
Actually, I wasn't even aware (until today) that C# had a goto statement. And I've also found a legitimate use for it as well: In a switch statement, control can not implicitly fall through from one case to the following case. Adding a goto statement deals with that problem. This can fix some awkward code I've written recently (using a lot of if statements).
You say that your developers are MS guys at heart? Then go with the MS stack to develop this. Your developers are your biggest expense, and Microsoft licensing for nonprofits is completely reasonable. As much as you might want to do everything open source, sometimes it's more important to get the job done in a timely fashion.
The last 2 failed TVs I've personally seen have been failed electrolytic caps on the power supply card. Look for a cap with the lid bowed up a bit, find a replacement part from DigiKey or Mouser, and take a soldering iron to it. The manufacturer of one wanted over $300 for a replacement board for an older 42" plasma. Fixed it with a $4 part, and a bit of bravery. Remember, electrolytics are polarity sensitive (look at the old cap for reference; the PCB should have markings as well)
I completely disagree. A modern TV requries enough processing power to decode and display HDTV. It's all handled in firmware. It's really not a big step to add a NIC and stream media from any arbitrary network source.
The problems that I see:
Standards - or lack thereof. There seem to be only a few common platforms out there such that you don't have to rewrite your app to work on 20 different platforms, however, I expect this to get worse before it gets better.
Games - building a standard environment for games will be problematic (see standards above and the whole PC gaming industry). Also requires a lot more processing power than simply decoding video.
Early adoption - we're still in the infancy here and anyone buying a smart TV in the next 2-3 years is likely to get bit on the ass as technology changes and their system is no longer supported. The upside is that you then turn it back to a dumb set and use a set-top box.
In any event, if I were buying a TV right now, I'd probably insist on something that can run Netflix and stream files from my PC. It's one fewer remote control and device to add to the living room. And with as cheap as sets are getting these days, I'm not that worried about replacing it after 5 years.