I think what is more likely is that someone came to the engineer and said they needed to get the data and nobody really bothered to think of the privacy concern since it was going to be used internally anyway. Sure, if the engineer was told that the requirements demanded better privacy, he could have stripped the payloads, but if someone asked you to just get the data, it's less likely you'd think of that as a problem.
I would redefine it as sloth on the part of the management for not considering the issues, as opposed to lazy engineers.
This is exactly what I was thinking, but I forgot to express it in my comment.
Looking through windows is different because the windows are obscuring the contents of the house, making it reasonable to assume that those contents are private.
Not so with broadcast SSIDs. It's called broadcast for a reason: you want people to see and know about it. If you don't, don't broadcast an SSID!
As for collecting the other information, in a sane world, that would be legal. This information is also broadcast, it's just that almost nobody who uses WiFi daily knows this. That information has every reasonable property of being publicly available. Hell, you receive all of it anyway, before the wireless card filters out the other packets and sends it on to the OS. But instead of securing our APs, we make laws that make receiving broadcast data illegal.
Basically, everyday people can't be expected to operate their home networks responsibly, so instead our laws start to make little technical sense.
Despite what everyone thinks (and how it seems to the uninformed) it very likely was accidental. If I was tasked to correlate Access Points to their locations, the simplest way would be to dump raw wireless traffic to one file, and raw GPS data to another. Later, you can zip them both up and run some analysis, and get the data you want out.
It'd be real easy to forget to filter the packets you dump to only anonymous, non-data-carrying packets. More than likely the people who designed it just forgot to, or figured it would be no big deal if they just never used that info. Sloppy engineering maybe, but certainly not malicious.
I suppose I'm not really answering the question in italics, but I'm interested anyway so I'll pose a metaquestion.
It's not illegal for Apple to decide what they want to sell in their App Store, and it's not illegal for them to attack alternate App sources. It's not even particularly immoral to most of the population. It is, however, tremendously immoral to the techie crowd and a few other groups.
However, what Apple is doing has been done before, many times. Almost every commercially successful game console has had the same walled garden: if you want to make a game, you have to agree to their terms. Apple is being a bit stricter in its terms, but in the end it still amounts to what most here would call censorship.
There was outrage before, but nothing compared to what I see against Apple today. At first I was prepared to pin it down as simple Apple-bashing, but it seems more powerful than that. Maybe we'll see a strong public movement towards personal freedoms with electronics.
My question is: Why are people so vocal in opposition to Apple's walled garden? Where were they for the last decade, through the XBOX and Playstation and GameCube/Wii? Why does the opposition today seem to be only against Apple?
(Full disclosure: I own an iPhone and iPad, and I love them. I also know I would never have bought them if I didn't think I could jailbreak them. They're useless to me stock, but perfect for me with root access. But I always feel a little sad whenever I use them; Apple's policy hurts.)
Someone could surely live inside that. An interesting question is whether the edge of our universe is itself an event horizon. This is a neat idea, for sure; it's also pleasingly symmetric.
During and after Katrina everyone attacked Bush, often very personal attacks for the Federal and even state responses to that event.
Yet here we are nearly two months after this started and there has been very little vitriolic attacking on the current President.
Hurricanes are well-studied and predictable, to some extent. Bush saw Katrina coming, he knew where it would hit, he knew how strong it was, and he was told how devastating it could be, and it was still a failure.
Oil leaks are not predictable. They're an eventuality, yes, and they're preventable, yes, but there was no weather report saying "tommorrow, 70% chance of massive explosion on oil rig. Take an umbrella."
The only problem is that the US is trying to get him to pay a fortune for damages, as if he created the vulnerability as opposed to exposing it.
If you walk into a china shop and kick over all the shelves, smashing all the china, then turn around and tell the shop owner, "These shelves should have been secured better," I'm willing to bet a jury would find you liable for damages.
I'm going to shoehorn my correction into the china shop metaphor, because it's more fun that way.
It'd be like if the china shop owner was actually an FBI agent, and after he locked up he opened his laptop and started looking at all his super-secret FBI stuff. Then, some guy behind him says "ooh that's some neat secret info," and it turns out there's a second door with no lock that this guy just had to open. Then the FBI charges him with stealing information and for money to install a new lock.
The point is, there are damages to charge for in this case, like how this guy stole information. However, asking for money to secure a system that they didn't know was insecure before the break-in is dumb.
If Jobs literally told a crowd that the sensor elements still capture a decent amount of photons, he just went up a notch in my awesome ladder. Unfortunately, he also would have gone up a notch in everyone else's nerdy ladder.
Ah, yes, thank you. I forgot to mention this in my post. The glass dust thing mentioned in the article is so large that it's wavelength is tiny, so any uncertainty in it's measurement would be tiny as well.
I'm not sure about the air molecules that they are trying to measure with this glass dust, but chances are they are also massive enough and fast enough that they have very little uncertainty about them, too.
The Uncertainty Principle only kicks in where the particle (wave packet) size and the wavelength of the observing "light" are approximately of the same order of magnitude. A "dust particle sized" (whatever that means) glass bead is much larger than the wavelength of visible light, else, you couldn't see it.
This is a huge misunderstanding of the uncertainty principle. This isn't about uncertainty in the experiments themselves; this is covered quite well by simple experimental error terms. This isn't even about measuring the position, and somehow knocking the particle out of its old path, though that can happen. This is a fundamental part of the universe: you cannot know perfectly, ever, a particle's position and momentum. No matter how perfect you make the experiments! It's like they're both stored in the same memory space, and getting more precise on one causes a loss in precision in the other as you eat up more space.
Where does this come from? Momentum, and therefore velocity, are related to the particle's wavelength (and yes, even normal matter has a wavelength!) When you measure the momentum, you know that the particle has a specific wavelength, so now its wavefunction spreads out according to that wavelength. This delocalizes the particle: it's likely to appear twice every wavelength, just about equally. You have no idea where! Conversely, if you measure the particle's position, the wavefunction collapses to a single spike right where you measured it to be. This spike is, practically, infinitely large, so the particle loses any well-defined wavelength it once had, so the momentum is now undefined!
Man, I have no idea what sort of fantasy world you live in; I hear all sorts of people dissing Apple on slashdot for this very reason. Yourself included.
OK, OK, OK. I'm going to repeat something I'm sure you've heard before. But on the off chance you haven't...
The root of this problem is write protection on the iPhone/iPad. Never forget that. It's not unreasonable for a phone to be write-protected like the iPhone is. It's not wonderful, but it's certainly been done before. The iPad is more iffy, for sure. I think Apple is getting away with it simply because of how similar the iPad and iPhone are.
Let's be clear on what Apple is asking, as well. They're saying, if you want to put Applications in our App Store, you have to use these development environments. That's not an unreasonable request. What's unreasonable is that there is no alternative to the App Store for putting programs on your device: they're write protected, our root problem. Don't miss the forest for the trees and focus on the API license terms.
Well, that's half-true. You can jailbreak, and put whatever you want on it. I've ported emacs to mine, and I'm halfway through TeX Live. It's annoying to have to do it yourself, and the iPhone and iPad should come jailbroken in a sane world, but there you have it. Jailbreaking has not yet been found illegal by any court in the US, and it's really up in the air right now.
The bottom line? Apple dictates what they will sell in their store. Whoop-de-doo. Apple won't let you write to your own device, except through them. Now there's the problem, but unfortunately a precedent has been set here already. The only people who care enough about it to speak out are the infocrats.
Keep in mind I agree with you, for the most part. I just think you're going about this the wrong way. The problem isn't Apple's developer terms, it's that you need to agree to those terms to develop at all without legal fears. People aren't staying quiet because it's Apple, it's just because this sort of thing has been happening for ages, and the general public has never cared. We have to get them to understand why they should care, and we can start effecting real change.
Even if there isn't, this is another observation that agrees with the existence of Gravitational Waves, as predicted by General Relativity. If there was such a thing, a merger between two supermassive black holes in a binary system will experience a gravitational wave recoil. In extreme cases, it'll be ejected from the galaxy, much like the one here.
There is tons of weak evidence for gravitational radiation, but if this is true, this is a great find.
A billion dollars is not a big number, and not really worthy of tooting ones horn over. Are you kidding me? And 50 million dollars for an industry isn't even enough to launch a magazine over. Wow.
Yep. Sure isn't. (and yes, I know this is not quite what you meant. I couldn't resist!)
and I think that everyone here is missing the point. It's not "wow, $50 million? that's a big industry!" It's more "wow, $50 million? OS hardware is growing fast from the ~$0 from about 5 years ago." And FYI, SparkFun Electronics, one of the companies listed, makes more than $10 million in annual revenue, which is some serious growth for one company in a new field. Couple that with sheer awesome, and you get a powerful combination.
I have no idea what version of emacs you tried to configure, but I have mine configured to use tabs only, and it was definitely not a hassle. It took me a few days, yes, but now it works exactly how I want it to.
If you ever give it another whirl, try (tab-width 4) and (c-basic-offset 4). This will force emacs to use tabs for all indentation.
Sure, configuration in lisp is certainly a bit harder, but it is also way more flexible. You can also configure emacs with the built-in configuration editor, too, if you like handy documentation with your settings.
Rubbish indeed. The DMCA has a ton of over-protective rules. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to say this has been upheld in any court, just that it's legally questionable. And I'm certainly not saying the laws are just.
(and your MacBook was never write-protected by anything as strong as Apple is using on their phones, so there was no protection to circumvent, which is unfortunately the key here.)
Jailbreaking gives write access to the iPhone (and iPad) file system, including write access to Apple's Fair Play libraries. It is not difficult, once you can write to the root, to replace this with dummy versions that let you play DRM'd songs that you didn't purchase. Similar things can be done with applications.
This is obviously not the primary reason people jailbreak, but it is covered under the DMCA because write protection can be necessary for copyright protection.
What's that got to do with the iPad? There's no law against jailbreaking it.
That is a questionable claim to make, whether we like it or not.
The DMCA prohibits circumvention of copy and write protection on a broad range of devices, which includes the iPhone and iPad. There are specific exemptions to this, which are generally exemptions to allow circumvention if it is towards increasing interoperability. However, these exemptions are created for specific cases, during a review process that occurs every few years or so. The EFF (god bless them) has been petitioning for the rights to circumvent DVD decryption, and more recently, for Blu-Ray decryption and jailbreaking. They have not been granted these exemptions, yet. It seems the review for last year has been postponed, though, so it doesn't look good.
There is, however, a specific exemption for circumvention to allow phones to work on cell networks they were not locked in to. This is especially ironic; Apple seems to be campaigning more strongly against unlocking, which lets you use the iPhone on other carriers, than jailbreaking, which simply gives you root access. Here, of course, unlocking is legal while jailbreaking may not be. The question to ask, though, is jailbreaking covered because you need a jailbroken phone to unlock it?
I'll let the lawyers and the EFF battle it out. I'll be sitting happy: I've just ported emacs to my iPad, and after I finish porting TeX Live, I'll be able to use it for everything I used my netbook for.
I can see how deleting the material would be obstruction of justice, and possibly how uninstalling a web browser could be (this could have been innocent, though that's not likely in this case).
I am extremely concerned, however, that clearing browser history and deleting files (especially when deleted securely by writing over them with zeroes) could be obstruction of justice. I clear my internet history regularly and delete files with secure removal methods... because I value privacy! I don't want any more information about myself on my various computers than I would be willing to tell anyone. Anything that I need to store that I don't trust everyone with, I encrypt.
God forbid I ever come under suspicion of anything, I bet telling a jury I have "encrypted files" would be enough to convict me of anything.
The first proof is clean and elegant if not particularly rigorous, but it is a perfect example to show to buddies. It shows what needs to be shown quickly and simply.
The second, however, is an abuse of induction. You have shown that a decimal point with n 9s after it is not equal to one; but infinity is not a natural number. What you were trying to do is make a limit argument, I think. So, here you go:
Let e > 0. We must show that there is an n > 0 such that x > n implies |1 - 0.99999...| < e (where there are x nines).
The archimedian property says that there is an n such that 10^-n < e. Let x > n. So, we have |1 - 0.99999...| = |10^-x| < |10^-n| < e.
QED.
(heh... sorry. I just got out of 3-hour long math homework mode, and I felt compelled...)
If I may, I will second the sentiment with Braid. It is, on its surface, a simple platformer. It certainly has clear goals, and you can certainly win Braid, but anyone who finishes it will certainly call it art. Not only is it visually beautiful, it is actually a very deep game.
I want to explain so much, but I couldn't forgive myself for spoiling anyone. Lets just say the two ending sequences were some of the most emotionally profound moments I've had with any visual medium, and leave it at that. If you don't think Braid is art, you don't know what art is.
Magnatune is a really under-appreciated source of good music. They have all of their music available free, online, as creative commons with a short audio blurb at the end. As such, they're totally cool with you using their music in a non-commercial CC work. Additionally, they have a monthly service for only about $15 where you can download as much music as you want in just about every format, including mp3, ogg, and lossless formats. The best part is they're not evil: half of everything goes directly to the artist.
The music's great too. They have a fine selection of classical, but a lot of other genres too. Off the top of my head I recommend the Seldon Plan, Chris Harvey, and those featured in Braid (Jami Sieber et. al.)
Okay, sorry about the ad speak. I have a tendency to go overboard about Magnatune... but I just love them so much!
People get all sorts of mad over the "corporations as people" thing, because it sounds terrible on the front of it. The most recent addition to this argument, though, deserves a closer look than most people give it.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was, at its core, about Citizens United being unable to promote and advertise its documentary, Hillary: The Movie. Now, you may not know, but Citizens United is a non-profit political organization. Under the McCain-Feingold Act, they were prohibited from showing this movie on TV or promoting it publicly so close to an election, because it was about a particular candidate. Many people, I'm sure, would not deny that Citizens United had the right to do this.
The Supreme Court ruled that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment. Of course, this brings up horrible images of huge faceless corporations running elections in their favor. However, the ruling was made on the case of a small, politically oriented non-profit. Perhaps the Court overstepped here, but where do you draw the line? There are other corporations like CU where they should have the right to financially support political broadcasts. Clearly something is wrong with the current law. What do we change to make this all make sense?
This Supreme Court ruling was not something evil. It was made to correct something seen as wrong with our current laws. The Court overturned a previous law they saw as unconstitutional; this is in their right. It is not in their right to create a new, better law to replace it, and they haven't. That is the role of Congress.
If you don't like the state of things, don't blame the ruling. They acted according to the rights and role they have. Go write Congress and get them to enact a saner law in the void that is now left.
I should not have set the tone I did at the beginning of the comment... I meant to poke fun at the language used, but no more.
When I mentioned gzip, I meant literally making a.js.gz file out of the source, and hosting that directly with the correct headers. No CPU overhead, less bandwidth, eveyone wins.
Including a standard library will probably make the files bigger, true. If Adobe is smart about it it will only include those bits you actually need, and if browsers and standards organizations were smart there would be a generic Javascript standard library for canvas and the other newfangled HTML5 elements, though I doubt such a thing would ever be the same between browsers.
How the hell do you think that this data is not already transmitted with Flash, and how do you know that it is well compressed? Even given that, I think you should read up on "Content-Encoding: gzip" and friends.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what is more likely is that someone came to the engineer and said they needed to get the data and nobody really bothered to think of the privacy concern since it was going to be used internally anyway. Sure, if the engineer was told that the requirements demanded better privacy, he could have stripped the payloads, but if someone asked you to just get the data, it's less likely you'd think of that as a problem.
I would redefine it as sloth on the part of the management for not considering the issues, as opposed to lazy engineers.
This is exactly what I was thinking, but I forgot to express it in my comment.
Looking through windows is different because the windows are obscuring the contents of the house, making it reasonable to assume that those contents are private.
Not so with broadcast SSIDs. It's called broadcast for a reason: you want people to see and know about it. If you don't, don't broadcast an SSID!
As for collecting the other information, in a sane world, that would be legal. This information is also broadcast, it's just that almost nobody who uses WiFi daily knows this. That information has every reasonable property of being publicly available. Hell, you receive all of it anyway, before the wireless card filters out the other packets and sends it on to the OS. But instead of securing our APs, we make laws that make receiving broadcast data illegal.
Basically, everyday people can't be expected to operate their home networks responsibly, so instead our laws start to make little technical sense.
*shrug*
Despite what everyone thinks (and how it seems to the uninformed) it very likely was accidental. If I was tasked to correlate Access Points to their locations, the simplest way would be to dump raw wireless traffic to one file, and raw GPS data to another. Later, you can zip them both up and run some analysis, and get the data you want out.
It'd be real easy to forget to filter the packets you dump to only anonymous, non-data-carrying packets. More than likely the people who designed it just forgot to, or figured it would be no big deal if they just never used that info. Sloppy engineering maybe, but certainly not malicious.
I suppose I'm not really answering the question in italics, but I'm interested anyway so I'll pose a metaquestion.
It's not illegal for Apple to decide what they want to sell in their App Store, and it's not illegal for them to attack alternate App sources. It's not even particularly immoral to most of the population. It is, however, tremendously immoral to the techie crowd and a few other groups.
However, what Apple is doing has been done before, many times. Almost every commercially successful game console has had the same walled garden: if you want to make a game, you have to agree to their terms. Apple is being a bit stricter in its terms, but in the end it still amounts to what most here would call censorship.
There was outrage before, but nothing compared to what I see against Apple today. At first I was prepared to pin it down as simple Apple-bashing, but it seems more powerful than that. Maybe we'll see a strong public movement towards personal freedoms with electronics.
My question is: Why are people so vocal in opposition to Apple's walled garden? Where were they for the last decade, through the XBOX and Playstation and GameCube/Wii? Why does the opposition today seem to be only against Apple?
(Full disclosure: I own an iPhone and iPad, and I love them. I also know I would never have bought them if I didn't think I could jailbreak them. They're useless to me stock, but perfect for me with root access. But I always feel a little sad whenever I use them; Apple's policy hurts.)
Personally, I've been waiting for Half-Life 2 Episode 3 since the Big Bang.
Someone could surely live inside that. An interesting question is whether the edge of our universe is itself an event horizon. This is a neat idea, for sure; it's also pleasingly symmetric.
During and after Katrina everyone attacked Bush, often very personal attacks for the Federal and even state responses to that event.
Yet here we are nearly two months after this started and there has been very little vitriolic attacking on the current President.
Hurricanes are well-studied and predictable, to some extent. Bush saw Katrina coming, he knew where it would hit, he knew how strong it was, and he was told how devastating it could be, and it was still a failure.
Oil leaks are not predictable. They're an eventuality, yes, and they're preventable, yes, but there was no weather report saying "tommorrow, 70% chance of massive explosion on oil rig. Take an umbrella."
The only problem is that the US is trying to get him to pay a fortune for damages, as if he created the vulnerability as opposed to exposing it.
If you walk into a china shop and kick over all the shelves, smashing all the china, then turn around and tell the shop owner, "These shelves should have been secured better," I'm willing to bet a jury would find you liable for damages.
I'm going to shoehorn my correction into the china shop metaphor, because it's more fun that way.
It'd be like if the china shop owner was actually an FBI agent, and after he locked up he opened his laptop and started looking at all his super-secret FBI stuff. Then, some guy behind him says "ooh that's some neat secret info," and it turns out there's a second door with no lock that this guy just had to open. Then the FBI charges him with stealing information and for money to install a new lock.
The point is, there are damages to charge for in this case, like how this guy stole information. However, asking for money to secure a system that they didn't know was insecure before the break-in is dumb.
If Jobs literally told a crowd that the sensor elements still capture a decent amount of photons, he just went up a notch in my awesome ladder. Unfortunately, he also would have gone up a notch in everyone else's nerdy ladder.
Ah, yes, thank you. I forgot to mention this in my post. The glass dust thing mentioned in the article is so large that it's wavelength is tiny, so any uncertainty in it's measurement would be tiny as well.
I'm not sure about the air molecules that they are trying to measure with this glass dust, but chances are they are also massive enough and fast enough that they have very little uncertainty about them, too.
The Uncertainty Principle only kicks in where the particle (wave packet) size and the wavelength of the observing "light" are approximately of the same order of magnitude. A "dust particle sized" (whatever that means) glass bead is much larger than the wavelength of visible light, else, you couldn't see it.
This is a huge misunderstanding of the uncertainty principle. This isn't about uncertainty in the experiments themselves; this is covered quite well by simple experimental error terms. This isn't even about measuring the position, and somehow knocking the particle out of its old path, though that can happen. This is a fundamental part of the universe: you cannot know perfectly, ever, a particle's position and momentum. No matter how perfect you make the experiments! It's like they're both stored in the same memory space, and getting more precise on one causes a loss in precision in the other as you eat up more space.
Where does this come from? Momentum, and therefore velocity, are related to the particle's wavelength (and yes, even normal matter has a wavelength!) When you measure the momentum, you know that the particle has a specific wavelength, so now its wavefunction spreads out according to that wavelength. This delocalizes the particle: it's likely to appear twice every wavelength, just about equally. You have no idea where! Conversely, if you measure the particle's position, the wavefunction collapses to a single spike right where you measured it to be. This spike is, practically, infinitely large, so the particle loses any well-defined wavelength it once had, so the momentum is now undefined!
Man, I have no idea what sort of fantasy world you live in; I hear all sorts of people dissing Apple on slashdot for this very reason. Yourself included.
OK, OK, OK. I'm going to repeat something I'm sure you've heard before. But on the off chance you haven't...
The root of this problem is write protection on the iPhone/iPad. Never forget that. It's not unreasonable for a phone to be write-protected like the iPhone is. It's not wonderful, but it's certainly been done before. The iPad is more iffy, for sure. I think Apple is getting away with it simply because of how similar the iPad and iPhone are.
Let's be clear on what Apple is asking, as well. They're saying, if you want to put Applications in our App Store, you have to use these development environments. That's not an unreasonable request. What's unreasonable is that there is no alternative to the App Store for putting programs on your device: they're write protected, our root problem. Don't miss the forest for the trees and focus on the API license terms.
Well, that's half-true. You can jailbreak, and put whatever you want on it. I've ported emacs to mine, and I'm halfway through TeX Live. It's annoying to have to do it yourself, and the iPhone and iPad should come jailbroken in a sane world, but there you have it. Jailbreaking has not yet been found illegal by any court in the US, and it's really up in the air right now.
The bottom line? Apple dictates what they will sell in their store. Whoop-de-doo. Apple won't let you write to your own device, except through them. Now there's the problem, but unfortunately a precedent has been set here already. The only people who care enough about it to speak out are the infocrats.
Keep in mind I agree with you, for the most part. I just think you're going about this the wrong way. The problem isn't Apple's developer terms, it's that you need to agree to those terms to develop at all without legal fears. People aren't staying quiet because it's Apple, it's just because this sort of thing has been happening for ages, and the general public has never cared. We have to get them to understand why they should care, and we can start effecting real change.
There wouldn't happen to be any stars orbiting it, would there?
Even if there isn't, this is another observation that agrees with the existence of Gravitational Waves, as predicted by General Relativity. If there was such a thing, a merger between two supermassive black holes in a binary system will experience a gravitational wave recoil. In extreme cases, it'll be ejected from the galaxy, much like the one here.
There is tons of weak evidence for gravitational radiation, but if this is true, this is a great find.
A billion dollars is not a big number, and not really worthy of tooting ones horn over. Are you kidding me? And 50 million dollars for an industry isn't even enough to launch a magazine over. Wow.
Yep. Sure isn't. (and yes, I know this is not quite what you meant. I couldn't resist!)
and I think that everyone here is missing the point. It's not "wow, $50 million? that's a big industry!" It's more "wow, $50 million? OS hardware is growing fast from the ~$0 from about 5 years ago." And FYI, SparkFun Electronics, one of the companies listed, makes more than $10 million in annual revenue, which is some serious growth for one company in a new field. Couple that with sheer awesome, and you get a powerful combination.
I have no idea what version of emacs you tried to configure, but I have mine configured to use tabs only, and it was definitely not a hassle. It took me a few days, yes, but now it works exactly how I want it to.
If you ever give it another whirl, try (tab-width 4) and (c-basic-offset 4). This will force emacs to use tabs for all indentation.
Sure, configuration in lisp is certainly a bit harder, but it is also way more flexible. You can also configure emacs with the built-in configuration editor, too, if you like handy documentation with your settings.
Rubbish indeed. The DMCA has a ton of over-protective rules. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to say this has been upheld in any court, just that it's legally questionable. And I'm certainly not saying the laws are just.
(and your MacBook was never write-protected by anything as strong as Apple is using on their phones, so there was no protection to circumvent, which is unfortunately the key here.)
Jailbreaking gives write access to the iPhone (and iPad) file system, including write access to Apple's Fair Play libraries. It is not difficult, once you can write to the root, to replace this with dummy versions that let you play DRM'd songs that you didn't purchase. Similar things can be done with applications.
This is obviously not the primary reason people jailbreak, but it is covered under the DMCA because write protection can be necessary for copyright protection.
What's that got to do with the iPad? There's no law against jailbreaking it.
That is a questionable claim to make, whether we like it or not.
The DMCA prohibits circumvention of copy and write protection on a broad range of devices, which includes the iPhone and iPad. There are specific exemptions to this, which are generally exemptions to allow circumvention if it is towards increasing interoperability. However, these exemptions are created for specific cases, during a review process that occurs every few years or so. The EFF (god bless them) has been petitioning for the rights to circumvent DVD decryption, and more recently, for Blu-Ray decryption and jailbreaking. They have not been granted these exemptions, yet. It seems the review for last year has been postponed, though, so it doesn't look good.
(See the 1201 copyright site for the current set of rules, and a badly-made website. Or check out the EFF's most recent exemption requests or one of their anti-DMCA articles.)
There is, however, a specific exemption for circumvention to allow phones to work on cell networks they were not locked in to. This is especially ironic; Apple seems to be campaigning more strongly against unlocking, which lets you use the iPhone on other carriers, than jailbreaking, which simply gives you root access. Here, of course, unlocking is legal while jailbreaking may not be. The question to ask, though, is jailbreaking covered because you need a jailbroken phone to unlock it?
I'll let the lawyers and the EFF battle it out. I'll be sitting happy: I've just ported emacs to my iPad, and after I finish porting TeX Live, I'll be able to use it for everything I used my netbook for.
I can see how deleting the material would be obstruction of justice, and possibly how uninstalling a web browser could be (this could have been innocent, though that's not likely in this case).
I am extremely concerned, however, that clearing browser history and deleting files (especially when deleted securely by writing over them with zeroes) could be obstruction of justice. I clear my internet history regularly and delete files with secure removal methods... because I value privacy! I don't want any more information about myself on my various computers than I would be willing to tell anyone. Anything that I need to store that I don't trust everyone with, I encrypt.
God forbid I ever come under suspicion of anything, I bet telling a jury I have "encrypted files" would be enough to convict me of anything.
The first proof is clean and elegant if not particularly rigorous, but it is a perfect example to show to buddies. It shows what needs to be shown quickly and simply.
The second, however, is an abuse of induction. You have shown that a decimal point with n 9s after it is not equal to one; but infinity is not a natural number. What you were trying to do is make a limit argument, I think. So, here you go:
Let e > 0. We must show that there is an n > 0 such that x > n implies |1 - 0.99999...| < e (where there are x nines).
The archimedian property says that there is an n such that 10^-n < e. Let x > n. So, we have |1 - 0.99999...| = |10^-x| < |10^-n| < e.
QED.
(heh... sorry. I just got out of 3-hour long math homework mode, and I felt compelled...)
If I may, I will second the sentiment with Braid. It is, on its surface, a simple platformer. It certainly has clear goals, and you can certainly win Braid, but anyone who finishes it will certainly call it art. Not only is it visually beautiful, it is actually a very deep game.
I want to explain so much, but I couldn't forgive myself for spoiling anyone. Lets just say the two ending sequences were some of the most emotionally profound moments I've had with any visual medium, and leave it at that. If you don't think Braid is art, you don't know what art is.
Magnatune is a really under-appreciated source of good music. They have all of their music available free, online, as creative commons with a short audio blurb at the end. As such, they're totally cool with you using their music in a non-commercial CC work. Additionally, they have a monthly service for only about $15 where you can download as much music as you want in just about every format, including mp3, ogg, and lossless formats. The best part is they're not evil: half of everything goes directly to the artist.
The music's great too. They have a fine selection of classical, but a lot of other genres too. Off the top of my head I recommend the Seldon Plan, Chris Harvey, and those featured in Braid (Jami Sieber et. al.)
Okay, sorry about the ad speak. I have a tendency to go overboard about Magnatune... but I just love them so much!
People get all sorts of mad over the "corporations as people" thing, because it sounds terrible on the front of it. The most recent addition to this argument, though, deserves a closer look than most people give it.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was, at its core, about Citizens United being unable to promote and advertise its documentary, Hillary: The Movie. Now, you may not know, but Citizens United is a non-profit political organization. Under the McCain-Feingold Act, they were prohibited from showing this movie on TV or promoting it publicly so close to an election, because it was about a particular candidate. Many people, I'm sure, would not deny that Citizens United had the right to do this.
The Supreme Court ruled that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment. Of course, this brings up horrible images of huge faceless corporations running elections in their favor. However, the ruling was made on the case of a small, politically oriented non-profit. Perhaps the Court overstepped here, but where do you draw the line? There are other corporations like CU where they should have the right to financially support political broadcasts. Clearly something is wrong with the current law. What do we change to make this all make sense?
This Supreme Court ruling was not something evil. It was made to correct something seen as wrong with our current laws. The Court overturned a previous law they saw as unconstitutional; this is in their right. It is not in their right to create a new, better law to replace it, and they haven't. That is the role of Congress.
If you don't like the state of things, don't blame the ruling. They acted according to the rights and role they have. Go write Congress and get them to enact a saner law in the void that is now left.
I should not have set the tone I did at the beginning of the comment... I meant to poke fun at the language used, but no more.
When I mentioned gzip, I meant literally making a .js.gz file out of the source, and hosting that directly with the correct headers. No CPU overhead, less bandwidth, eveyone wins.
Including a standard library will probably make the files bigger, true. If Adobe is smart about it it will only include those bits you actually need, and if browsers and standards organizations were smart there would be a generic Javascript standard library for canvas and the other newfangled HTML5 elements, though I doubt such a thing would ever be the same between browsers.
How the hell do you think that this data is not already transmitted with Flash, and how do you know that it is well compressed? Even given that, I think you should read up on "Content-Encoding: gzip" and friends.