0
stringlengths 9
22.1k
|
|---|
My Internet's not limited, and we don't even have time warner or google fiber in my area. |
My point exactly! AT&T (U-Verse, DSL), Comcast, Charter , and Verizon (FiOS) all have data caps! Time Warner tried to enforce data caps and failed and Google Fiber has never had data caps. |
It would be harder than you expect for Sony to delete your information from their servers. I had a job a few years ago at a major household name company which I won't say. I'm a developer and had lots of knowledge about how they store data.
First off, there's no delete button. In the few places there is a delete button it doesn't actually delete your record. It just flags your record as archived so it doesn't show up in the software anymore for purposes other than historical reports.
Let's say, for example, you wanted me to delete all data associated with you.
First of all, I'd have to check with the company lawyers to see if it's even legal for me to delete payment records, as there's going to be all sorts of accounting and tax related issues with having no records of sources for funds in the account. So right off the bat I need to at least keep enough information about you and your account to associate payments to. In addition, if there's any potential that you might sue us for anything we've done in the past, us having deleted our records of our interactions with you is bad juju. The lawyers will probably laugh in my face.
Secondly, we use a data anonymizer to do big data analysis for trends like geographically monitoring sales growth. Once the data is anonymized and goes into ye old data mining software I can't even identify your records to delete them. Presumably, you'd be okay with this though, since it's anonymized. However, I'm a software guy so I'm uber logical and explicit. If you say you want me to delete all of your data, I assume you mean all of it.
Since, as mentioned before, there's no delete button, deletion of your data will have to be done manually by a system and/or database administrator, and a developer would likely have to get involved. The first thing they'd have to do is identify third party locations in which your data is stored. In this particular case that generally only means your CC info. When you give us your CC info it goes directly to a bank and the bank gives us a token back which we may then be able to reuse for future authorizations (recurring payments). No one in my company would have the authority or ability to delete your records that are being held at that third party bank. We could, however, potentially delete the records that hold those tokens. The developer would be responsible for identifying which of our third party vendors have data about you and whether or not it can be removed. Then a combination of a developer and a database administrator is going to have to go through all of our systems to attempt to identify how many of them you're in. We have a customer relationship management app, a point of sale system, a billing system, a [service we provide] system, a marketing system, and I'm sure others that don't come to mind at the moment. Each one is unique and there may not necessarily be an easy way to find records associated with you. For example, you might have purchased things in our point of sale system that weren't actually tied to your main account. Anyways, for each of those systems a developer and a DBA will have to work together to identify your records and delete them all. This process could take days to complete per application we have to look for records associated with you in. Then, if we're thorough, we'll head on out to the off-site vault where all the data backups are housed. "Deleting" your data from there would require re-building a database from the backup, removing your records, then re-backing up the cleansed database over the old tape. This process would take weeks to complete. |
I had a similar issue with Time Warner, a while back. I was paying for 50mb/s service, and I was getting for a long time. Even after the promotional period ended, I was getting decent service.
This is where Time Warner gets sneaky, they slowly, over time, started lowering my service speed. I do a lot of big file uploads and downloads, so I noticed it happening, but I attributed it to the area I live in, and moved on. Eventually, I called, and they said it was a modem issue. I was okay with this, because mine WAS fairly old, and they replaced and upgraded it for free. For a few weeks after the replacement, I was getting my service again, then it went right back to where it had been. We pressed the issue, and eventually they sent a technician out to look at our lines.
I watched them do this, and he removed a small device from the end of the line. It was like magic, and my speed was back to normal. It was apparently an old bottlenecking device they no longer use, that we had taken out years ago. Eventually, the device magically reappeared, and we got no answer, so we switched service and never looked back. |
I got rid of mine so fast when I could, but they give me shit about not using their product when i have problems; they expect me to use their shit product.
I have the Motorola SBG6580 ( i needed it due to VPN issues with the comcrap box) and its been great, BUT about every 3rd day, i was getting .5Mbs (coming from 50Mbs download) and i constantly had to reset it... surprisingly, its been fine the last 2 weeks... |
I was having the same problems until I finally got them to send a tech after the third support call for dropped signal in 4 days. It then took three different techs to figure out that the issue was corrosion on the junction box out on the pole causing severe upstream interference.
We now get a consistent 50-55 down and the signal hasn't dropped out once since the final tech visit. Best of all, the final tech got us a $30 credit for all the outages and hassle. |
I think there is enough general evidence, or enough could be gathered, to show that comcast is abusing the Arbitration clause and that clause should be waved.
Arbitration is meant to protect them from a short term issue that could affect a large number of customers. So if they had a wide spread outage they basically protect themselves from a class action suit which while i think it is shitty is fine. However, if they start to abuse this and the issues remain on going and start to look like consumer rights violations the arbitration clause should be waved. |
It's kind of complicated, but judges can and do overrule judge-made rules all the time. The problem with the Federal Arbitration Act is that it's not a judge-made rule: it's an act of Congress. Acts of Congress trump judge-made rules. The only way the Supreme Court could overrule an act of Congress is if the act violated the Constitution. People have already challenged the Federal Arbitration Act as violating the Constitution (specifically as exceeding Congress's Commerce Clause authority), but those challenges have all failed.
So the hierarchy is: judge-made rules < acts of Congress < the Constitution.
Since there is no Constitutional provision that would invalidate the Federal Arbitration Act, the Supreme Court can't invalidate it.
The Court could overrule its previous precedent (e.g. in Concepcion and Italian Colors ) and say that it made a mistake in interpreting the Federal Arbitration Act, and the Act does permit states to refuse to enforce class action waivers in arbitration agreements. But these days, the Court rarely explicitly reverses itself. Maybe if a conservative justice died and was replaced by a liberal one, it might be possible. But justices are disinclined to do that because (a) it makes the Court look less legitimate, like it's decisions are all political and (b) if justices did stuff like this, then all their past decisions would be suspect and subject to being overturned every time a justice died.
The sad thing is, we're probably going in the opposite direction, with a liberal justice who will leave and be replaced by a conservative justice. For whatever reason, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a liberal justice) has refused to retire, despite her declining health. If Obama leaves office without her retiring, there is a good chance she gets replaced by a much more conservative justice. |
It's not more regulations or less regulations that we need that, it's better ones. The ones that we need would be ones that make it harder for Comcast , twc, and the like to be the oppressive monopolies that they are and easier for new companies to enter the marketplace. The ones that we have protect the established players and make it difficult if not impossible for new players to come in, such as the law in Tennessee prohibiting local communities from establishing their own ISPs. |
I get that they are using the HBO nordic to experiment with a standalone version of HBO go, it explains the really shitty and customer unfriendly service that lanunched around 2 years ago. Keep in mind that we are talking about the Nordics where most people under ~30 are pirating their shows.
They launched by doing everything opposite to e.g. Spotify and Netflix with poor device support, bad localization, non-transparent contract lenght + only able to cancel by phone and blocked the service on rooted devices. Not to mention how poorly it actually worked. This is the definition on how you don't get customers and they have since then backpedaled hard to try to compete with Netflix. Today their model and price is really close to that of netflix except that it doesn't work as well and they are lacking basic stuff like proper device support. No idea how the android support is nowadays and I'm quite frankly not interested in finding out as long as game of thrones is easily available on the pirate bay. |
How does this relate to the first comment (serious question, want answers)? I don't have enough time to read through a long wikipedia article and I can't find a good |
Well I would recommend it. It runs stock CyanogenMod 11 right now. Very customizable. Quad core 2.5ghz with 3gig ram. 64gb hard drive. Not expandable though :( but still great phone. I've bricked mine a few times but always managed to recover it with nandroid backup(I push the limits of what I can/know how to do). The camera is okay. Not amazing. I feel like my galaxy s 3 took better pictures. But its stock camera app is good as well as DL Google camera app, I use them for different shots. The slow mo camera is cool and it shoots 4k video. I don't have a TV that plays 4k video... Yet. Rooting it is simple. Xda developers has an easy idiot proof way to root once you unlock the bootloader. |
I'm seriously thinking of buying some shares. Anyone know a good way to go about this online? I'm not sure which service is reliable.
Last time I felt the need to invest was bitcoins, which I didn't at the time, and I regret it ever since. |
Here is why it's important: load factor.
It's the percent of power usage versus the total capacity to produce in a given area. In a normal city a graph of power usage looks like a camel hump. Big demand in the am, a dip and then a hump in the evening. Power storage like this can really help shave the high points off the peaks. This helps plants run more efficiently. In the summer when it's hot the humps get dangerously high. Power companies often have to turn on really dirty plants to meet the demand. In some areas they have old smokey plants that may just turn on once or twice per year. Not to mention the fact that for a few hours prices can go from 50/mwh to over 1000. A battery like this allows homes to buy as the grid and feed themselves from power loaded up in the nighttime when no one is using it. |
There really is nothing new under the sun. In that sense, you are right. This is just another implementation of client/server. I think the real difference is the scope though. We are seeing applications move from the desktop into the browser. Examples are obviously google docs and gmail. Also, the scale of this shift signals a significant shift in the direction of the industry. |
The problem with the "fills the gap" argument is that it suggests there is a gap between a smartphone and a laptop/netbook. I don't see a gap in there. If anything, I see an overlap. Also, being that it uses the iPhone OS, an iPhone can do almost anything the iPad can do (besides the apps specifically designed for the iPad). The problem with it is that being that it is a portable device, it has to replace a laptop because who would carry around 2 mobile devices that are roughly the same size. Either you carry around an iPad or you carry around a laptop/netbook. I would rather have a physical keyboard if I were doing any sort of typing on a large scale. If I were only typing a couple things then I could type that into a notepad app on my smartphone.
As an ebook reader I "might" (and that is a very big "might") see a use in it but the price is prohibitive if that will be its sole function. Ditto if used as a browser. |
Tron Legacy will show you what 3D is capable of. The reason 3D is being viewed as a fad is because its being treated like a cheap trick. It creates so much visual potential, but that potential is completely wasted when it is used to carry a movie. This is why Avatar is a load of shit. James Cameron got so excited when he realized what visual technology was capable of that he got consumed by it. His story was probably "inspired" but he clearly did not focus his attention on it. When an element of a movie becomes prioritized for no other reason then because it looks awesome (Avatar) then the flaws become much more visable. This is the trend in hollywood lately, trying to distract the public from serious flaws in movies through visuals.
Personally, I don't think 3D is neccesary at this point in time, it is most likely the future, but not until the glasses are out of the picture. What has been upsetting me about movies lately is that i feel like they have become less about storytelling, or communicating an idea and more about putting the viewer on an insane ride. Granted rides are fun, but rides have no lasting value. I am going to use inception as an example, but know that i did love the movie and thought it was really strong all around. The story was pretty fucking cool, the concept was awesome, the acting was great, and the editing style was a very unique take on a classic concept. However, the end result was less of a movie and more of an insane ride for your brain. Inception never really made me think about anything other than Inception. Again I liked it, and thought it was solid all around, but it is a perfect example of what hollywood is trying to do with movies these days, Inception is the gold standard right now (in hollywood, not in terms of all movies) and movie's should be aiming for solidity like that. |
I agree with every point that article brings up (except the glasses don't have any side-effects on me). I gave it a chance, and was bored of it half way through Avatar . The only other film I've watched in 3D is Toy Story 3 and that was only because it was only being screened in 3D so I didn't have a choice.
The glasses are stupid mainly because they are a solid piece of plastic that are supposed to be a one-size-fits-all product and the fact that they are so bulky means that you can see outside of them which destroys the whole effect anyway. Also you want to be sitting in a good seat (near the middle of a row somewhere around half way back) to experience it properly. If you are far back enough to have the very edges of the screen in good view, this can also destroy the 3D effect.
The worst thing is that a ticket for a 3D screening is like 3 quid more than a regular ticket and you don't even get the option. |
I never really understood the need for a special 3D TV... Maybe someone here can explain to me why my line of reasoning is wrong. A screen displays an image in 2D for us all to enjoy... To achive 3D, the image on the screen is changed to work in combination with special glasses to give the illusion of 3 dimensions. Could the image adjustment not be achieved by burning a movie to the disc pre-adjusted? (make it a bonus disc along side a traditional disc) Worst case scenario, if there had to be some hardware driving the 3D for whatever reason, could a special Blu-Ray player not do the trick? |
I got mucho downvotes for grandparent post. I suppose this, plus your reply, means I did not make myself understood.
I believe big media is dying because they are not serving their customers. They deserve to be dying, iow.
Pirates provide their products to the public in a more convenient format, with near-zero cost (for the pirate) while indie creators produce similar quality for much cheaper. Newspapers are dying because of blogs having taken over the editorial function, which was their value-added proposition all along. Hollywood is dying because cheap HD digicams > vimeo/hulu/netflix/piratebay model is trouncing the big production > cinema > disk > TV sales model in the marketplace. The music industry is dead and stinking up the place with Rihannas and Biebers because it costs less than 5k USD to have a decent production setup and zero to put music up for sale.
It is unsustainable to sell media on a physical support anymore, yet big media insists on producing disks and film reels and newspapers made out of paper and books and so on. They even insist that digital cinemas should play movies off cartridges (no doubt, stuffed with DRM). It is unsustainable to have a 100 million USD budget for an average movie, yet Hollywood insists in making crap "summer blockbusters".
Therefore, big media revenues are dropping. I am proud of all the people railing against SOPA and RIAA and whatnot. The truth is, though, that sooner or later these "media giants" will turn out to have had clay feet all along and things will get better simply because there is no way that they will get worse... Not since Hollywood got started has there been such an overturn.
EDIT: |
Root servers only refer queries to the servers responsible for TLDs (.com, .net, .org, etc.)
SOPA would affect the secondary DNS servers, the ones that handle queries for .com, .net, .org, and refer those queries to the DNS servers for the domain.
So let's say you want to go to www.google.com. First, your machine goes to a root server, and says, "I'm looking for www.google.com."
The root server says, "Go talk to that server, that's the one that handles everything in ".com".
Then your machine talks to the ".com" server, saying, "I'm looking for www.google.com". .com server says, "Here's the NS record for "google.com", look that up, and then go talk to that server.
(Insert iterative query for "ns.whatever.tld" that directs you to a machine that's responsible for "google.com".)
Then your machine goes to the DNS server responsible for "google.com" and says, "I'm looking for 'www.google.com'."
That server looks in its DNS zone file and says, "Oh, look, here's an A record for "www" in the "google.com" zone file. That must be what you're looking for!"
Okay, let's back up a sec. Where exactly does SOPA come in and hijack this? At the second level, right after the root servers. That means that if they decide to hijack DNS for "google.com", you won't be able to get to anything .google.com, even if the "infraction" was at some deep subsection like "infraction.level.seventy-nine.google.com". You won't be able to end run by using "mobile.google.com" and you won't be able to receive any email at any address *.google.com.
This is why this is so dangerous. This act has the power to black out wide swaths of the internet - and not just WWW, but everything. Please note that an actual blackout won't ever happen, but online content providers will fall over themselves to self-censor at any suggestion that SOPA might be called in as the hammer. |
x264 is the name of an open source h.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) encoder. It does not emulate anything, it is an h.264 encoder (and the best one out there!). It implements the standard. As such it does not circumvent any of the licensing issues (nor does it try to). It features no decoder at all.
Xvid is an open source MPEG-4 part 2 ASP codec, it too does not emulate anything.
DivX is either the "DivX ;-)" codec (coder/decoder), which became very popular in the late 90s, or the codec developed by the company that later took its name. The former is a hacked version of an old microsoft MPEG4 codec and the latter is an mpeg-4 part 2 ASP codec, just like XviD.
Since both Xvid and DivX (ASP) are software solutions implementing the same standard , they are compatible. You can for instance decode the MPEG4 ASP video Xvid outputted from its encoder with the Divx decoder. (They are however not automatically equivalent, since they can, and do produce MPEG4 ASP of different quality).
The same is true for x264 and DivX's h.264 encoder.
All these are software solutions, while they may cost money it's not software licensing fees the debate surrounding h.264 (etc.) is about. The discussion is about patent licensing fees. All MPEG4 based codecs utilize a multitude of patents held by the MPEG-LA group. So all products that feature MPEG4 decoders or encoders are subject to any royalties the MPEG-LA group demands from them for distribution.
This is eg. why the Firefox team is reluctant to include h.264 support in their browser. Should they include h.264 support they may well be required to pay a fee to MPEG-LA for every downloaded copy of Firefox. This is not a huge issue for a software company that is selling its products, but for an open source company that gives its products away for free it can be devastating.
Who does what?
MPEG : Moving Pictures Expert Group - a working group of experts that develop new video encoding standards. These are our gods.
x264, Xvid, ffmpeg, libav etc. - These are open source software projects that implement the standards developed by MPEG. They are our heroes.
Elecard, MainConcept, DivX - Companies that develop commercial implementations of the MPEG standards.
MPEG LA - Evil lawyers that hold patent pools for the MPEG4 AVC/h.264 standard. We hate these guys. |
I'm impressed that a single headline can capture so many misrepresentations and falsehoods.
So some people want to filter their internet access; how is this any different from the average redditor using AdBlock? Sorry..I meant...extremist internet pundit using Ad Block. |
Apple is pretty well known for putting the squeeze on its supply chain, so I seriously doubt price increases aren't exhaustively discussed in every contract. I'd be astonished if anyone at Apple was taken by surprise here - more likely just a contractually-permissible increase, and it's highly unlikely Samsung had the option to hike the price just to screw Apple. |
No, it's not a massive injustice. Anyone who thinks that needs to read the whole article. Let me explain with a metaphor:
Let's say some guy is doing some contracting work for a bank, one where he has a safe deposit box. Let's say he's installing some lights or something, when he realizes that the you can just pull off the ceiling tiles and get into the vault. Since his safe deposit box is vulnerable, he reports this to his employer and to the bank. A week later, he wants to make sure that the problem got fixed so he tries to break into the bank without the intention of actually stealing anything. The bank obviously gets angry and threatens to call the police. Then the next day, he gets fired from his job and doesn't know why.
Running the tool that he used, [Acunetix]( is the web/software equivalent of doing a vulnerability check on a building, or you know, basically trying to break in. The problem arises when you try and do this without being asked or without permission. The tool's website even says that it's to "Make sure your website isn't vulnerable to web attacks." |
Had to reply and give revenantae a little backup. Kinetic and thermal energy are extremely interchangeable in physics and chemistry. Thermal energy creates kinetic energy and vice versa in systems. Now of course that doesn't mean we can just automagically transmute heat into motion. The turbo is a heat scavenger though, that air spinning the blades is from high thermal energy causing air movement; its simply harvesting some of the energy waste from the engine that couldn't be used then. In a power plant steam is used as a medium of transferring thermal to kinetic energy, that heat, that energy is still in the end being harvested. For and example of kinetic to thermal (instead of thermal to kinetic) lets fire a bullet at a perfectly solid wall. The impact of the bullet on the wall is going to turn into mostly heat, (mostly cause well the slug is going to crush and possibly splinter). |
Thing is, the yellow ones stop at the intersection then become yellow to cross.
Meaning there was no reason to portray them as yellow cars, then what's important here, the crossing, requires them to act as white cars. |
This is supposed to be the premier auto racing series. The best drivers in the world driving the best cars in the world. It's not anymore.
The engineers are handcuffed more and more every year on vehicle design. They keep taking away power by reducing engine size. They force shitty overtaking with KERS and the DRS rear wing.
F1 has not been about the racing in 15+ years. It's about the organizers and owners of the series making hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
If you want to watch racing go to DTM or V8 Supercars. Both are going down the same road F1 has with over regulation but they aren't there yet.
Auto racing used to be about car manufacturers wanting their cars to perform well so they could sell more of them. Now it's just an extra cost to them. Nearly every racing series neuters the cars to make them even instead of promoting innovation and new technology. They don't want the cars to get faster every year. Instead they add weight and take rpms off of the faster cars to let the slower ones be competitive. The slower cars should be working to make their cars faster.
It's all about money now. Just like everything else in the world. It's never about the sport anymore. No matter what sport. Football (Both kinds), baseball, basketball, auto racing and many other sports. It's about owners making more money. They don't care if they win as long as the money keeps flowing in. If they do win it's just a bonus to them.
Greed has ruined F1 just like it's ruined everything else. It's not all Bernie Ecclestones fault. He played his part but we can't put all the blame on him.
I'm 100% for safety innovation. However Indy cars have turned into horrible looking, slow pieces of shit in the name of safety. Indy cars are not "open wheel" race cars anymore. The wheels are only open at the top. They are covered front and back to keep cars from interlocking wheels. You can't take the danger out of going 200+mph.
There is so much wrong with auto racing in general that I don't know how any of them survive. I quit travelling and spending my money on them long ago. If you have been to a recent race in nearly any series you will understand why. It's 10x worse than a football games in terms of costs for gear/food/drink. Everything there is an advertisement for something.
You can't get near the cars/drivers unless you are willing to spend thousands of dollars to get down in the pits. Even then you will be roped a good distance away from any cars or drivers. All of those people you see on pitlane at races on TV are friends/family/crew of the teams or VIPs who have been invited or paid a shit ton of money to get down there. Average Joe isn't anywhere near pit lane during pre race activites. |
I don't know if this is similar (most likely not), but about a month ago, I went to comcast and asked if they had any promotions going on (I knew that they can give you a six month premium sometimes). I already have the six month premium twice before, but I decided to give it a try.
Now I usually pay $72/month for 25Mbit speed (averaged to 1.8MB/S in download speed). So when I asked for any promotions, the girl behind the counter did give me a premium. The girl gave dropped it to $62/month for 35Mbit speed.
When I got home, I found a direct download (I think it was some Microsoft patch) and saw that my download speed was 6.8Mb/S (up from 1.8 previously.) I was extremely happy. I went to speedtest and it gave me something like 56Mbit transfer speed (the girl said that I will have 35Mbit transfer speed), and to make it better, when I got billed this month, it was actually $56 for a whole year than six months. |
I agree. Now, in the future, I can see this blowing up big time. With the return on the investments I've seen talked about in other threads, this seems like it'll be providing a huge amount of income to Google, maybe even enough to make them consider straight up becoming a nationwide ISP.
Even if they don't (due to the competition actually stepping up eventually, I'd guess), the income will at least start letting Google keep expanding more and more quickly. Once they start making sure that it's definitely going to be very profitable, I'd be willing to bet that more and more of Google's budget will go into expanding Fiber so they can get a practical monopoly on a lot of markets all over.
The main difference between Google getting a monopoly in large areas and, say, Comcast, is that they have a reason to keep the speeds as fast as possible. |
2 weeks ago my friend and I bought a sailboat and sailed it across one of the great lakes. At one point we got caught in a blow; 40km/h winds and 2m seas. This is not significant really but my father got unnerverd since we were outside cell range and called the coast guard. They were not overly concerned but contacted local police and learned that my cellphone had been in range at 9 pm in a rather desolate part of the country. The next marina was a few km off and they contacted them to learn we had arranged for a slip for the night. This put everyone at ease.
If there HAD been an emergency and we were outside of radio/cell range. Holy crap would I have been thankful that the cops were able to access my location data from my phone in order to find us and get the coast guard to rescue us. It literally could have saved our lives.
I don't really have a point to make just bringing up a circumstance where police accessing your phone data can be life saving. |
That comes from a case in 1975 called State v. Johnson.
Most people sign the waiver, actually, for a number of reasons. Maybe they think it will make the traffic stop go faster or they just don't care. Maybe they don't really understand that their refusal to consent would be honored.
Because of this, in 2003, in a case called State v. Carty, the rule was revised. Cops are also not even allowed to request consent unless they already have reasonable suspicion (one rung below probable cause) that you are committing a crime.
My advice is obviously to always refuse consent to search, even if you are sure there is nothing illegal in your car/home or on your person.
As to your question, "Wouldn't that make a search of criminal properties almost impossible", the answer is no. All we are talking about is what a cop can do without a warrant. They get a warrant, they can do what they want. They also could have a warrant exception such as probable cause plus exigency.
If a cop has probable cause to believe you have drugs in your car (he smells them or sees them) he can search your car without your consent. |
Uhuh. Have you read his writing in the last 5 years? The sparks gone out of it. It reads like someone trying to poorly imitate Pratchett, rather than actually reading as Pratchett. Also, it's telling that he's embarked on the long earth series, one of the only two collaborations he's ever done, which reads increasingly like pure Baxter (and thus essentially unreadable; Baxter has always had everything down in his work except for that which is most important: a sense of wonder and exploration. Pratchett has always had these in spades, till know). Is he or his family or his agent trying to conceal his decline, for any of a variety of reasons? |
More interview details here](
>"The FBI does not ask for backdoors. Period."
Such misleading language makes me sick.
>"No, we didn't ask for a makes finger quotations "backdoor." We only asked Microsoft to secretly create a copy of Bitlocker decryption keys at the time of encryption - just in case we suspect a child pornographer, we will be able to unlock his data without issue."
Obviously, this second quote is a parodical paraphrasing of dialogue that never really happened. However, the first quote shows that "backdoor" can be narrowed into a very specific meaning so that officials can now make misleading - but "honest" - statements pertaining to backdoors.
If you read the expanded interview you see that Biddle (the intervieee, ex-MS employee) remembers multiple requests being made for backdoors. The way he describes how the meeting electrified once somebody pointed out a true backdoor isn't necessary, just a copy of the private Bitlocker decrpytion key - it's disgusting. They found a way to give the FBI what they wanted without having to build a messy backdoor. So the adage remains, encryption is usually circumvented through attacks on poor implementation rather than via a successful crack.
The FISA judge reportedly said the NSA has been systematically misleading him. So, our purported "oversight" of the secret courts has been bought and legalese wins the day. |
Since no one has provided any form an argument I'm just going to list why your post and sources are terrible:
>Had James Clapper lie under oath to us - on camera - to Congress to hide the domestic spying programs Occured in March, revealed in June[1]
Clapper didn't think he was lying he said himself he thought that "collection of any type of data" meant listening to phone calls or looking at email and what not. On top of that, nowhere in that source does it say he was under oath, he might have been but that source doesn't say it.
>Warrantlessly accesses records of every phone call that routes through the US thousands of times a day June[2] September[3]
This is about metadata, the collection of which is [not a violation of the Constitution.](
>Steals your private data from every major web company (Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al) via PRISMJune[4] and pays them millions for it August[5]
It isn't really stealing if they pay for access to the information.
> Pays major US telecommunications providers (AT&T, Verizon, et al) between $278,000,000-$394,000,000 annually to provide secret access to all US fiber and cellular networks (in violation of the 4th amendment). August[6]
Again, it's not stealing if they pay for it. Also, you should probably read your sources because nowhere in that article does it mention anything about fiber and cellular networks unless those are the “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks."
> Intentionally weakened the encryption standards we rely on, put backdoors into critical software, and break the crypto on our private communications September[7]
This is really the only source that is mildly decent but is it really that surprising that someone is trying decode an encryption?
>NSA employees use these powers to spy on their US citizen lovers via LOVEINT, and only get caught if they self-confess. Though this is a felony, none were ever been charged with a crime. August[8]
Again, if you read your article it says that anyone who admitted to that was fired. I'm not saying it was OK that they did it in the first place but it isn't like the NSA said "that's fine just don't do it again. Now, get back to watching people take showers."
> Lied to us again just ten days ago, claiming they never perform economic espionage (whoops!) before a new leak revealed that they do all the time. September[9]
This is a very misleading source considering the email actually said the Department of Defense participates in [network exploitation]( which is exactly what they were doing.
>Made over fifteen thousand false certifications to the secret FISA court, leading a judge to rule they "frequently and systemically violated" court orders in a manner "directly contrary to the sworn attestations of several executive branch officials," that 90% of their searches were unlawful, and that they "repeatedly misled the court." September[10] September[11]
Nowhere in either of these articles is there anything about false certificates or 90% of the searches being unlawful.
> Has programs that collect data on US Supreme Court Justices and elected officials, and they secretly provide it to Israel regulated only by an honor system. September[12]
Once more, if you read your source you would see that they don't specifically target the Supreme Court or elected officials and if they do happen to recieve information on them they are to destroy it.
> And they spend $75,000,000,000.00[13] of your tax money each year to do this to you. I'm not putting up with this any longer.
I have absolutely no idea where you got this number from considering the first thing that source shows you is that they spend $52.6 billion for all the intelligence agencies combined. If you look at the NSA spending you'd see they only spend $10.8 billion. |
I think that despite many jobs becoming obsolete due to automation, there are opportunities for new jobs to arise. I am a mechanic at the port of Long Beach, which is slowly starting the process of automating some of the workforce (A new fully automated terminal is under construction right now).
Though much of the generic labor jobs will eventually be gone, there will be new demand for mechanics, IT personnel, and operators. There will always be a need for people, but those people must keep up with the evolution of the work environment. |
They actually took the 'history of the symbol' section.. directly from the thread's comments. |
Lawyer here: To everyone saying this is a troll because of spelling errors, don't judge a book by its cover. Because of the sheer amount of shit we type on a daily basis, there will be errors. It's just not feasible to double or triple check your work for everything. Important documents, (And, I mean that in terms of how the lawyer views it.) like ones that a judge will read, will be proofread. Some lawyers even initially misspell things to put the other side off guard by thinking that he or she is an idiot. |
I was confused while reading this article as well. When the writer says "net neutrality rules" I think she meant rules that either regulated or destroyed net neutrality; not rules that protect net neutrality. Either way, it was badly written or the writer does not know what net neutrality is. As it stands now, there are no "net neutrality rules". There is just net neutrality. |
As a pilot I'm genuinely curious whether people would happily get on board an aeroplane with no pilots. The amount of money which goes in to automation by the aviation industry is staggering, the technology is simply incredible and very smart. Although about 80% of plane accidents are due to human error, there is still that 20%. If we look at the Air France crash in the Atlantic, the systems had no idea what the hell was going on and in that case reverted complete manual control to the pilots. Although they failed to save the plane in that instance, it was preventable by means of human control, without anyone in the cockpit the chances of the plane recovering itself was exactly zero. |
By the way... I wouldn't think of any cryptocurrency as being some kind of 'one time event' or a 'train' that you either catch or miss. These are permutations of a new technology, the values of these coins relative to the dollar will ebb and flow. Sure, some people bought early when coins were cheap and made a profit, but that was because they believed that the value would increase. If you believe that the value is going to increase further then NOW is a good time to buy. |
This seems like a shrewd move for Nokia and Microsoft. Nokia has carrier and billing connections in more countries than Microsoft by far (and probably Google as well). So, they're in an interesting position to broaden distribution on this.
This also frees Microsoft to really push features on Windows Phone geared toward high end devices. Dominating the low end through the Lumia 520 may have been more of a liability than an asset for the platform (and a constraint on margins and app sales), though it's really hard to say. Some measured Android strategy could also force Microsoft's hand on their Windows Phone NT/Android plans that were mentioned earlier. This platform very well could get replaced with a WP/NT/Android platform that gets developed in the future and retains its Android app base (as well as adding Windows Phone apps into the fray).
No matter how you feel about these OS's, this is clearly about apps. Nokia needs apps today to take on Samsung in the developing world. Windows Phone is a long term strategy and Microsoft will continue to invest in that, but this allows Nokia to put Microsoft's services head-to-head against Samsung, which is a formidable player. Microsoft and Nokia simply cannot wait for Microsoft to grow Windows Phone in order to grab developing world marketshare.
Microsoft is clearly not done with Windows Phone and the short term matters. They'll have a much better time growing their platform in the future if Google/Samsung do not act as a gatekeepers on services and thus on users switching platforms. Services need to take precedent here and I think that as unfortunate as this maneuver might be for Microsoft it needs to happen and they're lucky they've been able to do it under the Nokia brand without having to put their name on it and undermine their "one platform" strategy. |
If I understand this correctly, Google's modular phones use an endoskeleton with the mobo embedded in it... Even if you managed to make components that were compatible 3, 6, or even 9 years down the road, you'd still be limited by the memory bus speeds on the mobo... meaning you'd need to buy a new endoskeleton to get the full performance of an upgraded component. |
We are in a city that has been operating a 'Data Threshold' for about a year now...and it sucks. It is like a flashback to the bad old days where you had to keep half an eye on how big your phone bill was going to be after some heavy Modem usage! In a household with two adults and four kids it does not take long for tablets, phones computers and Netflix to eat through 300Gb (and that is even with avoiding torrenting) .
The way around this was almost too obvious... we cancelled our Comcast subscription and signed up for Comcast Business class. Granted we had to sign a one year contract but that was a small price to pay for cheaper services, better support and NO CAPS. There are no complicated sign up requirements; you can be zoned residential and you don't even need to be a real business..they really don't care! You also get the opportunity to get a static IP address which has all sorts of useful purposes. the only restriction we found was that the reduced cost TV service available to business class subscribers could not be subscribed to unless your address was zoned commercial. |
According to comcast we are the 2%!!!
On a more serious and related note, these capped plans should not need to exist, because as per comcast only 2% of their customers go over 300gb, what would be the purpose of implementing data caps (besides attempting to take more money from their customers ) be but to overcharge, and throttle the 2%? Is the two percent holding a gun to their head preventing them from upgrading their infrastructure with the money they have been throwing at politicians? A 2% that are likely already (over)paying for a higher-tier internet plan in the first place.
This will obviously be an even more significant problem in the coming years, (I'm hoping comcast dies fiery death, but I'll settle for them treating their customers like humans and upgrading infrastructure). This is assuming that 4K as a standard isn't held back by the aforementioned lack of infrastructure.
I (like many others) don't even have to put up with comcast's shit personally, but just the idea of the direction they want to take is enraging. And beyond this being an idea they're implementing this fuckery.
Sorry about the rambling wall of text, but I couldn't bear to delete this fine specimen after typing it. |
If the band doesn't sign with google then their content will be blocked and removed from youtube. This is as stupid as they come and the article is correct they have horribly misjudged the market if they think they can get away with this. |
Ms Doudet was sued by the owner of Il Giardino restaurant in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France after she wrote a blogpost entitled "the place to avoid in Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino".
> According to court documents, the review appeared fourth in the results of a Google search for the restaurant. The judge decided that the blog's title should be changed, so that the phrase: "the place to avoid" was less prominent in the results.
> The judge sitting in Bordeaux also pointed out that the harm to the restaurant was exacerbated by the fact that Ms Doudet's fashion and literature blog "Cultur'elle" had around 3,000 followers, indicating she thought it was a significant number. |
Connection speed isn't what I'm referring to but latency. This works fine on a local network since distance isn't an issue. On long distances this doesn't matter for movies since you aren't doing anything dynamic other than stream.
But for streaming games from your PC over the internet to your device you've got a problem there. You'll get input lag when playing fast paced games (which is why I said except for turn based games).
Imagine an internet latency of 60ms.
1) Tablet hits button A.
2) Computer receives this msg 60ms later
3) Computer sends updated stream
4) tablet receives updated video 60ms later.
Total lag of 120ms.
This only gets compounded the further away you are.
Your local internet connection from your PC also needs to Upload at the same rate as your friend's internet connection to support that nice HD resolution otherwise you will be seeing artifacts. |
he has bypassed Congress lots of times, and brags about doing it again very soon |
I think got a pretty solid theory on why imgur went with h.264(gifv) vs VP8(webm). And it's pretty disappointing and not even really imgur's fault.
Apple does not support VP8. iPhones do not have hardware VP8 decoding. I think it is safe to assume that a large chunk of imgur's traffic comes from iOS devices/safari (although you can add VP8 support to safari with an add on). Imgur could do what gfycat does and host both a webm and .mp4 formatted file and display them based on user compatibility. But then they have to host two files rather than one.
So what? h.264 is supported by everyone and it's quality in some cases is slightly better than VP8. Well the problem is that h.264 is a closed source format that draws on a number of software patents (read: royalties). VP8/9 is open source,carries no patents, and is royalty-free. The holders of those h.264 patents get a payout for every h.264 license sold. Apple of course owns some of those h.264 patents, and hence profits on those h.264 licenses. Obviously Apple would like to see h.264/HVEC come out as the victor of the battle for the future internet video standard. Apple has a lot of weight to throw around too (see the imgur case I made above). This puts everyone in a pretty bad spot, because I think most can agree that it would be best if a free open source format became the new standard.
I should note that microsoft, who also holds h.264 patents, doesn't support vp8 either. I doubt IE is too popular on imgur (but like safari, support can be added) and I know that windows phone (despite having hardware VP8 decoding, it's disabled) hardly has a presence at all. |
The ELI5 version is that there are two ways of making the MP4 file being used here. Gfycat uses one that's more widely supported, imgur uses one that is supposed to be better. However, imgur's settings on their version of the files disables the best parts of the format they chose, making it more compatible with a wider variety of browsers, but still not as compatible as just doing it the way gfycat does. The gains they get doing it their way are so minor they'd be better off just using the more compatible way from the start. |
I almost wasn't going to comment but I feel like I have to. I am active duty Air Force and have had comcast for now 4 years. I am one of the lucky few that haven't had problems other than a stupid tech or two and comcast's DNS servers going down every so often, the usual. I attribute this to me being in the military.
I have upgraded my service twice with Comcast now since I moved into their coverage area. The last time I was blown away by what they did...In the opposite way. For those that don't know with comcast once you go to a triple play package or get HBO/etc. you can't give it up. I mean it you can't without costing more. The last time before this incident I upgraded to the everything under the sun package. It would actually cost me less to have the phone and all the premium channels than I was paying without so what the hell. Come like 12-18 months later due to equipment charge changes etc I am paying almost $300 a month. I call to switch to the X1 package, and downgrade services. After 30 minutes on the phone an like 2 people I find out I can't. If I downgrade a service I am suck at full price and will be paying about the same if I get the X1. The rep then looked though the plans and offered me a two year contract plan with a $90 savings over what I was paying. She mentioned that it was breakable with orders, and I wasn't planning on moving so I said fuck it and took the deal. Fast forward a couple of days. When the contract e-mail comes in there is no contract on my account. The rep because I was military put me on a 2 year fixed price contract with no contract because it would be voided if I moved anyway do to being military.
To top that off when they came out for the install, the tech is the lead install tech for my location. He finds and fixes a signal problem I have had since we moved in and gets the anyroom dvr that has never worked to work. He put in more work in that one install then I have ever seen another cable installer do. To inlude running a new line around the side of my house for a amplifer box, all of which was included in the free install. |
Wow, thanks for all that information. I probably would (personality-wise) fit into the second category of archivists. At one point I kind of thought I wanted to be a museum curator, but, again, no jobs and a shit ton of money for degrees that probably lead to retail and Starbucks.
I'm kind of an organization-minded person (I have relatives who are hoarders and it drives me insane -- as in literally insane, I used to live with them and can't count the nights I went to sleep contemplating suicide while laying on a 50-year-old soiled mattress that couldn't be thrown away because it belonged to Uncle Bob who was in the war ), and love to categorize things. I also often find myself clicking toward the "Rewind" section on BuzzFeed (I've seen Old School Cool but it looks to be mostly pictures of people's relatives... and I have no pictures of mine because the house was an absolute Chernobyl waste site). |
That's assuming the company actually reads & records your usage and charge based on that data. Where I used to live, power and gas companies would charge based on use for a little while, then charge based on estimated usage without actually referencing meter readings.
My mother was charged for a month she was out of the house and used minimal electricity, but was charged for a month of normal electrical usage as if she were still in the house watching TV every night. |
doesn't help that people are unable to think critically about it. "Oh nice 5MB/s, never mind the fact that: 5GB cap / 30 days = .1666GB/d .1666 / 24 hours = .00694/h .00694 / 60 mins = .0001157/m .0001157 /60 seconds = .0000019283 GB/s .0000019283 1000000000 = 1928 bytes / s that's a grand fucking total of 1.9KB / second not 5 megs a second about 3.4% of the speed of dial up |
I can give Microsoft a few words of advice. First, if I were to rename a donut covered in chocolate frosting, it's still a donut covered in chocolate frosting. Second, The IE brand wasn't so much destroyed as it was never really good from the beginning. Third, Why is that? Well IE ...or rather Windows in general has serious security flaws that have never truly been patched up. It's like a ship launched to sea only to find there are holes in the hull. Rather than go back to port and do a better build without those hulls the ship kept sailing while putting duct tape over the holes. Eventually the |
Here we go.
KHTML came out back in like the 90s, it was made by and for KDE on Linux.
Safari based their engine WebKit on KHTML
Chrome came out and based it on WebKit
Chrome forked WebKit to make Blink
Opera stopped using it's renderer a few years ago called Presto in favor of Google's Blink. |
Downloading them first is necessary in a lot of cases as the final rendered state won't appear in same cases until a resource has been downloaded and run. There are two basic kinds of blocking that those Adblock extensions focus on:
Blocking things based on domain (adsite.com/someadcode.js) and/or file name.
Blocking things based on rendered content (hiding or removing them from the DOM).
Take the following case:
I register an innocent domain, innocentdomain.com.
I load innocentdomain.com/flowers-are-pretty.js onto my website.
flowers-are-pretty.js renders a bunch of ad content.
So even though the JS file has been loaded and executed, Adblock still has things to do -- like looking for "sponsored", "advertisement", etc. Of course, they manage their own database and whitelist/blacklist, but this is the gist of it. |
Why has everyone started to use the term "Reality Distortion Field" in the past 24 hours to describe this thing!?
An Appleholic is a person who would buy any Apple product day one. Considering Apples recent track record, this isn't a bad gamble, but it is a poor consumer choice.
Don't buy it tomorrow. Instead go to the store and play with it. And I don't mean go 'flip flip poke' and walk away. Play with it for a good hour. Try watching movies on it. Fiddle with the apps, the browser, books, and whatever else you would want to do with it.
Over the next couple of weeks, watch what you are doing. Are there times you could have used an iPad? Could your iPad serve better than your laptop/phone for that task?
One of the benefits of the iPad will the flood of developers working on apps for it. As with the iPhone, you will see a flood of coll and unique programs to work/play with! I don't see the same thing happening when the HP Slate comes out.
Apples closed system isn't new in the tech world. You gotta do the same thing if you publish for the Xbox 360, PS3, DS, PSP, or Wii.
Also, remember about this when you consider an Android phone. Not all of the Phones are created equal. Some apps require 2.1 in order to run, and not all of the handsets are being upgrade to it. Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1 are all on handsets that are still being sold. Providers are being slow to upgrade everything. The Droid was just updated to 2.1 two weeks ago. An app that works on one Android may not work on another.
If you want to be able to modify the system, create your own custom programs, or use random programs that may or may not work, then the iPad probably isn't for you. But if you want it for the features it will offer (and preform quite well from what I can tell), then of course you can get an iPad. |
we read the dozens of other articles regarding this patent, which more or less made it clear that the patent aims at theft prevention. as does this one, btw.
jailbreaking in combination with the other indications from the patent, which are not even mentioned in this article, is a sensible means to determine if there's something fishy going on with the phone (the phones are all locked to at&t, so stealing a phone without jailbreaking it doesn't buy you jack squat).
of course, most of the sensors for a stolen phone are highly unlikely to be implemented (fingerprint and heartbeat sensors?), and apple disabling phones for high memory usage sounds like a liability nightmare. |
Alright i'll bite, but only because of the upvotes for this post are alarmingly high imnsho.
I use my mac, and gladly pay extra, because its Unix 2003 compliant and largely a hands off unix workstation. I use Linux at work, Aix, Solaris, and Windows, though thats mainly for outlook moreso than anything actually job related.
My most used apps are Terminal.app, Emacs.app, and Chrome. Which on other unixes are easy to find replacements for. aka, rxvt-unicode, emacs, and chrome. God forbid that the extra cost is for someone that used to pay for Solaris at home for a real Unix (tm)(c)(r) workstation, really not that big of a deal. Granted I'm glossing over things like git, curl, perl, ruby, ksh, zsh, etc... that I use in terminal to get things done, but osx is a certified Unix, it goes without saying.
Nice to know I'm a retarded american. These "other popular xyz that I don't use" is worse because they smell posts are getting old. Looks like /r/technology is another one of the reddits I can take off my feed as its gotten even worse lately. Not using this as the only straw but this subreddit is developing the same problems /pics, etc.. and all the other mainstream subreddits do. The signal to noise ratio is far too weighted on the noise side for anything useful. |
Sales tax in the US is typically between [5% to 10%]( depending on your state and municipality. That adds another $100 to $200 for a new 13.3" MacBook Pro that retails for $1199.
Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no state sales taxes (though some municipalities might have their own).
One more note: students and educators get $100 off MacBooks in the US. |
Sony got a head start with PS One and the fact that you could easily pirate games for it. When PS2 came people already had a big bias towards Sony which had big brand loyalty for decades (until recently).
Today the PS3 is available anywhere you can buy a Sony product, you just buy it, plug it in and use it, while the Xbox 360 is only officially sold in supported countries.
When the PS3 came out Sony had a party with free booze, celebrities and bands, the same thing with Gran Turismo a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft offers not only zero support for Xbox 360, but has the right to ban me from Live just because I don't live in a supported country.
That's the reason my Xbox cost almost 400 dollars, that's the reason Xbox games go up to a 100 dollars and that's the reason that even though I run a local Xbox forum, pay for Live and spread the word - I can get banned any minute just because I'm from Croatia. |
Because no cellular carrier operates "their own" network. There is a finite amount of spectrum. By being given some of that spectrum, they are taking a long-term lease from American citizens, and therefore "the network" is partially owned by us. The spectrum is a public good, and use of public goods should come with conditions that require equal access. |
yeah i just don't see much point for the unicycle mode. i doubt any apartment or office building is going to allow you to ride it inside and it would be almost impossible to push it around like that. are you going to store that thing in your apartment after riding it on the filthy streets or while it is dripping wet from the rain?
storage-wise it might have a slightly smaller footprint than a motorcycle, but that is meaningless in a parking lot. anyone who has actually ridden and parked a motorcycle downtown will tell you that it's not hard to find space to park your bike, the tricky bit is finding a spot where you aren't in danger of having someone back into your bike with their car or have pedestrians fucking with it. in some ways having a larger motorcycle might actually help with those issues, as you can effectively "block" an entire car parking spot if need be...
i ride a Honda CBR125R as an inner-city commuter and i guarantee you it is substantially more reliable, safer, faster, and easier to maneuver than this thing. my bike does 80+mpg, goes up to 135kph, and weighs under 300lbs. i experience none of the problems that this Uno thing is trying to "fix" and i'm sure that my bike will be riding just fine long after this heap of plastic has been relegated to the recycling plant. oh and the price tag on my bike was far less than what they will be asking for this thing for sure, not to mention replacement parts are easy to come by and relatively inexpensive.
also i noted that of all the hype i've seen on this Uno thing, i haven't seen any specs detailing it's top speed, acceleration, power required to charge it, or range on a single charge. these are all metrics which are critical to the success of electric vehicles and are the main competitive points for new electric motorcycles coming out. in absence of this info i am going to have to assume that it does not provide competitive performance on any of those key metrics. |
If a customer says the trojan Mac Defender is not installed, the support rep has only the customer's word for it. So the instructions in that case (not to confirm or deny infection) are appropriate given the rep's ability to diagnose over the phone.
If a customer says "Mac Defender" is installed, they could be correct (trojan is installed), kinda correct (the german software Mac Defender is installed, but not the trojan), or incorrect (or making things up). The instructions appropriately tell support reps not to deny that specific software has been installed, given that they can't really know by phone.
The instructions also tell support reps not to confirm that such software has been installed. Given that customers may confuse downloading with installing, or clicking/running a program with installing (having not yet given a password for installation), or that they may confuse the two Mac Defenders (trojan vs German software), it's at least reasonable to tell support reps not to confirm that such software has been installed. It's even more reasonable once you factor in the possibility of existing/future trojans that have entirely different names. Maybe one will even call itself ClamXav or Office 2011, etc. |
The Content-ID system is currently in Google's famous Beta mode. While it is true that there are entities that are definitely illegitimately taking advantage of the Content-ID system and claiming content they have no business claiming what I am sure is happening in the majority of cases is misusage / uneducated usage of the system. These media corporations feature public domain (or Fair Use) content in their broadcasts and then they blindly submit their content to the Content-ID system for claiming without any caveats. The content submission process is too automated as it does not force submitters to consider what exactly is in their content as they submit it. It is possible to configure Content-ID to not automatically claim content but instead force a manual review prior. A rule should be in place in the system that any content to be submitted that features public domain material (and Fair Use too) should require ticking the manual review option. The problem of course is that these companies are submitting thousands of examples of content and without a good in house company indexing system being employed to self-tag their content featuring public domain material (or Fair Use material which also gets mistakenly caught in the system) it is anyone's guess (outside of the original producers) as to what is proprietary in their submissions and what is not. Typically these big companies will respond to disputes but to help ensure a timely resolution one has to contact their media departments apart from YouTube to highlight the fact that the dispute exists and needs to be resolved. |
Over the past few months, I've worked on a port of an indie game from C++ to JavaScript. It's a perfect candidate for Flash, but we wanted to try something new.
You're right about the fragmentation problem. It's hard to get everything working even across just Chrome and Firefox. In Firefox, fullscreen support is a good example of that; alphanumeric keypresses bring up a moronic "Press ESC to leave full-screen mode" bezel. Mozilla did it so that people wouldn't type their machine's password into fake login prompts. I think that's a stupid reason.
It's true that the state of audio in HTML5 is terrible. I've been using [XAudioJS]( for that, but it doesn't have the niceness of Chrome's API.
All that said, I'm targeting Chrome/Firefox/Safari/IE 9 for my port, and I should be able to get them all working. Maybe even Opera too; we'll see.
Complaining about JavaScript is moot. You can build a [Game Boy Color emulator]( in JavaScript if you want to. Yes, there are syntactical and logical differences that I've had to deal with in my port, but I translated ≈40,000 lines of code by myself in a couple of months of my free time. I've been using [jDataView]( to read the binary files used in the original game. And bitwise operations work just fine. That's pretty much all I needed. And JavaScript is going to keep getting better with [Harmony](
JavaScript runs single-threaded by default, but you can push harder work off to [Web Workers]( in all the browsers I'm targeting.
In our case, bandwidth isn't an issue. Everything combined (concatenated JavaScript, images, metadata, scripts, sound, etc.) is going to end up being less than a 1 MB download in total. Even less than that when Gzipped. And I could load the game as it's being played too, resulting in further bandwidth savings. Multiple plays will be handled through aggressive caching, but I could also just preload all the assets and use the HTML5 offline mode, which would then give the benefit of offline access. My port is small enough that I don't need to lose any of the zero-install goodness, as an installation of our game takes such a short amount of time that we don't need to present any sort of progress indication.
I use WebGL, but mostly because it allows for silky smooth framerates. All I'm doing is animating sprites on the screen. I use Canvas 2D as fallback, but WebGL is the default because the game only uses like 10% CPU with it turned on. And people stealing my WebGL engine isn't an issue because it's super simple anyway — extending it would take some specialized knowledge, and you might as well write your own if you know what I'm doing. |
From the bill itself (pdf)](
>Cyber threat intelligence – The term ‘cyber threat intelligence’ means information in the possession of an element of the intelligence community directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from—
>‘(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or
> ‘(B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.
This bill allows "cybersecturity providers" (operationally defined as "a non-governmental entity that provides goods or services intended to be used for cybersecurity purposes") to:
> notwithstanding any other provision of law , a cybersecurity provider, with the express consent of a protected entity for which such cybersecurity provider is providing goods or services for cybersecurity purposes, may, for cybersecurity purposes –
>(i) use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property of such protected entity; and
>(ii) share such cyber threat information with any other entity designated by such protected entity, including, if specifically designated, the Federal Government.
with a "protected entity" meaning "an entity, other than an individual,
that contracts with a cybersecurity provider for goods or services to be used for cybersecurity purposes."
Other chilling tidbits:
>- EXEMPTION FROM LIABILITY.— No civil or criminal cause of action shall lie or be maintained in Federal or State court against a protected entity, self-protected entity, cybersecurity provider, or an officer, employee, or agent of a protected entity, self-protected entity, or cybersecurity provider, acting in good faith—
(with "self-protected entity" meaning "an entity, other than an individual, that provides goods or services for cybersecurity purposes to itself" )
>(A) for using cybersecurity systems or sharing information in accordance with this section; or
>(B) for not acting on information obtained or shared in accordance with this section.
>- RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER LAWS REQUIRING THE DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION.— The submission of information under this subsection to the Federal Government shall not satisfy or affect any requirement under any other provision of law for a person or entity to provide information to the Federal Government. |
I almost feel like we're going about objecting to all the various proposed bills in the wrong way. I mean this garbage just keeps coming and the constitution obviously doesn't mean shit to these people. Wouldn't it be more practical to support the creation of a proactive bill that expresses limits on governmental intrusion into digital data so that all subsequent bullishit must have a defined scope. Not sure if this is even possible, maybe I'm just dreaming... either way I don't have the infinite time and resources for the succession of actively sustained protestations this garbage requires. |
This is the first time I |
I'm sorry to break this to you dude, but despite what you see on the internet porn is not a well respected industry. Money counts, and there are porn industry lobbyists, but judges and law makers are also influenced by how reputable it is to support an industry. There's generally a lot less bang for your buck in lobbying for the porn industry because you have to convince a politician that the money he's siphoning off of your campaign contribution is worth more to him than the public backlash and threat to re-election he'll receive if he supports a pro-porn law. Copyright infringement lawsuits of porn industries have a significantly higher dismissal rate than that of other industries and most companies don't even file claims anymore, leading to the rise of free porn sites that show content from copyrighted videos or paid sites. |
Not everything is a conspiracy. Long-lived bulbs are possible, but require much, much more energy to work.
I'm not an engineer, but my understanding is that filaments work by resisting the flow of electricity, and thinner filaments create more light with less waste, but don't last as long. Thicker filaments are better conductors, and so you need to send more electricity through them and create more waste heat to get them to light up. They do last longer, though. |
There are two versions: this one is the L Prize bulb, and it meets certain efficiency specs that the previous-but-very-similar bulb does not. The other bulb, presumably the one you have in Europe, is cheaper as well. The L Prize bulb is supposed to sell for $22 as one of its conditions of winning. Apparently Philips argued that that could be a utility-subsidized price. Since they were the only entrant in the contest anyway, the point is mostly moot. |
I'm afraid I need to tell you that this is not a standard. Sometimes 0 will do, sometimes 9 or even # but most of the times, speaking to an operator is not included in the IVR, specially if the IVR asks for identification since the companies use that strategy to hang up before you reach a human for they're charged by the call center by the number of calls that get through.
Most IVRs are designed to filter your request (based on your navigation pattern) so they can transfer you to the "right" operator, so going directly to human usually screws you because you'll be put on the longest queue with the dumbest (cheapest) operator available. |
For people looking at this map and wondering a little more about it, let me (someone who is pretty familiar with the area) to give you a low down on this.
Lets start with Austin. Most of Austin has been cut out of his district. A decent amount of people living in Austin are pretty liberal.
San Marcos. San Marcos is a college town pretty much. Its an awesome town, but as always, usually heavier on the liberal side.
New Braunfels. Cool town, but mostly a tourist spot due to schlitterbahn and all of the German restaurants. Its kept in.
San Antonio. As with any city, the more central you are, the more liberal you are. Outer city is kept in district, inner city kept out.
So technically the largest city that is in a majority of his district is New Braunfels. The other parts are hills and not so very populated places. |
Google+ offers a Facebook-like format but your actual activity on the site is more like Twitter with substantial posts. You follow people, and you have to put them in categories. There's no way around it. You can limit which categories can see what. And they're built in a way that it's not a hierarchy or anything, and people can belong to as many groups as you want. Mike is both a friend and a coworker. But you don't want coworkers seeing you doing something embarassing. So you share it with Friends. Mike can see it because he's also a friend. Randy can't, because he's a jerk and he's just a coworker. The other key difference being anyone can Circle anybody. They'll get an alert but they don't need to take any action and you'll only see their public posts. If they add you to a circle, you'll see any posts shared to that circle. So it's a series of groups in a Twitter-style follow format with a really intuitive interface.
In short, nobody's encouraged to shout to the masses because all the masses have to do is stick you in their "Attention Whores" circle and never see your posts again. They'll never know what circles they belong to or how often that person views them, avoiding any sort of awkward "My mom sent me a friend request on Facebook" situation where you can't turn down the request but you also don't want them to see certain things. You end up without people just wanting attention and that means less engagement but more meaningful content.
Also cool, if your friends are being lame or just not being talkative this week you can discover new friends. Use the search bar, type in an interest, and find a stream of posts about said interest or topic. Want to know more about Robotics? Post a question to the Robotics stream. Someone will probably respond. Facebook, on the other hand, technically bans "talking to anyone you don't know in real life". So you're stuff with that crowd of awful attention whores.
It seems to similar at first. And the UI was similar at the start, too, just cleaner. But the way the platform is utilized is so much better. People post real content (as long as you avoid trending topics) and you have fine-tuned control over what appears in your stream. If you're willing to put up with not all your friends being there and learning how to find internet friends with similar interests then it's definitely a great place to go. And it's the little things that make it important. Subtle nods to encourage posts with substance. Better photo sharing tools (that Facebook poorly imitated), better privacy controls (that Facebook poorly imitated), and all-around a better community. |
Since it's soft and malleable, it can be made into..say a suit. A suit with active camo and anti-infrared capabilities. Since DARPA is making this a news now, it's probably safe to say it's a military top secret specialops standard issue like 10 years ago. Shit. |
I've been using Win 8 for months as well and I disagree about it being terrible for any pro user. (key word).
The author is spot on. Metro sucks, and so do all default windows apps. But for a "pro" or "advanced" user, I don't use any default windows apps anyway. Firefox/Chrome, VLC/MPC, Thunderbird, etc replace all the features that the author bemoans.
What's left is a great platform that is faster, slicker, and more user friendly than windows 7. You just have to throw Metro and Win Apps away. |
Yes, but their leverage to force their massive base of desktop users into becoming accustomed to Metro/mobile interface would go away too.
Microsoft must know Metro is dismal on the desktop but they have no reason to care. The desktop market is saturated with no alternative if you wish to keep running your current software. Very few will leave.
The portable touch market however is going through explosive growth and Microsoft has no share to mention. This is where Microsoft needs to go for growth and they're going to push people kicking and screaming whether they like it or not. |
As a user of Win8 Pro (no upgrade path from win7 ult x64 -> w8 enterprise x64)for about a week on my personal gaming rig I can say that the majority of this articles' complaints feel like he just doesn't know how to use Win 8 yet. Maybe I see things through a different lens as an admin but I haven't had any problems with games, drivers, or navigating. (Luck perhaps)
"Meant for tablets" - Id say it feels more device agnostic. After you spend some time mucking around you'll see influences from mobile operating systems, osx, and Win7.
"Treatment of desktop as an app..." I can see his point but I also don't really know what was "lost" in this change. "Metro" is the start menu. You always have fast access to both desktop and metro w/ the windows key. From the start menu is where most users start there "experience" so why is it a problem that they have access to a giant start menu. If anything it makes it more difficult for our less computer savvy counterparts to cover their desktops in a sea of icons.
I'll say "Shutdown" isn't exactly obvious like he says.
Add steam to your start menu -> Click -> ????? -> profit.
Switching between running apps (that have a GUI) is best accomplished through WIN+TAB. Simple & fast.
I don't use any of the built in apps beyond poking around for a minute or two so I can't speak to that. I typically don't use "email, IM, calendar, or media player" apps that come with operating systems so for me at least ~80% of the complaints are irrelevant.
Not sure why time was wasted complaining about IE. Chrome, Firefox, or GTFO? Win8 has nothing to do with IE shortcomings and nobody at this point was expecting much from a metro version of IE.
There is more to refute here but I've already spent too much time on reddit this morning.
TBH it almost feels like the author of this article wrote it after having used the release preview version which I will say was actually not that great.
System specs so others with similar setup can know there are no issues for this hardware profile.
i7 3770k
16gb ddr3 1600 (corsair)
m4 128gb ssd for boot
asus p8z77-v pro
560GTX
actively used and id say adequately tested in the past week:
photoshop cs5
vs2010
posh
bf3
l4d1&2
notepad++ (if this had problems id have rolled back to win7, lol)
chrome
display fusion
steam
origin
ect... |
Microsoft's claim is that [not metro] is easier and faster but in every practical case I've ever seen it in people don't know how to use it. It isn't intuitive and most people become lost as soon as the first application is open. I like Windows 8 for many things, but the GUI ruins it. Only time will tell whether its successful or not but if there is one thing I'm sure of, in the past "techies" have led the pathway to the new OS. Just about everyone on the internet is saying how bad it is and unless it starts getting some good press soon it will fail, especially without the techie support.
Microsoft claims it is just as usable with a keyboard and mouse as it is with a touch pad and that simply isn't true. Its a pain to use with only a mouse and even with the addition of the keyboard it requires memorizing MANY new keyboard shortcuts that your average user will NEVER use. Hell, I'm a computer engineer and couldn't figure out how to properly close an application until my friend who works at microsoft told me how (and that is sad on my part).
The simple fact that it is so different from its predecessor is why it is doomed to failure. Microsoft jumped on the "touch" bandwagon too soon and too fast. This should have been an interim operating system, much like windows xp is to vista (whether you like vista or not the GUI is a significant improvement to xp), where you start the GUI change but remind people how it is similar to the previous version. All they had to do was replace the desktop with [not metro] and keep the rest of the gui the same. I.e. keep the start menu, keep the taskbar, and run exactly the same as the normal desktop ON TOP of [not metro]. [Not metro] should not have been full screen on the desktop version for this version of windows unless f11 is pressed like now. This would have done two things, one showed the market a reason for touch screen desktops, and two allowed the market time to produce such items cheaply. There is simply no mass market for touch screens larger than 17 inches right now, though they do exist, they are not cheap and many are "all-in-one" computers which aren't very well received because of their poor touch interface.
I for one will never own a monitor where it has fingerprints all over it. The happy medium, and I don't know why this hasn't been announced already, will be "dummy" computers which function exactly like tablets except all they do is push video from the desktop and function as a touch screen. I don't want, or need a fully functioning tablet, all I want is a wacom with a screen that functions independently from the main monitor. |
I don't know if I'm just easy to please, but I've been running Windows 8 since the dev preview, and am now on the final build I grabbed from TechNet last week and I like Windows 8. As a tech junkie and IT guy by trade, here's my take on it:
PROS
It is fast. The resource footprint seems to be as low as Windows 7's was. The bootup process has been tweaked significantly. Thanks to the optimized file system and hidden system partitions, even a mechanical disk will have the OS up and running in no time at all.
Inclusion of BitLocker in a cheaper SKU Windows 8 Pro(7 Ultimate was needed last go round), and keeping the versions simple: back to 2 primary versions for OEM/retail/upgrade purposes. Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro. (Enterprise will be outside of the scope of consumers, and RT/Phone 8 is its own little beast that only manufacturers will be dealing with on a per-device basis)
MSE built-in(Defender runs the full MSE engine in Windows 8).
Metro is easier to ignore than many "Metro haters" would have you believe. Again, I'm handy with shortcuts and whatnot, so this may be easier said than done for non-power users. Here is my desktop(ignore the quality, I had to remote in): Does it look like Windows 7? Yep. Does it work like 7? Yep. How often do I go to Metro? Almost never. Control Panel and libraries and primary apps are pinned. Device manager? Win+R, devmgmt.msc, I'm there. Games? Steam is down there, I have a desktop folder to non-Steam game shortcuts on the desktop. What about another program I know I have installed but not pinned and I want to open it? I use keyboard shortcuts I've memorized. Let's take Malwarebytes for example. It's installed, but not pinned. I want to open it, so at the desktop, I press Windows key, M, A, L, Enter. And that's it. Windows key takes you to Metro home, typing letters searches apps, and learn how many letters you need to type before that app is a top search hit. Easy!
It could be worse. I made the jump to Mountain Lion on my Macbook Pro, and they are really pushing away from 3-rd party app installs. Unless you get something that is specifically signed by Apple or from the App Store, Mt. Lion will block the install. With Windows 8, you have full backwards compatibility for all your legacy apps. Yes, even all the way back to ancient 16-bit apps. Have old hardware that you can't ditch? Having x86 flavors of Windows 8 helps a tiny bit with that, as they haven't gone x64-exclusive. So another pro for Windows 8 is continuing on with legacy support in a time where everyone else is killing it off.
Metro is fantastic on an actual touch interface. It's what it's built around and for.
CONS
Despite any marketing Microsoft does, I think many novices and basic users (non-power users, basically) will buy Windows RT under the false assumption that it will be "Windows" as they know it. Once they find out that x86 support is gone thanks to ARM processors and Windows RT on top of it, they'll start to see a return rate of these devices similar to what we saw with netbooks years ago. It's not that RT isn't great at what it does or that Surface and other RT tablets are crap, it's just that acceptance and adoption will be based on consumer expectations of the OS, not the OS in and of itself.
Metro is clearly designed for touch, gestures, and motion. Not old-timey mice and keyboards. Everything appears to be swipe/hover/tap contextual. It is not difficult or terrible to use on a mouse and keyboard, but cumbersome nonetheless. But, if you stay out of Metro as I mentioned above, it's a moot point. Non-power users and novices will have a tough time getting around at first, but will learn it quickly. If they haven't rage-quit yet.
Drivers were completely cross-compatible between Vista and 7(per x86 and x64 versions, respectively). While it seems to be somewhat true between 7 and 8, it is not as consistent and absolute as before. For example, NIC/Wifi/Chipset drivers for 7 work fine on my machine for Windows 8; However, I have no way of shooting ADB commands to my Android devices because the ADB drivers for Windows 7 will not load in Windows 8. Until Windows 8-specific drivers are published, I'm out of luck. I have to break out a spare machine for my Android modding projects. Audio drivers were the same way. Audio drivers did the same thing, but thankfully, the generic audio driver in Windows 8 is no longer crap. It supports high quality sound and jack-switching. In Windows 7, however, until you installed the manufacturer's sound driver, the generic Windows audio driver would often not support auto jack-switching for headphones et al, and the sound would be rather "fuzzy".
As an IT guy, I must say that this would be a hypothetical nightmare in business environments if it got roller out en masse. (Clearly, we're sticking with Win7 for a while) I may be able to adapt to Metro, but it will be a huge, huge "WTF?" for the hundreds of clients I have, just having first-hand experience interacting with them and seeing what they know, their computer knowledgeably without me around, and how to just play around to find something to do what they need. It took my older clients long enough just to stop complaining about Windows 7, and that was about as fast and stable and close-enough-to-XP of an operating system as they come. Though I haven't played with it yet, I'm worried about how domain logins, Novell middleware, etc will play with Windows 8. I would think it'd go smoothly, but networking and domains seemed to be the biggest problem back when Vista first came around. |
This is a horrible article and most of his points are pretty retarded. |
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I was expecting it to be bad but this sounds unusable. What the hell, Microsoft? Is competing in touchscreens really so important that it's worth sacrificing all core functionality? It's called WINDOWS for shit sake, but all the core functions don't work in actual "windows"?
Unbelievable. Unreal. If Valve is serious about somehow getting all Steam games to run on Linux - something I have to imagine was a misquote since it seems logistically impossible - then that's it, I'm done with this shit. I'm only sticking with Windows because it's familiar and it's got the games and software. Well, the familiarity's gone and they managed to throw away the functionality along with it.
Bloody mess. Vista's like some fond memory... No wonder they're only charging $15 for the "pro" upgrade. "Pro"... yeah, right. I know professionals are going to be jumping all over this...
I can tell you one thing for sure, if Windows 7 piracy was ever "bad", it's going to skyrocket once computers start being sold with Windows 8 as standard.
I suppose the one saving grace of all this is that the built-in Windows programs tended to be the first thing I'd replace anyway. Image Viewer? Irfanview. Internet Explorer? Chrome. Windows Media Player? Media Player Classic for video and WinAmp for audio. MSN? Gtalk.
When I think about it, maybe it won't really be so bad as long as the basic OS works... Oh no, they better not have screwed up Snipping Tool, that was the best, most useful thing they've added to Windows in the last 10 years. Aw, I bet calc is going to be a metro app. Shit. I think I've used an open-source clone before though, maybe I can live with it... |
I was simply going with a number off the top of my head. But here you go. |
If I had to summarize my experience (of around 4 months) with Windows 8, I would say that it is Windows 7 just with attempts to add extra UI that to 95% of the world is a waste of space.
However I would never get upset with MS and say that this OS is a piece of shit. It runs quicker than Win7 and has a few features that I think are excellent (like when copying/deleting files it shows a graph of the HDD write speed and better organizes multiple processes of file transferring).
I am sick of all the butthurt about the lack of a start menu button. It is still there, just you have to click the windows key on the keyboard in lieu of pressing the start button. It organizes searching much better, and if you don't want to use the Metro apps, then don't! The OP makes it seem like you're stuck using the email app or the xbox app for games and that couldn't be further from the truth; if you don't like it, ignore it. |
Video driver problems? I didn't have any issues with either Developer Preview or Release Candidate. All applications and even things like Daemon Tools ran with little or no problems.
However GUI navigation was as bad as the author of the OP's article complains. I hope soon flow of critique like that will acquire momentum significant enough for MS to unclog its ears filled by "fast-and-fluid" lard. Although the tone is too rough, I gotta admit, it was milder than my reactions to "innovations" once I got 8 running on my box.
I ran Dev Preview on my laptop which was used as a simple browser for a while. The initial start screen was both useless and annoying but once you get to desktop it was OK. That is if you don't need to launch stuff other than pinned to your taskbar. I hoped that all those and other problems were just Metro being incomplete. And that MS would address mouse users in future builds. Until I installed the Release Candidate. Where they got rid of Start button completely. The Release Candidate didn't last 10 minutes on my laptop. I went back to 7.
The only thing I didn't try yet is multi-monitor setup. Unless it is a game changing experience, or there are some major changes from MS, or usability plug-ins from 3rd parties, I can tell today that I will not switch my desktops to Windows 8. Touch is not an alternative to mouse in desktop form factor. Even if your monitor supports it. Perhaps it'll be okay for a tablet running a browser and a casual game. But it's unproductive to "flip" through your applications on your work machine.
I don't expect any reasonable developers to fully switch their applications or games to Metro. As a framework, it's great. It's an improvement over old mix of Win32 APIs and misaligned COM objects. But just like with APIs introduced for Win7/Vista (e.g. Direct2D, DirectWrite, etc) which weren't ported back to WinXP, it'll take forever for developers to start taking advantage of them. BTW, as far as I'm aware, thankfully, to place an app in Windows Store you are not required to make it a Metro app.
Right now I expect 8 to be a disaster way worse than Vista. This is coming from person who never bashed Vista. I understood that change was needed following post-SP2 stagnation period. I realized that you shouldn't install it on five-year-old box with crappy video and no RAM. I evangelized UAC (which received so much hate from blogger community) and explained everyone I met that its annoying prompts were fault of lousy developers not following guidelines, not MS team (and by the time Win7 came out these devs cleaned up their act). I fully switched to Vista with its SP1. Besides few performance issues (pre-SP1 with indexer and file copying), it was a nice OS. And a ramp to Win7. |
What are these basic useful aspects? I do consider myself a power user, generally I will run Debian Linux for personal use, but I have been testing Windows 8 lately as a development platform and I must say it seems rather adequate. The only valid argument I can see against Windows 8 might be that the search behaves slightly differently, but it is hardly a huge issue. |
Thank you.
I shouldn't have to go out on a limb to say something like: "I think Metro is awesome."
Previously? I had to leave a browser window open to receive Facebook messages. If I was browsing , I'd have to navigate back to that tab to check for messages. It was a horrendous user experience.
With W8? I get a notification in the upper right for every facebook message, every email, and in the future? Anything I damn well please.
All of this without really detracting my focus. The OS is taking care of tracking my communications.
Previously? I used web apps + outlook to manage my e-mail.
Now? I can use native Metro apps to manage my email and calendars. They are a button press away, they load faster than a webapp, they're easier to use, and they don't need an active net connection.
I've taken to calling Metro "the fridge"... it's where you go when you need your information, and you need it fast.
For everything else? You use the desktop. Same as it has always been, except now it's streamlined, Aero is out of here , lots of apps have gotten a much needed facelift. (The Vista/7 "ribbon" was terrible in Explorer. It usually had ~3 functions. The new file explorer ribbon is feature packed. For people that don't know the shortcuts? That's tremendously useful.) |
No it doesn't, assuming by 'follows' you mean 'is entailed by'.
Take the set of sentences, let's call it M, {'Marijuana should be legal' , "Marijuana should not be legal'}. You would hold that the sentence 'Marijuana should be legal' follows from 'Marijuana should not be legal'. But M is logically inconsistent, i.e it is not the case that both 'Marijuana should be legal' and 'Marijuana should not be legal' can be simultaneously true. Hence 'Marijuana should be legal' does not follow from 'Marijuana should not be legal'. And the logical consistency of M is exactly what is necessary for said entailment to be valid. QED |
To compare a piece of software to Newtonian principles or the Lorentz factor - underlying natural truths which would exist regardless of whether they were discovered by the aforementioned, or by anybody at all - is entirely absurd
You are not patenting Microsoft Word or gmail. You are patenting algorithms, mathematical creations, systems of computation. You are, effectively, patenting math.
And both of those creations are just as much mathematical constructs, and required far more "innovative and critical thinking", than most any software patent. So under your reasoning, does not Newton deserve money for revolutionizing our understanding of the world?
Indeed, according to you, science cannot exist. Because it does not generate money, no one would ever do it. Are scientists to pursue innovation "out of the goodness of their hearts"? Don't make me laugh! That's why the most advanced mathematical formula is Pythagorean theorm, and the most advanced physics is Aristotle.
>There would be absolutely no reward for key, crucial innovation other than the chance to be intellectually raped by a group of super-rich multi-national corporations who have carte blanche to steal your idea without retribution.
Pray tell what happens now, do you think? When you can patent rounded corners, any but the most trivial of little guy patents is going to step on big corporate ones. And guess who wins when the two go to court?
> |
i am an apple "fanboi" my dad was a graphic designer in the 80's in london and i could use a one button mouse with a GUI before i could walk, i remember going to friends houses and wondering why they where typing to launch an app in DOS.
i remember getting a 16 bit colour card and how cool the original prince of Persia and kids piks were. i also remember going to try to buy games and finding basically nothing in the 90's. i still use a mac because its A) passed down so basically free and B) i know it.
but i used to feel like apple had a soul perhaps it was nostalgia or because i was the underdog for so many years. (i have friends who used to take the piss out of me for using mac in uni, and now there jobs are managing macs for big companies). but this whole lawsuit thing has really pissed me off. |
here's the kicker. It's been shown time and time again that iOS apps make more money than Android apps. Sadly, the only way to ensure you will be able to continuously run an iOS dev environment is to buy a mac to run XCode. So you have to spend a minimum of $1000 on a macbook air plus $100 a year for the pleasure of selling your app where apple makes 30%.
The computers run well when you aren't trying to do anything they don't deem unusual. But the consistency between OS builds is not there. Features are not guaranteed to carry over to the next version of the OS, so you really never know what you're going to get. |
Of course software should be patentable. A patent exists to grant the holder exclusive rights over an invention so that they may exploit it to financial gain. And the innovative and critical thinking involved in developing a new piece of software is every bit as valid as the innovative and critical thinking involved in creating a tangible invention.
To compare a piece of software to Newtonian principles or the Lorentz factor - underlying natural truths which would exist regardless of whether they were discovered by the aforementioned, or by anybody at all - is entirely absurd.
And on a larger note, without the patent, why would anyone bother inventing anything at all, save out of the kindness of their heart? There would be absolutely no reward for key, crucial innovation other than the chance to be intellectually raped by a group of super-rich multi-national corporations who have carte blanche to steal your idea without retribution. Furthermore, patents do encourage innovation - all patented ideas are made available for public viewing (with full descriptions, analysis, schematics, etc...) whereupon anybody can look them up and consider how to further innovate upon them. Patents are also only valid for a certain number of years (depends where you live), and not in perpetuity, meaning they can be copied directly after a time. |
I used to work with Samsung for 3-4 years right up to the time the Galaxy SII came out. In our meetings, there were vibrant discussions on how take market share from Apple, everything from starting an iTunes-like marketplace to the many iPhone features were discussed. It was the phone to beat. In fact at pre-launch, the SII was openly touted as an Iphone clone.
Not an Apple fan boy by any means, but the fact is Samsung is purely a sales-driven company. Apple innovated and moved the focus from mobile hardware to software (apps etc). Samsung pumps out 50 different phones annually (at diff price points) with little to no long-term view or support. (Product defects crop a lot, After-sales support isn't very awesome) Still; the SIII is an awesome machine and most likely my next phone. |
It doesn't matter what the correct verdict is based on current patent laws. This has serious implications for how technology is developed on this planet, and on how quickly innovation can propagate. The only purpose of these laws is to give abusive companies like Apple more money and keep technology out of the hands of potential innovators. I have no support for this kind of thing, and this is why I will support Android for all its flaws. Fuck Apple, but as far as I'm concerned this is a big thumbs down for the software world, not just Apple, for allowing this to happen. |
Look people, there are two sides to this story. Neither of them should have won in my opinion, but that doesn't matter here. What does matter is that the patent system is clearly broken which is leading to these kinds of things.
There is a lot to be said about Samsung specifically, especially the blatant copying that they do. But is that necessarily wrong? Well, I don't like it when it's just copying instead of inspiring, but let's not kid ourselves here, Apple copied a whole lot as well.
Samsung example: S-Voice - Siri, and just look at Touchwiz!
Apple example: Notification center, Do not Disturb
And both did probably copy a whole lot more. (I must say though that Samsung lives off of copying, just look at the hardware design of their phones. Apple also profits from it, but I don't know if they necessarily live off of it.
But I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle. which is good. If you look at Android before the iPhone came out you'll see how much different it was.
It may be true that Samsung and other companies were in fact working on smartphone types of devices, but they probably only started really working on them after the iPhone came out. There's two different kinds of these so called smartphones, you can the actual smartphones (modern Android devices (2.0 and up)/iPhone/Windows Phone) and then you have the not-so-smartphones. Things that Samsung made a lot of, like the Samsung phones with keyboards that are not running Android.
Edit: Just wanted to say that I do agree that Apple was right in this case from a legal standpoint, but I don't think that Apple should've even been able to make this case the way they did it.
But how else should we solve it? Should companies be allowed to copy each other or how else would you protect your designs?
Edit #2: And let's not even begin of this particular quote by Steve Jobs: "Picasso had a saying, he said: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal'" Which is just pure hypocrisy.
Anyway I'll stop now. |
i work with cell phones for a living and android 4.0 phones will not do mass storage mode on a mac. fuckin pissing match between apple and google. we just work around it in my office by using PCs or bluetooth or whatever, but it'd be nice to just plug in the cable and bam, file access. i still run android 2.3 on my phone so i personally don't have a problem, but the thing is, that's not going to get me to buy an iphone. it's just gonna make me really pissed off at apple and start thinking about alternatives to my macbook the next time i upgrade. |
Can I get the |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.