Posts by ratfox 3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Terrorism causes a number of death and injuries that is insignificant compared to, say, the flu. There are more people killed by lightning strikes than by terrorism. It simply is not worthy of attention.
And it most definitely does not justify extraordinary rights for the government to peer into our every thoughts.
It is precisely the so-called "gatekeeper" position of Google, as regulators often complain, which makes it possible for the "right to be forgotten" to be enforced. If the web search business was vibrant with competition with dozens of search engines, it would likely be near impossible to convince every single one of them that your embarrassing results should be forgotten.
Also, free tip: if you want an article censored, post an obviously inappropriate comment to it under your own name, then issue a request to have the article forgotten.
No. If you try to use this technique to censor an article about, say, Tim Cook, the article will not show anymore when searching for your own name; but it will still show up when searching for "Tim Cook".
Do try to pay attention.
Apple in this case has not acted like a premium product company.
There is absolutely nothing in luxury products that guarantees better quality or durability. You might buy a watch that is 100 times more expensive than a cheap swatch, but that does not mean it will last 100 times longer.
I can't recall any case where people sued Louis Vuitton because the quality of their bag was, actually, not worth the price. I assume the strategy of these lawyers is that Apple will settle soon in order to keep the lawsuit out of the news; I'd be really surprised if their argument that price should mean quality is upheld in court.
We're talking about Apple here, which does have a certain power in the market. Yet even them were not able to get Verizon to accept freaking iPads in their system.
And even Google, with all its "anti-competitive" power, has to bow down to the telcos. Android Lollipop now comes with a default messaging app whose default behavior is to send SMS and MMS messages, which earns the operator money, rather than a hangout message, which does not. Guess why…
Nice to have some numbers! The worldwide PC shipments for that quarter was around 75m, 5m of which were Macs. Assuming the growth numbers stay the same, there will be more Chromebooks than Macs sold around 2016. It's not negligible, but it's not that much either.
If we compared to smartphones in terms of current market share, I guess Chromebooks would be Windows phones, Windows would be Android, and Apple would be Apple. The winds seem to be blowing differently, though.
Take them down? How? Go after the hosting company? It's in China and doesn't care about your yapping. Revoke the domain name? The next day the site exists under a slightly different name. As pirate bay has shown, it's remarkable how difficult it is to get rid of a website you don't like.
Some would argue that this is a feature, rather than a bug, of the Internet.
In order to have investments, you need profits, but also competition. Take TWC and Comcast: they make profits, but are not competing against each other. They are even proclaiming it: one of the arguments they are advancing for their merger is that anyway, they are already not competing against each other, so nothing would change. No competition means no need to fight for customers means no investments. QED.
On the other hand, I don't think there is anybody who would claim that Apple and Google are not competing against each other. The fight for market share is real, constant, and there is even Microsoft trying to make a viable third horse. For them, banning a network means losing users. They are unlikely to play that game.
Oh, and about Google Fiber: considering it exists in about half a percent of the US, I doubt Google can leverage anything on that front.
The FBI can hack into whatever computer in order to prove it is yours. Either you deny the computer is yours, in which case you are not protected by the 4th Amendment, and their evidence stands, or you admit yourself it is your computer, in which case their evidence is dismissed, but you have incriminated yourself; something you should have a right not to do according to the 5th Amendment…
Finding a way to reverse the hash function would mean an earthquake in theoretical computer science. It would be a discovery on the order of cold fusion. Scientists have tried for 30 years to solve such problems, and while we don't actually have proof, there is little chance that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time.
On one hand, the precise description of everything Google does with the data in all possible configurations would probably dwarf the Encyclopedia Britannica.
On the other hand, Google does not want to have to publish new T&Cs every time the data is used in a different way. I imagine there are several more every month.
Finally, Google might want to keep secret some uses of the data, to avoid competitors imitating them.
The way I read it, it is Stanford who wants to protect itself from accusations of impropriety, by ensuring Google money is not going to people who might be defending Google.
After the Lessig thing, it would make sense for the University to take steps. Now they can claim that Google is not paying their academics to write anything favorable to the company, since the Google money does not fund these people. See?
Of course, this is at best a semi-truth, considering Google money can fund other people working on unrelated things, and these other people would otherwise have to be paid by a different source of funds, which can now go to the privacy people.
Well, it's not because Samsung had the features first that their phones are better. I believe the fingerprint scanner existed on a Samsung before it did on an iPhone, but the rumors say the iPhone version works better.
On the other hand, this should put to rest the accusations that Android phones are copying iPhones.
Blizzard is one of the few companies able to look at a product being built, after a lot of work done, and say "not good enough". They've done it before, with the adventure game that was supposed to be about Thrall's youth.
That's what it means to have standards. I wish there were more companies like them.
Six months ago, I created prior art against such a patent in this post:
My idea to use echolocation to warn the user of incoming lampposts is much better.
And by the way, unless somebody filed a patent for that already, this post will count as prior art. I'll stuff a few keywords to make it easier for the experts to find it: Cell phone echolocation radar sonar detection lamppost wall advance warning system bullshit.
…Ok, now the USPTO will have to reject the patent for being insufficiently novel.
Nor an operating system with no sense of resolution independence.
When you control exclusively what devices can use the OS, you don't really need resolution independence. And when you want developers to write a lot of apps for your brand new OS, a single resolution is a feature, not a bug; as mentioned occasionally by Apple on the subject of Android fragmentation.
But indeed, they are paying for it now. Three different screen sizes, and the downscaling.
I find this downscaling rather curious coming from Apple. Surely it wouldn't have been very hard to have an actual 2208x1242 screen? Why such a compromise? Maybe the battery life…?
Seriously, is anyone going to even consider the 16 gig flavour when there is no expansion possible?
I have a 16 GB Nexus 5 here, had it for a year. Never felt I needed more. In fact, I had to check in settings for the first time to know how much memory I had in total (~13 GB, I assume the rest is Android), and how much I was using (~9 GB, of which ~4GB of apps, ~3GB of pics and videos, and ~2GB for music and cached data).
Unless you have a lot of music or you are hoarding apps, I find 16 GB is plenty enough…
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