I've had splendid success on those occasions when I've had a problem with an Apple product. Had a G4 desktop system power supply go titsup on me some years back, with the machine about two weeks out of warranty, and Apple swapped out the power supply in an afternoon and didn't charge me for it even though the warranty had expired.
One of my sweeties has an aluminum Macbook Pro system that developed a graphics fault; when she brought it in *several years out of warranty) she was told that that model had a problem with its graphics chip, and that her problem wasn't related, but they'd swap out the logic board for free anyway.
The only company I've had as good experiences with is IBM, actually, back when they still made PCs. A client had an eServer system that had developed leaky capacitors; IBM shipped out a replacement system overnight the next day, and didn't even want the old system back.
Worst customer service experience I ever had, by way of comparison, was with a Gateway that developed a bad RAM socket. Gateway never did honor the warranty on it, even after weeks of struggle.
".. it is the same as standing inside your house and shouting as loud as you possibly can. Would it be a crime if I happened to hear you voice wafting out the windows and across the street?"
No...but depending on your jurisdiction, it might be a crime if you recorded it. It would quite likely be a crime if you recorded it for commercial gain. And if you drove down the street with parabolic microphones pointing at people's bedroom windows, and recording everything you heard as you drove by, well...
Not odd at all. That's generally the way it is with almost any comment on almost any Internet community devoted to almost any subject.
Go onto YouTube and say that the moon landings AREN'T a hoax and we really did send human beings to the moon, and sure as rainbows someone will say that you're getting paid to be part of The Conspiracy. Go onto a "natural medicine" forum and say that homeopathy has not been proved to work (and often has been shown not to work), and you can bet that as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, a dozen people will accuse you of being a paid shill for "Big Pharma."
This is the Internet. The only possible reasons someone could ever have to post anything that disagrees with you is either (1) they're idiots or (2) someone is paying them to.
Re: @Captain Save-a-ho.. I do not dispute your figures - they appear entirely believable.......
"Fundamentally I am saying that BigCorp in this context are a bunch of bastards - Apple is simply the poster-boy/example."
Actually, in this particular case, I think General Electric is the example. I seem to recall that they have an effective *negative* tax rate; that is, the US Treasury pays them money (in the form of "tax incentives" for building manufacturing plants in the US, which they then transfer to a shell company organized offshore so as to avoid paying tax on revenue generated from that plant, or something like that).
"People always moan about tax avoidance but when pressed about it they would not:
1. Offer to pay more tax themselves on their income (unless they have too much money to possibly spend of course).
2. Offer to pay more for a product so the company can pay more taxes."
I notice option 3 is missing from your list: Expect the company to take a lower profit. A company that's got approximately $100,000,000,000 in cash on hand is clearly making sufficient profit to afford to pay more tax without throwing people out of work or raising their prices.
"First, it's great that it will help reduce STDs but really, BIG PHARMA has a lot to do with this, they research remedies and temporary relief for all sorts of ailments but never really research the cure like they did with small pox because it's not profitable."
*yawn* Not that tired old trope again.
Anyone who believes this has no clue about medical research. First, "Big Pharma" is not some giant monolithic entity. It's a collection of companies, some large and many small, who compete with one another on a level that makes Oracle v. Google look like a minor tiff at a Boy Scout camp.
Second, there's a lot more money than you think in curing STDs.
Third, trying to get a bunch of academics and researchers to curtail their research for some cynical motivation...are you serious? Most of the folks who go into medical research--and I know quite a few scientists and academics who do this for a living--do it because they genuinely want to help people. You couldn't pay me enough to do their work; they go into debt for advanced graduate-level degrees, then work their asses off doing research for less money than an average MBA makes, all so they can get slagged as being part of some greedy entity that wants to keep people sick.
And last, if you seriously think that these folks would find a cure for something and then suppress it, you're more bonkers than the moon-hoax-conspiracy nutters. They'd all look around each other at the conference table and say "Sure, I promise not to tell anyone we have a cure for AIDS"...and then race each other to the patent office. The person who finds a full-stop cure for that or other common STDs is a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize and all the grant money she could ever want.
Seriously, the conspiracy dingbattery around "Big Pharma" is nuts. If all these conspiracy theories were true, we would not expect to see huge, sprawling, multinational pharmaceutical companies like Bayer making cheap, low-margin, unpatentable products like...err, aspirin.
Re: No precedent for programming language copyright?
"Anyone sufficiently long in the tooth to have programmed Intel and Zilog 8-bit microprocessors in assembly language will remember that Zilog were forbidden from using the same instruction mnemonics as Intel because Intel had claimed copyright on theirs."
"but the kid will just turn it back on if they know the password"
The iTunes password and the password to change in-app purchases (and other system settings) are two separate things. Frankly, I don't think it's a terribly bright idea to give either one of them to one's darling child.
"To those saying parents should work out whether the app is going to request in app purchases, the shite is aimed at kids, do you really want to wade through the childish shite to find out if you're going to be ripped off in each and every app downloaded?"
No.
Nor is it necessary. You simply switch off in-app purchases and the problem is solved.
"In this comment thread, I see one person that actually has a child, and four that don't (and it would seem haven't ever met or been a child). I notice the same thing among my friends. It's the ones without kids that don't understand why you can't keep an eye on *everything* each of your three kids is doing at all times, in addition to perfectly pre-screening (i.e. play the game yourself for several hours) everything your kids are about to do."
Whether or not people have children is a distraction. It's a red herring argument, as though only folks who've had children can be excused for not taking common-sense measures to prevent this sort of thing. (Full disclosure: I do not have biological children myself. My girlfriend has an 11-year-old girl.)
1. You can not watch what your kids do 24.7, that is true. You CAN, however, keep your app store password private. That gives you two advantages: it prevents your darling from draining your wallet, AND it lets you know what games and apps your kid is playing with, because you have to authorize purchases.
Several folks have commented that free apps should be downloadable without a password. That's a terrible idea, because it removes one of the parents' tools for monitoring what apps their children are using. The fact that you need to use a password to download any app, even a free one, is a GOOD thing. If you actually take an interest in what apps your kid is downloading, that's a feature, not a bug.
2. You can turn off in-app purchases. If this guy is so upset about in-app purchases, for fsck's sake, why didn't he just turn them off?
"Apple established a distribution monoply (ipad coupled with itunes)..."
Actually, iPad plus iTunes is neither a lock-in nor a distribution monopoly. I can read iTunes, Kindle, Nook, and generic .pub and .epub books on my iPad, as it turns out. So I'm not sure how "buying an iPad" == "being locked in to a distribution monopoly." In fact, I have more Kindle books than iTunes books on my iPad.
"...and then tried to get all the publishers to set a common price."
Is that true? I don't think it is. My understanding was that Apple told the publishers "You can set the price for your eBooks," whereas Amazon tells the publishers "You can't set your price for eBooks; we will determine what the price is."
This parallels the way their respective app stores work--with the Apple app store, the app developers sets the sale price, whereas on the Amazon Android app store, the developer sets a "suggested" price but Amazon can change that price if they like.
It seems to me that what this is all about isn't device lock-in (the iPad does not limit you to only the Apple book store) so much as who sets the price for eBooks, the book publisher or the book seller.
"Amazon set up various distribution points (kindle, phones, ipad, PC readers etc) which only relied on having a legitimate Amazon account to purchase from any sellor you wanted in their store and then Amazon tried to establish a decent market share by undercutting the competition by selling their stocks of ebooks at almost to no profit."
Partly. Partly, Amazon also tried to get their eBook suppliers to cut THEIR prices to almost no profit, too, which is why some smaller publishers have stopped selling eBooks through Amazon.
Amazon says that the traditional model of book publishing is broken; that publishers need to accept the reality that book prices will drop. On the one hand, I see their point. Publishers certainly have lower expenses with eBooks, that's for sure. On the other hand, my feeling is that the person who really gets shafted by the downward pressure on prices is the author, and discouraging authors is not a good way to serve the interest of readers.
"If the advertisements were for museums, no problem. However, they were for translation tools, and there Rosetta Stone has a trademark."
Actually...that's not *entirely* correct.
Rosetta Stone is big on attacking anyone who uses the word "Rosetta" in a Google ad, or on the Web, in any context whatsoever. I have actually received a cease-and-desist order from Rosetta Stone's lawyers because I administer a Web site that's a Mac troubleshooting forum, and many people on the forum have left posts talking about Rosetta, the PowerPC emulation layer built into some versions of OS X on Intel.
Rosetta Stone appears to target *anyone* who pops up in a Google search that includes the word "Rosetta," alone or in combination with "Stone," whether the term is used as part of a Google ad keyword or not.
You can see the cease-and-desist they sent me and the response I sent back to them on my blog:
Re: No one has ever been granted a copyright on a layout.
Actually, people have. Westlaw publishes the text of US law in a series of bound books. Since it's the standard for law books, most court briefs and so on will reference laws by the volume and page number in Westlaw books.
The text of the law can't be copyrighted. But the volume and page numbers can. Which is how Westlaw maintained a near-monopoly on legal texts for decades.
I personally consider that to be pretty ridiculous, but it's established nonetheless.
"Your right-angled triangle has a vertex with a 90-degree inner angle. We have copyright on presenting a right-angled triangle in such a manner."
Actually, it's more like "You presented a photograph of Chartres Cathedral that looks suspiciously identical to the one in our book, and the caption on the photo happens by some weird coincidence to be word-for-word identical to ours, and by some even greater coincidence it falls on the same page as the one in our textbook, with the same copy surrounding it" from what I gather.
Which, if it's true, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
If it's true. That's a big "if;" I think a person might reasonably assume it's a bad idea to take any large publishing company's word for it, all things considered.
If it is what you describe, then fsck the publishing company. If it's what the publishing company, then the new textbook people deserve to get smacked down; they should have known better.
"There's no reason to ever buy a contract/locked phone - unless you want to throw money at the phone company for some reason."
You always throw money at the phone company, at least if you want phone service. A phone does little good without service, after all.
At least as a phone. My old iPhone works as a music player, even though I replaced it with an HTC once the contract was up. But the point still stands that if you want to use your phone as a phone, you're going to throw money at the phone company to make it go.
"So you still have to rasterise some of each page...So why bother?"
Because the PDFs are far smaller; only the raster content is delivered as raster.
Because the text remains text, meaning it can be searched and annotated and manipulated like...err, text.
Because the text renders cleanly on any kind of display, regardless of resolution or pixel density.
Because PDF is a universal format, so the same file will work on desktop machines or wherever else you want to take it to.
Because the reader has more control; the PDF can be rendered exactly as the designer intended, or for folks who have vision problems, the text can be enlarged.
Because the text is available to assistive devices like text-to-speech programs for the blind.
iOS has a PDF renderer built in; it's part of the core graphics processing format.
I've heard it claimed, though I don't know if this is true or apocryphal, that Conde Nast opted to go with screen shots of every page rather than PDFs of every page because they didn't want to pay the licensing fees to embed the fonts in the PDFs. If that's true--and I stress that I'm not sure it is--it sounds pretty ridiculous to me, as the licensing fees are not that expensive in the overall scheme of things. Probably about comparable to the storage and bandwidth costs of keeping and pushing out these honking big bitmaps.
...distributing magazine content on digital devices in the form of a bunch of raster images is a stupid, misguided, and profoundly sucky thing to do.
What good is a bunch of effin' PICTURES of magazine pages, fercrissake? The text isn't text, which means it isn't searchable, it can't be indexed, it can't be annotated, you can't copy-paste it into another app. Seriously, when it comes to ways to distribute information in the Information Age, this is imbecilic.
There are all sorts of file formats which are designed to preserve the look of a printed page in a digital file while keeping the text as text instead of pixels, so that, you know, it can be SEARCHED since it's on a bloody COMPUTER and that's one of the things we use computers FOR.
If it were possible to attach two icons to a post here at El Reg, I'd make them both "fail" for this.
"erm you have to type in your admin password for it to install"
Actually, you don't.
It's a bit of an odd duck, this one. It asks you for an administrator password, but you don't actually have to type it.
When the malicious Java applet runs, it attempts to download additional code. To do this, it prompts the user for an administrator password. If the user is gullible enough to type it, the downloader installs a payload in the Mac's Applications folder, and (I believe) sets it to run automatically at startup.
If the user *doesn't* type the administration password, the downloader installs a hostile payload in the user's home folder. This payload runs in userland, without administrator privileges, and I'm not certain but I don't believe it runs on restart (and it certainly doesn't if the user restarts and logs in to a different account). It's a lot more limited in what it can do, but it does still run, and (if the user doesn't have the firewall enabled) does seem to have the capability of making outside connections.
So the upshot is: No, you don't have to type an admin password. If you don't, the infection is somewhat mitigated, but it is still effective.
"It is trivially easy for any website to obtain an SSL certificate (even scammers) and they do nothing to prevent trojans. Not one thing!"
True that.
And if the malware writer responsible for this malware really is the same person behind the DNSchanger malware, he knows it, too. In fact, there was one variant of the DNSchanger malware that was code-signed with a digital signing certificate in the name of "Mistland Limited," so not even running only signed code will *necessarily* protect you.
In any event, the most common way to spread this and other malware is to hack legitimate, "reputable" sites and embed iFrames or hostile JavaScripts that then attempt to load various exploits from the malware domains. So whether or not you use https is not necessarily relevant; you may be visiting a site that you believe to be perfectly innocuous that you've used dozens of times before, or in some cases you may even be visiting a site that uses https but that's still been pwn3d.
Re: Is this why lots of asteroids are made of Iron?
"I am not totally sure that is correct: I understood it that fusion processes create all the elements up to and including iron at which point the fusion process is in fact energy neutral - no more elements are then made and the star cools down as more or less an iron sphere with not much else going on..."
Well, kind of. My understanding, if I remember my physics classes from my dim and distant college past, is that there are actually several fusion processes happening in a star at once (even just hydrogen fusion can take place in one of several different ways). Iron is the bottom of the hill for most of the fusion processes, but there are also different fusion processes (which occur inside stars to varying degrees simultaneously) that produce nickel and cobalt as well. Those are also, if I recall correctly, exothermic, so you can end up with iron, nickel, and cobalt from exothermic processes but everything above that point is endothermic.
On a side note, I remember being at an orgy some years ago and geeking out about this stuff, to the point that "stellar nucleosynthesis" is still, a number of years later, the slang term for "group sex" in my social set.
Au contraire. While any shaven ape might be able to run Microsoft approximately as well as Ballmer is, the actual task of playing Ballmer on screen requires someone with a much wider repertoire. It's the small nuances that are important--the scowl of outrage when flinging office furniture about the room, the particularly graceless physical humor when dancing. Capturing the *essence* of Ballmer requires considerable range indeed!
"Usual stuff. If the users are being prompted for admin rights for the malware installation and letting it happen, then there's no story as no O/S is proof against stupidity. If, on the other hand, the O/S is allowing this to happen without complaint, then Apple would appear to have implemented some of M$s legendary failings themselves."
It's actually a bit of both. This particular strain of malware doesn't prompt for an administration password, but then it doesn't do anything at an OS or kernel level either; it's strictly userland stuff. As with some other Mac malware, like a Trojan that circulated a few years back that masqueraded as a bootleg copy of Microsoft Office but that was actually just an AppleScript that deleted everything in the user's home folder, there's nothing going on that would normally require authentication.
If you have the firewall turned on, that prevents the malware from opening communication with the outside world, which mitigates its effects.
"No O/S should rely on applications being bug-free and well behaved for security, there'd be some top-quality FAIL there, if it were the case."
To be fair, OS X is moving in the direction of greater hardening with each release. The next iteration notifies the user the first time an application runs that isn't digitally signed with a code-signing cert, so in that environment, this particular malware will raise a flag to the user that something hinkey is up.
"A lot more than occasionally. Basically, he had to step down because the team suggested something blasphemous"
See, with that sentence you tipped your hand and showed that you don't actually know anything about science.
Science teaches us not to jump to conclusions, and not to make up stories based on our own preconceptions. Someone schooled in science would say "We know the team reported results that were shown to be incorrect, and we know the leader of the team resigned. We do not have enough data to show that the poor results were a causal factor in the resignation. More information is necessary."
To be fair, natural language processing is a tough nut to crack on the best of circumstances, and asking a computer to figure out the referent to "that" in that kind of situation requires much more cognitive nimbleness than you might think. Computers are still pretty primitive beasts, and natural language processing on computers is still pretty dicey.
I don't use Siri or any of its competitors; I don't really think that computers are at the point yet where they can be expected to process language with the agility that people want them to.
"Looks like crap to me. How can a small panel at a fixed angle behave any differently to a larger panel at the same fixed angle?"
Well, the nice thing about the scientific method is that it relies on empirical evidence, not on what seems like what might make sense. It's easy enough to test whether or not their method of mounting panels results in greater power per unit area of ground it covers...
For all his questionable talents as a filmmaker (I quite liked "Aliens," myself), he seems quite serious about exploration. He's a National Geographic Explorer-In-Residence, something you don't get to be just by being a casual tourist, and he's also got an interesting string of inventions to his name. He's reportedly the designer of the sub that made the descent, and he also reportedly helped design the cameras on the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
I'm still a bit puzzled by what "harm he caused the stars," exactly. I mean, inconvenience, certainly, but "harm"? I find it odd that he's potentially facing a 100-year sentence (at least according to the news reports I've read), whereas the bloke who killed Michael Jackson got, what, 4? Does seem odd to me that filching someone's cell phone pics is, in the eyes the law, more harmful than killing them. How else can we explain the discrepancy in maximum jail terms?
Re: 4 out of 5 developers "Very Interested" to develop for Android
It's one thing to be "very interested" in developing for a platform; it's another to actually go out and actually develop for it. I'm very interested in a flight to the International Space Station, but I'm not exactly packing my bags.
The sort of person who's being headhunted for a six-figure job is likely the sort of person who has skills and/or abilities that the employer really, really, really wants (or thinks it does--whether or not the person is worth six figures is another story).
That person isn't likely to be asked for her Facebook password. It's the midlevel managers, the grunts, the junior sales associate second class folks--in other words, the expendable, replaceable, interchangeable commodity worker bees--who are going to be asked to hand over their passwords.
You don't really think a company is going to ask this of its new CEO or the superstar programmer they just stole away from Google, do you? Hell, no. It's the people who are desperate for work and who have fifteen applicants lined up behind them who're going to get shafted.
I for one would love to play with one of these things once someone slaps 'em onto a cheap PCB with a USB breakout and ports an Arduino-compatible programming library over to them, which I'm sure someone will likely do not long after they're released.
They might or might not make it in the world of ultra-low-power embedded systems--time will tell--but they sound like they'd make fun toys.
Re: Lawyers, lying lawyers, and more lying lawyers
Actually, and somewhat bizarrely, that's exactly what trademark law *does* say, at least here in the States. If a trademark owner becomes aware of trademark infringement and fails to take action against the infringer, the trademark owner can lose the trademark.
It's a bit bonkers, really. A little like saying if I become aware that my roommate is stealing my silverware, and I don't boot him out for it, I can never own silverware again.
"I'll be interested in signing up for this, let me dump my $50+/mth "traditional" bank merchant system."
And then you'll be hitching your fate to PayPal, which doesn't exactly have a reputation as the most transparent or the most friendly of merchant service providers.
They've reached the point where there's no new business model left for them except to copy other people--in this case, Square, who's been doing the exact same thing for a while now. And who, it must be said, has a rather more transparent set of Ts and Cs.
"The big problem with wind is not the reliability: it's building the transmission capacity so that you can distribute it effectively. That's also expensive, but tough shit."
Actually, cost of production matters.
First, if you manage to produce all the electricity the nation could ever need, but you're doing it for £8 per kWh, you have not solved the problem at all...because the cost of electricity would actually exceed the total size of the economy.
Second, every £ you spend on inefficient power production that is expensive and lacks high availability is money you're not spending on developing other sources of energy which are cheaper and/or more available. Even a fully mature wind power system might never reach the cost and availability of some other form of power generation.
The problem with pumped water as an energy storage medium is that you need a LOT of it. By my quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, a thousand kilograms of water pumped up a hundred meters to a storage reservoir yields a very small 0.3 KWh of stored power. If you want enough capacity to be meaningful, you're talking about a huge reservoir located somewhere very high up.
"But she attended a Catholic college, so what was she expecting with regard to contraception?"
Actually, her testimony centered more around medically necessary treatments that the Catholic college would not fund because they can *also* be used for contraception, in addition to their other medical uses. In some cases, this resulted in severe injury or illness to people.
I strongly, strongly recommend that everyone, no matter what your political leaning, opinion of Rush, or opinion of contraception may be, read the actual testimony that triggered the firestorm. A transcript is available at
"if you look at the raw capabilities of both devices the playbook is the clear winner..."
Except among hardcore geeks, who make up only a very small percentage of the buying public, tech specs do not a desirable product make. Sadly, relatively few geeks actually realize that.
Tech specs are only one part of the equation, and honestly, for most folks, not necessarily even the most important part. This is part of the reason geeks shouldn't be allowed to do design.
Can't be war. In order for it to be war, you have to be a nation. In order to be a nation, you have to have a flag, as any fule know. Was there a flag? I think not!
Mine's the one with the Eddie Izzard DVD in the pocket...
"Because a lot of information can be gained by putting together pieces of seemingly innocuous data. If you know everything surrounding a secret then you've a much better chance of working out what is restricted."
Of course, there's a rather sizable difference between "that which is restricted because knowing it would aid a legitimate enemy to stage a real attack" and "that which is restricted because it would embarrass and humiliate those in power." Seems to me that much of the "restricted" information that was leaked properly belongs in the latter category, not the former.
"The brass would be embarrassed if the public knew what utter muppets they are" is hardly, in my view, a compelling reason to classify something.
A piano has keys that are arranged in multiple horizontal rows offset from one another, in which each key is affixed to a cantilever that is anchored to a pivot at one end and comes into contact with a rounded metal dome on the other?
Honestly, does ANYONE actually read the patent before commenting, rather than just the summary of the patent in the article? FFS, the link is right there in the middle of the article itself!
Does solar cell manufacture still generate large quantities of toxic heavy-metal waste?
I seem to recall that some years ago, one of the top polluters in the US was a firm making solar cells. They contaminated the ground around them with arsenic and gallium in the process.
Register
337 posts • joined Thursday 17th May 2007 16:15 GMT
Page:
Re: Now that is rocket science!
Well, rocket engineering, really. Which is a lot harder, as it turns out, than rocket science.
Re: Customer service
I've had splendid success on those occasions when I've had a problem with an Apple product. Had a G4 desktop system power supply go titsup on me some years back, with the machine about two weeks out of warranty, and Apple swapped out the power supply in an afternoon and didn't charge me for it even though the warranty had expired.
One of my sweeties has an aluminum Macbook Pro system that developed a graphics fault; when she brought it in *several years out of warranty) she was told that that model had a problem with its graphics chip, and that her problem wasn't related, but they'd swap out the logic board for free anyway.
The only company I've had as good experiences with is IBM, actually, back when they still made PCs. A client had an eServer system that had developed leaky capacitors; IBM shipped out a replacement system overnight the next day, and didn't even want the old system back.
Worst customer service experience I ever had, by way of comparison, was with a Gateway that developed a bad RAM socket. Gateway never did honor the warranty on it, even after weeks of struggle.
Re: Big Deal
".. it is the same as standing inside your house and shouting as loud as you possibly can. Would it be a crime if I happened to hear you voice wafting out the windows and across the street?"
No...but depending on your jurisdiction, it might be a crime if you recorded it. It would quite likely be a crime if you recorded it for commercial gain. And if you drove down the street with parabolic microphones pointing at people's bedroom windows, and recording everything you heard as you drove by, well...
Re: Hey, El Reg...
"BUT I bet you know more about Linux than both of them put together."
I wouldn't take that bet. I've known, and been involved romantically with, some VERY randy female Linux users, and at least one programmer...
Re: Fingers crossed
Oh, it'll touch down, all right. One way or the other.
Not odd at all. That's generally the way it is with almost any comment on almost any Internet community devoted to almost any subject.
Go onto YouTube and say that the moon landings AREN'T a hoax and we really did send human beings to the moon, and sure as rainbows someone will say that you're getting paid to be part of The Conspiracy. Go onto a "natural medicine" forum and say that homeopathy has not been proved to work (and often has been shown not to work), and you can bet that as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, a dozen people will accuse you of being a paid shill for "Big Pharma."
This is the Internet. The only possible reasons someone could ever have to post anything that disagrees with you is either (1) they're idiots or (2) someone is paying them to.
Re: @Captain Save-a-ho.. I do not dispute your figures - they appear entirely believable.......
"Fundamentally I am saying that BigCorp in this context are a bunch of bastards - Apple is simply the poster-boy/example."
Actually, in this particular case, I think General Electric is the example. I seem to recall that they have an effective *negative* tax rate; that is, the US Treasury pays them money (in the form of "tax incentives" for building manufacturing plants in the US, which they then transfer to a shell company organized offshore so as to avoid paying tax on revenue generated from that plant, or something like that).
"People always moan about tax avoidance but when pressed about it they would not:
1. Offer to pay more tax themselves on their income (unless they have too much money to possibly spend of course).
2. Offer to pay more for a product so the company can pay more taxes."
I notice option 3 is missing from your list: Expect the company to take a lower profit. A company that's got approximately $100,000,000,000 in cash on hand is clearly making sufficient profit to afford to pay more tax without throwing people out of work or raising their prices.
Re: Umm No.
"First, it's great that it will help reduce STDs but really, BIG PHARMA has a lot to do with this, they research remedies and temporary relief for all sorts of ailments but never really research the cure like they did with small pox because it's not profitable."
*yawn* Not that tired old trope again.
Anyone who believes this has no clue about medical research. First, "Big Pharma" is not some giant monolithic entity. It's a collection of companies, some large and many small, who compete with one another on a level that makes Oracle v. Google look like a minor tiff at a Boy Scout camp.
Second, there's a lot more money than you think in curing STDs.
Third, trying to get a bunch of academics and researchers to curtail their research for some cynical motivation...are you serious? Most of the folks who go into medical research--and I know quite a few scientists and academics who do this for a living--do it because they genuinely want to help people. You couldn't pay me enough to do their work; they go into debt for advanced graduate-level degrees, then work their asses off doing research for less money than an average MBA makes, all so they can get slagged as being part of some greedy entity that wants to keep people sick.
And last, if you seriously think that these folks would find a cure for something and then suppress it, you're more bonkers than the moon-hoax-conspiracy nutters. They'd all look around each other at the conference table and say "Sure, I promise not to tell anyone we have a cure for AIDS"...and then race each other to the patent office. The person who finds a full-stop cure for that or other common STDs is a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize and all the grant money she could ever want.
Seriously, the conspiracy dingbattery around "Big Pharma" is nuts. If all these conspiracy theories were true, we would not expect to see huge, sprawling, multinational pharmaceutical companies like Bayer making cheap, low-margin, unpatentable products like...err, aspirin.
Re: No precedent for programming language copyright?
"Anyone sufficiently long in the tooth to have programmed Intel and Zilog 8-bit microprocessors in assembly language will remember that Zilog were forbidden from using the same instruction mnemonics as Intel because Intel had claimed copyright on theirs."
And Zilog's made more sense. But I digress.
Re: Yeah, maybe this guy shouldn't have given his kid the password...
"Exploiting children"? Did you seriously just make a "somebody think of the chiiiiildren" argument?
"but the kid will just turn it back on if they know the password"
The iTunes password and the password to change in-app purchases (and other system settings) are two separate things. Frankly, I don't think it's a terribly bright idea to give either one of them to one's darling child.
"To those saying parents should work out whether the app is going to request in app purchases, the shite is aimed at kids, do you really want to wade through the childish shite to find out if you're going to be ripped off in each and every app downloaded?"
No.
Nor is it necessary. You simply switch off in-app purchases and the problem is solved.
Re: When will parents learn
"In this comment thread, I see one person that actually has a child, and four that don't (and it would seem haven't ever met or been a child). I notice the same thing among my friends. It's the ones without kids that don't understand why you can't keep an eye on *everything* each of your three kids is doing at all times, in addition to perfectly pre-screening (i.e. play the game yourself for several hours) everything your kids are about to do."
Whether or not people have children is a distraction. It's a red herring argument, as though only folks who've had children can be excused for not taking common-sense measures to prevent this sort of thing. (Full disclosure: I do not have biological children myself. My girlfriend has an 11-year-old girl.)
1. You can not watch what your kids do 24.7, that is true. You CAN, however, keep your app store password private. That gives you two advantages: it prevents your darling from draining your wallet, AND it lets you know what games and apps your kid is playing with, because you have to authorize purchases.
Several folks have commented that free apps should be downloadable without a password. That's a terrible idea, because it removes one of the parents' tools for monitoring what apps their children are using. The fact that you need to use a password to download any app, even a free one, is a GOOD thing. If you actually take an interest in what apps your kid is downloading, that's a feature, not a bug.
2. You can turn off in-app purchases. If this guy is so upset about in-app purchases, for fsck's sake, why didn't he just turn them off?
Re: Distribution monopoly
"Apple established a distribution monoply (ipad coupled with itunes)..."
Actually, iPad plus iTunes is neither a lock-in nor a distribution monopoly. I can read iTunes, Kindle, Nook, and generic .pub and .epub books on my iPad, as it turns out. So I'm not sure how "buying an iPad" == "being locked in to a distribution monopoly." In fact, I have more Kindle books than iTunes books on my iPad.
"...and then tried to get all the publishers to set a common price."
Is that true? I don't think it is. My understanding was that Apple told the publishers "You can set the price for your eBooks," whereas Amazon tells the publishers "You can't set your price for eBooks; we will determine what the price is."
This parallels the way their respective app stores work--with the Apple app store, the app developers sets the sale price, whereas on the Amazon Android app store, the developer sets a "suggested" price but Amazon can change that price if they like.
It seems to me that what this is all about isn't device lock-in (the iPad does not limit you to only the Apple book store) so much as who sets the price for eBooks, the book publisher or the book seller.
"Amazon set up various distribution points (kindle, phones, ipad, PC readers etc) which only relied on having a legitimate Amazon account to purchase from any sellor you wanted in their store and then Amazon tried to establish a decent market share by undercutting the competition by selling their stocks of ebooks at almost to no profit."
Partly. Partly, Amazon also tried to get their eBook suppliers to cut THEIR prices to almost no profit, too, which is why some smaller publishers have stopped selling eBooks through Amazon.
Amazon says that the traditional model of book publishing is broken; that publishers need to accept the reality that book prices will drop. On the one hand, I see their point. Publishers certainly have lower expenses with eBooks, that's for sure. On the other hand, my feeling is that the person who really gets shafted by the downward pressure on prices is the author, and discouraging authors is not a good way to serve the interest of readers.
"If the advertisements were for museums, no problem. However, they were for translation tools, and there Rosetta Stone has a trademark."
Actually...that's not *entirely* correct.
Rosetta Stone is big on attacking anyone who uses the word "Rosetta" in a Google ad, or on the Web, in any context whatsoever. I have actually received a cease-and-desist order from Rosetta Stone's lawyers because I administer a Web site that's a Mac troubleshooting forum, and many people on the forum have left posts talking about Rosetta, the PowerPC emulation layer built into some versions of OS X on Intel.
Rosetta Stone appears to target *anyone* who pops up in a Google search that includes the word "Rosetta," alone or in combination with "Stone," whether the term is used as part of a Google ad keyword or not.
You can see the cease-and-desist they sent me and the response I sent back to them on my blog:
http://tacit.livejournal.com/365489.html
Re: No one has ever been granted a copyright on a layout.
Actually, people have. Westlaw publishes the text of US law in a series of bound books. Since it's the standard for law books, most court briefs and so on will reference laws by the volume and page number in Westlaw books.
The text of the law can't be copyrighted. But the volume and page numbers can. Which is how Westlaw maintained a near-monopoly on legal texts for decades.
I personally consider that to be pretty ridiculous, but it's established nonetheless.
Re: Hahaha
"Your right-angled triangle has a vertex with a 90-degree inner angle. We have copyright on presenting a right-angled triangle in such a manner."
Actually, it's more like "You presented a photograph of Chartres Cathedral that looks suspiciously identical to the one in our book, and the caption on the photo happens by some weird coincidence to be word-for-word identical to ours, and by some even greater coincidence it falls on the same page as the one in our textbook, with the same copy surrounding it" from what I gather.
Which, if it's true, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
If it's true. That's a big "if;" I think a person might reasonably assume it's a bad idea to take any large publishing company's word for it, all things considered.
If it is what you describe, then fsck the publishing company. If it's what the publishing company, then the new textbook people deserve to get smacked down; they should have known better.
Re: Phony Economics
"There's no reason to ever buy a contract/locked phone - unless you want to throw money at the phone company for some reason."
You always throw money at the phone company, at least if you want phone service. A phone does little good without service, after all.
At least as a phone. My old iPhone works as a music player, even though I replaced it with an HTC once the contract was up. But the point still stands that if you want to use your phone as a phone, you're going to throw money at the phone company to make it go.
Re: Blame your tools. not your ipad
"So you still have to rasterise some of each page...So why bother?"
Because the PDFs are far smaller; only the raster content is delivered as raster.
Because the text remains text, meaning it can be searched and annotated and manipulated like...err, text.
Because the text renders cleanly on any kind of display, regardless of resolution or pixel density.
Because PDF is a universal format, so the same file will work on desktop machines or wherever else you want to take it to.
Because the reader has more control; the PDF can be rendered exactly as the designer intended, or for folks who have vision problems, the text can be enlarged.
Because the text is available to assistive devices like text-to-speech programs for the blind.
Shall I keep going? I have more!
Re: Blame your tools. not your ipad
iOS has a PDF renderer built in; it's part of the core graphics processing format.
I've heard it claimed, though I don't know if this is true or apocryphal, that Conde Nast opted to go with screen shots of every page rather than PDFs of every page because they didn't want to pay the licensing fees to embed the fonts in the PDFs. If that's true--and I stress that I'm not sure it is--it sounds pretty ridiculous to me, as the licensing fees are not that expensive in the overall scheme of things. Probably about comparable to the storage and bandwidth costs of keeping and pushing out these honking big bitmaps.
Now, to be fair...
...distributing magazine content on digital devices in the form of a bunch of raster images is a stupid, misguided, and profoundly sucky thing to do.
What good is a bunch of effin' PICTURES of magazine pages, fercrissake? The text isn't text, which means it isn't searchable, it can't be indexed, it can't be annotated, you can't copy-paste it into another app. Seriously, when it comes to ways to distribute information in the Information Age, this is imbecilic.
There are all sorts of file formats which are designed to preserve the look of a printed page in a digital file while keeping the text as text instead of pixels, so that, you know, it can be SEARCHED since it's on a bloody COMPUTER and that's one of the things we use computers FOR.
If it were possible to attach two icons to a post here at El Reg, I'd make them both "fail" for this.
Easy solution to that.
Hookworm.
Seriously. Hookworm. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/health/01iht-01prof.14122951.html?pagewanted=all
Sure, it gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies just thinking about it, but... No, wait, on second thought, maybe the bacteria are better.
Re: Oh the humanity!
"erm you have to type in your admin password for it to install"
Actually, you don't.
It's a bit of an odd duck, this one. It asks you for an administrator password, but you don't actually have to type it.
When the malicious Java applet runs, it attempts to download additional code. To do this, it prompts the user for an administrator password. If the user is gullible enough to type it, the downloader installs a payload in the Mac's Applications folder, and (I believe) sets it to run automatically at startup.
If the user *doesn't* type the administration password, the downloader installs a hostile payload in the user's home folder. This payload runs in userland, without administrator privileges, and I'm not certain but I don't believe it runs on restart (and it certainly doesn't if the user restarts and logs in to a different account). It's a lot more limited in what it can do, but it does still run, and (if the user doesn't have the firewall enabled) does seem to have the capability of making outside connections.
So the upshot is: No, you don't have to type an admin password. If you don't, the infection is somewhat mitigated, but it is still effective.
Re: Easy to fix (a couple of months ago)
"It is trivially easy for any website to obtain an SSL certificate (even scammers) and they do nothing to prevent trojans. Not one thing!"
True that.
And if the malware writer responsible for this malware really is the same person behind the DNSchanger malware, he knows it, too. In fact, there was one variant of the DNSchanger malware that was code-signed with a digital signing certificate in the name of "Mistland Limited," so not even running only signed code will *necessarily* protect you.
In any event, the most common way to spread this and other malware is to hack legitimate, "reputable" sites and embed iFrames or hostile JavaScripts that then attempt to load various exploits from the malware domains. So whether or not you use https is not necessarily relevant; you may be visiting a site that you believe to be perfectly innocuous that you've used dozens of times before, or in some cases you may even be visiting a site that uses https but that's still been pwn3d.
Re: Is this why lots of asteroids are made of Iron?
"I am not totally sure that is correct: I understood it that fusion processes create all the elements up to and including iron at which point the fusion process is in fact energy neutral - no more elements are then made and the star cools down as more or less an iron sphere with not much else going on..."
Well, kind of. My understanding, if I remember my physics classes from my dim and distant college past, is that there are actually several fusion processes happening in a star at once (even just hydrogen fusion can take place in one of several different ways). Iron is the bottom of the hill for most of the fusion processes, but there are also different fusion processes (which occur inside stars to varying degrees simultaneously) that produce nickel and cobalt as well. Those are also, if I recall correctly, exothermic, so you can end up with iron, nickel, and cobalt from exothermic processes but everything above that point is endothermic.
On a side note, I remember being at an orgy some years ago and geeking out about this stuff, to the point that "stellar nucleosynthesis" is still, a number of years later, the slang term for "group sex" in my social set.
Re: But WHO will play Ballmer
"about any shaven ape will do..."
Au contraire. While any shaven ape might be able to run Microsoft approximately as well as Ballmer is, the actual task of playing Ballmer on screen requires someone with a much wider repertoire. It's the small nuances that are important--the scowl of outrage when flinging office furniture about the room, the particularly graceless physical humor when dancing. Capturing the *essence* of Ballmer requires considerable range indeed!
Re: Nice of Microsoft...
"Usual stuff. If the users are being prompted for admin rights for the malware installation and letting it happen, then there's no story as no O/S is proof against stupidity. If, on the other hand, the O/S is allowing this to happen without complaint, then Apple would appear to have implemented some of M$s legendary failings themselves."
It's actually a bit of both. This particular strain of malware doesn't prompt for an administration password, but then it doesn't do anything at an OS or kernel level either; it's strictly userland stuff. As with some other Mac malware, like a Trojan that circulated a few years back that masqueraded as a bootleg copy of Microsoft Office but that was actually just an AppleScript that deleted everything in the user's home folder, there's nothing going on that would normally require authentication.
If you have the firewall turned on, that prevents the malware from opening communication with the outside world, which mitigates its effects.
"No O/S should rely on applications being bug-free and well behaved for security, there'd be some top-quality FAIL there, if it were the case."
To be fair, OS X is moving in the direction of greater hardening with each release. The next iteration notifies the user the first time an application runs that isn't digitally signed with a code-signing cert, so in that environment, this particular malware will raise a flag to the user that something hinkey is up.
Re: "the result of someone's power play"
"A lot more than occasionally. Basically, he had to step down because the team suggested something blasphemous"
See, with that sentence you tipped your hand and showed that you don't actually know anything about science.
Science teaches us not to jump to conclusions, and not to make up stories based on our own preconceptions. Someone schooled in science would say "We know the team reported results that were shown to be incorrect, and we know the leader of the team resigned. We do not have enough data to show that the poor results were a causal factor in the resignation. More information is necessary."
Ballmer
His approval rating is sinking? Maybe it's time for him to throw more office furniture. I hear that helps.
Re: Siri's lack of context is annoying
To be fair, natural language processing is a tough nut to crack on the best of circumstances, and asking a computer to figure out the referent to "that" in that kind of situation requires much more cognitive nimbleness than you might think. Computers are still pretty primitive beasts, and natural language processing on computers is still pretty dicey.
I don't use Siri or any of its competitors; I don't really think that computers are at the point yet where they can be expected to process language with the agility that people want them to.
Re: Breakthrough?
"Looks like crap to me. How can a small panel at a fixed angle behave any differently to a larger panel at the same fixed angle?"
Well, the nice thing about the scientific method is that it relies on empirical evidence, not on what seems like what might make sense. It's easy enough to test whether or not their method of mounting panels results in greater power per unit area of ground it covers...
...which, apparently, they've done.
Re: Credit where credit is due
For all his questionable talents as a filmmaker (I quite liked "Aliens," myself), he seems quite serious about exploration. He's a National Geographic Explorer-In-Residence, something you don't get to be just by being a casual tourist, and he's also got an interesting string of inventions to his name. He's reportedly the designer of the sub that made the descent, and he also reportedly helped design the cameras on the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
I'm still a bit puzzled by what "harm he caused the stars," exactly. I mean, inconvenience, certainly, but "harm"? I find it odd that he's potentially facing a 100-year sentence (at least according to the news reports I've read), whereas the bloke who killed Michael Jackson got, what, 4? Does seem odd to me that filching someone's cell phone pics is, in the eyes the law, more harmful than killing them. How else can we explain the discrepancy in maximum jail terms?
Re: 4 out of 5 developers "Very Interested" to develop for Android
It's one thing to be "very interested" in developing for a platform; it's another to actually go out and actually develop for it. I'm very interested in a flight to the International Space Station, but I'm not exactly packing my bags.
One hopes the antilock brakes, at least, are not being run by Windows.
Re: Try this one on for size...
The question misses an important point.
The sort of person who's being headhunted for a six-figure job is likely the sort of person who has skills and/or abilities that the employer really, really, really wants (or thinks it does--whether or not the person is worth six figures is another story).
That person isn't likely to be asked for her Facebook password. It's the midlevel managers, the grunts, the junior sales associate second class folks--in other words, the expendable, replaceable, interchangeable commodity worker bees--who are going to be asked to hand over their passwords.
You don't really think a company is going to ask this of its new CEO or the superstar programmer they just stole away from Google, do you? Hell, no. It's the people who are desperate for work and who have fifteen applicants lined up behind them who're going to get shafted.
Re: Cell phones and "social networking" will be the death of Humanity as we know it
"Don't they understand that they cannot have decent sex while texting?"
You obviously haven't sexted with the right people. It'll never replace the real thing, natch, but that doesn't mean it can't be decent.
Or, ahem, so I've heard.
Re: 60 a day, is that all?
"....we've since had words....."
Words with your daughter over the text volume, or words with O2 over their marketing-speak of "unlimited" that actually means "limited"?
Re: Inaccurate and Wrong
On the other hand...
I for one would love to play with one of these things once someone slaps 'em onto a cheap PCB with a USB breakout and ports an Arduino-compatible programming library over to them, which I'm sure someone will likely do not long after they're released.
They might or might not make it in the world of ultra-low-power embedded systems--time will tell--but they sound like they'd make fun toys.
Re: Lawyers, lying lawyers, and more lying lawyers
Actually, and somewhat bizarrely, that's exactly what trademark law *does* say, at least here in the States. If a trademark owner becomes aware of trademark infringement and fails to take action against the infringer, the trademark owner can lose the trademark.
It's a bit bonkers, really. A little like saying if I become aware that my roommate is stealing my silverware, and I don't boot him out for it, I can never own silverware again.
Re: Breakages in 3...2....1
"I'll be interested in signing up for this, let me dump my $50+/mth "traditional" bank merchant system."
And then you'll be hitching your fate to PayPal, which doesn't exactly have a reputation as the most transparent or the most friendly of merchant service providers.
They've reached the point where there's no new business model left for them except to copy other people--in this case, Square, who's been doing the exact same thing for a while now. And who, it must be said, has a rather more transparent set of Ts and Cs.
Re: Omissions
"The big problem with wind is not the reliability: it's building the transmission capacity so that you can distribute it effectively. That's also expensive, but tough shit."
Actually, cost of production matters.
First, if you manage to produce all the electricity the nation could ever need, but you're doing it for £8 per kWh, you have not solved the problem at all...because the cost of electricity would actually exceed the total size of the economy.
Second, every £ you spend on inefficient power production that is expensive and lacks high availability is money you're not spending on developing other sources of energy which are cheaper and/or more available. Even a fully mature wind power system might never reach the cost and availability of some other form of power generation.
Re: Self-evident wisdom
The problem with pumped water as an energy storage medium is that you need a LOT of it. By my quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, a thousand kilograms of water pumped up a hundred meters to a storage reservoir yields a very small 0.3 KWh of stored power. If you want enough capacity to be meaningful, you're talking about a huge reservoir located somewhere very high up.
Re: Am I the only one here that thinks this is not good?
"You guys trust the government too much..."
Well, to be fair, it is a bit of a pickle. The government:
- Is made up of a bunch of public figures who all have their own agenda
- Can't be trusted to have an agenda that's (necessarily) in the interests of the people at large, though they often claim to be.
- Operates with limited public accountability.
- Operates with limited public oversight, which can often be revoked in the interests of "national security"
- Doesn't know as much about tech-related issues as it thinks it does
On the other hand, Anonymous et. al.:
- Is made up of a bunch of secret figures who all have their own agenda
- Can't be trusted to have an agenda that's (necessarily) in the interests of the people at large, though they often claim to be.
- Operates with no public accountability.
- Operates with no public oversight
- Doesn't know as much about tech-related issues as it thinks it does
Bit of a devil's choice, really. Though in my book, "limited public accountability" still trumps "no public accountability."
Re: His remarks were offensive and uncalled-for
"But she attended a Catholic college, so what was she expecting with regard to contraception?"
Actually, her testimony centered more around medically necessary treatments that the Catholic college would not fund because they can *also* be used for contraception, in addition to their other medical uses. In some cases, this resulted in severe injury or illness to people.
I strongly, strongly recommend that everyone, no matter what your political leaning, opinion of Rush, or opinion of contraception may be, read the actual testimony that triggered the firestorm. A transcript is available at
http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/statement-Congress-letterhead-2nd%20hearing.pdf
It's quite short. Even a quick read shows that it really has very little to do with "paying for other people to have sex."
Re: Excuses, excuses.
"if you look at the raw capabilities of both devices the playbook is the clear winner..."
Except among hardcore geeks, who make up only a very small percentage of the buying public, tech specs do not a desirable product make. Sadly, relatively few geeks actually realize that.
Tech specs are only one part of the equation, and honestly, for most folks, not necessarily even the most important part. This is part of the reason geeks shouldn't be allowed to do design.
Re: Murder is a big assumption
Can't be war. In order for it to be war, you have to be a nation. In order to be a nation, you have to have a flag, as any fule know. Was there a flag? I think not!
Mine's the one with the Eddie Izzard DVD in the pocket...
Re: Re: "what about the OTHER 699,999 documents"
"Because a lot of information can be gained by putting together pieces of seemingly innocuous data. If you know everything surrounding a secret then you've a much better chance of working out what is restricted."
Of course, there's a rather sizable difference between "that which is restricted because knowing it would aid a legitimate enemy to stage a real attack" and "that which is restricted because it would embarrass and humiliate those in power." Seems to me that much of the "restricted" information that was leaked properly belongs in the latter category, not the former.
"The brass would be embarrassed if the public knew what utter muppets they are" is hardly, in my view, a compelling reason to classify something.
Re: WTF!? It's a piano keys design!
A piano has keys that are arranged in multiple horizontal rows offset from one another, in which each key is affixed to a cantilever that is anchored to a pivot at one end and comes into contact with a rounded metal dome on the other?
Honestly, does ANYONE actually read the patent before commenting, rather than just the summary of the patent in the article? FFS, the link is right there in the middle of the article itself!
Re: Re: But its inefficient to build...
Does solar cell manufacture still generate large quantities of toxic heavy-metal waste?
I seem to recall that some years ago, one of the top polluters in the US was a firm making solar cells. They contaminated the ground around them with arsenic and gallium in the process.
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