If every drunken person at the airport was arrested, the holding area would be full. Mostly with nervous flyers and claustrophobes that appreciate a little detachment from the flying experience.
The TSA has taken over the investigation. I'm certainly they really, really don't want a charge of sexual assault until they can differentiate what happened with what commonly occurs during a 'screening'.
They similarly don't want an 'under color of authority' charge, because that would open the question of what authority the screeners operate under. They aren't officers. They aren't certified. What are they?
My guess is that the TSA will assess an administrative penalty, probably a single instance of the $10K maximum, for disrupting the screening process. This is notoriously difficult to challenge or appeal.
Yes, this could be the case that 'six strikes' starts to be taken down.
MM doesn't benefit from six strikes, so they won't be motivated to defend it.
If there are zero strikes, that's exculpatory. If there are a few strikes, then the possible reasons for false positives can be brought into play. Even a single strike that can be positively dis-proven shows that strikes are unreliable accusations. The next case where 'six strikes' comes into play might find the claim is regarded as presumptively unreliable, eventually moving to presumptively false.
I don't believe that Verizon is holding back Android updates in order to encourage you to buy a new phone.
After all, new phones usually are subsidized. And while the new phone extends the contract commitment another two years, it's still less expensive for them to have you update your phone and continue month-to-month. The risk of you switching carriers is low.
I believe that Verizon has actually bitten off more than they expected. They really want to further monetize their customer base. They want the phone to be shopping portal into their stores. So they customize their phones. But each effort has been a failure. My ancient minimal-feature phone keeps trying to sell me ringtones, music and web browsing by putting their store on the keys most likely to be hit accidentally. They made lots of money on ringtones (remember spending $1 or more for a few notes?) but nothing since then has made significant profit. Without a new revenue opportunity, they don't see any reason to put the work into an update. And allowing an update to generic Android would get rid of the work they put into locking partner apps into the phone.
A little off-topic. The 40,000 rounds per kill in Vietnam was an oft-quoted figure. It was variously used to show how the M16 was a bad weapon, soldier training standards had dropped, that soldiers weren't "really trying", or that "spray and pray" was common.
It's now understood that it reflects a different kind of warfare. Just as it took decades to recognize that rank-and-file had become absurd against heavy rifles, it took years to recognize that suppressive fire was an excellent tactic.
In Vietnam we had excellent logistical support and complete control of the air. Bullets were cheap and easily resupplied. It wasn't always clear that what you were shooting at should be dead, or was just a decoy for the real danger. So the best tactic was loosely aimed fire at a density that made it a risky for the enemy to move or return fire.
If you actually want to kill something in a specific area, that's what artillery was for: keep them from moving using suppressive light rounds, while you call in AP artillery rounds.
I'm expecting that judge Howell will accept the dismissal notice.
It's not a motion. The judge doesn't need to do anything. The recommendation from the appeals court to consider sanctions is not binding. She can just close the docket and take no further action.
The dismissal without prejudice is certainly tactical, to avoid paying costs. But it's defensible as nothing was decided except for lack of jurisdiction. It's very unlikely that the case will be refiled.
Remember, that the standard here is "reasonable person". No reasonable person could believe that this is anything but a prank.
Just because some school official pretends that it could be taken otherwise doesn't make it so. Letters from Nigerian princes are far more believable, but we still expect that no reasonable person would fall for them. (The tiny handful of cases where they have is balanced against the billions of emails sent.)
I actually came up with a few tips while reading. They missed many opportunities. Should I contact Barry McCockinher? Is there mailstop?
It's something completely obvious, but only in retrospect. Before there was a solution didn't know it was a problem.
The usual competition in the GPU wars is an immediate claim of "that doesn't matter", followed by implementing a similar feature a year or two later, when it suddenly matters.
A good example is fixing frame rate variability, which caused jerky game play even with high FPS rates.
The reaction to G-sync was 'no one cares' followed a few days later by '[oh shit]' and a mad scramble by AMD to find something.. anything.. that would have the same benefits.
AMD figured out an alternate approach. The AMD approach is not quite as good, but it still gets most of the benefit. It was possible to reprogram the latest AMD hardware to put out variable sync, and could be quickly added to an existing VESA standard.
AMD would not have done this on their own. The motivation was an innovation by Nvidia. AMD was strictly reacting.
Actually, almost all of those situations make the opposite point than you suggest.
For instance, Nvidia helped Crytek use a new sophisticated feature of their upcoming GPUs. Nobody was mislead. It was simply "Use this technique to get better visual quality. It's was too expensive to do with old GPUs, but we now have the hardware and software advances to make it feasible."
How is that legitimately bad for anyone but competitors?
And "They way it's meant to be played" program.. Nvidia advises game creators how to make their game faster by looking at effectively it's utilizing the GPU, and moving some of the physical simulation from the CPU to GPU. They aren't making the game slower for AMD users, they are making the game faster for Nvidia users.
How is that legitimately bad for anyone but competitors?
It's not at all like the Intel compiler generating deliberately bad code for AMD processors. It wasn't a case of not generating special extension instructions such as SSE. Telling the compiler to optimize for AMD resulted in code that would run slower everywhere. Telling it to optimize for generic Intel processors, without SSE, resulted in code that ran fast on AMD as well. That's trying to trip your competitor rather than running faster yourself.
Disclaimer: I'm a little biased on this topic, but I'm fairly well informed. Evaluate for yourself.
The press battle talks about this as tools, which is a nebulous term. It's really pretty much libraries, and education on how to use those libraries.
Nvidia spent years and huge bucks on developing the techniques to make these effect, and more money writing and tuning the code necessary to implement the ideas. Many movie and game effects weren't written by the studios, they came from Nvidia.
AMD does the same thing. Or I should say used to do the same. When they ran into a cash crunch they stopped investing. ATI was still very profitable, but rather than investing in the long-term market position it was used as a cash cow to subsidize the money-losing parts of AMD (the entire rest of the company, including the Global Foundry wafer-start commitments). It was probably needed to save the company, but you still have to look at it as cutting R&D.
What's happening now is what is supposed to happen in a competitive marketplace. Companies that invest in the next generation have a more advanced product and a competitive advantage. Companies that don't invest, or invest in the wrong area, end up with a less desirable product.
AMD chose to invest in next generation console chips. They won every major console, displacing Nvidia GPU IP. Nvidia invested in visual computing, including libraries that do realistic rendering, simulating massive numbers of objects, flame effects, fog effects, hair, facial and gesture realism, etc. AMD has.. TressFX for hair.
These features add huge value to games. Or I should say figuring out how do these things is innovative and inventive. Being able to do these effect in real time is astonishing. People don't know how to put a price on these features. But they can compare two implementations, and buy the one that does the best job. Or pay the same for two that have equivalent performance.
In the GPU business the hard metric has long been compute speed and FPS (frames per second). That's easy to measure. But increasingly customers have realized that driver quality and feature support -- the expansive part of the GPU business -- is far more important. It's hard to measure.. until features like this makes a huge difference that can be measured in FPS.
Yes, anything you read on FOSSpatents is paid-for distortion. FM is quite good at getting press coverage, using likely-sounding 'facts' and misleading statistics.
I only know the numbers behind a few of the categories, and the ones in the story are wildly wrong. But you don't need to be an insider to know that you can buy complete WiFi devices for less than the claimed license fee.
I'm pretty sure that Prenda considered this case a loss at the first objection.
The DC circus just a rear-guard action. Losing the appeal rather than winning it is a loss solely because now Duffy will have to prepare for and attend another hearing.
Their business model wasn't to win cases. It wasn't even to start litigation and settle. It was to never be in court at all. They only needed to use the power of the court for discovery and to threaten potential victims. They needed discovery to get the names and addresses of targets. They then used the threat of ruinous legal expense -- not punishment for wrong-doing -- to extort money.
Ideally this would take only a single filing fee, with no document ever needing to be reviewed by a judge.
Home-grown encryption is very likely to end up with something like applying rot-13.. twice.
Hmmm, I should run out and patent that before someone else does.
For those that got the obvious joke but missed the subtlety: doubling up on your encryption provides only the protection of the most secure round. And if you use the same key it might actually leak bits. A good example is 'triple DES', which is mostly equivalent to DES with different S-boxes.
A comment on devising your own encryption being equivalent to being your own lawyer: no, it's not even close. There is no secret method or logic in law. The NSA's internal approaches to cryptography are far more advanced than what is public. Presumably there are a handful of other places that have their own advances.
It took outside people well over a decade to figure out that the government's tweak to IBM's S-boxes made it more secure rather than less, and they still aren't certain how they knew to change just those few bits instead of all of the boxes at once.
I am less optimistic. Some of the changes made cannot be undone.
The best example is the extension of copyright. Nothing created in our lifetime will enter the public domain under long after we are dead. Changing that would be likely be consider a 'taking' by the courts, requiring compensation by the federal government. Since the future value of any specific work is unknowable and unbounded, the claims would exceed the total value of everything produced by mankind to date.
Now you might think 'what the government grants, they certainly can take away'. But I can't think of case where that has happened. An example to the contrary is the egregious toll that western 'water rights' has taken on the economy. They have been upheld, even when they were gotten fraudulently (e.g. Henry Miller claiming most of the California central valley desert was swampland) and have long since been decoupled from the land they were attached to. Now they are just the right to collect money from anyone that uses water in the state.
This isn't a two-tiered system. That implies that you just need to be in the higher tier.
This is allowing the ISP to charge based on the value of the delivered material. Pretty much like a parking garage charging more if you buy jewelry at Tiffanys than if you buy diapers at Walmart. The parking lot owner thinks that is fair, because they enabled the high dollar sale, even though their cost structure and delivered service is exactly the same.
It would be interesting to adjust for depreciation and for customers served.
Using "Cumulative investment" suggests that most equipment is still viable for current use. That might be true when you are buying printing presses or machine tools. But it's probably not true with communication or computing equipment.
On the post: Chubby Checker Checks His Lawsuit Against App That Checks Your Chubby
I'm actually old enough to know of Chubby Checker. I didn't get the joke meaning of his name before, but now that's what will come to mind first.
On the post: The Inevitable: Drunk Man Arrested For Impersonating Groping TSA Agent At Airport
If every drunken person at the airport was arrested, the holding area would be full. Mostly with nervous flyers and claustrophobes that appreciate a little detachment from the flying experience.
The TSA has taken over the investigation. I'm certainly they really, really don't want a charge of sexual assault until they can differentiate what happened with what commonly occurs during a 'screening'.
They similarly don't want an 'under color of authority' charge, because that would open the question of what authority the screeners operate under. They aren't officers. They aren't certified. What are they?
My guess is that the TSA will assess an administrative penalty, probably a single instance of the $10K maximum, for disrupting the screening process. This is notoriously difficult to challenge or appeal.
On the post: Copyright Troll Malibu Media Allowed To Get Six Strikes Info From Comcast
MM doesn't benefit from six strikes, so they won't be motivated to defend it.
If there are zero strikes, that's exculpatory.
If there are a few strikes, then the possible reasons for false positives can be brought into play. Even a single strike that can be positively dis-proven shows that strikes are unreliable accusations. The next case where 'six strikes' comes into play might find the claim is regarded as presumptively unreliable, eventually moving to presumptively false.
On the post: Verizon Math Strikes Again: Promises 2 Years Of Free Data Access To Chromebook Users; Delivers Just 1
After all, new phones usually are subsidized. And while the new phone extends the contract commitment another two years, it's still less expensive for them to have you update your phone and continue month-to-month. The risk of you switching carriers is low.
I believe that Verizon has actually bitten off more than they expected. They really want to further monetize their customer base. They want the phone to be shopping portal into their stores. So they customize their phones. But each effort has been a failure. My ancient minimal-feature phone keeps trying to sell me ringtones, music and web browsing by putting their store on the keys most likely to be hit accidentally. They made lots of money on ringtones (remember spending $1 or more for a few notes?) but nothing since then has made significant profit. Without a new revenue opportunity, they don't see any reason to put the work into an update. And allowing an update to generic Android would get rid of the work they put into locking partner apps into the phone.
On the post: DailyDirt: Feeding More People Sustainably
On the post: Copyright Troll Malibu Media Tells Court That Its Critics (And Opposing Lawyer) Are Part Of A Psychopathic Hate Group
On the post: Six Officers Charged In Police Pursuit That Ended With 137 Shots Being Fired At Suspects In A Little Over 20 Seconds
It's now understood that it reflects a different kind of warfare. Just as it took decades to recognize that rank-and-file had become absurd against heavy rifles, it took years to recognize that suppressive fire was an excellent tactic.
In Vietnam we had excellent logistical support and complete control of the air. Bullets were cheap and easily resupplied. It wasn't always clear that what you were shooting at should be dead, or was just a decoy for the real danger. So the best tactic was loosely aimed fire at a density that made it a risky for the enemy to move or return fire.
If you actually want to kill something in a specific area, that's what artillery was for: keep them from moving using suppressive light rounds, while you call in AP artillery rounds.
On the post: No, A 'Supercomputer' Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better
On the post: Yes, Verizon Is At Fault In Netflix Dispute; It's Not Delivering What It Sold Customers
Now we are also the product being sold to someone else.
On the post: Prenda Tries To Weasel Out Of Case It Just Lost At The Appeals Court
It's not a motion. The judge doesn't need to do anything. The recommendation from the appeals court to consider sanctions is not binding. She can just close the docket and take no further action.
The dismissal without prejudice is certainly tactical, to avoid paying costs. But it's defensible as nothing was decided except for lack of jurisdiction. It's very unlikely that the case will be refiled.
On the post: Harmless High School Prank That Occurred Completely Off Campus Turned Over To School Police Officer
Just because some school official pretends that it could be taken otherwise doesn't make it so. Letters from Nigerian princes are far more believable, but we still expect that no reasonable person would fall for them. (The tiny handful of cases where they have is balanced against the billions of emails sent.)
I actually came up with a few tips while reading. They missed many opportunities. Should I contact Barry McCockinher? Is there mailstop?
On the post: Is Nvidia Playing Fair With Their New Development Tools?
I don't use those words casually.
It's something completely obvious, but only in retrospect. Before there was a solution didn't know it was a problem.
The usual competition in the GPU wars is an immediate claim of "that doesn't matter", followed by implementing a similar feature a year or two later, when it suddenly matters.
A good example is fixing frame rate variability, which caused jerky game play even with high FPS rates.
The reaction to G-sync was 'no one cares' followed a few days later by '[oh shit]' and a mad scramble by AMD to find something.. anything.. that would have the same benefits.
AMD figured out an alternate approach. The AMD approach is not quite as good, but it still gets most of the benefit. It was possible to reprogram the latest AMD hardware to put out variable sync, and could be quickly added to an existing VESA standard.
AMD would not have done this on their own. The motivation was an innovation by Nvidia. AMD was strictly reacting.
On the post: Is Nvidia Playing Fair With Their New Development Tools?
For instance, Nvidia helped Crytek use a new sophisticated feature of their upcoming GPUs. Nobody was mislead. It was simply "Use this technique to get better visual quality. It's was too expensive to do with old GPUs, but we now have the hardware and software advances to make it feasible."
How is that legitimately bad for anyone but competitors?
And "They way it's meant to be played" program.. Nvidia advises game creators how to make their game faster by looking at effectively it's utilizing the GPU, and moving some of the physical simulation from the CPU to GPU. They aren't making the game slower for AMD users, they are making the game faster for Nvidia users.
How is that legitimately bad for anyone but competitors?
It's not at all like the Intel compiler generating deliberately bad code for AMD processors. It wasn't a case of not generating special extension instructions such as SSE. Telling the compiler to optimize for AMD resulted in code that would run slower everywhere. Telling it to optimize for generic Intel processors, without SSE, resulted in code that ran fast on AMD as well. That's trying to trip your competitor rather than running faster yourself.
On the post: Is Nvidia Playing Fair With Their New Development Tools?
The press battle talks about this as tools, which is a nebulous term. It's really pretty much libraries, and education on how to use those libraries.
Nvidia spent years and huge bucks on developing the techniques to make these effect, and more money writing and tuning the code necessary to implement the ideas. Many movie and game effects weren't written by the studios, they came from Nvidia.
AMD does the same thing. Or I should say used to do the same. When they ran into a cash crunch they stopped investing. ATI was still very profitable, but rather than investing in the long-term market position it was used as a cash cow to subsidize the money-losing parts of AMD (the entire rest of the company, including the Global Foundry wafer-start commitments). It was probably needed to save the company, but you still have to look at it as cutting R&D.
What's happening now is what is supposed to happen in a competitive marketplace. Companies that invest in the next generation have a more advanced product and a competitive advantage. Companies that don't invest, or invest in the wrong area, end up with a less desirable product.
AMD chose to invest in next generation console chips. They won every major console, displacing Nvidia GPU IP. Nvidia invested in visual computing, including libraries that do realistic rendering, simulating massive numbers of objects, flame effects, fog effects, hair, facial and gesture realism, etc. AMD has.. TressFX for hair.
These features add huge value to games. Or I should say figuring out how do these things is innovative and inventive. Being able to do these effect in real time is astonishing. People don't know how to put a price on these features. But they can compare two implementations, and buy the one that does the best job. Or pay the same for two that have equivalent performance.
In the GPU business the hard metric has long been compute speed and FPS (frames per second). That's easy to measure. But increasingly customers have realized that driver quality and feature support -- the expansive part of the GPU business -- is far more important. It's hard to measure.. until features like this makes a huge difference that can be measured in FPS.
On the post: The $120 Smartphone Patent Tax: Patent Royalties Cost More Than The Actual Hardware In Your Phone
FM is quite good at getting press coverage, using likely-sounding 'facts' and misleading statistics.
I only know the numbers behind a few of the categories, and the ones in the story are wildly wrong. But you don't need to be an insider to know that you can buy complete WiFi devices for less than the claimed license fee.
On the post: Appeals Court Overturns Prenda Win From Former RIAA Lobbyist Judge
The DC circus just a rear-guard action. Losing the appeal rather than winning it is a loss solely because now Duffy will have to prepare for and attend another hearing.
Their business model wasn't to win cases. It wasn't even to start litigation and settle. It was to never be in court at all. They only needed to use the power of the court for discovery and to threaten potential victims. They needed discovery to get the names and addresses of targets. They then used the threat of ruinous legal expense -- not punishment for wrong-doing -- to extort money.
Ideally this would take only a single filing fee, with no document ever needing to be reviewed by a judge.
On the post: Schneier: Snowden's Leaks Have Actually Made It Easier To Crack Terrorists' Encrypted Messages
Hmmm, I should run out and patent that before someone else does.
For those that got the obvious joke but missed the subtlety: doubling up on your encryption provides only the protection of the most secure round. And if you use the same key it might actually leak bits. A good example is 'triple DES', which is mostly equivalent to DES with different S-boxes.
A comment on devising your own encryption being equivalent to being your own lawyer: no, it's not even close. There is no secret method or logic in law. The NSA's internal approaches to cryptography are far more advanced than what is public. Presumably there are a handful of other places that have their own advances.
It took outside people well over a decade to figure out that the government's tweak to IBM's S-boxes made it more secure rather than less, and they still aren't certain how they knew to change just those few bits instead of all of the boxes at once.
On the post: The End Of Maximalist Copyright?
The best example is the extension of copyright. Nothing created in our lifetime will enter the public domain under long after we are dead. Changing that would be likely be consider a 'taking' by the courts, requiring compensation by the federal government. Since the future value of any specific work is unknowable and unbounded, the claims would exceed the total value of everything produced by mankind to date.
Now you might think 'what the government grants, they certainly can take away'. But I can't think of case where that has happened. An example to the contrary is the egregious toll that western 'water rights' has taken on the economy. They have been upheld, even when they were gotten fraudulently (e.g. Henry Miller claiming most of the California central valley desert was swampland) and have long since been decoupled from the land they were attached to. Now they are just the right to collect money from anyone that uses water in the state.
On the post: NY Times And Washington Post Describe Yesterday's Net Neutrality Vote In Diametrically Opposite Ways
This is allowing the ISP to charge based on the value of the delivered material. Pretty much like a parking garage charging more if you buy jewelry at Tiffanys than if you buy diapers at Walmart. The parking lot owner thinks that is fair, because they enabled the high dollar sale, even though their cost structure and delivered service is exactly the same.
On the post: Cable Industry's Own Numbers Show General Decline In Investment Over Past Seven Years
Using "Cumulative investment" suggests that most equipment is still viable for current use. That might be true when you are buying printing presses or machine tools. But it's probably not true with communication or computing equipment.
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