JackC

36 ms·

271.
by JackC 12y ago
It's interesting to consider from a legal perspective exactly why this isn't something a company is allowed to do. (Assuming the company did in fact intentionally damage people's chips, reversibly or not -- sounds like we d
272.
by JackC 12y ago
First of all, believe me, I would love it if publishers came and asked me how to beat Amazon. A new online bookstore (with a radically different approach to DRM) would definitely be on the list. I agree with you that publishers are not nece
273.
by JackC 12y ago
Krugman's point is summed up in another quote from the comment you linked to: "Hachette failed to come to mutually agreeable terms with [Amazon]. That's their most important job as a publisher, and they blew it, to the tune
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by JackC 12y ago
To reverse your point: unless you're talking about predatory publishers, comparing them to VCs is an insult. You can't get anywhere useful by excluding the bad actors in one industry and focusing solely on the bad actors in anothe
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by JackC 12y ago
> how is staring for hours at a stationary rectangle with miniature information more natural and easy for your neck muscles than having information spread around you in even spacing at a comfortable virtual distance? Low-pixel displays c
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by JackC 12y ago
This appears (to me) to be another good temporary fix for OS X: http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/146851 It provides a one-step copy and paste into the terminal to download, patch and compile bash from apple.com and gnu
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by JackC 12y ago
As an analogy, suppose I go to a website written in PHP and register with the username "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--". A correct PHP script will sanitize the name; it'll escape the quote and run something like `updat
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by JackC 12y ago
With high-res, widescreen monitors, it makes a lot more sense to have tabs in a vertical stack. Check out Tree Style Tabs for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... This is t
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by JackC 12y ago
I see how you're getting that, but I don't think the license is intended that way or would be enforced that way. When they say "makes a claim," they mean "makes a claim to an entity with the power to grant the claim
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by JackC 12y ago
I'm not so sure that's true. The conclusion is that the statute "was intended and understood only to prohibit manufacturer-owned dealerships when, unlike Tesla, the manufacturer already had an affiliated dealer or dealers in
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by JackC 12y ago
Text of the decision: http://www.mass.gov/courts/docs/sjc/reporter-of-decisions/ne... --- Edit: having read the decision, I thought it might be fun to explain what the Court did here. Reading statutes is
282.
by JackC 12y ago
> Why can my 2008 Vista laptop be upgraded all the way to 8.1 and use software that come out today and my 2008 pocket computer / smartphone cannot do that? In 2008 the 2nd gen (3G) iPhone launched. It had the same 400mhz 32-bit proc
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by JackC 12y ago
The entrapment defense is pretty much non-existent. The thing is that it's perfectly fine to entrap someone who is willing to commit the crime anyway. A government agent can give you everything you need to commit a crime, beg and plead
284.
by JackC 12y ago
For a heroic attempt to explain this article to laypeople, check out physicsmatt's comments over at Metafilter: "First, for maximum sense-making, read my previous comments here, here, here, and here. I realize that's a lot, s
285.
by JackC 12y ago
This is actually a tricky question. Your assault & battery law probably says something like "unconsented or violent touching," so the fact that you consented doesn't matter, so you've been assaulted. And you can&#x
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by JackC 12y ago
To the skeptics here -- the problem is that malware can turn one kind of USB device into another kind of USB device, and that creates a massive attack surface given the scope of USB. Check out all the things that a USB device can claim to b
287.
by JackC 12y ago
This is really great. By the by (and I know that this is about to sound like an ad, but I have no connection, I'm just someone who likes printing out old books scans and sticking them to my walls), if you want large-scale color prints
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by JackC 12y ago
> I did not single out one person, nor attack any one position. Sure you did, when you wrote this: > No word on if he supports the GLBT community hook, line and sinker. "Hook, line, and sinker" has a pretty clear meaning, as
289.
by JackC 12y ago
This can also be handled by a clipboard manager, which will have the nice side effect of making your life 1000 times better in every way. My current favorites are Ditto[1] on Windows and ClipMenu[2] on the Mac. Clipboard managers are so ins
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by JackC 12y ago
> ... when it's so much more attractive to companies to rent their products to you for a constant stream of monthly income? Which companies are you thinking of here? Amazon is still trying to drag book publishers into participating
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by JackC 12y ago
> one could also argue that ... market forces would make them untenable if there were truly a dearth of the needed specialized labor to complete the product. It's not a good argument. There are markets where these agreements work an
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by JackC 12y ago
So, I'm a lawyer, but not at all a tax lawyer. I was talking to a tax lawyer the other day, though. I told her that I heard a lot of public-interest journalism projects were getting rejected for tax-exempt status, and it seemed like a
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by JackC 12y ago
A version of this idea I really like is Crypto Stamp: http://cryptostamp.net/ What kills you with Bitcoin timestamping is transaction costs. It's fine for timestamping that one brilliant screenplay, but not timestampin
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by JackC 12y ago
> I see no reason to ever allow direct copying by allowing copyright to expire. The chart of books in print on Amazon, by decade, offers a compelling reason to allow copyright to expire.[1] There are more books available from 1830 than 1
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by JackC 12y ago
> Can you provide some kind of definition for what "readability" is? Sure. In this particular case, your parent considers an algorithm "readable" if it can be readily understood by someone who is not familiar with t
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by JackC 12y ago
I don't think patent incentives work this way. HP are not "the only people who are allowed to work on this problem." Patents don't forbid research, only use. And patents stack: if HP has a patent on the general idea of m
297.
by JackC 12y ago
I had the “conversation” below with the version of Eugene Goostman available at http://default-environment-sdqm3mrmp4.elasticbeanstalk.com/ . It’s possible that there’s a more recent version somewhere else, but this is the
298.
by JackC 12y ago
I'm pretty sure the post you're replying to isn't talking about an iOS app, so IOKit doesn't have anything to do with it. They're saying that a store could install their own cell antenna to listen to nearby cell pho
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by JackC 12y ago
The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years ... People on both sides who say stuff like that need to watch the United States of Secrets.[1] What's go
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by JackC 12y ago
This headline is backwards -- it's the opposite of the actual stackoverflow question. The question is why, in the D language, `0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3` is true , when it should be false given the underlying floating point implementation. (Sp

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