> They can't keep themselves secure... they can't police themselves?
What does that have to do with it? Better laws on security will force the government to police itself better too.
Simple example: a law requiring all passwords to be stored with unique salt and encryption of certain minimum strength. Or a law preventing IoT devices from functioning on a network when their password is still set to the default.
How do you fail to see how simple actions such as these would help?
Both examples that you give are sound, and I would support regulations that enforced these basic security guidelines. The question is whether these are the types of regulations we would get. I expect there would be rather a lot of useless and silly regulations that do nothing but drive up costs.
This is not a rhetorical question, I'm just trying to better understand how this process would work. Who would be designing and brainstorming these laws in the government?
I do not know the answer to this question. It seems reasonable that a "committee of experts" would be designated by the politicians for this purpose, but I don't feel confident that one could be sure of the expertise involved, or whose interests would be served.
From Wikipedia: The bills in both House and Senate had bipartisan support, as well as strong support from numerous music industry groups representing musicians, producers, and publishers, as well as from digital streaming media services and related industry groups.
Notably missing from the list are musicians themselves (who are the "groups representing them"?) and consumers.
Is this actually a good thing? Will it lead to greater income for the majority of musicians (as opposed to the top 0.1%?). Will it end up raising prices on Spotify or making it harder for new streaming competitors to enter the market?
The support list definitely put my hackles up, as did the name. It's not quite "The Patriot Act", but it's in that "embarrassing to oppose the name" vein. To my surprise, it actually seems fine. The lack of representation for artists looks like a product of the law's main features not impacting active performers. The law has four distinct features, none of which have a significant impact on "some up-and-coming band played a song and wants to get paid".
1. It establishes a non-profit agency to track mechanical license holders of works, and allows streaming services to pay license fees into that agency, which will pass them along. This sounds like it might have bad effects, but in practice it's apparently an attempt to fix the problem of "Spotify can't offer this song because they can't find who they need to pay".
Importantly, 'mechanical license' means "music and words", so this will track who owns Happy Birthday, but not change anything about how Spotify pays performers over "the song as we wrote and performed it". And since mechanical licensing is already compulsory, the fees can go to a clearinghouse without any need to negotiate a price.
2. It extends federal copyright laws to pre-1972 music. This will undoubtedly help some people and hurt others, but it mostly serves to clear out a rat's nest of state laws. Some much older works will enter public domain in 3 years, newer stuff will receive the usual 95 year copyright window.
3. Guarantees a portion of mechanical license fees to producers/engineers/etc who played a creative role in the production. Apparently not very controversial.
4. Fixes some jurisdictional weirdness with royalty rate disputes by spreading the cases across more judges.
Mostly this looks like it fixes one big liability issue ("wait, who do we pay?") and several issues with existing laws, and it looks like artists are indifferent because the situation for people who actually perform a song is unaffected. I'm pleasantly surprised.
>Intended to update music copyright law for the digital era, H.R. 1551 (formally the “Orrin G. Hatch-Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act”) accomplishes three key things: making sure songwriters and artists receive royalties on songs recorded before 1972; allocating royalties for music producers; and updating licensing and royalty rules for streaming services to pay rights-holders in a more streamlined fashion, via a new, independent entity. Under the act, many music creators will have a more reliable way of collecting the money that they’re due.
> Unsustained by the particle or droplet, the wavefront disperses long before reaching its slit, and there’s no interference pattern. The Danish researchers verified these arguments with computer simulations.
Wait, what? From what I've always understood, the math behind de Broglie-Bohm interpretation results in the same exact results as the Copenhagen interpretation. It shouldn't be possible for any "computer simulation" to disprove it, by definition.
This article feels 1) pointless and 2) like it has an agenda. Oil droplets are a macro-scale approximation of something on the particle level where we already know the math works. This doesn't disprove anything, any more than doing experiments with rubber sheets and basketballs lets you disprove the general theory of relativity.
> crushing a century-old dream that there exists a single, concrete reality.
This is just sensationalist, cheap journalism. I expected far better from Quanta Magazine, and I'm disappointed in them. I've enjoyed many of their articles in the past, but I'm not sure I can trust them editorially any more if they print something so obviously incorrect as this article.
If you read all the way to the end, de Broglie-Bohm is discussed. I think the point is that the simpler, original pilot wave theory, which was never fully nailed down, is disproven.
correct, and the Broglie-Bohm uses an abstract amplitude wave just like copenhagen - the only difference is in copenhagen the result auto-magically appears, in-toto, when it is "measured" (¿), and in Broglie-Bohm the particle really exists the whole time and travels the whole path mapped out by what the abstract amplitude wave specified.
> Wait, what? From what I've always understood, the math behind de Broglie-Bohm interpretation results in the same exact results as the Copenhagen interpretation.
The de Broglie-Bohm interpretation is not the same as the pilot-wave theory, which was never fully fleshed out. de Broglie-Bohm is valid and makes the same predictions as the standard interpretation, but as I understood it, has never been generalized to the relativistic versions of the standard theory. That is, there is no de Broglie-Bohm version of quantum field theory.
This is discussed in the article; the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation relies on a global pilot wave, which has non-locality issues that pilot wave theory hoped to avoid.
> It shouldn't be possible for any "computer simulation" to disprove it, by definition.
Here I believe they are disproving the idea that the oil droplets riding the pilot waves cannot result in the double-slit interference pattern, using standard fluid mechanics (which appears to be Tomas Bohr's area of expertise).
> The de Broglie-Bohm interpretation is not the same as the pilot-wave theory, which was never fully fleshed out.
Most contexts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory) define pilot-wave theory and the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation as the same. de Broglie himself also proposed a specific pilot-wave theory that is not valid (see article). When referring to a "pilot-wave" theory it is helpful to state specifically who the author is in order to resolve any likely confusion, which this topic usually seems to involve.
> has never been generalized to the relativistic versions of the standard theory
>This is discussed in the article; the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation relies on a global pilot wave, which has non-locality issues that pilot wave theory hoped to avoid.
Isn't it the other way round? Pilot-Wave theory having issues with non-locality that de Broglie-Bohm hoped to avoid?
However, unlike many companies, they actually have a process where you can submit your "weekend projects" for Google to review and "gain back" explicit ownership of them.
Basically Google just checks to make sure it's not competing with anything Google's already doing, and then contractually assigns it back to you. (And anecdotally, if it does compete, you may be offered the opportunity to join said team, since it shows you're passionate about it.)
The assignment agreement took away all excitement I had coming to work for Google. It is so shitty. The two things I submitted to that process were rejected. I've kept on building stuff in my spare time (can't stop, won't stop), if they want to come after a side project that I made in my time, on my resources, with my ideas, and my code, that's their PR nightmare.
I cannot wait until I'm in a position to work on my own stuff full time.
It's also pretty easy to contribute to FOSS projects on your own time, as long as you're OK with Google being the owner of your contributions (I personally don't care since it's open source licensed anyway). https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/ is an almost fully public version of the process Googlers have to follow to contribute stuff to open source projects.
Disclaimer: works at Google, maintains some FOSS code in my own time, both under my own copyright for some projects and under Google's copyright for others.
Have you encountered any project maintainers uneasy with the idea of Google "owning" that part of the source code? In practice it doesn't matter, but that part kind of confuses me.
This still kills the possibility of quickly collaborating with someone on a project in your free time. Any time you want to even start working on something together, you have to wait a couple of days for approval.
This simply doesn't work if you want to be active in a hackerspace or any other community where you iterate on projects quickly.
>This still kills the possibility of quickly collaborating with someone on a project in your free time. Any time you want to even start working on something together, you have to wait a couple of days for approval.
This depends on the project. If you and the project maintainer are ok with Google maintaining copyright over the code, there's a self-approval process that takes ~2 minutes.
And of course, that's only necessary if I'm working on the side project using company resources. If I'm not, I literally can't do the self-approval. There's only an issue if you want to maintain copyright should you want to monetize your product. Most hobby projects won't encounter those issues.
Fascinating! Serious question: could this turn JavaScript (technically Walt) into a serious language for scientific computation? That now runs in any browser?
E.g. Python is used a lot together with NumPy/SciPy, but for performance the actual computation in NumPy/SciPy is done in C since Python is too slow. Would it be possible to create Walt-native versions of NumPy and SciPy... e.g. NumWalt and SciWalt? Or even Jupyter notebooks based on Walt?
Considering Apple has been making old hardware even more performant, that doesn't seem to be their goal at all.
I brought my out-of-warranty iPhone to the store last week because its battery was swelling, and they couldn't replace the battery due to employee safety issues. So they simply gave me a brand-new identical phone for the $29 battery replacement price.
In my experience, Apple goes further out of their way to give customers low-cost or even free replacements in far more cases than I've ever seen any other company do.
I took a 14 month old iPhone 7 into the store which wouldn't charge or communicate via the lightning port. In the engineer's words it was "in perfect condition".
They couldn't repair it, wouldn't do anything because I didn't have apple care and the only way to get around it was a new device.
14 month falls under a reasonable warranty period, so you could've claimed that. In the EU at least you'd have a very good case and they wouldn't cause trouble.
It could've been something trivial though, lint tends to pile up in the back of the lightning port, eventually causing the problem you described. Poking the back of the port with a needle or something often helps.
I'm pursuing the retailer/credit card company under the consumer rights and consumer credit act in the UK but they're requesting an engineer's report stating this is a manufacturing fault which is very difficult to get.
Tried cleaning it, there's no dirt or anything in there
Couldn't you demonstrate right there that the Lightning port wouldn't charge the iPhone? Seems like a pretty simple way to refute the technician's claim.
Sorry badly worded on my part - he meant in perfect condition apart from the fault (ie: we hadn't drowned it or dropped the phone to cause any issue) but couldn't do anything
I've found it's highly variable depending on the person you get. I've had some people that are really great and just help me replace it or figure out options. I've had other people force me to reinstall the OS even though the issue is clearly hardware and then come back in a week showing the same problem.
The subsidized battery replacement program is intended to offset the significant civil liability they have from making these phones poorly in the first place. This is not charity or even a long term business decision, it ends January 1.
I've built my own PCs for a decade, every hardware manufacturer I've dealt with has a better RMA policy than Apple.
It depends. As soon as something happens to the screen, they charge ridiculous money for repair. Went through that with an iPad pro. 3rd party repair with (a different) screen was a small fraction of the cost
Apple's screen prices are actually fair if you care about getting a "good" one. If you don't (and if you're not using it for color-related work it doesn't really matter) then unofficial screens can be a good deal.
My experience: I replaced my laptop screen thru iFixit and the replacement part had a "soft focus" camera. It also has worse backlight bleed+a little bit less contrast than the official part, and a dead pixel.
They had good customer service and when I complained about the camera and they refunded me some money, but next time I will probably (begrudgingly) pay the Apple tax.
What really happened is Apple was forced to replace your device, because they
1 sold defective devices in the first place, hence 'battery replacement' program aka lets do something after ignoring years of public pressure, but just before big lawsuit comes (famous Fight Club recall equation).
2 designed products and procedures in such a way as to minimize the ability of repair by non specialized technical personnel. Glued parts, sneaky short holes and different length screws, LCD screens blowing backlight circuit if you unplug them without unplugging battery first, etc.
Consumers like you are why Apple will continue to rip people off and only respond when their is a threat of a Class Action lawsuit like they did with the batteries
You should care because one day the issue you have will not impact thousands of customers and.or will not raise to the level that a class action lawsuit would be possible and you will be one of the thousands of people that have been screwed over by Apple's business practices...
I am sure this will fall of deaf ears though hopefully you will remember your attitude on this day when you are standing in front of a "Genius" refusing to help you
What?! It's criminal fraud, it's illegal and should be illegal period.
Your argument is extremely dangerous, it's no different from "of course you got robbed and beaten, what are you expecting when you walk into a dangerous neighborhood?"
There's a very important line between what's illegal/criminal (robbery, fraud) and what's merely objectionable/distasteful (not selling repair parts), and it's a dangerous game to confuse the two.
Apple knows it's increasing the reward of fraud — and therefore its own loss to fraud — by not selling parts. But Apple accepts that cost and chooses only to take enforcement actions, not market actions.
The fact that Apple knows the risk and considers it still makes sense financially to maintain their policy has nothing to do with the situation being "black or white".
The practice described in this article is illegal, plain and simple. It's fraud. It is very much black and white. Finding some "moral" justification for why you may think it's OK to do it doesn't change this.
I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell but you're playing the victim blaming game. And yes, I know it sounds ridiculous to say Apple is a victim but it's still stealing and you're justifying it. Sounds a lot like the people who blame the rape victim for dressing "inappropriately" and "increasing the reward".
Dude, _nobody_ cares about the legality of it. We're looking at it from the market perspective. And in the market perspective Apple can do a lot of things to prevent this rather than whine about the obvious results of its policy.
As a trillion-dollar company, I couldn't give less of a shit about its victimhood.
I do and that’s why I commented. Dude. You seem to think that any opinion different from yours should simply be suppressed. That’s a good label to have attached to your comments to put them in perspective.
If you wanted a venue where everyone has to agree with you or shut up your living room was more appropriate.
And I’ll have to say your definition of “nobody” is extremely narrow based on the dynamic of the votes for those opinion “nobody cares about”.
Although I’ll admit the “I’m OK with stealing if the company is rich and I don’t like ‘em” group is in the lead.
This is a great post, and it's a good illustration of the difference between fun hacking/project buildling, and actually creating a business around software.
The ugly fact is, when you're creating a startup, only about 5% of your time is spent on the fun coding stuff, the main implementation of your whole idea.
The other 95% is spent on "plumbing" -- refactoring, credit-card integration, e-mail newsletters, browser bugs, server administration, and so on. And that's even before you get to things like hiring, fund-raising, and such.
> We can’t keep building apps with the desktop mindset of permanent, fast connectivity...
That's just silly. A lot of apps are rightly useless without normal connectivity, like checking the weather [edit: for current conditions], or sending e-mails, or Facebook, or shopping on Amazon. There's no reason for these to work offline.
I mean, an app is pretty much online-only, or mostly offline (like most games, for example).
I don't see a big middle ground between the two where online apps need to be made to work better offline. And the few which do (which involve syncing data), seem to work fine.
So... I don't get it. What is "Offline first" trying to accomplish in the real world?
> A lot of apps are rightly useless without normal connectivity, like checking the weather, or sending e-mails,
Except that thinking leads to really shitty behaviour from apps. Like weather apps that refuse to show you the data cached from the last time they checked, or e-mail apps (I'm looking at you here iOS GMail) that are feeble-to-useless at letting me read offline. Facebook: I should be able to check my events calendar offline, or look again at favourite photos.
The set of apps that consume online data is much, much larger than the set of apps that are usable if and only if they have absolutely live information.
By not thinking offline-first, too many apps behave like they're in the second set.
Responding to you and everyone else using weather as an example:
NO, I don't EVER want cached weather data! In fact, it drives me nuts that when I look up the weather on my iPhone to see what the current temperature is outside, I have no idea if it's accurate or 20 degrees wrong, because it just assumes that cached data from 1am is good enough, until it happens to get a connection again. For people who live in places where the temperature can vary 40 degrees in a day, this is really important.
[Edit: why is this being downvoted? Is it not clear that I'm talking about current weather conditions, as opposed to 3-days-out? And that having my phone present stale data as current data can be harmful? Many people use their weather app for current conditions, not forecasts.]
Your weather app generally is able to show around a week of data in advance, so if I check weather today and am offline tomorrow, it should be able to show me a reasonable approximation.
Also you generally want to see what the weather is in the future, and its always a best guess, if you want an accurate way to know precisely if it is raining right now, look out the window.
And you asked for an explanation of why you are being downvoted, you are obviously trying very hard to make an example of a counter point for something that doesnt make sense '12 hours ago we thought the weather would be X' is unarguably better that 'this application is offline', but you are attempting to argue it. Even if you did find a single counterpoint it doesnt add anything to the conversation, not absolutely everything is going to have an offline use case, but its clear that we could do better providing offline capability (and to be clear, I didnt downvote)
You're being downvoted because based on a single, arguably marginal, use case ("I only ever want to know the exact temperature right this very second and everything else is useless to me") you're a claiming that there's no need for anybody to consider the much more important and larger use case of "I need my phone not to instantly become a dumb brick when it loses reception"
I saw elsewhere that you think mobile apps are already doing the right thing here. The reaction to you - and the point of the OP - is that they're not. Proper offline support is often a poor second in application design, if it's considered at all. We should change that.
> "A lot of apps are rightly useless without normal connectivity, like checking the weather, or sending e-mails, or Facebook, or shopping on Amazon."
They aren't fully functional without fast connectivity, but they aren't useless. It is shocking how many ways apps break when offline.
- If I'm offline I should still be able to view the last weather report I got. Many apps simply refuse to work and throw up an unhelpful "you're offline" screen instead.
- If I'm offline I should still be able to type out a reply to emails. In fact, I should be able to queue it for sending, and my device should intelligently take care of it at the next connection opportunity.
- Similarly, if I'm offline I should still be able to view emails that I have seen recently.
There are a lot of ways people can interact with apps while experiencing no/poor connectivity. I believe the essay is simply saying that some basic affordances should be built into your apps - that features which don't strictly require a network connection shouldn't fail in ugly ways when the network is down. It is atrocious how many mobile apps have only one reaction to a loss of connectivity: completely shut off all access to everything.
But... phone apps already do all those things, so I don't get what you're complaining about. My point is, apps already seem to be doing the right things. So what's some kind of new manifesto needed for? What is supposed to be changed?
I just downloaded the first 4 results for 'weather' on my iphone. 2 refused to show any data offline, one showed cached data without saying it was, and one showed a needlessly verbose error about being offline, then showed cached data with an indication of how stale it was.
So no, not all apps are already doing the right thing.
We are trying to get people to talk about offline-first app design for when it makes sense.
Weather is a great example, being offline could communicated as an error, leaving the user with an abysmal experience. Or some older content could be shown with the note that it is likely that the accuracy is off, but if the user just needs a general idea of the weather, that suffices and is not at all an “error” in the networking sense.
We have no common UX/UI language for these things and we’d like to change that. ;)
Good luck.
Anecdote: after finding a small scorpion on the bathroom wall in the Honduran jungle, I had a huge compulsion to tear everything apart to make sure there's no nest. The only thing that calmed me down was access to offline, text-only Wikipedia on my Nokia n800. It was 2 a.m., slept like a baby when I found out this species was harmless. To this day, I never travel without it. (Edit: Wikipedia, not the n800 ;)
Many parts of the world have reasonably accurate weather forecasts for 24-48 hours out -- you'd only need to have five minutes of connectivity at the beginning of the morning; the rest of the day the app should work just fine. And if you're stuck without connectivity for longer, it can show the right part of the 7-day forecast in many locales (albeit with lower certainty). If you need to know the weather _right now_, many phones ship with a barometer sensor, or you can just look out the window.
Sending e-mails was a mostly offline process in most of the 90s; you'd only connect to your dial-up connection to actually send and receive messages to your ISP's SMTP/POP servers.
Facebook already displays old news feed items when you're offline, and with a bit of work, it could decide to cache comments and likes offline when you interact with news feed items. Similarly, it could place photo uploads and status updates in a queue and sync them when the connection does come online.
Amazon predicts items you might want to see based on prior shopping history. While you wouldn't be able to do a search or see real-time pricing/availability information, it could happily show you pictures and product description in a carousel while offline.
If my mobile email client didn't have good offline functionality I'd be looking for another one. Reading and queuing emails to send should generally not require a connection.
Weather is another strange example for you to pick. Yes, the more recent a forecast, the more useful it is. But if I checked the weather this morning, and then want to reference that again in the afternoon (to make a plan for the weekend, for example), that should work without a subsequent connection.
And really, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to check Facebook updates and comment when it's convenient for me. Inherently asynchronous activities like this are well suited to offline scenarios.
Shopping is a better example, but you're 1 for 4 here, in my opinion.
Being able to read, organise and draft reply to emails, being able to see my facebooks profile / contact information, in every app where you need to be online, being able to view history (or precache future data) when offline would always be useful.
I am most certainly not the only person that has had an important page shown on my phone etc and accidently clicked some link and suddenly lost all that information.
Most applications have a very large middle ground between offline and online capability, I think the reason its hard to see is that as developers we are so terrible at doing it well right now
Better mail applications allow you to "send" the mail with no connectivity and then simply hold onto it until there's a network connection. At which point the mail is actually sent out. But for the user it's transparent. He or she hits send and (at some point), the mail goes out. I wish more phone apps did this (looking at you, Twitter).
Mobile apps that are really online-only could do a lot better job though. The biggest examples would be to queue and store data to be posted and also to handle larger caches of downloaded info.
If ¥ou look at Instagram, it does not store much in the way of old photos in your feed, your old likes, or even older photos of your own profile. It's probably done in to part to simplify the experience, so you know the comments/like-count on photos are up-to-date, and it also keeps the app's footprint smaller. The percentage of time you are not connected and want to use Instagram is small, but it would be nice as disk space increases, to have more functionality available.
Apple's shared photostream is a good example of a similar use case (photos) where data is permanently cached and available offline ( to a degree) and you can still interact and 'post' to it where it'll wait and perform the action when network connectivity returns.
> like checking the weather, or sending e-mails, or Facebook, or shopping on Amazon.
* You don't need to check the weather every time. It's enough if you show me the data you fetched this morning or maybe just 2 hours ago (maybe so the time of the last successful request somewhere)
* Just let me write (and read...) my emails, change the label of the send button and put them in a queue when i click it. Actually send the mails when i get online again. (Fun fact: I am already doing that on my laptop, i write a lot of mail offline and msmtp queues them until i got a connection again. Useful on train rides and flights with spotty or no connection.
* I do not use facebook, but i hear that a lot of people also use it as an addressbook, for example. At least some of that data (names, telephone numbers, addresses,...) should be available offline if possible. Depends of course...
What does that have to do with it? Better laws on security will force the government to police itself better too.
Simple example: a law requiring all passwords to be stored with unique salt and encryption of certain minimum strength. Or a law preventing IoT devices from functioning on a network when their password is still set to the default.
How do you fail to see how simple actions such as these would help?