shawn-furyan

Good note, thanks for the warning. My quote is the patent applicant's summary of its invention and so worth taking with a large side of salt. I'm far from an expert but my interest has been piqued.

Reviewing the document after this note, I would say that the claims[1] themselves seem more vague than the diagrams suggest, but refer to the diagrams. Taken together the claims and diagrams referenced therein suggest a specific device, but the claims taken alone could equally apply to a much broader set of possible devices, which are nonetheless at least superficially distinct from the traditional tin-can walkie talkie. However, the nesting configuration does not seem to be covered by the claims explicitly, though it is illustrated in the diagrams.

If the claims irrespective of any referenced figures compose the whole of the patent, then it would seem that this patent took the general idea of a tin can walkie talkie and added a couple very straightforward practical construction considerations to obtain a patent that covers a large chunk of the possible ways you would want to go about mass producing a tin can walkie talkie inspired device. To wit, the claims seems mostly descriptive of a tin can-style walkie talkie with notches cut into the lip surrounding the diaphragm, then limited to more common modern mass production materials including poly resins, paper, and plastic. That is pretty broad without bringing significant innovation to the idea (unless I'm missing other nuances in the claims that make the invention described distinct from the platonic idea of a tin can walkie talkie other than the notches and the material).

If on the other hand, the specifics set out in the figures add restrictions to what is covered by the patent, i.e. if the patent doesn't cover items which could be construed to hold to the text of the claims, as long as they substantially diverge from the specifics of the figures, then the patent seems fairly specific.

I would be interested in any commentary on whether the figures are purely illustrative or if they actually add specificity apart from the text of the claims that further restricts the scope of the patent. Given the comment I'm responding to, I'm guessing that they are purely illustrative, which in this case seems to mean completely misleading since a more accurate illustration of the 'innovation' would be a tin can with notches in the lip surrounding the intact end of the can along with a note "not made out of tin", more or less.

[1] The claims:

1. A device for communicating comprising a flat base and a hollow frustum integral therewith and extending outwardly therefrom, retaining means at the smaller end of said frustum, a discrete diaphragm complementary in shape to said smaller end of said frustum and held thereagainst by said retaining means, and means for connecting a string between a pair of said diaphragms, whereby when a string between two diaphragms is under tension conversation into one device is transmit ted via the string to the other device.

2. The device set forth in claim 1, wherein the intersection between said base and said frustum is oval.

3.The device set forth in claim 1, wherein said resilient retaining means includes an inwardly facing flange at the smaller end of said frustum with a plurality of tabs spaced therefrom and integral therewith.

4. The device set forth in claim 3, wherein there are tabs spaced equidistantly around the periphery of said flange and spaced therefrom to define four undercuts therebetween.

5. The device set forth in claim 1, wherein said connecting means is spaced apart apertures in said diaphragm.

6-9 just cover suitable materials

tl;dr:

"This configuration is the most advantageous for molding and for shipping in cereal packages."

The patent is on the specific packaging efficient design, not on the general idea.

Yes, it seems that most companies misrepresent their requirements in job postings. It also seems that most candidates misrepresent their skills in responding to those job postings. There's a certain symmetry there.

Employer: First job out of school pay, requires four years of experience in our exact tech stack.

Candidate: Sure I'm willing to take first job out of school pay (BTW, just graduated in May). Yeah, totally have 4 years of experience, and what do you know, it covers exactly your tech stack!

I think venomsnake was onto something a little more than you're giving credit for. I would rephrase it a little:

Diversity and plentifulness of nutrition, social/sexual opportunity, and economic opportunity are strong attractions of cities rooted in our core biological needs.

That more general form combines the ideas that the two of you present (I think efficiency is significantly enough intertwined with economic opportunity that it makes sense to treat them as a single factor). Different people may emphasize differing core attractions as reason for wanting to be in a city, but I think all of these factors are core to what attracts significantly large groups of people to cities, and I think you lose a large part of the attractions of cities by leaving out any of these factors.

edit: oops, originally cited the wrong commentor, also fixed a typo

I'm not sure it's exactly missing so much as not explicitly stated in that way. The author does partially attribute the misunderstanding to the mostly uninhabited northern territory of Canada. The author also says that Canada populates it's northern regions less than Russia does. So, the focus is more on people not being in the north than the fact that they are mostly in the south, but one conclusion casually follows from the other.

As I was reading it, I looked at the map, and concluded that a bunch of the population was likely in the Toronto area which juts well below the mean longitude of Canada's southern border.

Exactly. Short passwords/longish pins suffice for short durations if they are random (i.e. not guessable), particularly if the device requires external hardware to brute force due to attempt duration scaling.

I currently use a generated long password on my Android phone and have adapted to the extra work, but having the option to enter a password once a day and a pin or shorter password throughout that day would be a welcome convenience option, and it's not really significantly more onerous than just a pin.

Historically library usage has been surveilled, so I would say that making passive surveillance of your users more difficult is a 'valid reason' for going through the trouble.

You don't need logins/user accounts for your users to be identified. IP is sufficient in many cases, and browser fingerprint pretty much covers the other cases.

Also, if the website ever has need to become more complex, it will be easier and less error prone not to have to throw 'figure out how to implement TLS' on the pile of tasks.

Also, if permissions are the primary concern, might I recommend moving to a host that does SSL/TLS for you? Webhosts have come a long way in the last few years. Moving to a nicer one may actually save you effort in the long run.

> Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days?

I think that's a pretty good description of what's going on in the last decade of a lot of people's lives. There's a huge bias toward high risk invasive procedures that have a high probability of leaving the patient debilitated even when the expected lifespan increase is fairly modest. Our penchant for hope in difficult circumstances leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering. There is plenty in modern medical practice to consider 'barbaric'. Skepticism with regard to the current crop of medical utopists is warranted, because assuredly current barbaric medical practices were developed and implemented, overwhelmingly, with the best of intentions.

This is an insufficient explanation. Canada's debt to GDP ratio is in the 60-70% range where that of the US is in the 90% range. Yet the situation in Vancouver is significantly more acute than those of New York and San Francisco.

Well, one of the sub-themes of the article was that Chinese investors are underpinning this situation. So you've got a lot of players in the market with no interest in actually living in the city.

I think the effect you mention is probably a lot more relevant to the people selling at below market to speculators that approached them, because if they were assuming that they could finance a home purchase in the city with the proceeds of the sale, they're going to find their purchasing power significantly weaker than they were probably expecting (given that they just clear 3x their original investment, "YAY!"). On top of that, with many agents speculating themselves, and a lot of foreign investors on the buy side of the market, they're likely to find that they are now swimming with sharks having just sold their boat.

Additional commentary: If you find yourself in this situation, you might as well try to get a loan to buy a new house before you sell your current shelter from the elements. If you're no longer able to get a loan for an amount that would get you a house in your area, perhaps that's an indication that you should be very careful with how you proceed. It still may be worth selling, even taking a below market offer (conceivably). But now you know that selling your house is going to mean moving to a more buyer friendly market in advance of committing yourself. Or... if you're the gambling type, renting in anticipation of a bubble burst (though I think heavy foreign investment messes with people's expectations of what is too hot for a given market; certainly it is fickle, but can potentially prop prices up significantly above historical levels for a long time).

I think that this issue is potentially moot if you've transitioned to immutable deploys. Under such a system, arbitrage steps would tend to change from the standard have an SA/Dev ssh in and muck around until the issue is found. Instead, first step may be just redeploying (in case of transient/intermittent issues that are disrupting service), and then checking out the production system locally to do root cause analysis.

So yeah, most organizations couldn't do this today, because they don't have the deploy process in place. But when an organization has made the switch, then it is much more realistic to assume that it can get along without granting ad hoc ssh access to production systems.

I find the scenario believable, but I think the mechanism by which the 'good' politician is getting sacked is more complex. I think s/he is getting sacked because s/he spent a lot of political capitol on a difficult undertaking that doesn't bring much credit back to her/him. Improving decaying infrastructure doesn't insert a positive 'this politician accomplished' association into many voters minds. S/he's just doing the things that voters assume happen on their own anyway. On the other hand, the 'bad' politician that ignored the issue had a nice extra bit of political capitol to spend on flashier issues like crime, lowering taxes, etc.

So, rather than it being a "the people have spoken" situation, I think that the situation is driven by constraints on public attention for political issues. I don't think you would get many voters endorsing continued poisoning of the population when a marginal increase (or reshifting) of taxes could address the issue. Rather I think that it is rarely ever politically advantageous to spearhead these kind of issues (that is until it explodes into an attention grabbing crisis, as is now the case with Flint lead poisoning).

We can see this sort of thing in microcosm in office politics as well. How often are we complaining about always being reactionary and putting out fires instead of proactively taking care of problems before they can cause a lot of damage? Well, once a fire starts, everyone is keen to figure out what's causing it and how to deal with it. But recognizing the pre-conditions that could potentially lead to a fire, and then eliminating them sound much more boring[1], and often requires a concerted information campaign just to get people invested in supporting the mitigation. But if there's an actual [2] fire, people are immediately interested by the inherent drama of the situation, and attention is no longer a barrier to overcome.

[1] even that description of it sounded much more boring than the bit about fire! [2] an 'actual' figurative 'fire'. I know the wording is sub-optimal, but I'm pot committed to this metaphor so...

In my reading, the description of the process running in this manner is an allegation, not an established fact. So it's not really clear that Yahoo has anything to answer for on this point.

You are still misreading what I've written? I said "relatively rare". That does not mean "rare". It means less common than the scenario being compared with. If lone commuting is 51% of driving, and multi-passenger is 49% of driving, it would not be inaccurate to say that multi-passenger driving is relatively rare when compared to lone commuting. I am not saying that multi-passenger trips rarely happen.

To reiterate, I am saying that more miles are driven single passenger (excluding hired drivers) than multi-passenger, and that is the only claim that I am making on the subject.

I trust we have that cleared up now. It means that once it makes sense to have driverless car fleets chauffeuring people around in cities, it will likely make economic sense to make a lot of those vehicles single passenger, because they can be made much more cheaply and run more efficiently. This is not really possible with the current consumer car industry, because consumers want the capability to drive more than one person (whether they have kids or not), even if most of the driving they do is alone. Likewise taxis are always moving at minimum two people when it's making money.

And I don't see any reason there wouldn't still be plentiful multi-passenger cars. I'm not trying to banish multi-passenger car trips from society. I'm not against them! They are just currently "relatively rare" in practice. I could see electric cars potentially increasing adult carpooling, or reducing it. For instance, maybe a car service has a fleet of minvans, and offers discount rates, but fills itself to capacity on the way to your general destination. Or maybe carpooling among adults with different starting and ending points ultimately essentially goes away, like if tiny single passenger driverless vehicles in constant use end up being more efficient than carpooling once all the numbers are in. Even in that case there would still be multi-passenger cars, because there are always going to be people who want to go on dates, or out with friends, adults that need to accompany kids and any number of other reasons that people choose to travel together. Driverless cars don't get rid of the need for multi-passenger cars. They get rid of the incentives that cause people to waste full size cars on one person trips. They unlock the potential for cars to further specialize to improve efficiency.

A consumer car needs to be multi-passenger. A driverless fleet car doesn't. It makes sense then that the fleets that service a given area would tend to try to balance the number of single passenger and multi-passenger vehicles in their fleet to match the demand for these two types of trips. That's really all I'm getting at with this line of thought. I'm not making a strong statement about the single vs multi-passenger composition of trips.

I have a child, that's beside the point. I also live in an Austin, TX suburb, so am pretty driving dependent. My comment is not naive due to inexperience with the occasional necessity of having to move multiple people around.

Objectively, the majority of driving is single passenger during commute time. I said multi-passenger trips are "relatively rare", that is, less common. I don't even see what could possibly be offending you in my comment. Yes, many people have children, and most of them drive mostly alone in one of their two cars 15 miles both ways to and from work. I don't see this as controversial. I'm not being remotely hyperbolic.

> So now I'd have to carry my gun and ammo (or my sport gear, or ...)

Of course there are all kinds of little assumptions in our daily lives that would suddenly change and have to be addressed. In this case though, do you really need 170 sq. feet to store whatever you are carrying with you? Opening parking lots to development will generate enough value to provide a couple 12x18x72 inch lockers for each space removed. That still clears up over 98% of the square footage currently being taken up by parking spaces, and it would obviate the need to use cars for personal storage.

It might even lower theft since a big component of theft from automobiles is that a thief can look into a bunch of cars and only break in when something valuable enough is identified. And since lockers could be located inside where the people are, it would probably opportunities for would be thieves to have alone time with valuables.

> people like to forget stuff in their cars

If cars begin to be produced primarily for the purpose of transporting a single different person over and over again all day (with a smaller number of multi-passenger vehicles being produced for the relatively rare case of multi-passenger rides), then I imagine that eventually they would evolve a design that makes it more obvious when you drop things you are carrying. Currently cars[1] have all kinds of nooks and crannies for your wallet to fall into, because it's not that big a problem in most cases when you do that. But it would be fairly trivial to add a little fiber glass hip that sits flush with the seat. You would have to relocate the seat adjustment controls, but a lot of vehicles have already centralized those controls on the main console, and ridesharing vehicles would actually see enough benefit to consider such a change.

[1] this includes taxis because taxis fleets are made up of essentially consumer vehicles. This makes sense, because you always have at least 2 people in a taxi, so you can't really comfortably make it that much smaller. But if there were fleets of rideshared self-driving cars everywhere, most cars would only need to carry a single person, and you can drastically reduce the size of a one-person car without sacrificing comfort.

Edit: added third paragraph and the accompanying footnote

Connect-Disconnect cycle performance doesn't have much to do with a cable's "rugged"-ness, i.e. robustness to normal stressors encountered during normal use. I've destroyed a million percent more Micro-USB cables than previous USB standard cables because the connectors are prone to irrevocably deforming when stepped on or when the cable gets lightly tugged up or down when plugged into a device.

Simply put, connect-disconnect cycles aren't the biggest threat that USB style cables encounter in normal use, and so this metric has little to say on the topic of cable ruggedness.

> If a country like the United States, where the majority people are actually a lot more conscientious, moral, and patriotic[4] than most countries

yikes...

High pressure sales techniques are awful, and they exist because they work. I don't think having to say "no" 50 times is reasonable, and it makes you feel like an asshole just for not being an easy mark that can be pressured into buying something s/he doesn't want. I've learned to close the door in the face of over-aggressive solicitors, but I know people who have trouble with it, because it's objectively rude to do something like that. The only reason I find it acceptable is that these sales techniques are intentionally designed to exploit people's hesitancy at being rude to other human beings.

So yes, it's common practice. That doesn't mean it's not a practice that is loathsome and bad for society.

Note: I think strong arm is a completely reasonable description of this. The sales person offered multiple carrots, and then upon being rebuffed, brought out the stick (keep in mind that the context is someone cancelling on the last day of their subscription):

>Chaitra: Devon, you have purchased a subscription with annual commitment, since you wish to cancel the subscription before the end of one year period, you will be billed 50% of your monthly rate for the remaining months in your annual commitment as early termination fee.

>

>Chaitra: If you pay early termination fee, you will not be able to use the product, however If you continue with the subscription with 2 month free subscription you will be able to use the subscription and also get two months free subscription. In this case, I would suggest you to take an advantage of two months free subscription.

This wasn't a good faith misunderstanding, this was a situational script aimed at maximizing retention in the particular context. This is a lever that is being intentionally applied to cow people into buying an extra year of a service they don't want.

Meta, Response to sub-comments[meta enough yet?]: Ah, that makes way more sense. Sorry for labelling the parent a troll. This was clearly my mistaken interpretation. It was weird. As I tried to check out the math on the parent's assertions, they came out an order of magnitude too high like 3 times in a row. So I concluded that the parent was intentionally inflating the relevant costs to misdirect the discussion. However, it was really just my failure to consider the perspective of the parent, aligned with a loose enough situation that the mistake was possible. Again, I apologize for the misapplied label. I'll leave the original comment below so as not to rewrite history on how I was (due to sincere misunderstanding, I maintain) kind of a jerk :/

A couple grand? 500GB hdds have been less than $100 for a long time now, certainly since before Amazon Glacier was a product.

Just because you can formulate a large valuation for something doesn't mean that it's a reasonable valuation.

Even $10/cd is a ridiculous estimate of the cost of blank CDs. If you insisted on using blank CDs for backup, you could do 200 CDs for $40.

Edit: And what are CDs... 640mb? that's like 12 CDs, not 200... I'm realizing that I've fallen into a troll trap...

Meta: I guess I'll leave this comment up as a cautionary tale.

It's not unreadable, but is designed to make it difficult to realize that typical usage might result in very significant costs.

'Use Amazon Glacier, it costs about a cent!' is the essential pitch.

The goal posts are continually moved with AI because AI never seems to look quite like human intelligence (though why should it?). AI and ML coupled with robots that are relatively simpler than Rosie from the Jetsons are cheaply out-competing human labor in many sectors today, and an avalanche of new sectors is on the cusp (within 2-5 years, not 20 years). Driverless cars currently outcompete human drivers, and a enormous number of people are currently employed as drivers. The remaining hurdles are regulatory. AI is intelligent enough today to outcompete a lot of humans in the work which is currently putting food on their tables. And I haven't seen the burgeoning industry that readily turns former taxi drivers into productive workers in other industries. The industries that can readily accept taxi drivers are generally shrinking as well (meaning, they've got all the workers they need, more than they need, in fact).

Maybe you're right, and it will all work itself out. Some huge growth industry to which humans are uniquely (at least at first) well suited may spring up in the next couple years. But the crisis is awfully close (taking into account driving occupations alone), and there's no market solution in sight, so it seems like prime time to start looking for non-market solutions.

It's not surprising that compensation and perks of non-profits converge with those of for-profits in the same industry. They are hiring from the same talent pool.

Also, at the margins, I tend to think that perks allow organizations to hire more cheaply than wage increases.

If you are bothering the user with a modal, popup, post-install screen, etc., then why not ask your customers TO promote the product providing Email and Social sharing options? Then you can measure how many people ACTUALLY promoted your product, instead of how many said they would (but mostly probably didn't).

Declared action is a notoriously unreliable signal.

Good note. The line would be more accurate if it read:

>DRM /often/ uses cryptographic methods [...]

Too late to edit though.

That's a better example. Thanks for the addition.

At first blush (having just looked at their contribution system for the first time, and not having actually followed through with a contribution), I would say that open stack has built a commendably low friction contribution system. Their documentation seems clear, and the source is conspicuously located on their site. There are minor barriers, but nothing that would limit anything besides drive-by pull requests, which are of dubious value anyway.

I would tend to say that Openstack was somewhat anomalously well supported (and funded) early on. Github has enabled a lot of one-person-show projects to grow into projects with many contributors (Ansible and Cookiecutter jump immediately to my mind for whatever reason). It may be the case that larger projects that are desired by large institutions have the flexibility to build their own contribution systems that neither cede control nor introduce undue friction. It does however seem to me that Github, Bitbucket, et. al. have lowered the friction of open source projects that get actual external contributions (where the project, if not the contribution system is open source) to much smaller groups of developers, all the way down to one-person projects.

Projects that have multiple large organizations on board early on have a large incentive to implement a relatively comprehensible contribution system, as well as additional resources to bring such a system into existence. Small team or one-person projects have less incentive early on, and have less resources to implement such a system. Having Github/Bitbucket as a default for small projects means that small projects likely have much less chaotic contribution methods early on.

Since quite a few of these small projects have become strong opens source projects with many contributors, where it seems unlikely that some of them would have outside of the existence of such contribution organization options, it still seems safe to say that Github has on the whole lowered the overall level of chaos in open source contribution. It has apparently done so through its influence on small open source projects, and through it's role in raising the standards regarding the level of friction that would be OSS contributors see as reasonable, i.e. by competing with other contribution systems, it has forced other systems to lower the amount of friction in their contribution processes. So while there are still disparate contribution systems, Github has influenced things toward a lower friction state by being a strong leader in the space. And this has resulted in more coherent contribution processes on the whole despite the existence of projects that exist outside of Github.

> Doesn't help when you have to share data with companies and governments, and the information ends up on someone else's disk.

FDE was an example among a vast array of encryption products. Attacking an non-comprehensive example as non-comprehensive isn't very enlightening. I still fail to see which DRM product you are suggesting is the proper tool for this situation. Even further, cryptography and careful allocation of trust seem to be a better solution than DRM for disseminating sensitive information since DRM is generally only a barrier, and not robust against concerted attack.

That is to say, if you are disseminating information to untrustworthy sources via DRM, then in the great majority of cases, you can consider the information compromised. Most DRMed content is copyable with as simple a solution as recording your screen. Even HDCP can be defeated with a simple camcorder.

DRM should not be confused with cryptography.

DRM uses cryptographic methods, but I've never heard of a use case where a user chose a DRM product rather than a more straight forward cryptographic product to protect themselves.

Full disk encryption is a better tool for protecting yourself than SecuROM. In fact using SecuROM may well leave you more vulnerable to attack due to it's hacky obfuscation methods.

> 1. While the situation improved tremendously in certain areas the way to participate in Open Source is still very much fragmented. Most of the major open source projects (like Linux, Mozilla, Apache and nginx, to name a few) still have their own workflows, patches are still circulated in emails and issues are still being reported in a myriad ways. Despite of the big visibility GitHub has among the new open source projects we are very far from not being fragmented.

All of the projects that you list began in the pre-Github era where the choices were essentially endure Sourceforge's significant shortcomings or roll your own contribution system (Linux and Apache didn't even have Sourceforge as an option for a long time).

OSS Projects that have begun in the Github era have a much higher probability of having an approachable contribution workflow.

So in short, Github didn't solve all of the chaos in the OSS world, but it has improved the situation going forward from its inception. It's even attracted several legacy projects that previously had more insular and opaque development processes.

Note: this is not to dismiss the issues that do exist with Github. I just don't think that criticism #1 above is very valid.

Indeed. People who specialize in shorting stocks, bonds, etc. live on the cycle of finding dirt through thorough private research, shorting the stock, and then publicizing the dirt.

This is actually one of the mechanisms that Efficient Market Theory relies upon for disseminating market information. If you could only benefit from assets increasing in value, then there would mostly be negative incentive for anyone to try to expose companies that are weaker than the market assumes them to be.