Technically, the client did err, as it performed a request that is not legally permitted in its jurisdiction. For example, this response could be used for geographically-limited resources (such as BBC iPlayer), which means your client erred by not being in Britain.
If it's a takedown of some kind, your client erred by being subject to a government that ordered you unable to see the resource that you requested. The 4xx code fits, in this case, as 5xx implies the server made a mistake (it didn't).
Although I have my fair share of hesitance at worshiping cloud services, the fact that a service is "cloud" has nothing to do with the quality of its architecture. You can make a crucial architecture mistake designing a fleet of dedicated PHP servers talking to a MySQL cluster just as easily as you can building atop some cloud service.
Best solution here would appear to be never sync that iPad again, back it up to iTunes, disable its Wi-Fi, and consider it her speech appliance. Don't update the OS, don't sync to iTunes, never do anything with it again aside from using it for this essential purpose. If you have to buy another one, restore it from your iTunes backup. These are the 'legal' avenues, clearly with jailbreaking it's simpler.
Unfortunate that a legal battle puts you in that position, but if this app is as important to her life as she says, she should be perfectly fine freezing that iPad where it is and not treating it like an iPad any more. It is now a dedicated appliance, not a general-purpose iPad. Buy another one for everything else.
Sucks, but, best solution given the circumstances, I think. Obviously, it'd be great if the circumstances changed.
Modern computer equipment is not designed to last forever. Computer equipment that is heavily used by a 4 year old is even less likely to survive. (I just was trying to talk in my pool/sandbox/mud/...!)
Are you going back up the iTunes computer too? Restoring backups relies on various moving parts. It's never a simple matter when operating systems and hardware keep moving forward. I'm not saying there's a better solution here, just saying it's non-trivial and fragile.
I think the best solution is to port the code over to android. You might be disallowed from selling your app on any marketplaces, but there's nothing preventing you from running it on your own device.
I don't do IOS development, but from what I hear you still need a developer account (which costs money and I'm assuming can be revoked) and there exists an install limit for your dev app (though I hear that limit is a lot higher than it used to be).
Their goal is also to provide this to other families. I don't think you can expect everyone that wants this tool to have apple hardware to compile on as well as a developer account.
That's a lot of hoops to get through when the alternative is as simple as attaching your .apk in an email or posting it online.
I wouldn't update to a major new iOS version (to avoid incompatibility issues), but there's no reason to turn off WiFi or not sync it. Like Google with Andriod, Apple has the ability to remotely remove apps from devices, but unlike Google [1] [2] I've never heard of them using it and I can't find any articles that suggest they have.
I assume that it's only for malware (given they haven't removed tethering apps, for example) so I wouldn't worry.
Who should pay for that? The company which believes they aren't infringing and are already in negotations over the licensing? Or the family who presumable don't have infinite wallets?
I feel the discussion may be either:
Cheap enough or marketed enough.
Because never the article talk about it. So either it's cost prohibitive, our they couldn't even find it's existence. But again... If it were life changing...
Perhaps you missed this passage on a first read-through:
What would happen if we lost SfY? I have no idea. As I’ve explained
before, we have tried other communication apps and didn’t find any
that were a good match for Maya. Interestingly, we also carefully
considered purchasing a communication device from PRC, and met with
one of their representatives in November, nine weeks before a post
on my Facebook wall introduced me to SfY (and seven weeks before it
even existed in the iTunes store). We examined PRC’s devices and
were disappointed to see that they weren’t a good fit for Maya.
For us, this wasn’t an issue of an expensive device versus a
“cheap” app. This was an issue of an ineffective device (for Maya)
versus an app that she understood and embraced immediately. The
only app, the only system, that she immediately adopted as her own
way of communicating.
I used to edit video in Avid on a Mac Pro. Multimedia usages will drink memory like water, and your system being more powerful directly implies that you get more work done. Less render time is a big one.
To that end, I can understand some of the complaints.
Even if Justin Beiber himself is clueless (and I don't think he is), the people around him are experts at creating a product that appeal to their target demographic. The most successful stars that, to you, seem to create shitty music are those that actually have the most clever people handling them.
I would classify his handlers as manipulative, not clever. I would classify Justin himself as clueless, largely due to his apparent immaturity that he constantly exhibits, but I'm sure he'll be pretty sharp when he grows up. We were all young and clueless at one time.
As for my previous statement, it was mostly a joke.
And this is why my statement was "either clueless or is having serious problems maintaining competent hardware engineers", and then proceeded to talk seriously only about the latter case.
Does anybody else think secretive companies annoy customers more than open ones? A lot of bad feelings could have been avoided yesterday were this public information, without Tim having to e-mail someone to break it. There was a genuine rash of anger, obviously (from the HN coverage), and just taking a few moments to say what's in the pipeline, while very not Steve, would have made this situation a lot better.
It's not just Apple I've noticed this with. Maybe it's time we rethink secrecy from a product development standpoint? Does it really give your competitors an advantage to know what you're working on in the days of the Internet? Is this something that business types have put thought into, since secrecy seems to be the status quo?
I can understand new products entirely, but a simple update to their Mac Pro is something they could just say, publicly, with little recourse, to reassure its small (and dedicated) fan base.
I could really use one now. I'd buy one of the existing ones, but man... I really feel like a sucker paying so much for a system that's clearly lacking in a lot of spots, to know that I'll be upgrading in a year.
Buying electronics is always a gamble of buy now or buy later. Announcing there is an update coming can poach some sales of the current model. I'm sure there is more to it than that. but it can happen.
I think Apple annoys people more than other companies. It's something of a lightning rod. Should they be more open about product roadmaps? Past performance would seem to indicate know. It doesn't matter if people are annoyed if they're selling out everything like hotcakes.
The people I know who buy Mac Pros keep themselves quite up to date with technological developments. They know when Intel releases a new processor family, they know when nVidia and AMD release a new generation of GPU. They know that when these items are on the market they could easily call up Dell or HP and have a workstation with these components, but they don't want a Dell or HP, they want an Apple. As a result they are annoyed when Apple continues ignoring their flagship product, a product that now is now two generations behind in both CPU and GPU.
They're also typically the type of people that are irked that Apple's geometry shaders run on the CPU and not the GPU.
My comment was a generality. For example, if Apple (or any company) tomorrow published:
Q1 2013 (tentative) iOS 6.1
Q2 2013 (tentative) Mac Pro update
Q3 2013 (tentative) iOS 6.2
Does that give competitors a leg up on them, genuinely? What does Apple gain from being secretive? Is it just status quo thought at this point that is keeping companies thinking secretively? I understand new products being a surprise, that's kind of cool, but does it hurt Apple to be a bit more open? Is there some competitive advantage I'm missing?
Say you're Dell. You see Apple is working on a Mac Pro update. Does that change your priorities at all, strategically? Does it matter to you? Now Apple working on a game-changer, that I understand, but a simple update? Why keep that secret? What do competitors gain from knowing every little detail of what Apple is up to?
I'm trying to figure out Steve's reasoning, since I'm not terribly versed in business, and this generally seems to be a business decision. It's especially epidemic in IT, where all of us are writing cool software, but nondisclosure prevents us from sharing with competitors except in special circumstances. So instead of advancing the state of the art, we're all reinventing the wheel because our prior wheel inventions are nondisclosured to the prior company.
Giving out that sort of information would change some amount of people from just buying now to waiting for the new product. That's nice from a customer standpoint but bad for Apple.
Consider:
1) Less outdated inventory moved.
2) More problems keeping up with new product demand, which Apple already can't do.
3) More customers think about the question of buy now or wait when making a purchase. This doesn't sound like a lot, but Apple strives for the simplest possible buying experience.
A big part of the secrecy is the way that they can surprise and delight people by blowing their minds and then making the product available almost immediately. It's theatre as much as anything.
In this case I definitely agree with you. Professionals should have some sort of roadmap. Pro software investments can be huge, and I wouldn't want to invest in pro software for a platform that may no longer support pro hardware.
Daryl Oster's company has submitted proposals to Florida, at least, on building and maintaining a system such as this. I think part of the requirement for submitting such a proposal is at least a cursory cost analysis. Wikipedia reads a bit like the company wrote it itself, but:
The firm fixed bid for the 96-mile (154 km) Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system was $253M, this was less than one tenth of the cost of the bid by Global Rail Consortium to build electrified double track High Speed Rail for $2.6B. The bid by et3 contained letters of support by three entities in China to supply IP and key materials for the project. The engineering consultants hired by the authority did not dispute the validity of the et3 bid price or ETT technology, but recommended to eliminate the et3 bid from consideration for other reasons.[1]
This comment doesn't pass judgment on whether Daryl Oster is a patent troll or not, but that's also a discussion worth having.
Would love to see how they costed that out. Given that I don't know of a single engineering company that can build straight up light rail track for at $2.5M/mile even if you give them the land for free.
Edit: add this update --
Interestingly this link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/843626/posts claims that the ET3 bid was 1.2B$ which is $12.5M/mile which is a lot more credible (still low though since the surrounding infrastructure to keep the tube evacuated, the mag lev stuff, etc all add cost over regular fused rail electrified service (which California is considering for its fast rail) and that is looking closer to $25M/mile in the current state of the art)
That is a great question, I wish I could reasonably answer it. I'm a big fan of rail, and while San Jose was celebrating their first 4 miles of light rail (in just 10 years from the start of the project!) I was looking that the marker in the Sacramento Rail museum (recommended) commemorating the laying of 10 miles of the Union Pacific rail line in one day.
Part of it is that some folks really hate rail, so much so that they will continually sue anyone who is working to build it. They will argue wildlife endangerment, habitat destruction, cancer risk, suicide risk, traffic risk, earthquake/disaster risk, global epidemic risk, job preservation/creation/destruction risk, you name it. Anything to get back in court and have a judge temporarily suspend work. Because you hire someone to work on a project, and they can't because of some court order, you still have to pay them. So what happens is these projects have 'burn rates' (which is the cost of renting equipment (or depreciating it if you own it) and labor and materials (some of which degrade over time if not used)) and then you have 'able to work' days. Actual work days might be 90 for a mile of track, but time actually passed is like a year. So the other 275 days people sat on their hands while expensive lawyers argued to get work restarted.
Its one of the things I bring up at town hall meetings with politicians. The tax payer, and the 'NIMBY' [1] folks, fight a very asymmetric kind of warfare. No court challenges until funds are committed, and then six. You need look no further than the maneuvering around the California High Speed Rail project to see it play out in all of its ugliness.
[1] NIMBY -acronym Not In My Back Yard for people who are opposed to any new infrastructure near where they live.
Haven't you just proven that your initial post above is irrelevant to an undersea rail system?
I'm not saying an undersea rail system is practical or smart. I'm just asking the relevance of your comparisons to US urban construction costs to begin with.
As a suggestion, a different tone might make your post seem more useful and less trollish. For example "An undersea tunnel will require serious construction breakthroughs to be practical. As a comparison, today's costs...". That would be a lot more constructive than attacking the people behind the article.
Great feedback, thanks. The conversation wandered a bit, and while I don't think of my style as trollish I can certainly see how my emotion on rail interferes with my communication.
My initial point is a prima facie argument, the proposal is impractical by inspection. I certainly stand by that assertion, but as part of the supporting argument we've been discussing land based construction with the implicit, albeit not as well supported, stipulation that sea based construction would always be more expensive than land based.
An interesting way to approach the problem would be to outline the design space in terms of operation cost, development cost, and rate of return and see what sort of solutions, if any, might fit inside that box.
What conceivable technologies might make it practical someday?
How can we get back to a society that is able to engage in large scale projects again? Look at the rapid low-cost subway construction in China today.
I think you're a super smart guy with really broad interests, experience, and knowledge. I think you could make the impossible happen if you applied yourself to it.
>San Jose was celebrating their first 4 miles of light rail (in just 10 years from the start of the project!)
> Actual work days might be 90 for a mile of track, but time actually passed is like a year
So currently, San Jose can build 0.25 mi/year. Optimistically, with no lawsuits, their actual work days could increase to say, 225 days/year, which is 2.5x faster. So we're up to say, 0.66 mi/year, which still sounds way too low. What are the other bottlenecks?
Well one of my political suggestions to 'even' the playing field was to create a certification date for a project after which no lawsuits could be brought against it. This would give the project planners a way to budget the years of litigation, and once they were certified they could start and continue until they were finished without interruption (except for the usuals, weather, labor disputes, and material shortages).
I've gotten some positive feedback for that but have yet to find someone willing to actually submit it in a bill.
Isn't this part of why rail is a lot easier to do in Europe? My understanding is that it is a lot harder to sue over stuff like this there. Maybe someone familiar with Europe's rail situation can chime in.
The process is definitely different at least in the smaller countries. In Denmark, when the Copenhagen metro expansion was agreed on by the government, the plans were passed as a law through the national parliament. Therefore, everything in it became by definition legal, superseding any contrary legislation, unless it violated the constitution.
The U.S. instead tends to work on a model where the legislature passes general rules, and then agencies administer the rules in specific cases. So, for example, a specific rail plan is proposed pursuant to a piece of legislation, but the plan is not itself a piece of legislation superseding others. That leaves it open to all sorts of lawsuits alleging that it didn't comply with the legislation that applies to it.
Modern trains also are heavier and accelerate and decelerate faster than the trains you see in westerns. Both mean that they exert greater forces on the rails.
Finally, safety standards are way higher. That means that material must be of higher quality and tested better, both at the factory and after installation.
There is also the issue that the FRA in the US makes trains considerably heavier than equivalents in the rest of the world. http://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html
I feel that most of the cost is for tunneling and the difficulties of working in such a space as a subway system. as for normal railroads, a quick googling shows that the cost is much more conservative, with a 1995 estimate[1] stating about $250,000 per mile to rehabilitate an existing railroad.
Slave labor was too expensive to use because you risked losing your valuable capital. Instead new immigrants were used such as Irish (East Coast) or Chinese (West Coast).
A large chunk of the costs of projects like this is building the long flat tunnel/level ground over significant distances. The actual costs of building a moderate vacuum is not that significant. Where this project falls down is in the maintenance and safety side of things not the infrastructure to send the first train down the line.
Don't forget every 10m adds 1atm water pressure. Building a glass enclosed under sea walkway 30m down is not that much harder than building one 20m down and these projects are going to be using glass.
> a glass enclosed under sea walkway 30m down is not that much harder than building one 20m down
It's 50% harder.
What pressure are the passengers exposed to?
I ask because 1 hour @ 4 atmospheres of 80% N2/20% O2 is risking decompression illness. (Yes, 4 - you've got 1 atmosphere at sea level.) You can reduce that risk by increasing the O2 percentage but if you do that too much, you're risking O2 toxicity.
Firstly: As I see it, an evacuated tunnel at 20m is a very different proposition to a non-evacuated tunnel at 30m, even if the pressure difference is the same. Why? Well, your big problem is always going to be leaks. In an air-filled tunnel you can get away with microscopic cracks, no problem; you've got a small direct interface between water and air, and the surface tension of the water is enough to keep the water in place. It's very hard to force water through a really tiny crack. In a vacuum, however, surface tension goes away -- liquid water at an interface with vacuum will boil, and all of a sudden you've got water vapour filling your nice evacuated tube through every microscopic crack in its five thousand mile length. Nasty. Clearly the joined-concrete construction used for the Transbay Tube isn't going to be sufficient.
Secondly: unfortunately the Atlantic Ocean isn't 20m deep, or 30m deep, or even 40m deep like the deepest point of the Transbay Tube. It's several kilometers deep.
Is there some reason that sandwiching air between the evacuated tube and the water wouldn't work? Granted it would add to the cost.
The ocean depth point is interesting. The article says "engineers would tether the tunnel at a fixed depth." I take this to mean tethering to the bottom and relying on buoyancy to keep the tunnel floating at the right depth, which presumably could be 30m or so.
>Is there some reason that sandwiching air between the evacuated tube and the water wouldn't work?
Yep, because now you've just got your air rushing into the vacuum through the cracks, instead of water.
The ocean depth point is interesting. The article says "engineers would tether the tunnel at a fixed depth." I take this to mean tethering to the bottom and relying on buoyancy to keep the tunnel floating at the right depth, which presumably could be 30m or so.
Even if you could get it to be neutrally bouyant at 30m (realistic estimate? dunno) you're now stuck with a tube, five thousand miles long, floating free in the ocean and anchored only to the bottom. Even neutrally bouyant, there'd have to be huge strains on the joints due to ocean currents, plus presumably some up-and-down forces as the season changes the water temperature and... heck, even a whale headbutting such a flimsy structure sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. And remember, you can't afford to get any imperfections in your tube or it'll leak -- that probably eliminates anything you might have used to build in a bit of flexibility.
>Yep, because now you've just got your air rushing into the vacuum through the cracks, instead of water.
Fair enough. I imagine there's a trade-off between the quality of the tunnel materials and the number of pumps needed along the way, assuming an imperfect vacuum is good enough.
I'd be worried about flexibility too. Skyscrapers do pretty well in high winds and earthquakes, so I'm not completely convinced that a similar effect isn't possible with an underwater tube. Any bending would have to be extremely gradual, though, if there's any hope of shooting something through it at high speeds. I agree that glass isn't going to cut it.
Safe to say that the terrorists have won, if the first eight comments on something as cool as this have to do with possible ways the terrorists can destroy it. What a depressing new era.
FunnyJunk is apparently responding quietly on their site, as just searching for the word 'oatmeal' results in no search results (that wasn't the case when this blog post went up). According to people I know that use the site, you cannot add comments with the word 'oatmeal', either. They also deleted every single linked image he exhaustively listed.
I have a hard time resolving litigation like this with the fact that the truth can change in minutes, as Web sites are fairly easy to edit. It's just scary.
Interesting question - you could take automated screenshots, save them in a lawyer-friendly format (e.g. PDF) and then add a certifying signature with a secure timestamp (perhaps adding the raw pages and images from the site as attachments to the PDF as well).
If the target market was lawyers you could probably charge a chunk-o-money for it as well...
NB I have no idea whether such a service already exists.
The alleged libel is based, in part, upon Funnyjunk's claim that they are acting legally within the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA by only hosting UGC and taking it down upon notice of infringement.
The Oatmeal's response to the claim included a list of content infringing his copyright. Funnyjunk is going to want to remove that content to retain its safe harbor from liability for the infringement. It may or may not be a properly worded notice under the DMCA, but a lot of notices UGC hosts get aren't, and they still take down the content -- because the intent of the parties and whether they acted in good faith matters when it's time to face a judge.
That the pages are no longer accessible does not mean the evidence has been destroyed, either. The DMCA requires only that you "block access to" the content, not physically remove it from a server.
I'm no lawyer but couldn't this theoretically be used in court by Inman since FunnyJunk apparently makes it extra hard for content creators like Inman, the Cyanide & Happiness guys et cetera to find their content and issue takedown requests?
Thinking a bit further: by filtering search they are implicitly saying that they know they are hosting content by Inman aren't they? In that case they shouldn't be able to hide behind the DMCA safe harbor provisions since one of the requirements of the DMCA is that the Online Service Provider has no knowledge about any infringing material on their servers (Section 512(c) http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512)
I don't really know about oatmeal, but they still have thousands of comics from Cy&H: Searching for "cyanide happiness" does not return any result[1], but just "cyanide" returns tons of comics.
If it's a takedown of some kind, your client erred by being subject to a government that ordered you unable to see the resource that you requested. The 4xx code fits, in this case, as 5xx implies the server made a mistake (it didn't).