This whole argument about copying is rather silly, at some point the text must be transmitted in a human readable form. At which point it can be recorded either electronically, or in the most difficult case by writing down manually what must be copied. Everything else is a question of degrees.
To what end? A shot across the bows of screen manufacturers? I suppose that's possible, to try and force screen manufacturers (i.e. Samsung) to cooperate on production costs for existing screens. But that doesn't seem like a useful negotiating tactic to me and it would probably be more useful to keep this secret until scale manufacturing deals have been signed and work has started.
It seems that having this kind of information out there would be of benefit to Apple in negotiations with screen manufacturers eg. it could make suppliers more willing to sign a long-term deal at lower rates than they might otherwise, due to the fear of being dumped in the future.
Another potential purpose for such a leak would be to boost the stock price.
A better negotiation position would have been my first guess, too.
> The screens are far more difficult to produce than OLED displays, and the company almost killed the project a year or so ago [...] consumers will probably have to wait a few years before seeing the results.
So the best-case scenario is that Apple finishes developing this technology in a few years, and the worst-case scenario is that they kill this development, which almost happened already.
This could go either way both for Apple and for screen manufacturers. It only makes sense to explore an option without all this uncertainty, by seeking a new middle ground.
Apple has frequently used exclusive advanced screen technology as a differentiating factor in their products. Retina displays, better colour fidelity, wide colour gamut, 5K, etc. Previously they have done so by working together with screen manufacturers and underwriting the development of such technologies, the tool chains and manufacturing buildout with massive (Bns of dollar) loans, but actually owning the patents, tool chain and manufacturing gives them even more control and exclusivity.
To me it depends. You might not actually want to produce your own screens, or what ever else you currently buy instead of making it yourself. Because that would require dedicated resources, diverted from your core competencies. But you might have someone, or a small team, look into it. Work out what you might need to do, what it is going to cost. Then you take that research and knock on your suppliers door and ask for a better price.
I'm not saying that is what is happening here, but it could be a viable negotiation strategy.
Samsung stock did take a hit as a result of this. Another possibility is a fabricated leak for a pump and dump style scheme.
Seems indeed very little interest for Apple. I'm sure any effect of a public leak can be as efficiently done with regular phone call. By shear size, Apple is very close to all its providers, the "pride and prejudice" drama is creative license of the media to animate what is mostly regular boring corporate interactions.
I find it unexpectedly hilarious that we now have issues that cannot be fully described without running the risk of crashing our machines. Its as if there are certain unholy words that could cause us to faint if we were to utter them.
Achilles: I see the dilemma now. If any record player—say Record Player X—is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X", it will create just those vibrations which cause it to break...So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect. It seems that every record player is vulnerable to one or the other of those frailties, and hence all record players are defective. (p77)
I don't think anyone ever intended for text rendering to be a "sufficiently powerful formal system" like second-order logic, number theory, or like Hofstadter says the human brain is. I would hope that, in the absence of bugs, rendering text X on computer system Y would be a plain old computable function.
Could some of this also result from the contractual nature of using Chinese suppliers? I know that from my own experience with contracting, that proposing an improvement can be difficult if you also want to attach a fee to the improvement. How do you say, "I think your proposal is flawed, this way is better, but it will cost you $X more" in a way that doesn't feel like a money grab or an insult? It can be in your best interest to allow the flaw to stand, let the client notice and propose the improvement during the next round of contract negotiations. And so the only improvements a contractor can propose are those that do not cost substantially more then the established price.
Of course this is more for fixed price for fixed work contracting. Contracts with more variable pricing my be better. Maybe other contacting setups can alleviate this issue, but I haven't seen many that could work and that clients are willing to sign.
Well an existing gem might not. But a gem you use has could have a developer's computer get compromised and could publish a malicious update. If you inadvertently download it while updating your gems you could get compromised.
The problem here is that you don't even have to get directly attacked to be affected.
I don't think there's really approval for protests, but "The majority of protests in China concern local grievances, such as the corruption of county- or township-level government or Communist Party officials, exploitation by employers, excessive taxation, and so on. Protests targeting specific, local grievances, and where citizens propose actionable remedies, are more likely to succeed than alternative forms of protests."
These are usually broadcasted openly on the Chinese internet and allowed by the Chinese government. Like I'm of Chinese ethnicity and I occasionally see Chinese news, these are the only protests put on Chinese State news that you can see because it forwards Chinese govt. agenda.
EDIT: Note that a BBC News article about it says that "The BBC's Martin Patience in Beijing says the outbreak of protests was almost certainly sanctioned by the Chinese authorities, as they were well policed."
> This might also be another avenue for causation.
If people with mental disorders were more sleep-deprived and then consumed more sugar, wouldn't that also show up in the data?
> Although the study looked for this link, it was not seen in the data: men and women with mental disorders were not more likely to consume more sugar.
A causal A > B > C link would look similar (data-wise) to a A > C link.
