You don't pay those taxes "in exchange for citizenship", you pay them for living in the country and using the infrastructure. This should be obvious, since non-citizen greencard holders pay the same taxes.
Voting and jury duty are pretty much the only civic duties directly associated with citizenship.
What for? iOS has no multitasking, so the new app will run in the foreground, in direct view of the user. If the user doesn't like it, he can quit the app. Unless starting random apps really becomes a major sport for troll web sites, occasionally quitting an accidentally started app sounds a lot more efficient than having a confirmation box for every mailto: link.
You just really don't know how the appstore works, do you? The legal construct is that the customer buys directly from the developer; Apple is just a brokering the deal. You are not buying from Apple, so Apple is not a distributor.
As others have pointed out, the analogy is more that of a brick-and-mortar store. Now, this may still be distributing in the spirit of the GPL, but that part has never been tested in court and t is not at all clear that would hold up (middlemen can be useful in transactions, and this provision would arguably put an unreasonable burden on middlemen).
Also, the appstore development agreement makes it very clear that the authors of the software are responsible for fulfilling all requirements of the GPL. That is, the authors need to make the GPL code available through some other means. Note that the GPL does not specify that the code has to be made available through the same means as the binary. So anyways, Apple has received assurances from the developer that the developer is following all GPL license term. If somebody were to sue Apple over a GPL violation, they would be able to point to the software developer, either as a defense in the main lawsuit, or at least after the fact in a separate lawsuit. In the meantime of course they would just remove the offending program form the store.
Yes. I had a brain fart and wrote "NP hard" rather than "NP complete". TS is NP complete and therefore can be verified in polynomial time, so the basic gist of my original message stands.
Well, traveling salesman is an NP hard problem. That means you can VERIFY whether a proposed solution is optimal in polynomial time. FINDING the optimal solution is slow (basically you have to try all possible solutions and verify them individually until you find the best).
Unless US union laws are more screwed up than I thought, you are not required to participate in a strike even if you're a member of the striking union. Last time the staff at my college (In Canada) went on strike, all of my professors crossed picket lines and kept on working ("Screw that. I've got students to teach.").
Actually, that is only because the Profs are not members of the same union as the staff that were on strike. I don't know what university you are at, but at most Canadian universities, the profs are members of the faculty association, which, while being a collective bargaining unit, does not typically have legal union status. But if you are a union member, and you cross a picket line, the union has the authority to fine you (or pressure the university into terminating your employment if you violate your "duties" as a union member). This is true in Canada.
Free? Absolutely. Fair? Not what I would call an electoral system where 34% of the voters get to put in place a government. We need proportional representation.
Research professors get salaries that generally come directly from federal grants. They work for the government.
Actually, no, they don't. In Canada, salaries for the principal investigators (ie. grant holder(s)) are explicitly NOT eligible expenses for federal grants. Faculty salaries come from university general operating funds (GPOF), which in turn are provided by the provinces, not the feds.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but one thing that may not have been clear form the summary is that this only affects scientists who work for federal research institutes. The rules do NOT apply to university researchers receiving government grants, only researchers at institutions that are under direct control of some ministry.
So what? Nobody fully understands EVERY issue out there. Not even you, Mr. Smartpants.
Also, on the scale of things, if a voter gets astronomy wrong, that is going to have a lot less of an effect on me than if he gets, say, economy wrong. We should still work on improving education, but from a practical point of view it is just not that big a deal.
Depends. If the girls at the neighboring table are giggling over a youtube video, or the tourist/exchange student on the next table is on an hour long skype chat with his family back home, those are distractions, too.
I don't have an iPhone, and therefore I don't have first hand experience with "Where To?" However, I have read the claims of the Apple patent, and the description of the "Where To?" software, and there is no overlap. The Apple patent is explicitly about notifying a third party of your arrival at some destination after detecting that you have been traveling. "Where To?" doesn't seem to do anything like this. The screen illustration is simply used as an example for what kind of UI the relevant application might have. So with this it is clear that "Where To?" is not prior art to the Apple patent, and Apple didn't steal an idea from FutureTrap.
That leaves the question of whether Apple is guilty of copyright infringement by using an illustration showing a screenshot of an app from another company. This gets pretty technical, but my educated guess is: probably not. The "screenshot" has obviously been redrawn with different fonts and slightly different icons, so it is not a verbatim copy of the original.
That said, using the image without asking for explicit permission from FutureTrap was a pretty stupid move on Apple's part, if only for the negative PR they'll be getting over this.
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You don't pay those taxes "in exchange for citizenship", you pay them for living in the country and using the infrastructure. This should be obvious, since non-citizen greencard holders pay the same taxes.
Voting and jury duty are pretty much the only civic duties directly associated with citizenship.
Because everybody pays taxes, while jury duty singles out a miniscule percentage of the population.
What for? iOS has no multitasking, so the new app will run in the foreground, in direct view of the user. If the user doesn't like it, he can quit the app. Unless starting random apps really becomes a major sport for troll web sites, occasionally quitting an accidentally started app sounds a lot more efficient than having a confirmation box for every mailto: link.
The developer is using libraries provided by Apple. Apple does not modify the code. The rest is features implemented in iOS, not the app itself.
Two wolves and a sheep is a 2/3 majority, which is enough to change the constitution. Just sayin...
Evidently you are confusing common language and legal terms.
You just really don't know how the appstore works, do you? The legal construct is that the customer buys directly from the developer; Apple is just a brokering the deal. You are not buying from Apple, so Apple is not a distributor.
Fair enough, but that doesn't mean the GPL is somehow "free". In fact, establishing restrictions is the opposite of "free".
As others have pointed out, the analogy is more that of a brick-and-mortar store. Now, this may still be distributing in the spirit of the GPL, but that part has never been tested in court and t is not at all clear that would hold up (middlemen can be useful in transactions, and this provision would arguably put an unreasonable burden on middlemen).
Also, the appstore development agreement makes it very clear that the authors of the software are responsible for fulfilling all requirements of the GPL. That is, the authors need to make the GPL code available through some other means. Note that the GPL does not specify that the code has to be made available through the same means as the binary. So anyways, Apple has received assurances from the developer that the developer is following all GPL license term. If somebody were to sue Apple over a GPL violation, they would be able to point to the software developer, either as a defense in the main lawsuit, or at least after the fact in a separate lawsuit. In the meantime of course they would just remove the offending program form the store.
Yes. I had a brain fart and wrote "NP hard" rather than "NP complete". TS is NP complete and therefore can be verified in polynomial time, so the basic gist of my original message stands.
Well, traveling salesman is an NP hard problem. That means you can VERIFY whether a proposed solution is optimal in polynomial time. FINDING the optimal solution is slow (basically you have to try all possible solutions and verify them individually until you find the best).
Huh? Wouldn't an alot be larger than an aswell?
So his flopping tongue will stick out of the screen? Nice.
Unless US union laws are more screwed up than I thought, you are not required to participate in a strike even if you're a member of the striking union. Last time the staff at my college (In Canada) went on strike, all of my professors crossed picket lines and kept on working ("Screw that. I've got students to teach.").
Actually, that is only because the Profs are not members of the same union as the staff that were on strike. I don't know what university you are at, but at most Canadian universities, the profs are members of the faculty association, which, while being a collective bargaining unit, does not typically have legal union status. But if you are a union member, and you cross a picket line, the union has the authority to fine you (or pressure the university into terminating your employment if you violate your "duties" as a union member). This is true in Canada.
The U.S. did not lose the Vietnam War. We signed the Paris Peace Accords, withdrew, and then South Vietnam lost to North Vietnam.
If only there were a term for withdrawing from an armed conflict without having met your objectives...
Free? Absolutely. Fair? Not what I would call an electoral system where 34% of the voters get to put in place a government. We need proportional representation.
Research professors get salaries that generally come directly from federal grants. They work for the government.
Actually, no, they don't. In Canada, salaries for the principal investigators (ie. grant holder(s)) are explicitly NOT eligible expenses for federal grants. Faculty salaries come from university general operating funds (GPOF), which in turn are provided by the provinces, not the feds.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but one thing that may not have been clear form the summary is that this only affects scientists who work for federal research institutes. The rules do NOT apply to university researchers receiving government grants, only researchers at institutions that are under direct control of some ministry.
So what? Nobody fully understands EVERY issue out there. Not even you, Mr. Smartpants.
Also, on the scale of things, if a voter gets astronomy wrong, that is going to have a lot less of an effect on me than if he gets, say, economy wrong. We should still work on improving education, but from a practical point of view it is just not that big a deal.
...fellow academicians from the same field.
Maybe you should improve your own command of the English language before blasting others about their writing skills...
Except that, by scaling up the camera relative to the scene, you have just lost depth of field. Overall, the DOF will be a wash.
It is funny because anybody who is familiar with levels and quality of IT support at universities knows how ludicrous the idea is.
Depends. If the girls at the neighboring table are giggling over a youtube video, or the tourist/exchange student on the next table is on an hour long skype chat with his family back home, those are distractions, too.
I don't have an iPhone, and therefore I don't have first hand experience with "Where To?" However, I have read the claims of the Apple patent, and the description of the "Where To?" software, and there is no overlap. The Apple patent is explicitly about notifying a third party of your arrival at some destination after detecting that you have been traveling. "Where To?" doesn't seem to do anything like this. The screen illustration is simply used as an example for what kind of UI the relevant application might have. So with this it is clear that "Where To?" is not prior art to the Apple patent, and Apple didn't steal an idea from FutureTrap.
That leaves the question of whether Apple is guilty of copyright infringement by using an illustration showing a screenshot of an app from another company. This gets pretty technical, but my educated guess is: probably not. The "screenshot" has obviously been redrawn with different fonts and slightly different icons, so it is not a verbatim copy of the original.
That said, using the image without asking for explicit permission from FutureTrap was a pretty stupid move on Apple's part, if only for the negative PR they'll be getting over this.
This, in a nutshell, is why representative democracy is better than direct democracy.