And 10,000 CPUs and expanding for the public launch... who is going to pay for all that? It's not that Google has a few more of those CPUs running now, but when Google went public I'm quite sure it was less. They just expanded with the expansion of their market.
Maybe this is the late 90s again (prepare for totally unrealistic user numbers), or this search engine indeed needs so much horse power, meaning in effect that it can never become profitable.
Also the article talks about queries running a few seconds, instead of a typical 0.2 seconds for a Google search. That already indicates 5-50 times the computational resources just to get the answer on a query, and thus much higher cost per query than Google et. al have.
In case of DVDs, the original copy protection was CSS. But this has been broken so much that it is not much more than a protocol, just like encoding a video to mpeg or to wmv, this is just a little more data mangling that has to be done to get back the original image. After all copy protection (CSS, Bluray's system, whatever) is a mere protocol, an algorithm that has to be followed to be able to display the original image/movie/music.
Nowadays when popping a DVD in my computer, be it Linux or Windows, I expect it to play, not seeing anything about this "copy protection". I also kinda expect to be able to read the raw data, and with that to copy the DVD. Without noticing copy protection.
How do you (as consumer) know it's copy protected, thus illegal, or not copy protected, thus legal? Because it is written on the disk? Then just writing it on the disk would be enough to "copy protect" it?
Could be a nasty can of worms if the copy protection lobby would really want to bring this to court.
A month or two ago I had to get two new computers and a server for my office.
I went to the computer shop, and simply asked for "the slowest, cheapest stuff". Price matters, speed doesn't. For an office the slowest is more than fast enough, we're just a trader, so I need to do some accounting and emailing and typing invoices and some IM or Skype calling. So I have an 1.8 GHz celeron, and 1GB mem. That "slowest is fast enough" accounts also for the server: imap/postfix/apache/etc for two people in office and the occasional visitor to the web site, and a couple dozen mails per day. I just added some extra by getting a second harddisk so my data drives are RAID1 now. One of the new harddisks has died already (after a few days, manufacturing error obviously) so I am already saved by that. The RAID is 2x 250 GB, smaller not available, and I have only about 25-30 GB worth of data. Including seven years of e-mail with many photo attachments (has to do with how my trade is done), that is like 10-12 GB now or so. And this amount is collected in about seven years so at this rate it takes another 50 years or so to fill up my storage.
Really who needs that much storage unless you want to download (and keep) numerous movies? Music and image files are so small relative to modern hard disk space.
I'm looking forward to cheap 50-100 GB SSD drives. It's more than enough for most people, really. And with 64GB USB drives available... nothing stopping you from getting expansion for long-term (can they do that?) storage.
[...]it's unlikely Linux will ever just run Photoshop, at least until Linux gains sufficient marketshare that Adobe targets it. (Not that this stopped them from porting the Flash player or Acrobat Reader...)
That may be done because it's relatively easy compared to PhotoShop, and/or because they are afraid of losing the market to cheaper/FOSS alternatives.
Flash: there is no working competing implementation that I am aware of. I actually like flash now I have FF with flashblock, and can only use flash for where it is useful (mostly embedded video - I know quality is not great but it Just Works).
Reader: there are better alternatives to this. Recently I had a pdf document on my iBook, opened it in Preview, wanted to copy some text out of it, but got the message "this is not allowed". Stupid DRM. Luckily the free alternative pdf viewers do not have that restriction, and happily let me copy bits and pieces from that document. I should install one of those besides Preview.
But no Reader for me, ever. I sometimes run into it on Windows (rarely) and am always irritated by the slow startup, especially when compared to e.g. Preview or xpdf.
I still don't get why to use Windows in the first place on a netbook, when the idea is that most, if not all, tasks are done in the browser. In effect, it becomes a smart terminal, with the applications hosted partly on the network, partly (AJAX et. al) in the browser on the local computer.
So you just need a decent browser, e.g. Firefox. And the OS just serves to store some of your files on the local drive, to connect to the network, and to run the browser.
Why using Windows? It sounds like masochism. Quote of choice:
The program icon showed up in the system tray and it alerted me several times about potentially suspicious events. I was able to right-click that icon and use its menu to scan the system for viruses and check for updated virus definitions without a problem,
A proper, secure O/S doesn't need this. Maybe if you like to install all kinds of software from untrusted sources but that's not the idea of a netbook. It should just work, maybe a software update now and then, but it should not bug me all the time for suspected virus activity. That keeps me doing more important things, such as posting on/. or so.
Oh and besides, I have an EEE, the original one, and would really have a problem wiht this three-app limit. FF for browsing, TB for e-mail, sometimes OOo for some minor document reading or typing an invoice, stuff like that, IM program, music player... artificial limits suck.
Do you really get competing offers with lower prices from the other company than you use currently (I mean you use company A and company B sends you a better offer)? Has the price really gone down significantly (as in more than 30%) since the second operator is there? Are your prices significantly lower and service quality significantly better than in locations where there is only one cable operator?
Two companies is a duopoly, that is not free competition. There is no way for NEW competitors to enter the market, that's why. And that is the part YOU conveniently forget about. It's better than one, as you have a second choice if one totally screws up.
In case of one shared cable you save half the cost of putting two cables in the ground, save half the disruption to residents due to dug up sidewalks, and you could even have five no ten companies offering services on the same cable. Now that is competition, and because there is only one cable to maintain the costs and final price for the consumer will be lower.
In my home country of The Netherlands, everybody has a choice of a couple dozen ADSL providers on a single telephone network. Serious competition.
In my current residence Hong Kong there are possibly hundreds of IDD companies, all operating on the same telephone networks (that includes fixed and mobile). IDD calling is almost as cheap as local calling. Also serious competition.
But in HK only one cable Internet/TV provider, and one ADSL Internet/TV provider. No competition. And as such our Internet fees are quite high, and customer service is poor. Mobile internet is better as there are more than two providers (about five on 3G alone) and they are really competing with one another, driving down prices fast. It'd be great if there were more companies that could offer ADSL services on the same cable.
This should be compared to e.g. roads, railways, waterways, airports and other major pieces of infrastructure. As such it is best owned by the government or a government-appointed company that takes care of the maintenance only, and is not providing services. All users pay a certain fee, based on a flat fare or per use or whatever. I say here government, it may also be a public non-profit that is set up for this very purpose.
For example the government builds and maintain roads, and charges a vehicle tax to use them.
An airport, often also government run, charges the aircraft that want to land there a certain fee, possibly depending on size of the aircraft.
So it would be the government that builds/maintains the cables, and then rents it out for the ISP to provide services on it. Or maybe even telephone companies, or TV services. All the government should do is lay a digital cable, and other companies can connect to it with their digital services (and provide end-point equipment such as set-top box for the TV, modem for an Internet connection or telephone set). The cable just provides a way to get those bits from a to b regardless of what those bits are for. The only limits may be the legality of content, and the bandwidth demanded.
It is not doable, also not desirable, to lay more than one set of the same infrastructure. Coax or telephone cables may be replaced by fibre for example, but it is not a good idea to put two sets of coax (TV cable) in the ground.
The competition should not come from more sets of cables here, like there is only one road network but it is operated by various bus companies, minibus operators, taxis, rikshaws, and private cars. They all pay a certain fee to be licensed to use the road, and maybe tolls for use of certain tunnels or bridges. That's how cables should work as well.
The problem is of course that lots of cables were laid by private companies, though often government sponsored, when it was thought that it all should be privately owned and run. That legacy we have now basically all over the world, and this is why they are talking about a "third channel" and thinking of ways to do Internet over electricity cables just to get more competition. It is just patchwork. Cables should be publicly owned like the roads and other major pieces of infrastructure, become a common carrier, and sell no more than their transport service to wholesale customers. Just like the telephone companies sell telephone calls (data transport) to anyone, regardless of whether you are just having a nice chat with your mum, trying to close a business deal, or are having a bout of telephone sex. The call costs the same, and everyone is allowed to make as many of them as their line allows (which is usually one at the time but more lines can be rented if you need it).
Well in the city they actually tend to remove most of the seats, leaving only a few on the sides of the cars, to be able to stuff more people in. A standing person takes less floor space than a sitting person after all.
It really makes me wonder why Microsoft bothers with the continued development of Windows. The customers have spoken: they like XP, and find it so good that they do not even bother to upgrade nor switch to the much more modern Linux distributions that are available already for years. Vista flopped, and Win7 (or whatever it's going to be called upon release) is also not getting a too warm reception so far.
Just lay off >90% of the workers, keep a core of XP maintainers, and profit.
I would be more worried if you are an small business and are running your own simple web site and e-mail server for you and your three employees, and using the connection to connect your local LAN to the Internet.
Are you an ISP then? Do you have to keep records of all your e-mail traffic? Including actual messages and spam? What if law enforcement or who-ever comes to have a look for it? In what format are you supposed to give the information? Raw postfix log enough?
I don't know what you expect but you don't need too much hardware for those two or three visitors a day. Googlebot will probably visit more often than all human visitors together on such a site. Just be realistic, if he now is using a decent database like MySQL at the backend then adding a simple web with user login and check-my-pet-status is really easy. He may be able to run it from a remote hosting company (but then the database updates may be an issue) or get a half-decent Internet connection.
This kind of stuff usually doesn't need much maintenance. As soon as it works don't touch the set-up and you should be fine for long time to come. I have to maintain my own web site so infrequent (and this site is database-driven, with my latest offers posted and removed automatically all the time, really more than some static pages) that by the time I want to change something I forgot how I set it up... it just works. You just have to be realistic and remember this is a small operation, really small, the slowest and cheapest modern hardware being a hundred times what is needed, this is not a website that gets hundreds of hits a second, ever. This is something many IT types tend to forget.
I don't understand how this works. What is the point on improving on a patented invention if you won't be able to distribute it because doing so would infringe on the original patent?
Improvements do not necessarily infringe on the original invention. E.g. someone invents a new way to boil water, the scientific principle behind it can not be patented, just a technology using that new principle. This is why business method and software patents are evil: they do not try to protect the invention, but the principle behind it. It is the difference between "invention" and "discovery". The first is technological, the second scientific.
For example someone discovers that mercury expands its volume when the temperature goes up, then someone else invents a thermometer that uses this expansion. The thermometer can be patented, the thermal expansion discovery not.
With the principle thermal expansion someone else discovers that two metals linked together change shape, and yet another person realises that this also can make a nice thermometer. Then some smart scientists discovers that two metals linked together, and the ends kept at different temperature, result in a potential difference. Presto, thermometer nr. 3. And of course a mere 20 years later all these inventions end up in the public domain, well documented and likely well researched by other inventors.
Why redesign the boards, instead of just not soldering those parts on? Saves the labour and parts. I don't think there is any logic in those parts that the board would miss suddenly.
What is killing a person is indeed current, not voltage.
However I can't imagine 12V to produce enough of a current through your body to injure let alone kill a person. Otherwise scores of children would be electrocuted while playing with their electrical trains, which also run typically at 12-14V DC. The internal resistance of your body is simply too high. Just make sure you do not short circuit those batteries, then you can get the huge currents that can start burning stuff and so.
GP is correct in this: part of the purpose of a patent is to fully reveal the invention, the idea being that someone skilled in the field can build the invention using only the information given in the patent. So a patent must give complete instructions to actually build the invention patented.
After all patents are to promote innovation, partly by revealing it. Other people can build the invention (that is fully allowed, you are just not allowed to sell/distribute a product based on the invention), and improve on it: this is how innovation is promoted.
Furthermore the protection is not only for a limited time frame, it is also limited by geographic region. So unless a patent has been applied for in all countries of the world (e.g. via the PCT), it may simply not exist for example in China. Which would mean that the Chinese could build the invention, and sell it within China, but they may not export it to say the USA where the patent is valid.
It is a strategic decision on the side of the patent holder where the holder may or may not want to cover the world (cost is an issue). As another poster indicated already, China is also part of PCT so Google may apply for the same patent in China as well and get their IP protection (admittedly enforcement is an issue in China but that is not the point here).
Think of what are now 21st birthday parties combined with driving for the first time, smoking, and porn.
Sorry, no idea what you are talking about here. But then I come from a country where you can smoke tobacco from 16, weed from 18, drink in private at all ages (yes even babies can drink legally at home. I had my first glass of wine at 12 or 13 years old or so), light alcohol in bars/restaurants from 16 and distilled from 18, drive a car from 18 (start lessons at 17), and a person can consent to sex from the tender age of 12 (this may have changed by now, not sure). This is The Netherlands by the way.
In this case I would expect the/. management to first ask their lawyer about the validity of the request and if their lawyer says it is valid and should be answered to, I would expect the/. management to do so and reveal all available information.
And they would most likely post everything on the front page as well for all to see what has happened.
/. after all is a discussion board, and a commercial enterprise. They are not in the business of fighting court cases, that's what EFF is for.
The main question here is what information does/. keep about their posters (both anonymous and not anonymous), and for how long is it kept. Are anonymous coward's IP addresses kept after closing of a discussion, for example? There is no need to keep it to e.g. prevent moderating by the poster.
Your IP address is also stored when voting on the poll, limiting you to one vote per day. This information is apparently used for one day only, but is it still kept after that or all deleted?
...and still get sued for copyright infringement by some artist that DID opt out of the scheme.
I bet it won't be like that levy Canada and many other countries charge on blank media - the levy that allows you to put any copyrighted materials you like on said media without the risk of being sued for copyright infringement, right? Oh, wait... someone knocking at the door... brb.
It sounds overkill (strip search for a mobile) but if they called in the police, at least the school followed proper procedures.
It makes me also wonder in this case why the student let it come that far instead of just handing over the phone... notwithstanding that stuffing a phone down there is probably not very good for the phone. Crazy teenagers.
Are you completely insane? Teachers should need to get warrants to stop children dealing drugs in school?
Well, probably, yes they should. Really. And if they have strong enough suspicion that their students are dealing in drugs then they should call the police and let the police deal with it. Tell the police what they think the student was doing, have the student arrested if needed, and let the police deal with it. That's what they are for. School administrators are hired mostly for other purposes, such as keeping an eye on the students and dealing with minor offenses. Drug dealing is a serious offense.
If carrying ibuprofen is such a dangerous drug that it requires a strip search, shouldn't the police be called in the first place? It scares me mostly that the school can do this kind of investigation without having to call the authorities.
In case a student was suspected of carrying an illegal drug (no matter which drug), the police should have been informed. In this case the drug she was suspected of carrying was not illegal (it required a prescription still but that doesn't make it illegal in itself). She should have been questioned first at the very least.
The scariest part in this matter is for me that school authorities apparently have (or at least think they have) this kind of investigative powers. They may have certain powers, after all they have a bunch of school children to look after, but this is definitely going to far. This are powers of a kind that belong in the hands of the police only. Next thing you know is that teachers are allowed to carry weapons as a way to help them keep/restore order.
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And 10,000 CPUs and expanding for the public launch... who is going to pay for all that? It's not that Google has a few more of those CPUs running now, but when Google went public I'm quite sure it was less. They just expanded with the expansion of their market.
Maybe this is the late 90s again (prepare for totally unrealistic user numbers), or this search engine indeed needs so much horse power, meaning in effect that it can never become profitable.
Also the article talks about queries running a few seconds, instead of a typical 0.2 seconds for a Google search. That already indicates 5-50 times the computational resources just to get the answer on a query, and thus much higher cost per query than Google et. al have.
Then the question: what is copy protection?
In case of DVDs, the original copy protection was CSS. But this has been broken so much that it is not much more than a protocol, just like encoding a video to mpeg or to wmv, this is just a little more data mangling that has to be done to get back the original image. After all copy protection (CSS, Bluray's system, whatever) is a mere protocol, an algorithm that has to be followed to be able to display the original image/movie/music.
Nowadays when popping a DVD in my computer, be it Linux or Windows, I expect it to play, not seeing anything about this "copy protection". I also kinda expect to be able to read the raw data, and with that to copy the DVD. Without noticing copy protection.
How do you (as consumer) know it's copy protected, thus illegal, or not copy protected, thus legal? Because it is written on the disk? Then just writing it on the disk would be enough to "copy protect" it?
Could be a nasty can of worms if the copy protection lobby would really want to bring this to court.
Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs? Ah well. No matter which one you fill in the joke stands. It just gets a different perspective.
A month or two ago I had to get two new computers and a server for my office.
I went to the computer shop, and simply asked for "the slowest, cheapest stuff". Price matters, speed doesn't. For an office the slowest is more than fast enough, we're just a trader, so I need to do some accounting and emailing and typing invoices and some IM or Skype calling. So I have an 1.8 GHz celeron, and 1GB mem. That "slowest is fast enough" accounts also for the server: imap/postfix/apache/etc for two people in office and the occasional visitor to the web site, and a couple dozen mails per day. I just added some extra by getting a second harddisk so my data drives are RAID1 now. One of the new harddisks has died already (after a few days, manufacturing error obviously) so I am already saved by that. The RAID is 2x 250 GB, smaller not available, and I have only about 25-30 GB worth of data. Including seven years of e-mail with many photo attachments (has to do with how my trade is done), that is like 10-12 GB now or so. And this amount is collected in about seven years so at this rate it takes another 50 years or so to fill up my storage.
Really who needs that much storage unless you want to download (and keep) numerous movies? Music and image files are so small relative to modern hard disk space.
I'm looking forward to cheap 50-100 GB SSD drives. It's more than enough for most people, really. And with 64GB USB drives available... nothing stopping you from getting expansion for long-term (can they do that?) storage.
[...]it's unlikely Linux will ever just run Photoshop, at least until Linux gains sufficient marketshare that Adobe targets it. (Not that this stopped them from porting the Flash player or Acrobat Reader...)
That may be done because it's relatively easy compared to PhotoShop, and/or because they are afraid of losing the market to cheaper/FOSS alternatives.
Flash: there is no working competing implementation that I am aware of. I actually like flash now I have FF with flashblock, and can only use flash for where it is useful (mostly embedded video - I know quality is not great but it Just Works).
Reader: there are better alternatives to this. Recently I had a pdf document on my iBook, opened it in Preview, wanted to copy some text out of it, but got the message "this is not allowed". Stupid DRM. Luckily the free alternative pdf viewers do not have that restriction, and happily let me copy bits and pieces from that document. I should install one of those besides Preview.
But no Reader for me, ever. I sometimes run into it on Windows (rarely) and am always irritated by the slow startup, especially when compared to e.g. Preview or xpdf.
I still don't get why to use Windows in the first place on a netbook, when the idea is that most, if not all, tasks are done in the browser. In effect, it becomes a smart terminal, with the applications hosted partly on the network, partly (AJAX et. al) in the browser on the local computer.
So you just need a decent browser, e.g. Firefox. And the OS just serves to store some of your files on the local drive, to connect to the network, and to run the browser.
Why using Windows? It sounds like masochism. Quote of choice:
The program icon showed up in the system tray and it alerted me several times about potentially suspicious events. I was able to right-click that icon and use its menu to scan the system for viruses and check for updated virus definitions without a problem,
A proper, secure O/S doesn't need this. Maybe if you like to install all kinds of software from untrusted sources but that's not the idea of a netbook. It should just work, maybe a software update now and then, but it should not bug me all the time for suspected virus activity. That keeps me doing more important things, such as posting on /. or so.
Oh and besides, I have an EEE, the original one, and would really have a problem wiht this three-app limit. FF for browsing, TB for e-mail, sometimes OOo for some minor document reading or typing an invoice, stuff like that, IM program, music player... artificial limits suck.
Do you really get competing offers with lower prices from the other company than you use currently (I mean you use company A and company B sends you a better offer)? Has the price really gone down significantly (as in more than 30%) since the second operator is there? Are your prices significantly lower and service quality significantly better than in locations where there is only one cable operator?
Two companies is a duopoly, that is not free competition. There is no way for NEW competitors to enter the market, that's why. And that is the part YOU conveniently forget about. It's better than one, as you have a second choice if one totally screws up.
In case of one shared cable you save half the cost of putting two cables in the ground, save half the disruption to residents due to dug up sidewalks, and you could even have five no ten companies offering services on the same cable. Now that is competition, and because there is only one cable to maintain the costs and final price for the consumer will be lower.
In my home country of The Netherlands, everybody has a choice of a couple dozen ADSL providers on a single telephone network. Serious competition.
In my current residence Hong Kong there are possibly hundreds of IDD companies, all operating on the same telephone networks (that includes fixed and mobile). IDD calling is almost as cheap as local calling. Also serious competition.
But in HK only one cable Internet/TV provider, and one ADSL Internet/TV provider. No competition. And as such our Internet fees are quite high, and customer service is poor. Mobile internet is better as there are more than two providers (about five on 3G alone) and they are really competing with one another, driving down prices fast. It'd be great if there were more companies that could offer ADSL services on the same cable.
This should be compared to e.g. roads, railways, waterways, airports and other major pieces of infrastructure. As such it is best owned by the government or a government-appointed company that takes care of the maintenance only, and is not providing services. All users pay a certain fee, based on a flat fare or per use or whatever. I say here government, it may also be a public non-profit that is set up for this very purpose.
For example the government builds and maintain roads, and charges a vehicle tax to use them.
An airport, often also government run, charges the aircraft that want to land there a certain fee, possibly depending on size of the aircraft.
So it would be the government that builds/maintains the cables, and then rents it out for the ISP to provide services on it. Or maybe even telephone companies, or TV services. All the government should do is lay a digital cable, and other companies can connect to it with their digital services (and provide end-point equipment such as set-top box for the TV, modem for an Internet connection or telephone set). The cable just provides a way to get those bits from a to b regardless of what those bits are for. The only limits may be the legality of content, and the bandwidth demanded.
It is not doable, also not desirable, to lay more than one set of the same infrastructure. Coax or telephone cables may be replaced by fibre for example, but it is not a good idea to put two sets of coax (TV cable) in the ground.
The competition should not come from more sets of cables here, like there is only one road network but it is operated by various bus companies, minibus operators, taxis, rikshaws, and private cars. They all pay a certain fee to be licensed to use the road, and maybe tolls for use of certain tunnels or bridges. That's how cables should work as well.
The problem is of course that lots of cables were laid by private companies, though often government sponsored, when it was thought that it all should be privately owned and run. That legacy we have now basically all over the world, and this is why they are talking about a "third channel" and thinking of ways to do Internet over electricity cables just to get more competition. It is just patchwork. Cables should be publicly owned like the roads and other major pieces of infrastructure, become a common carrier, and sell no more than their transport service to wholesale customers. Just like the telephone companies sell telephone calls (data transport) to anyone, regardless of whether you are just having a nice chat with your mum, trying to close a business deal, or are having a bout of telephone sex. The call costs the same, and everyone is allowed to make as many of them as their line allows (which is usually one at the time but more lines can be rented if you need it).
Well in the city they actually tend to remove most of the seats, leaving only a few on the sides of the cars, to be able to stuff more people in. A standing person takes less floor space than a sitting person after all.
It really makes me wonder why Microsoft bothers with the continued development of Windows. The customers have spoken: they like XP, and find it so good that they do not even bother to upgrade nor switch to the much more modern Linux distributions that are available already for years. Vista flopped, and Win7 (or whatever it's going to be called upon release) is also not getting a too warm reception so far.
Just lay off >90% of the workers, keep a core of XP maintainers, and profit.
I would be more worried if you are an small business and are running your own simple web site and e-mail server for you and your three employees, and using the connection to connect your local LAN to the Internet.
Are you an ISP then? Do you have to keep records of all your e-mail traffic? Including actual messages and spam? What if law enforcement or who-ever comes to have a look for it? In what format are you supposed to give the information? Raw postfix log enough?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Their job is to take care of pets, not to run a fancy website. The computer is a tool, nothing more than that.
I don't know what you expect but you don't need too much hardware for those two or three visitors a day. Googlebot will probably visit more often than all human visitors together on such a site. Just be realistic, if he now is using a decent database like MySQL at the backend then adding a simple web with user login and check-my-pet-status is really easy. He may be able to run it from a remote hosting company (but then the database updates may be an issue) or get a half-decent Internet connection.
This kind of stuff usually doesn't need much maintenance. As soon as it works don't touch the set-up and you should be fine for long time to come. I have to maintain my own web site so infrequent (and this site is database-driven, with my latest offers posted and removed automatically all the time, really more than some static pages) that by the time I want to change something I forgot how I set it up... it just works. You just have to be realistic and remember this is a small operation, really small, the slowest and cheapest modern hardware being a hundred times what is needed, this is not a website that gets hundreds of hits a second, ever. This is something many IT types tend to forget.
I don't understand how this works. What is the point on improving on a patented invention if you won't be able to distribute it because doing so would infringe on the original patent?
Improvements do not necessarily infringe on the original invention. E.g. someone invents a new way to boil water, the scientific principle behind it can not be patented, just a technology using that new principle. This is why business method and software patents are evil: they do not try to protect the invention, but the principle behind it. It is the difference between "invention" and "discovery". The first is technological, the second scientific.
For example someone discovers that mercury expands its volume when the temperature goes up, then someone else invents a thermometer that uses this expansion. The thermometer can be patented, the thermal expansion discovery not.
With the principle thermal expansion someone else discovers that two metals linked together change shape, and yet another person realises that this also can make a nice thermometer. Then some smart scientists discovers that two metals linked together, and the ends kept at different temperature, result in a potential difference. Presto, thermometer nr. 3. And of course a mere 20 years later all these inventions end up in the public domain, well documented and likely well researched by other inventors.
Why redesign the boards, instead of just not soldering those parts on? Saves the labour and parts. I don't think there is any logic in those parts that the board would miss suddenly.
The server itself will be obsolete in a few years anyway, should be easy to match that with the battery running out and needing replacement.
What is killing a person is indeed current, not voltage.
However I can't imagine 12V to produce enough of a current through your body to injure let alone kill a person. Otherwise scores of children would be electrocuted while playing with their electrical trains, which also run typically at 12-14V DC. The internal resistance of your body is simply too high. Just make sure you do not short circuit those batteries, then you can get the huge currents that can start burning stuff and so.
GP is correct in this: part of the purpose of a patent is to fully reveal the invention, the idea being that someone skilled in the field can build the invention using only the information given in the patent. So a patent must give complete instructions to actually build the invention patented.
After all patents are to promote innovation, partly by revealing it. Other people can build the invention (that is fully allowed, you are just not allowed to sell/distribute a product based on the invention), and improve on it: this is how innovation is promoted.
Furthermore the protection is not only for a limited time frame, it is also limited by geographic region. So unless a patent has been applied for in all countries of the world (e.g. via the PCT), it may simply not exist for example in China. Which would mean that the Chinese could build the invention, and sell it within China, but they may not export it to say the USA where the patent is valid.
It is a strategic decision on the side of the patent holder where the holder may or may not want to cover the world (cost is an issue). As another poster indicated already, China is also part of PCT so Google may apply for the same patent in China as well and get their IP protection (admittedly enforcement is an issue in China but that is not the point here).
Think of what are now 21st birthday parties combined with driving for the first time, smoking, and porn.
Sorry, no idea what you are talking about here. But then I come from a country where you can smoke tobacco from 16, weed from 18, drink in private at all ages (yes even babies can drink legally at home. I had my first glass of wine at 12 or 13 years old or so), light alcohol in bars/restaurants from 16 and distilled from 18, drive a car from 18 (start lessons at 17), and a person can consent to sex from the tender age of 12 (this may have changed by now, not sure). This is The Netherlands by the way.
In this case I would expect the /. management to first ask their lawyer about the validity of the request and if their lawyer says it is valid and should be answered to, I would expect the /. management to do so and reveal all available information.
And they would most likely post everything on the front page as well for all to see what has happened.
/. after all is a discussion board, and a commercial enterprise. They are not in the business of fighting court cases, that's what EFF is for.
The main question here is what information does /. keep about their posters (both anonymous and not anonymous), and for how long is it kept. Are anonymous coward's IP addresses kept after closing of a discussion, for example? There is no need to keep it to e.g. prevent moderating by the poster.
Your IP address is also stored when voting on the poll, limiting you to one vote per day. This information is apparently used for one day only, but is it still kept after that or all deleted?
Maybe it's time to start reading the privacy statement.
Download copyrighted stuff,
...and still get sued for copyright infringement by some artist that DID opt out of the scheme.
I bet it won't be like that levy Canada and many other countries charge on blank media - the levy that allows you to put any copyrighted materials you like on said media without the risk of being sued for copyright infringement, right? Oh, wait... someone knocking at the door... brb.
It sounds overkill (strip search for a mobile) but if they called in the police, at least the school followed proper procedures.
It makes me also wonder in this case why the student let it come that far instead of just handing over the phone... notwithstanding that stuffing a phone down there is probably not very good for the phone. Crazy teenagers.
If so, they should get a fucking warrant.
Are you completely insane? Teachers should need to get warrants to stop children dealing drugs in school?
Well, probably, yes they should. Really. And if they have strong enough suspicion that their students are dealing in drugs then they should call the police and let the police deal with it. Tell the police what they think the student was doing, have the student arrested if needed, and let the police deal with it. That's what they are for. School administrators are hired mostly for other purposes, such as keeping an eye on the students and dealing with minor offenses. Drug dealing is a serious offense.
If carrying ibuprofen is such a dangerous drug that it requires a strip search, shouldn't the police be called in the first place? It scares me mostly that the school can do this kind of investigation without having to call the authorities.
In case a student was suspected of carrying an illegal drug (no matter which drug), the police should have been informed. In this case the drug she was suspected of carrying was not illegal (it required a prescription still but that doesn't make it illegal in itself). She should have been questioned first at the very least.
The scariest part in this matter is for me that school authorities apparently have (or at least think they have) this kind of investigative powers. They may have certain powers, after all they have a bunch of school children to look after, but this is definitely going to far. This are powers of a kind that belong in the hands of the police only. Next thing you know is that teachers are allowed to carry weapons as a way to help them keep/restore order.