That seems to be a common misconception. That's not how the GPL works. They need to make the code available to their customers on demand. You aren't their customer, you can't demand anything.
The GPL covers distribution, not "being a customer". If someone uses GPL code in a project, then only the GPL itself gives them a right to re-distribute the derivative product. If the distributor does not comply with the GPL then they do not have a license to redistribute and are guilty of copyright infringement unless they have some alternative license, or copyright law does not apply to them for some reason.
Remember, this is a design patent case.
It's not just rounded rectangles and a black bezel. It's rounded rectangles, a black bezel, this AND that AND other things.
Protect Individual Design Features
– Perhaps the best reason to get a design
patent is to protect individual design features. Protection of individual design features is probably the most effective way to
protect the “visual brand” of a product. For
example, assume your product is the first
of its type to use a particular shape (i.e.,
rounded, squared, hollow, arched, etc.) for
a major design component or set of components. Consumers may begin to recognize
this unique shape as part of your brand
identity. Then assume a competitor (i) uses
the same shape for the same component,
but changes the shape of other components,
or (ii) uses the same shape for a portion,
but not all, of the same component. The
competitor likely will have intruded upon
your visual brand identity and created some
confusion in the marketplace, but may have
done so in a way that avoids design patent
infringement. A solution to this problem
is to use advanced design patent prosecution techniques to protect the individual
design features of your product. These techniques include portion claiming, broken
line claiming, indeterminate break lines,
multiple embodiments, multiple patents,
continuation practice, and combinations of
all these techniques.
Samsung being a supplier for the iPhone would have access to these designs during the development stage.
Samsung don't build the iPhone - they only supply a few components chips (cpu, flash) and the LCD display. All of these parts can be purchased in volume, there's absolutely no reason why Apple would need to supply Samsung with pre-release iPhone designs.
30% cut to handle payment services for your customers, including card processing and verification, refunds, fees to banks and credit card companies, gift cards, customer service, helpdesk etc? Yes please.
That alone is worth the 30% cut
On the contrary, 30% for payment processing is a huge markup - contrast with PayPal's Merchant Fees. As a developer, which would you rather pay?
But if price is such an important metric, why is the iPad — with its premium price tag — so popular? Simple, it was the first tablet to go mass market, and cumulative sales of around 85 million gives the iPad credibility in the eye on potential buyers.
This is just stating the obvious - the iPad has had more sales, because it has been available for longer. If the Nexus 7 had been released in April two years ago (like the iPad), and the iPad were released last month, then the Nexus 7 would have sold more units.
By driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations.
This is not true. Did Nokia irrevocably harm the phone market by constantly driving down the price of a phone until it hit a low of $19? Did Asus irrevocably harm the laptop market by releasing the first cheap netbook? Did Dell harm the PC market by pursuing lower and lower prices? Sure, you could argue that, or you could argue that cheaper technology expands the market - by making it accessible to people on a lower income. Cell phones are cheaper now than ever before, but the market has expanded so that 5.2 billion people now have cell phones, and the total market is still growing (two years ago revenue from phone sales passed $1 trillion and revenue from associated mobile services like calls etc. is also about $1 trillion).
The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007,
Yes, and Samsung internal documents show the F700 design going back to 2005, and a Korean design patent was filed in December 2006 - before the iPhone design was unveiled.
So is Samsung saying that Apple used a time machine
No, Samsung is not claiming that Apple copied the F700, Samsung is claiming independent invention. Apple is claiming that the F700 copied the iPhone.
it’s actually a chunky 16.4mm-thick slider QWERTY that looks appreciably different than the iPhone. It also has a homescreen that’s quite different than iOS
And yet Apple have claimed that it is a copy of the iPhone...
Samsung has an even higher duty to NOT discuss the case with the media, as does Apple.
There is no such legal duty - lawyers have a First Amendment right to speak to the press - a right that has been upheld by the courts. Lawyers are not allowed to release attorney-client privileged documents, but they can release documents that were filed in public records. But both sides are allowed to respond to press inquiries, which is all the Samsung lawyer says he did.
ordered to avoid consulting the media regarding this issue, an order Samsung is making extremely hard to comply with
Is Samsung holding a gun to the jurors collective heads? On the contrary, it is extremely easy for the jurors to comply - they just have to avoid reading articles on this particular case. As Groklaw said of the SCO vs Novell judge, "he said he relied on the jury to follow his instructions, adding that if you can't trust them to do that much, we might as well just quit.".
Yes it is, it's called contempt to court, and in this case can be taken as an attempt to influence the jury
Read the Groklaw article:
3. The materials were already publicly released, some by Apple and the rest because this very court forced the parties to unseal documents. (See Docket 1256, the judge's order: "The whole trial is going to be open." Also the order, docket 1269: "Unlike private materials unearthed during discovery, judicial records are public documents almost by definition, and the public is entitled to access by default.”)
In harmony with those orders, Samsung released the materials, attached to Joby Martin's Declaration, Exhibits 5, 6, and 8 [PDFs].
4. Apple released some of the information itself, in Docket Numbers 1428-1, 1438-2 (Tucher Declaration in Support of Apple's Motion to Enforce), 1429-13 (Walker Declaration in support of Samsungs Opposition to Motion to Enforce), and 1451 (Cashman Declaration in Support of Motion for Leave).
7. It can't influence the jury in any way now, because they are not allowed to read any coverage of this litigation. "Moreover, Apple's baseless and public assertions that Samsungs transmission to the media of public information constituted contempt of court and that these actions were intended to pollute the jury were themselves glaring falsehoods, highlighting why Samsung has every right to defend itself in the public domain from unfair and malicious attacks."
8. Attorneys have a First Amendment right to speak. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has already so ruled, in Standing Comm. on Discipline of U.S. Dist. Court for Cent. Dist. of Cal. v. Yagman, 55 F.3d 1430 (9th Cir. 1995), where the court held that "truth is an absolute defense" and a "statement of opinion based on fully disclosed facts can be punished only if the stated facts are themselves false and demeaning."
Which of those arguments do you think is incorrect? What law do you think can be used to punish Quinn for exercising his First Amendment right to republish information that is already in the public domain?
you can't appeal a jury's decision without being able to claim mistrial
A mistrial and an appeal are two completely different legal concepts. Mistrial is when the court is disbanded before concluding its business. Appeal is something that happens after the original trial is concluded.
Because the BBC isn't licensed to distribute content beyond the borders of the UK.
I'd prefer to have a login that is provided when I pay for my license fee.
That would require an Act of Parliament to redefine the BBC's broadcasts to include internet distribution (a TV license is not a legal requirement to watch iPlayer, a fact that you can verify at the TV licensing web site - the TV license only covers video that is watched at the same time as it is being broadcast).
There already is QT for NACL. It's a very interesting idea, you can deploy QT apps over Chrome instead of having to target a native desktop. If you build for x86 and ARM you've got a complete software stack for web-accessible native GUI apps that will run on any platform that Chrome runs on (which apparently will soon include Android).
Last I checked, the F700 was a Samsung phone. You're claiming that Apple hid Samsung's own product history from them, making it impossible for Samsung to get it any earlier.
Perhaps Apple did not reveal until they were in court that they were going to attempt to use the F700 as evidence that Samsung copied the iPhone? And now Samsung is not allowed to refute that claim by showing that the F700 designs predate the iPhone.
Apple: "Your F700 copied the design features of our phone after it was released in 2007"
Samsung: "No, here are our internal design documents for the F700 phone from before 2007"
Judge: "Sorry, you can't refute Apple's claim with new evidence"
How can you refute a claim if you aren't allowed to introduce evidence in support of your refutation? Is Samsung only allowed to say "we designed it before, please believe us"?
If Samsung can spring surprise evidence on the other side on the eve of trial, having withheld it during months and months of required disclosure and discovery, then what point is there for due process?
If Samsung is not allowed to introduce relevant evidence, then what is the point of this trial? The courts judgement is going to be based on a partial view of the available evidence. If Samsung lose, they will instantly appeal and submit the relevant evidence that they weren't allowed to introduce the first time. Seems like a waste of time and money to allow this to happen.
But, the iPhone design images are from 2005, a year before the Samsung sketches.
Shin Nishibori has testified that his Sony design changed the course of the iPhone project - the existing design was scraped and the Sony design was adopted instead. Apple is insisting that Nishibori is wrong, and that the existing design wasn't influenced by the Sony design.
Samsung's design could have been created independently, but it could have also been based on information leaked by hardware suppliers in Asia. Who knows.
Samsung might have copied, Apple might have copied, but doesn't "innocent until proven guilty" still apply? If Apple believes that its designs were leaked and copied (which it is not arguing, and there is no reason to suspect that, in 2005, Asian manufacturers would have access to Apple internal design documents) then it has to show this.
on top of the Linux stack pretty much everything runs on freaking Java virtual machine. I do hope that Rasbperry Pi, however, is not trying to emulate that.
Dalvik uses a register-based architecture, which is supposed to be more efficient. It also has a just-in-time compiler so it's not like each bytecode is being interpreted. But, yes, if you want to run Android apps then you have to do it this way. Hypothetically you could use something like gcj to compile Android apps from Java source to native code and you might see a performance improvement.
Every reunification of a nation was an act of diplomacy.
Every treaty signed by two nations, mutually agreeing to stop fighting, was an act of diplomacy.
If you want an example, then I suggest that you study European history. England versus France, for example. Kings forcing their children into marriage to establish bloodlines to prevent war. The Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years War. England and France both had resources to continue fighting the war indefinitely, but at some point both realized that diplomacy and mutual consent was a better approach to managing their differences. And so it is for every group of people that have ever fought and made peace.
Surrender and the subsequent establishment of a legal state of peace is also an act of diplomacy: Treaty of San Francisco. Surrender is usually not one side giving in unconditionally, but instead a delicate balancing act where one side admits it is losing, and is willing to make major concessions to establish peace. That is diplomacy. The alternative would be war without end until one side is completely exterminated.
Not really. Look at Northern Ireland. The relative size of our military compared to the IRA was irrelevant, and ultimately it was negotiation that resolved the situation.
Disputes between neighbouring populations, like Northern Ireland, can only be ultimately solved by either a) diplomacy and a meeting of minds in the center, or b) genocide. You could say the same about Palestinian territories, Afghanistan etc. However, it's worth keeping in mind that the small size of the IRA is one of the reasons that the conflict could be contained - the IRA killed around 700 British military personnel over the course of several decades. That is a manageable number for the British military. If the IRA had more soldiers, and more weapons, then it's possible that number would've been much higher, and at some point the number becomes too high and all-out war begins.
The other point worth considering (and one that some legal experts have considered central to the issue of why Northern Ireland didn't escalate to the point of all-out war) is that Northern Ireland law, like all British law, does not allow a person to be in a legal state of "war". Hence prisoners were prosecuted as criminals, tried in a civilian court, had appropriate legal protections etc. Of course there were some issues, but this is a very different situation to that of some nations where being in a paramilitary group puts you in a legal state where you essentially lose all rights, and in some cases may even be summarily tortured or executed without trial.
You don't need a better model to overturn the existing model, you just need to show that the existing model is making incorrect predictions
You need a model that explains the data with a lower error metric. Remember: "all models are wrong, but some are useful" - showing that a model is wrong does not, in itself, show us anything that we didn't already know. What it can do, of course, is to highlight the areas of the model that need improving.
Relativity makes incorrect predictions, but it is not going to be overturned until someone produces a better model.
When I was stationed in Africa the bulk of AKs we recovered after fights were made in part or often in whole, in country in the manner described above.
Gun Owners SA disagree. TABLE 10. ESTIMATES OF ILLEGAL FIREARMS IN CIRCULATION Of 500,000 illegal firearms, only 20-30,000 were homemade. The majority are missing state owned firearms. There are five or six times more firearms stolen from private owners than homemade.
Sadly, as much as guns are portrayed as deadly, other homemade weapons can be far more deadly.
Such as? Anders Behring Breivik shot and killed 69 people, and injured hundreds. If he had been armed with a knife, or sword, cross bow, etc. the death toll would surely have been less. The only thing that might be more deadly is a bomb, and often bombs are less effective than guns; the car bombs that Breivik set killed only 8 people. Bombs are also much harder to target against a specific person, which makes them not so useful for many murder attempts.
If there are other weapons that are more effective than guns, then why isn't everyone using them?
...but its only a matter of time really. I actually like gun control laws, but I can't see any way they can be enforced, long term, in light of this kind of technology
The logical extension to that argument is that there is no way to enforce any form of laws that can be easily broken with more advanced automated manufacturing technology. What happens when you can manufacture drugs using some a chemists "printer"? What about biological weapons being manufactured on DNA synthesisers? What about printing a dirty bomb, complete with re-processed nuclear material from household sources? If the age of home manufacturing really appears then society is going to have to deal with this, and I doubt that the choice will be to legalise it all.
Not really, since the majority of global warming skeptics seem to base their belief on one of those single dimensional causes:
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record must be wrong, the instruments are faulty or the temperature data gathered incorrectly.
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record shows no warming since 1998 (aka "global warming stopped in 1998").
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: the temperature on Venus (96.5% atmospheric CO2) shows little variation.
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: Anthony Watts did a video of an experiment with CO2 which showed no warming effect.
Belief: Increased CO2 won't contribute to the greenhouse effect. Reasoning: Other planets have atmospheric temperature variations, and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere of those planets isn't changing.
Belief: Burning fossil fuels does not release much CO2. Reasoning: volcanoes release CO2.
There are many variations of these reasons to not accept global warming, but in the end it comes down to either denying that the temperature is increasing, denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, denying that increasing amounts of a greenhouse gas will have any effect on the temperature, or denying that burning fossil fuels increases the amount of atmospheric CO2.
(There is another approach - the "we just don't know" crowd. Well, sorry, but that is not how science works, if you want to overturn the existing model then you have to propose a model that better explains the observed data. You can't just wave your hands in the air and say "your model is wrong but I have no idea why" or "your model is wrong because Obama is a socialist and I don't like the United Nations".)
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Of course, that only applies to one side of the debate.
Which claim is extraordinary? The claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is not extraordinary. The claim that fossil fuels contain CO2 which is released into the atmosphere when burnt is not extraordinary. The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary. These claims have been known and investigated since the industrial revolution (Fourier in 1824 and Arrhenius in 1896) and are widely accepted.
The Surfacestations web site was set up with the explicit aim of disproving global warming by showing that the observed warming in the temperature record is caused by poorly sited measuring stations. And now their results show exactly that. I will reserve judgement until if/when the paper passes review, but I suspect this may be a case of confirmation bias. From the paper:
Comparisons demonstrate that NOAA adjustment processes fail to adjust poorly sited stations downward to match the well sited stations, but actually adjusts the well sited stations upwards to match the poorly sited stations. Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after USHCNv2 adjustments are applied.
So they are claiming that a simple mistake has been made that has the effect of overestimated warming by three times, and that everyone doing this research previously has made this same mistake, and that, despite all of the arguments surrounding climate science and the instrumental temperature record, nobody noticed it yet? It is certainly not impossible, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems to be a common misconception. That's not how the GPL works. They need to make the code available to their customers on demand. You aren't their customer, you can't demand anything.
The GPL covers distribution, not "being a customer". If someone uses GPL code in a project, then only the GPL itself gives them a right to re-distribute the derivative product. If the distributor does not comply with the GPL then they do not have a license to redistribute and are guilty of copyright infringement unless they have some alternative license, or copyright law does not apply to them for some reason.
Remember, this is a design patent case. It's not just rounded rectangles and a black bezel. It's rounded rectangles, a black bezel, this AND that AND other things.
Design patents also cover individual features. Why get a design patent?
Protect Individual Design Features – Perhaps the best reason to get a design patent is to protect individual design features. Protection of individual design features is probably the most effective way to protect the “visual brand” of a product. For example, assume your product is the first of its type to use a particular shape (i.e., rounded, squared, hollow, arched, etc.) for a major design component or set of components. Consumers may begin to recognize this unique shape as part of your brand identity. Then assume a competitor (i) uses the same shape for the same component, but changes the shape of other components, or (ii) uses the same shape for a portion, but not all, of the same component. The competitor likely will have intruded upon your visual brand identity and created some confusion in the marketplace, but may have done so in a way that avoids design patent infringement. A solution to this problem is to use advanced design patent prosecution techniques to protect the individual design features of your product. These techniques include portion claiming, broken line claiming, indeterminate break lines, multiple embodiments, multiple patents, continuation practice, and combinations of all these techniques.
Samsung being a supplier for the iPhone would have access to these designs during the development stage.
Samsung don't build the iPhone - they only supply a few components chips (cpu, flash) and the LCD display. All of these parts can be purchased in volume, there's absolutely no reason why Apple would need to supply Samsung with pre-release iPhone designs.
30% cut to handle payment services for your customers, including card processing and verification, refunds, fees to banks and credit card companies, gift cards, customer service, helpdesk etc? Yes please. That alone is worth the 30% cut
On the contrary, 30% for payment processing is a huge markup - contrast with PayPal's Merchant Fees. As a developer, which would you rather pay?
But if price is such an important metric, why is the iPad — with its premium price tag — so popular? Simple, it was the first tablet to go mass market, and cumulative sales of around 85 million gives the iPad credibility in the eye on potential buyers.
This is just stating the obvious - the iPad has had more sales, because it has been available for longer. If the Nexus 7 had been released in April two years ago (like the iPad), and the iPad were released last month, then the Nexus 7 would have sold more units.
By driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations.
This is not true. Did Nokia irrevocably harm the phone market by constantly driving down the price of a phone until it hit a low of $19? Did Asus irrevocably harm the laptop market by releasing the first cheap netbook? Did Dell harm the PC market by pursuing lower and lower prices? Sure, you could argue that, or you could argue that cheaper technology expands the market - by making it accessible to people on a lower income. Cell phones are cheaper now than ever before, but the market has expanded so that 5.2 billion people now have cell phones, and the total market is still growing (two years ago revenue from phone sales passed $1 trillion and revenue from associated mobile services like calls etc. is also about $1 trillion).
The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007,
Yes, and Samsung internal documents show the F700 design going back to 2005, and a Korean design patent was filed in December 2006 - before the iPhone design was unveiled.
So is Samsung saying that Apple used a time machine
No, Samsung is not claiming that Apple copied the F700, Samsung is claiming independent invention. Apple is claiming that the F700 copied the iPhone.
it’s actually a chunky 16.4mm-thick slider QWERTY that looks appreciably different than the iPhone. It also has a homescreen that’s quite different than iOS
And yet Apple have claimed that it is a copy of the iPhone...
Samsung has an even higher duty to NOT discuss the case with the media, as does Apple.
There is no such legal duty - lawyers have a First Amendment right to speak to the press - a right that has been upheld by the courts. Lawyers are not allowed to release attorney-client privileged documents, but they can release documents that were filed in public records. But both sides are allowed to respond to press inquiries, which is all the Samsung lawyer says he did.
ordered to avoid consulting the media regarding this issue, an order Samsung is making extremely hard to comply with
Is Samsung holding a gun to the jurors collective heads? On the contrary, it is extremely easy for the jurors to comply - they just have to avoid reading articles on this particular case. As Groklaw said of the SCO vs Novell judge, "he said he relied on the jury to follow his instructions, adding that if you can't trust them to do that much, we might as well just quit.".
Yes it is, it's called contempt to court, and in this case can be taken as an attempt to influence the jury
Read the Groklaw article:
3. The materials were already publicly released, some by Apple and the rest because this very court forced the parties to unseal documents. (See Docket 1256, the judge's order: "The whole trial is going to be open." Also the order, docket 1269: "Unlike private materials unearthed during discovery, judicial records are public documents almost by definition, and the public is entitled to access by default.”)
In harmony with those orders, Samsung released the materials, attached to Joby Martin's Declaration, Exhibits 5, 6, and 8 [PDFs].
4. Apple released some of the information itself, in Docket Numbers 1428-1, 1438-2 (Tucher Declaration in Support of Apple's Motion to Enforce), 1429-13 (Walker Declaration in support of Samsungs Opposition to Motion to Enforce), and 1451 (Cashman Declaration in Support of Motion for Leave).
5. There were, as a result multiple articles about the materials already in the media, *before* the jury was even chosen, in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, Huffington Post and CNET. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/technology/apple-samsung-trial-highlights-patent-wars.html
7. It can't influence the jury in any way now, because they are not allowed to read any coverage of this litigation. "Moreover, Apple's baseless and public assertions that Samsungs transmission to the media of public information constituted contempt of court and that these actions were intended to pollute the jury were themselves glaring falsehoods, highlighting why Samsung has every right to defend itself in the public domain from unfair and malicious attacks."
8. Attorneys have a First Amendment right to speak. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has already so ruled, in Standing Comm. on Discipline of U.S. Dist. Court for Cent. Dist. of Cal. v. Yagman, 55 F.3d 1430 (9th Cir. 1995), where the court held that "truth is an absolute defense" and a "statement of opinion based on fully disclosed facts can be punished only if the stated facts are themselves false and demeaning."
Which of those arguments do you think is incorrect? What law do you think can be used to punish Quinn for exercising his First Amendment right to republish information that is already in the public domain?
you can't appeal a jury's decision without being able to claim mistrial
A mistrial and an appeal are two completely different legal concepts. Mistrial is when the court is disbanded before concluding its business. Appeal is something that happens after the original trial is concluded.
Why do the Beeb bother with IP geolocation?
Because the BBC isn't licensed to distribute content beyond the borders of the UK.
I'd prefer to have a login that is provided when I pay for my license fee.
That would require an Act of Parliament to redefine the BBC's broadcasts to include internet distribution (a TV license is not a legal requirement to watch iPlayer, a fact that you can verify at the TV licensing web site - the TV license only covers video that is watched at the same time as it is being broadcast).
There already is QT for NACL. It's a very interesting idea, you can deploy QT apps over Chrome instead of having to target a native desktop. If you build for x86 and ARM you've got a complete software stack for web-accessible native GUI apps that will run on any platform that Chrome runs on (which apparently will soon include Android).
Last I checked, the F700 was a Samsung phone. You're claiming that Apple hid Samsung's own product history from them, making it impossible for Samsung to get it any earlier.
Perhaps Apple did not reveal until they were in court that they were going to attempt to use the F700 as evidence that Samsung copied the iPhone? And now Samsung is not allowed to refute that claim by showing that the F700 designs predate the iPhone.
Apple: "Your F700 copied the design features of our phone after it was released in 2007"
Samsung: "No, here are our internal design documents for the F700 phone from before 2007"
Judge: "Sorry, you can't refute Apple's claim with new evidence"
How can you refute a claim if you aren't allowed to introduce evidence in support of your refutation? Is Samsung only allowed to say "we designed it before, please believe us"?
If Samsung can spring surprise evidence on the other side on the eve of trial, having withheld it during months and months of required disclosure and discovery, then what point is there for due process?
If Samsung is not allowed to introduce relevant evidence, then what is the point of this trial? The courts judgement is going to be based on a partial view of the available evidence. If Samsung lose, they will instantly appeal and submit the relevant evidence that they weren't allowed to introduce the first time. Seems like a waste of time and money to allow this to happen.
But, the iPhone design images are from 2005, a year before the Samsung sketches.
Shin Nishibori has testified that his Sony design changed the course of the iPhone project - the existing design was scraped and the Sony design was adopted instead. Apple is insisting that Nishibori is wrong, and that the existing design wasn't influenced by the Sony design.
Samsung's design could have been created independently, but it could have also been based on information leaked by hardware suppliers in Asia. Who knows.
Samsung might have copied, Apple might have copied, but doesn't "innocent until proven guilty" still apply? If Apple believes that its designs were leaked and copied (which it is not arguing, and there is no reason to suspect that, in 2005, Asian manufacturers would have access to Apple internal design documents) then it has to show this.
on top of the Linux stack pretty much everything runs on freaking Java virtual machine. I do hope that Rasbperry Pi, however, is not trying to emulate that.
Dalvik uses a register-based architecture, which is supposed to be more efficient. It also has a just-in-time compiler so it's not like each bytecode is being interpreted. But, yes, if you want to run Android apps then you have to do it this way. Hypothetically you could use something like gcj to compile Android apps from Java source to native code and you might see a performance improvement.
Really? What has diplomacy EVER solved?
Every ceasefire was an act of diplomacy.
Every reunification of a nation was an act of diplomacy.
Every treaty signed by two nations, mutually agreeing to stop fighting, was an act of diplomacy.
If you want an example, then I suggest that you study European history. England versus France, for example. Kings forcing their children into marriage to establish bloodlines to prevent war. The Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years War. England and France both had resources to continue fighting the war indefinitely, but at some point both realized that diplomacy and mutual consent was a better approach to managing their differences. And so it is for every group of people that have ever fought and made peace.
Surrender and the subsequent establishment of a legal state of peace is also an act of diplomacy: Treaty of San Francisco. Surrender is usually not one side giving in unconditionally, but instead a delicate balancing act where one side admits it is losing, and is willing to make major concessions to establish peace. That is diplomacy. The alternative would be war without end until one side is completely exterminated.
Not really. Look at Northern Ireland. The relative size of our military compared to the IRA was irrelevant, and ultimately it was negotiation that resolved the situation.
Disputes between neighbouring populations, like Northern Ireland, can only be ultimately solved by either a) diplomacy and a meeting of minds in the center, or b) genocide. You could say the same about Palestinian territories, Afghanistan etc. However, it's worth keeping in mind that the small size of the IRA is one of the reasons that the conflict could be contained - the IRA killed around 700 British military personnel over the course of several decades. That is a manageable number for the British military. If the IRA had more soldiers, and more weapons, then it's possible that number would've been much higher, and at some point the number becomes too high and all-out war begins.
The other point worth considering (and one that some legal experts have considered central to the issue of why Northern Ireland didn't escalate to the point of all-out war) is that Northern Ireland law, like all British law, does not allow a person to be in a legal state of "war". Hence prisoners were prosecuted as criminals, tried in a civilian court, had appropriate legal protections etc. Of course there were some issues, but this is a very different situation to that of some nations where being in a paramilitary group puts you in a legal state where you essentially lose all rights, and in some cases may even be summarily tortured or executed without trial.
You don't need a better model to overturn the existing model, you just need to show that the existing model is making incorrect predictions
You need a model that explains the data with a lower error metric. Remember: "all models are wrong, but some are useful" - showing that a model is wrong does not, in itself, show us anything that we didn't already know. What it can do, of course, is to highlight the areas of the model that need improving.
Relativity makes incorrect predictions, but it is not going to be overturned until someone produces a better model.
When I was stationed in Africa the bulk of AKs we recovered after fights were made in part or often in whole, in country in the manner described above.
Gun Owners SA disagree. TABLE 10. ESTIMATES OF ILLEGAL FIREARMS IN CIRCULATION Of 500,000 illegal firearms, only 20-30,000 were homemade. The majority are missing state owned firearms. There are five or six times more firearms stolen from private owners than homemade.
Sadly, as much as guns are portrayed as deadly, other homemade weapons can be far more deadly.
Such as? Anders Behring Breivik shot and killed 69 people, and injured hundreds. If he had been armed with a knife, or sword, cross bow, etc. the death toll would surely have been less. The only thing that might be more deadly is a bomb, and often bombs are less effective than guns; the car bombs that Breivik set killed only 8 people. Bombs are also much harder to target against a specific person, which makes them not so useful for many murder attempts.
If there are other weapons that are more effective than guns, then why isn't everyone using them?
...but its only a matter of time really. I actually like gun control laws, but I can't see any way they can be enforced, long term, in light of this kind of technology
The logical extension to that argument is that there is no way to enforce any form of laws that can be easily broken with more advanced automated manufacturing technology. What happens when you can manufacture drugs using some a chemists "printer"? What about biological weapons being manufactured on DNA synthesisers? What about printing a dirty bomb, complete with re-processed nuclear material from household sources? If the age of home manufacturing really appears then society is going to have to deal with this, and I doubt that the choice will be to legalise it all.
Not really, since the majority of global warming skeptics seem to base their belief on one of those single dimensional causes:
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record must be wrong, the instruments are faulty or the temperature data gathered incorrectly.
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record shows no warming since 1998 (aka "global warming stopped in 1998").
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: the temperature on Venus (96.5% atmospheric CO2) shows little variation.
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: Anthony Watts did a video of an experiment with CO2 which showed no warming effect.
Belief: Increased CO2 won't contribute to the greenhouse effect. Reasoning: Other planets have atmospheric temperature variations, and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere of those planets isn't changing.
Belief: Burning fossil fuels does not release much CO2. Reasoning: volcanoes release CO2.
There are many variations of these reasons to not accept global warming, but in the end it comes down to either denying that the temperature is increasing, denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, denying that increasing amounts of a greenhouse gas will have any effect on the temperature, or denying that burning fossil fuels increases the amount of atmospheric CO2.
(There is another approach - the "we just don't know" crowd. Well, sorry, but that is not how science works, if you want to overturn the existing model then you have to propose a model that better explains the observed data. You can't just wave your hands in the air and say "your model is wrong but I have no idea why" or "your model is wrong because Obama is a socialist and I don't like the United Nations".)
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of course, that only applies to one side of the debate.
Which claim is extraordinary? The claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is not extraordinary. The claim that fossil fuels contain CO2 which is released into the atmosphere when burnt is not extraordinary. The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary. These claims have been known and investigated since the industrial revolution (Fourier in 1824 and Arrhenius in 1896) and are widely accepted.
Comparisons demonstrate that NOAA adjustment processes fail to adjust poorly sited stations downward to match the well sited stations, but actually adjusts the well sited stations upwards to match the poorly sited stations. Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after USHCNv2 adjustments are applied.
So they are claiming that a simple mistake has been made that has the effect of overestimated warming by three times, and that everyone doing this research previously has made this same mistake, and that, despite all of the arguments surrounding climate science and the instrumental temperature record, nobody noticed it yet? It is certainly not impossible, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.