So you think that, if the UN Oil For Food programme did not exist, then the people of Iraq would have been provided with adequate food, clean water and medical care, despite the sanctions? How?
Yes, that is a familiar argument: "The sanctions would have worked if Saddam Hussein was a good man who had the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart." I trust you can see the flaw in that logic. Saddam was not a good man, and he had already ordered the use of chemical weapons against thousands of Iraqi civilians.
And some New Yorkers remember seeing Israelis dancing and cheering in the streets of New York after the attack... "I was in tears. These guys were joking and that bothered me." These guys were like, "Now America knows what we go through."... And some Iranians held candlelit remembrance vigils... The world is a big place, and acts of compassion and lack of compassion cross the boundaries of nationality.
Robert Fisk is, was, and always will be uber anti-american. Quoting him on this day just makes you look like the idiot you are.
My post was not intended as anti-American, since I am not anti-American. I was summarising an interview with Osama bin Laden on why he planned to attack the U.S and what his motivations were. Is that not relevant to this discussion? Why is interviewing Osama bin Laden considered anti-American? Why, "on this day", are we not allowed to state the reasons that he gave for attacking the U.S.? Would it make you feel better if we all pretend that he was just a crazy guy who never tried to justify his actions?
Yes, life under the Taliban sucked. Yes, killing thousands of civilians is bad. Yes, Al Qaeda is not a conventional military of a nation state (although the Taliban could have been considered that way in 2001). I have no idea if they have a functioning legal system, perhaps Sharia? Regardless, I really don't see how these points are relevant; they do not refute Osama bin Laden's statement that he intended to draw the U.S. into a protracted war in Afghanistan, and that he stated some reasons, which is all that my original post said...
The US may not be winning the war but they sure as hell are thinning out the Taliban.
Evidence, and over what time period? In 2009 it was reported that "Taliban-led forces fighting US and Nato troops in Afghanistan have increased nearly fourfold since 2006, according to a US intelligence estimate". In the last few years the Taliban have managed to spread their influence (or, at least, philosophy) to largely destabilise the tribal regions of north west Pakistan, suggesting that their power over the last 5 years has increased rather than decreased. This graph of coalition casualties in Afghanistan shows that most deaths have occurred in the last two years, further suggesting that Taliban power isn't waning.
It wasn't even a secret. British journalist Robert Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden several years before the Twin Towers attacks. He stated that his aim was to draw the U.S. into a protracted war in Afghanistan, one which would last a long time, ultimately leading to defeat of the U.S. - just like the way they beat the Soviets. He understood that, as with the Soviet campaign, they could not hope to win a conventional war. He also named the U.S. Somalia experience as being an influence. When U.S. marines went to Somalia Osama sent some Afghan Mujahideen fighters to battle them. They reported back that the American soldiers had fled the country after a few short battles; they believed that the Americans were not ready to fight against a long-term guerilla campaign. And why did Osama want to fight the U.S.? Two of the important factors he mentioned in these interviews were U.S. troops entering Saudi Arabia, and U.S. sanctions against Iraq leading to the indirect deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children. Fisk also pointed out that some of the first anti-U.S. operations - the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which had been blamed on simple "hatred of America" by the western media, occurred on the eighth anniversary of the arrival of the first US troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990.
The first thing they will ask is "where did this number come from?". The 29 million users estimate appears to be the ratio of new registered users multiplied by an old estimate from 2001. It seems like a very unreliable figure. I've been using Linux as my main desktop since 1996, I've installed hundreds of servers, several desktops, and I've never heard of this Linux Counter site before now. I would imagine most Linux users have also never heard of this site... and now it appears on Slashdot, registrations will suddenly jump, and the estimate will increase by several million users?! And how many non-English speakers will have registered with this site?
Here's another guesstimate I just came up with: 2 billion internet users, 2.38% Linux desktop share according to Wikipedia, so 56 million Linux users...oh well, quality is often more important than quantity...
Which simply doesn't translate. The US here is asking for something like the DMCA (which is required by treaty), not for "three strikes" legislation.
Wrong. The "injunctive relief" legislation that is being pushed is indeed ISP disconnection. From the PDF that TFA links to:
Injunctive relief in civil cases -- EU Copyright Directive: The law implementing Sweden’s obligations under the EU Copyright Directive entered into force on July 1, 2005 (Law 2005:360 amending the Act on Copyright in Literary and Artistic Works, Law 1960:729). Particularly disappointing has been the lack of a specific injunctive relief remedy against ISPs as required under Article 8.3 of the Copyright Directive (and Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive). Proposed legislation to provide such a remedy is now pending in the Swedish Parliament.(3) If adopted by the Parliament, the amendment would go into one of the major deficiencies that rights holders have faced and which IIPA highlighted in its 2008 submission. (3)(http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2008/2008SPEC301SWEDEN.pdf)
And if you follow the link to the 2008 IIPA paper on the proposed legislation...
civil litigation, without preliminary injunctive relief, is just too slow to act as a deterrent.... Unfortunately, we have also heard that the present draft proposal does not contain a right to injunctive relief in a civil case against ISPs, and that it therefore fails to cure Sweden’s inconsistency with Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive and Article 8(3) of the Copyright Directive. In September 2007, a report was issued by Swedish Chief Judge, Cecilia Renfors (“Renfors Report”), recommending that the upcoming legislation contain provisions requiring ISPs to take action to terminate the contracts of certain users who repeatedly use the Internet to infringe copyright.... While this report and, in particular, the suggestions regarding disconnection of repeat infringers is welcome, it does not go far enough to bring Sweden’s legal and enforcement regime into harmony with international trends even assuming that the proposed legislation is adopted in its present form
So, not only do they want ISP disconnections, they actually want even stronger laws.
TFA links to Government Commits To Open Source Route which states "The government has confirmed that when costs are similar, it will opt to purchase open source rather than proprietary software" and where Francis Maude's parliamentary statement is linked to, saying "The Government are committed to using more open source solutions where possible.".
No, the commitment specifically referred to open source: "The Government are committed to using more open source solutions where possible." - Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister.
As a proof to show that he really did infiltrate DigiNotar, he shares the domain administrator password of the CA network: Pr0d@dm1n. DigiNotar would be able to confirm if this was accurate or not.
The industry will eventually respond with the only tool they have, more patent garbage.
This is exactly it. It was inevitable that, when faced with patent attacks, companies would acquire patents to defend themselves in a "Mutually Assured Destruction" scenario. Microsoft thought that they could charge a slice of every Android handset sold. Apple wanted HTC and Samsung phones and tablets taken off the market. What did they think was going to happen? That these companies would just shut up and die? Of course not. Instead, HTC acquired S3 for its large patent portfolio, and Google acquired Motorola for its patent portfolio.
When you threaten people with a weapon, their first response will be to try and acquire one of those weapons for themselves. When you have a knife, they will try to get a knife. When you have a gun, they will try to get a gun. When you have a nuke, they will try to get a nuke. It's simple psychology.
Problems with bug triage and inflation aren't just a Firefox problem. Gentoo's bugzilla reports 1557 bugs in state UNCONFIRMED and over 5k NEW bugs. RHEL5 has 2276 bugs in state NEW. Ubuntu has over 50k bugs in state NEW across all releases. Microsoft once let slip that Windows 2000 had over 63k known bugs. Bugs languishing in an open state for a long time is a recognised problem, but nobody really has a good answer. Ubuntu's automated periodic "is this fixed yet?" posts and followup bug closures on no response is one way to do it, but there is definitely room for improvement.
On the contrary, I agree that this forced "experiment" is pointless. But in the longer term, it is worth asking these questions - how is it that the children of Finland are consistently ranked at the top of international education tables, and yet "Finnish children spend the fewest number of hours in the classroom in the developed world"? There is clearly more to optimising education than maximising hours in the classroom.
From TFA it seems teachers pay stays the same since they work the same hours, but other workers who don't get their pay cut: "Teachers who still work the same number of hours over four days, instead of five, generally don't see a reduction in salary. But staff who can't make up the lost time, such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers, are often hard-hit, losing as much as 20% of their pay."
From TFA: "Two different Boys and Girls Club sites and a church are offering affordable child care and tutoring, respectively, on Mondays for between $10 and $15."
The district has 300 students - 300 x $10 (or $15) x 36 weeks = $108000 to $162000.
So you are right, the cost of childcare is far more than the cost of the extra $50k to run the school for a day. However, the article also states that locals are unwilling to pay the extra cost in taxes: "We've repeatedly asked our residents to pay higher taxes, cut some of our staff, and we may even close one of our schools. What else can you really do?".
There is no evidence that a 4-day school week makes education worse. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not, and it may be that cutting the long holidays may be beneficial or not. Perhaps a 7-day school week would be optimal. But this kind of research should be done as controlled experiments with the aim of figuring out the best way to educate children. Doing it in a haphazard way because of lack of funding is not useful.
The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?
The same way a 1999 patent can cover using a regex to markup email?
The game is simple. Take an old existing concept (email). Find some simple way to adapt it to a modern UI (regex match URLs, numbers etc.). Incorporate this into your GUI (highlight the text). Voila! You now have a feature that is patentable.
Motorola's "18 patents" include several that could apply to email: Method and apparatus for communicating summarized data, System for communicating user-selected criteria filter prepared at wireless client to communication server for filtering data transferred from host to said wireless client, Method and apparatus in a wireless messaging system for facilitating an exchange of address information, Method and apparatus for providing cryptographic protection of a data stream in a communication system.
So if an email client provides a summary of the email (subject, sender), enables user-specified server side filters (e.g. interacts with gmail style filters), enables email addresses to be imported and exported, or encrypts the data stream, then potentially it violates all of those patents.Potentially; the specifics are supposed to protect the patent from being dismissed as prior art. Unfortunately the qualifier "... on a mobile device" is often enough. Because people would never have thought of doing the same old things they did on networked PCs "on a mobile device"...
5,311,516 Paging System Using Message Fragmentation to Redistribute Traffic 5,319,712 Method and Apparatus for Providing Cryptographic Protection of Data Stream in a Communication System 5,490,230 Digital Speech Coder Having Optimized Signal Energy Parameters 5,572,193 Method for Authentication and Protection of Subscribers in Telecommunications Systems 6,175,559 Method for Generating Preamble Sequences in a Code Division Multiple Access System 6,359,898 Method for Performing a Countdown Function During a Mobile-Originated Transfer for a Packet Radio System
5,359,317 Method and apparatus for selectively storing a portion of a received message in a selective call receiver 5,636,223 Methods of adaptive channel access attempts 6,246,697 Method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access signal 6,246,862 Sensor controlled user interface for portable communication device 6,272,333 Method and apparatus in a wireless communication system for controlling a delivery of data 7,751,826 System and method for E911 location privacy protection
5,710,987 Receiver having concealed external antenna 5,754,119 Multiple pager status synchronization system and method 5,958,006 Method and apparatus for communicating summarized data 6,008,737 Apparatus for controlling utilization of software added to a portable communication device 6,101,531 System for communicating user-selected criteria filter prepared at wireless client to communication server for filtering data transferred from host to said wireless client 6,377,161 Method and apparatus in a wireless messaging system for facilitating an exchange of address information
Thanks to Android, HTC nearly triples Q4 profits in 2010: "Anyone claiming that it’s hard to make a profit off of Google’s open Android platform might want to check in with HTC and ask them how things are done. HTC’s latest numbers for Q4 of 2010 show that the smartphone manufacturer nearly tripled their profits over the previous year, pulling in $500 million"
He didn't say it was impossible. He just said that Amazon couldn't do it for Kindle. There is a difference between a) manufacturing a small run of not-so-price-sensitive items and b) manufacturing hundreds of millions of items in a year for a price that is competitive with other factories around the world.
The article is talking about high volume manufacturing like the Kindle and iPhone - 10+ million sales per year - and not small production runs. His claim is that U.S. hardware manufacturers have lost the design skill base and don't have the capacity to manufacture large volume production runs for some of the components in the Kindle. He is probably correct to some degree - are there any U.S. manufacturers that have both the expertise and production capability to create 10+ million LCD displays a year? Are there any U.S. factories that are producing 10+ million polished injection moulded cases a year? Are there any U.S. manufacturers that are creating 3G chipsets in this volume? Are there any U.S. factories that are producing lithium batteries on a scale of those in Asia (100+ million cells a year)?
R&D Expenditures for Tech Companies. As a percentage of revenue, Microsoft is highest (14.6%), followed by Cisco (14%) and Google (12%). Apple is down at the bottom with 2.3%.
After discussions with my iPhone owning friends, I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that the only people who care about user replaceable batteries are a small subset of nerds and engineers. IMHO, the battery - the part that will degrade faster than any other component of a mobile device - should be easily field replaceable. But nobody cares. Apparently, "real people" buy a new mobile device every 12-24 months, so a user replaceable battery is a pointless feature.
Apparently the Ideos U8150 does not run flash. (quoting from a forum "I think the problem is that currently Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is only for Android phones with ARM7 processors. U8150 has ARM6.")
Isn't that the natural result of a Libertarian paradise? When governance by a single powerful entity is replaced with the enablement of individuals to accumulate resources and weaponry without limit, then the individuals with the most resources and weapons will grow in strength until they can become powerful enough to subvert or destroy the weak government. This is an intrinsic problem in Libertarian thought - that you can have a weak government and strong unregulated individuals, and yet the government will still have the power to govern those individuals.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think that, if the UN Oil For Food programme did not exist, then the people of Iraq would have been provided with adequate food, clean water and medical care, despite the sanctions? How?
Yes, that is a familiar argument: "The sanctions would have worked if Saddam Hussein was a good man who had the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart." I trust you can see the flaw in that logic. Saddam was not a good man, and he had already ordered the use of chemical weapons against thousands of Iraqi civilians.
And some New Yorkers remember seeing Israelis dancing and cheering in the streets of New York after the attack... "I was in tears. These guys were joking and that bothered me." These guys were like, "Now America knows what we go through."... And some Iranians held candlelit remembrance vigils... The world is a big place, and acts of compassion and lack of compassion cross the boundaries of nationality.
Robert Fisk is, was, and always will be uber anti-american. Quoting him on this day just makes you look like the idiot you are.
My post was not intended as anti-American, since I am not anti-American. I was summarising an interview with Osama bin Laden on why he planned to attack the U.S and what his motivations were. Is that not relevant to this discussion? Why is interviewing Osama bin Laden considered anti-American? Why, "on this day", are we not allowed to state the reasons that he gave for attacking the U.S.? Would it make you feel better if we all pretend that he was just a crazy guy who never tried to justify his actions?
Yes, life under the Taliban sucked. Yes, killing thousands of civilians is bad. Yes, Al Qaeda is not a conventional military of a nation state (although the Taliban could have been considered that way in 2001). I have no idea if they have a functioning legal system, perhaps Sharia? Regardless, I really don't see how these points are relevant; they do not refute Osama bin Laden's statement that he intended to draw the U.S. into a protracted war in Afghanistan, and that he stated some reasons, which is all that my original post said...
The US may not be winning the war but they sure as hell are thinning out the Taliban.
Evidence, and over what time period? In 2009 it was reported that "Taliban-led forces fighting US and Nato troops in Afghanistan have increased nearly fourfold since 2006, according to a US intelligence estimate". In the last few years the Taliban have managed to spread their influence (or, at least, philosophy) to largely destabilise the tribal regions of north west Pakistan, suggesting that their power over the last 5 years has increased rather than decreased. This graph of coalition casualties in Afghanistan shows that most deaths have occurred in the last two years, further suggesting that Taliban power isn't waning.
It wasn't even a secret. British journalist Robert Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden several years before the Twin Towers attacks. He stated that his aim was to draw the U.S. into a protracted war in Afghanistan, one which would last a long time, ultimately leading to defeat of the U.S. - just like the way they beat the Soviets. He understood that, as with the Soviet campaign, they could not hope to win a conventional war. He also named the U.S. Somalia experience as being an influence. When U.S. marines went to Somalia Osama sent some Afghan Mujahideen fighters to battle them. They reported back that the American soldiers had fled the country after a few short battles; they believed that the Americans were not ready to fight against a long-term guerilla campaign. And why did Osama want to fight the U.S.? Two of the important factors he mentioned in these interviews were U.S. troops entering Saudi Arabia, and U.S. sanctions against Iraq leading to the indirect deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children. Fisk also pointed out that some of the first anti-U.S. operations - the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which had been blamed on simple "hatred of America" by the western media, occurred on the eighth anniversary of the arrival of the first US troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990.
The first thing they will ask is "where did this number come from?". The 29 million users estimate appears to be the ratio of new registered users multiplied by an old estimate from 2001. It seems like a very unreliable figure. I've been using Linux as my main desktop since 1996, I've installed hundreds of servers, several desktops, and I've never heard of this Linux Counter site before now. I would imagine most Linux users have also never heard of this site... and now it appears on Slashdot, registrations will suddenly jump, and the estimate will increase by several million users?! And how many non-English speakers will have registered with this site?
Here's another guesstimate I just came up with: 2 billion internet users, 2.38% Linux desktop share according to Wikipedia, so 56 million Linux users...oh well, quality is often more important than quantity...
Which simply doesn't translate. The US here is asking for something like the DMCA (which is required by treaty), not for "three strikes" legislation.
Wrong. The "injunctive relief" legislation that is being pushed is indeed ISP disconnection. From the PDF that TFA links to:
Injunctive relief in civil cases -- EU Copyright Directive: The law implementing Sweden’s obligations under the EU Copyright Directive entered into force on July 1, 2005 (Law 2005:360 amending the Act on Copyright in Literary and Artistic Works, Law 1960:729). Particularly disappointing has been the lack of a specific injunctive relief remedy against ISPs as required under Article 8.3 of the Copyright Directive (and Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive). Proposed legislation to provide such a remedy is now pending in the Swedish Parliament.(3) If adopted by the Parliament, the amendment would go into one of the major deficiencies that rights holders have faced and which IIPA highlighted in its 2008 submission. (3)(http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2008/2008SPEC301SWEDEN.pdf)
And if you follow the link to the 2008 IIPA paper on the proposed legislation...
civil litigation, without preliminary injunctive relief, is just too slow to act as a deterrent.... Unfortunately, we have also heard that the present draft proposal does not contain a right to injunctive relief in a civil case against ISPs, and that it therefore fails to cure Sweden’s inconsistency with Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive and Article 8(3) of the Copyright Directive. In September 2007, a report was issued by Swedish Chief Judge, Cecilia Renfors (“Renfors Report”), recommending that the upcoming legislation contain provisions requiring ISPs to take action to terminate the contracts of certain users who repeatedly use the Internet to infringe copyright.... While this report and, in particular, the suggestions regarding disconnection of repeat infringers is welcome, it does not go far enough to bring Sweden’s legal and enforcement regime into harmony with international trends even assuming that the proposed legislation is adopted in its present form
So, not only do they want ISP disconnections, they actually want even stronger laws.
TFA links to Government Commits To Open Source Route which states "The government has confirmed that when costs are similar, it will opt to purchase open source rather than proprietary software" and where Francis Maude's parliamentary statement is linked to, saying "The Government are committed to using more open source solutions where possible.".
No, the commitment specifically referred to open source: "The Government are committed to using more open source solutions where possible." - Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister.
As a proof to show that he really did infiltrate DigiNotar, he shares the domain administrator password of the CA network: Pr0d@dm1n. DigiNotar would be able to confirm if this was accurate or not.
Maybe something will come of that...
The industry will eventually respond with the only tool they have, more patent garbage.
This is exactly it. It was inevitable that, when faced with patent attacks, companies would acquire patents to defend themselves in a "Mutually Assured Destruction" scenario. Microsoft thought that they could charge a slice of every Android handset sold. Apple wanted HTC and Samsung phones and tablets taken off the market. What did they think was going to happen? That these companies would just shut up and die? Of course not. Instead, HTC acquired S3 for its large patent portfolio, and Google acquired Motorola for its patent portfolio.
When you threaten people with a weapon, their first response will be to try and acquire one of those weapons for themselves. When you have a knife, they will try to get a knife. When you have a gun, they will try to get a gun. When you have a nuke, they will try to get a nuke. It's simple psychology.
Problems with bug triage and inflation aren't just a Firefox problem. Gentoo's bugzilla reports 1557 bugs in state UNCONFIRMED and over 5k NEW bugs. RHEL5 has 2276 bugs in state NEW. Ubuntu has over 50k bugs in state NEW across all releases. Microsoft once let slip that Windows 2000 had over 63k known bugs. Bugs languishing in an open state for a long time is a recognised problem, but nobody really has a good answer. Ubuntu's automated periodic "is this fixed yet?" posts and followup bug closures on no response is one way to do it, but there is definitely room for improvement.
On the contrary, I agree that this forced "experiment" is pointless. But in the longer term, it is worth asking these questions - how is it that the children of Finland are consistently ranked at the top of international education tables, and yet "Finnish children spend the fewest number of hours in the classroom in the developed world"? There is clearly more to optimising education than maximising hours in the classroom.
From TFA it seems teachers pay stays the same since they work the same hours, but other workers who don't get their pay cut: "Teachers who still work the same number of hours over four days, instead of five, generally don't see a reduction in salary. But staff who can't make up the lost time, such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers, are often hard-hit, losing as much as 20% of their pay."
From TFA: "Two different Boys and Girls Club sites and a church are offering affordable child care and tutoring, respectively, on Mondays for between $10 and $15."
The district has 300 students - 300 x $10 (or $15) x 36 weeks = $108000 to $162000.
So you are right, the cost of childcare is far more than the cost of the extra $50k to run the school for a day. However, the article also states that locals are unwilling to pay the extra cost in taxes: "We've repeatedly asked our residents to pay higher taxes, cut some of our staff, and we may even close one of our schools. What else can you really do?".
There is no evidence that a 4-day school week makes education worse. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not, and it may be that cutting the long holidays may be beneficial or not. Perhaps a 7-day school week would be optimal. But this kind of research should be done as controlled experiments with the aim of figuring out the best way to educate children. Doing it in a haphazard way because of lack of funding is not useful.
The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?
The same way a 1999 patent can cover using a regex to markup email?
The game is simple. Take an old existing concept (email). Find some simple way to adapt it to a modern UI (regex match URLs, numbers etc.). Incorporate this into your GUI (highlight the text). Voila! You now have a feature that is patentable.
Motorola's "18 patents" include several that could apply to email:
Method and apparatus for communicating summarized data,
System for communicating user-selected criteria filter prepared at wireless client to communication server for filtering data transferred from host to said wireless client,
Method and apparatus in a wireless messaging system for facilitating an exchange of address information,
Method and apparatus for providing cryptographic protection of a data stream in a communication system.
So if an email client provides a summary of the email (subject, sender), enables user-specified server side filters (e.g. interacts with gmail style filters), enables email addresses to be imported and exported, or encrypts the data stream, then potentially it violates all of those patents.Potentially; the specifics are supposed to protect the patent from being dismissed as prior art. Unfortunately the qualifier "... on a mobile device" is often enough. Because people would never have thought of doing the same old things they did on networked PCs "on a mobile device"...
6 patents from Illinois 1 lawsuit:
5,311,516 Paging System Using Message Fragmentation to Redistribute Traffic
5,319,712 Method and Apparatus for Providing Cryptographic Protection of Data Stream in a Communication System
5,490,230 Digital Speech Coder Having Optimized Signal Energy Parameters
5,572,193 Method for Authentication and Protection of Subscribers in Telecommunications Systems
6,175,559 Method for Generating Preamble Sequences in a Code Division Multiple Access System
6,359,898 Method for Performing a Countdown Function During a Mobile-Originated Transfer for a Packet Radio System
6 patents from Illinois 2 lawsuit:
5,359,317 Method and apparatus for selectively storing a portion of a received message in a selective call receiver
5,636,223 Methods of adaptive channel access attempts
6,246,697 Method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access signal
6,246,862 Sensor controlled user interface for portable communication device
6,272,333 Method and apparatus in a wireless communication system for controlling a delivery of data
7,751,826 System and method for E911 location privacy protection
6 patents from Florida:
5,710,987 Receiver having concealed external antenna
5,754,119 Multiple pager status synchronization system and method
5,958,006 Method and apparatus for communicating summarized data
6,008,737 Apparatus for controlling utilization of software added to a portable communication device
6,101,531 System for communicating user-selected criteria filter prepared at wireless client to communication server for filtering data transferred from host to said wireless client
6,377,161 Method and apparatus in a wireless messaging system for facilitating an exchange of address information
People who like making money?
Thanks to Android, HTC nearly triples Q4 profits in 2010: "Anyone claiming that it’s hard to make a profit off of Google’s open Android platform might want to check in with HTC and ask them how things are done. HTC’s latest numbers for Q4 of 2010 show that the smartphone manufacturer nearly tripled their profits over the previous year, pulling in $500 million"
Yes, it would be terrible to be like HTC...
He didn't say it was impossible. He just said that Amazon couldn't do it for Kindle. There is a difference between a) manufacturing a small run of not-so-price-sensitive items and b) manufacturing hundreds of millions of items in a year for a price that is competitive with other factories around the world.
The article is talking about high volume manufacturing like the Kindle and iPhone - 10+ million sales per year - and not small production runs. His claim is that U.S. hardware manufacturers have lost the design skill base and don't have the capacity to manufacture large volume production runs for some of the components in the Kindle. He is probably correct to some degree - are there any U.S. manufacturers that have both the expertise and production capability to create 10+ million LCD displays a year? Are there any U.S. factories that are producing 10+ million polished injection moulded cases a year? Are there any U.S. manufacturers that are creating 3G chipsets in this volume? Are there any U.S. factories that are producing lithium batteries on a scale of those in Asia (100+ million cells a year)?
R&D Expenditures for Tech Companies. As a percentage of revenue, Microsoft is highest (14.6%), followed by Cisco (14%) and Google (12%). Apple is down at the bottom with 2.3%.
After discussions with my iPhone owning friends, I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that the only people who care about user replaceable batteries are a small subset of nerds and engineers. IMHO, the battery - the part that will degrade faster than any other component of a mobile device - should be easily field replaceable. But nobody cares. Apparently, "real people" buy a new mobile device every 12-24 months, so a user replaceable battery is a pointless feature.
Apparently the Ideos U8150 does not run flash. (quoting from a forum "I think the problem is that currently Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is only for Android phones with ARM7 processors. U8150 has ARM6.")
Isn't that the natural result of a Libertarian paradise? When governance by a single powerful entity is replaced with the enablement of individuals to accumulate resources and weaponry without limit, then the individuals with the most resources and weapons will grow in strength until they can become powerful enough to subvert or destroy the weak government. This is an intrinsic problem in Libertarian thought - that you can have a weak government and strong unregulated individuals, and yet the government will still have the power to govern those individuals.