A direct democracy, swayed easily by the latest celebrity gossip and completely ignoring the general consensus of the relevant scientific communities?
An oligarchy, where only well-respected scholars are granted the privilege of participating in government?
A dictatorship, where one person's guidance would lead the nation to either greatness or despair?
Or how about a representative democracy, where the decisions are made by people who can judge whether their constituents' recommendations are being made from reason or reaction, and can choose to follow or reject those recommendations appropriately?
Every form of government is broken by the simple fact that there are humans involved. Humans are easily-corrupted creatures, and the system can only work around our failures.
Maybe a theocracy would work, where the guidance comes from a particular chosen deity, through the interpretation of its priests...
My comment was in no way intended to excuse the actions of bad programmers. I am a firm believer in minimal programming, but that wasn't really clear in my post.
Instead, please consider my example as a harrowing illustration of just how much we accomplished with so little, and questioning why we now accomplish so little with so much.
More processing power is used to watch Youtube videos than it took to land on the Moon. More instructions are used to compose and print a corporate memo to authorize moving an office chair than it took to send astronauts 380,000 kilometers away through space - and bring them back safely. In the past 40 years, we've gone from epic journeys of exploration to grinding raids to buy epic mounts.
Instead, we are using more processing and memory cability to run solitaire than entire mega corps had in their computing labs from that period. (That dx10 certified gpu you have rendering aero for you, so that solitaire can present pixel shaded 3d cards to you is able to crank out more flops than a cray supercomputer from the 90s. Think about what that means, when it is a requirement to play solitaire.)
As I understand it, the Apollo 11 guidance computer could process a maximum of 6x10^10 operations during the course of the whole mission. That's assuming only simple instructions were run, nonstop. In comparison, that many instructions can be run in under one second on even the slowest model of Intel Core i7. Think about what that means.
My complaint with interfaces like Unity is that they try hard to be good, but fail so badly. I recently (within the past week) sat down and tried using Unity from a live CD to play with a new machine I'm setting up. My goals were simple: Install VirtualBox, make a test VM, and identify the contents of a few old hard disks.
What I found was that from Ubuntu's main frame (I'm not even sure what it should be called... it's the interface where you pick what application to run, from ones that aren't listed on the side), I could install and launch any application I wanted, as long as I knew exactly what it was named, or where in the classification it was placed. I quickly gave up on directly looking at the contents of the drive, when a few minutes of clicking around showed me no sign that the disk was even recognized. I ended up using a terminal session to list the drive contents. Installing a new application meant hitting a button, and being presented with an entirely differently-designed interface, which I then had to figure out in order to use.
That's when I realized that Unity was not a good interface for me. I dislike Microsoft's vaunted Ribbons for the same reason: There is no consistency between levels of classification. People make hierarchies well. When a program has lots of commands, it's natural to organize them into a hierarchy. The Ribbon interface uses text labels for the top level of the hierarchy, unnamed segments for the next level, icons for the next, and an assortment of widgets (sometimes menus, sometimes option buttons, sometimes a color picker, sometimes a table grid thing) for the next, and so on. Consistency between levels is gone, and I see Unity doing the same thing. The top level is buttons, the next level is icons, the next level is a custom "find something to install" design, and so on.
Another problem (or an extension of the same, depending on how deeply you choose to view the issue) is that the interface changes drastically depending on what you're doing. Again, I use Ribbons as an example. I used to be able to tell my mother over the phone "Look along the top of the screen with all the buttons. Find the one that's a bold 'B'. Click that to make your text bold." Now, I have to first have her switch to the "Home" ribbon, hope that nothing's been customized to where the button's missing, then have her look for the bold "B". Explaining things that used to have their own window (like line spacing) is even worse, because I now have to try to describe the icons, rather than using English words.
A program should follow the `Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the way that astonishes him least. --The Tao Of Programming
Once upon a time, commands could be expected to be organized by what they did. If you were looking for a command to change the line spacing of a paragraph, you could look first in a "format" menu, because it's a formatting option. You could then look in a "paragraph" or "line" or even a "spacing" menu, because those are all reasonable categories for the task you want to accomplish. Now, to find the same option, you must look wherever it seemed aesthetically pleasing to put the option's icon, and in each place you look, you must learn how that particular interface is designed. It's tedious to find simple commands, but it sure looks pretty!
The final straw in my Unity experiment was that installing VirtualBox required clicking the disabled "use this source" button to install from the universe. After 15 minutes, I figured out that the button was disabled because I didn't have a working network connection. There was no error message. The intent is there, but the polish that made Ubuntu once a decent distro simply isn't up to the level I expect.
TFA only makes a passing mention of OS X, and doesn't acknowledge its presence on servers at all. TFA is really little more than an advertisement for FreeBSD over Linux, saying "Look! It's more stable and has better features!" while completely missing the point that Linux is stable enough for use and also has ample useful features of its own.
Linux is used more than BSD because there are more available distros, meeting diverse needs without any configuration necessary. Professional support is more readily available, and in my limited experience, even hardware support is somewhat better.
Personally, I think Apple servers don't have much market share because they're so damned expensive, and there's not much in the way of specialization.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Most of the people in this world are pretty smart, individually. Take the time to explain something to them, and they'll think rationally about it. However, when groups get together, they usually just accept that the group has done the thinking for them, and a few people with enough charisma can bend the entire group to their cause, with no concern for any facts supporting their opinions.
Yes, this applies to me as well. I constantly have to stop and think about whether my actions are based in fact, or merely repeating the assumptions of others.
Thing is, people (and corporations, and nonprofit organizations, and universities) with money often do start other companies with the intent of making more money, and that makes more jobs. It just doesn't happen as reliably or on as large a scale as the Republican party would like to believe.
The opposite extreme theory is just as ridiculous. If the rich folks don't make new jobs, who does? I doubt you'll see very many lower- or middle-class entrepreneurs take a few years without income to perfect a product and bring it to market before they see any profit. The only jobs created by someone without enough resources stockpiled to last for a while will be more of the same production jobs we have now, which are rapidly getting cut out by automation.
So let me get this straight... they built a school in a shipping container, with an electronic whiteboard, air purifier, and LED lighting? And they expect this to somehow stay intact in rural Africa? Almost nobody in those villages is going to understand the value of education. From their perspective, it's all just a shiny piece of technology to be sold off by the first person who can steal it.
The sad part is, that statement is not intended to be racist or discriminatory in any way. I personally have volunteered in Africa, and I doubt very much that these folks from Samsung have spent much time at all in the rural villages they want to help so much.
Here's a better idea: Take those solar panels, and build a charging station. Distribute flashlights to the village. Now those villages have a longer usable day, where working on the meager farms is not really feasible. Now they can learn. Spend most of the rest of the money on books. For a chalkboard, use a piece of plywood covered in black paint made from charcoal. It works. Get a few teachers who have actually graduated from college, give them supplies, fund their classes for three years, then rotate them out to avoid apathy.
What I saw (in rural Ghana, which as I understand is well above the continental average) was that among those few students who had a desire to learn, none were paired with teachers who actually cared about teaching. They haven't had schools for the last three generations, so why bother now? In their opinion, it's more important to learn how to cook an egg, so you can sell it to the passengers on buses at the gas station.
The school is "portable" in the sense that it can be manufactured someplace and used someplace else. In rural Africa, traveling between villages takes a few hours. Including set-up and tear-down time, a single classroom mounted on a bus could only reach two or three villages in a day, if there's no mechanical trouble. That also means that the class has to be taught all the same material in the single class each day.
You mean like they do all the time with the "preferred shopper" cards and such? The ones where they aggregate the data, correlate milk sales with cookie sales, and offer promotions to correspond with buyer habits to maximize order efficiency and therefore profits? I like them. They make things cheap right when I'm about to buy them. Yes, sometimes the brands change, but I'm not particularly loyal to brands, so I really don't mind that.
If I may take the liberty of bring up literature, I would like to compare this situation to Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. In short, civilization is optimized to make people happy. Needs are provided for, and people are manipulated into being whatever is needed of them for the good of society. The underlying evil in the society is simply that there is no way out. A rebel who does not want to be a part of the massive self-improving system cannot live a life on their own.
Coming back to the grocery store analogy, it is perfectly possible to opt out of the system. Pay with cash, and do not use any identification cards. Likewise, you can opt out of using Google's services by blocking traffic to their servers and refusing to do business with their partners. I do agree that any entity that wants to collect significant information about someone should be subject to increased scrutiny, but the extreme privacy-above-all view is just as bad as a devil-may-care attitude.
If stalking is "taking pictures everywhere you go", then I can take pictures for an hour, record notes for an hour, draw cartoons of your actions for an hour, then dictate into a recorder for an hour, and I'm fine, right? Or four separate people can do each action on their own, and they're all fine, right?
The nature of what's being done determines the nature of what's being done. Google isn't installing taps on your network. They aren't recording your house continuously. They aren't doing anything to single you out or work around any attempts to hide yourself (more or less). They aren't seeking you out in any way. You are instructing you computer to talk to Google, and somehow it's expected that Google should forget everything that happens? If you don't want Google to know about you, poison your online identity with misinformation, and configure your firewall to block all traffic to Google's servers. In other words, go back inside your house and don't worry about the photographer down the street. He doesn't really care about you.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar, but if it helps, many of my posts are written with the following set of people in mind:
A half-crazed high school teacher, who is amazed by the manifestations of physics everywhere: "Convection in a glass of water! That's ahMAZing!"
An irritated middle-aged middle-class middle-manager, who is mostly ambivalent about things that piss others off, because there's better and worse things in the world, and thinks that too many complaints are utterly pointless and stupid: "Yes, I know that restaurant was your favorite because of its particular 'atmosphere', but that 'atmosphere' was the putrid odor of rotting flesh which scared away customers."
A grumpy 80-year-old widower who knows now how little he knew back when he knew everything, and has realized that he can't take care of the world, so he'll take care of his lawn, while trying unsuccessfully to prevent others from falling into the same situation: "Hey you kids! Get off my lawn! Go read a book!"
The preceding post was written mostly from the perspective of person number two.
Everyone pays the same, except for those who can afford to shuffle money out of (whatever your particular country is) to somewhere else, those who have disproportionately high or low profit margins, and anybody else with a some disparity between their actual situation and the particular number chosen for taxation.
The system (whatever your particular country is) has is a monster because it's the government's attempt to model real life in nice easy-to-compute numbers. Life is complex, and so are taxes.
Would you have the same objection to an individual person taking a single picture in public, or a store salesman recommending a product that fits your needs? Does it matter that the guy taking a picture of your house is a Google employee, rather than a random person from the next town over? On a more global scale, does it matter that somebody in Tunisia can now know what color your front door is? Google, like many companies that are now assaulted for "violating privacy" like it was some innate right, just did often what is perfectly fine to do rarely.
What I would consider evil are actions like buying up competitors, only to shut them down to preserve one's own market share. I find it wrong to knowingly mislead people into investing in something that will never bring a return. It offends me to see people (including executives, managers, and shareholders of a company) attacked because they provide a service for a profit.
...the absence of the sea wall extension measure would have led to a similar disaster
"Most", being comparative, isn't a perfectly appropriate word here, but that's just being pedantic. The wall prevented the plant from losing power to two of its three pumps. I assume they take one pump down at a time regularly for maintenance. Lucky or not, there is still no newsworthy story in the fact that a safety system did its job admirably, just like it isn't newsworthy every time an airplane lands safely because its tires compressed as weight was applied. Flinging accusations of suppressing knowledge is pure FUD.
It seems that since the wall held most of the water out, and the pumps functioned correctly, the plant was not "in trouble" so there was no news to report.
It wasn't a cover-up, because there wasn't anything to cover up.
The "impossible" particles are likely due to miscalculation of relativity effects due to GPS satellites moving. The "impossible" star is possible under the laws of physics, but so improbable that it goes against theories of the exact sequence of events leading to a star's formation, and has nothing to do with relativity. The Pioneer anomaly has many possible causes, few of which involve a new cosmological theory.
Sorry, but worship of Tesla is just as bad as worship of Einstein.
The point where it's no longer an infringement is the point where someone walking by can take a casual glance and see that you are or are not using an Apple iPad. Your GPS unit is probably much smaller than an iPad, and likely would be used mounted in a car. A casual observer would not look at it and say "Oh, is that an iPad?", so it's not damaging to Apple's brand recognition.
Apple didn't patent a rectangle. They patented a particular appearance, and Samsung has copied most of the details of that appearance (and note that the 10.1 tab is even worse than what's in that comparison, being the same size and having the logo less obvious). Samsung could have differentiated by adding a few more buttons, or putting a pattern on the bezel, or any number of other things. They didn't.
That's a big post full of ad hominem, so I'll respond to the meaningful parts:
i actually thought... that was a real ipad in that movie and they just took decades to release it.
The point of a trademark or design patent is to establish a distinctive appearance, so that it is clear at a quick glance what product you're seeing. It could be the logo, or the shape of a bottle, or something more general, like a color or a particular plaid. In essence, a trademark protects a distinctive aspect of a product, and a design patent protects a distinctive product in particular.
The entire point of this thread is to point out that the design patent for the iPad really only applies to the iPad, and the Galaxy Tab is clearly a copy. The "prior art" in 2001 is so different, even from a large distance, that it is not enough to invalidate the design patent.
So we see a difference between the ipad and the 2001 device, which we accept differentiates them. We also have the beveled edge which differs significantly between the ipad and the galaxy, yet only you fail to accept that as a difference.
It's certainly a difference, just not one that matters. The Galaxy Tab is also missing a large apple on the back, but nobody's going to notice that when walking past a user on the street. Similarly, the only way to notice the different bevel is a close comparison. The appearance of an iPad is iconic. The different bevel does not significantly differentiate the two. Yes, a blind person could tell the difference, but the iPad isn't being heavily marketed for blind people, is it?
i was saying there is a very obvious difference in profile between the 2001 device and the ipad just as there is a very obvious difference between the aspect ratio of the ipad and galaxy.
This is actually the first time I realized they had different aspect ratios. Thanks for the information. Given that it's taken over a year for a potential customer (who was looking into buying a tablet this past spring, then decided against it) to notice, I'm going to go ahead and lump this in the "subtle difference" category as well.
it's a square on the button, not a fucking house you blind idiot
Oh hey, it is. Sorry about that. The extent of my Apple product ownership is an iPod Touch that I keep out in my car. I've used an iPad, and as mentioned earlier I was looking at buying one. I must not have been paying close attention to the exact picture used, and my references from this thread have been found through Google.
Again, that's the whole idea behind a patented design: A potential customer should be able to recognize the product by its appearance from a casual glance.
The point is...
The point is there are a number of similarities and differences between the two real devices, but on the whole the differences are far smaller than the similarities. The similarities outweigh the differences so much that the two are indistinguishable at a distance of only 10 feet. Conversely, the differences between the modern devices and the tablets from 2001 are much more pronounced, to the point where even from 10 feet away they are clearly not the same product.
It's not a question of whether there are differences or not. It's a question of whether the differences are significant enough to distinguish the pro
That's the closest to prior art yet, but still not quite there. I don't see any iPads. I see small computers that are about an inch thick, with a stylus interface. It's clearly not an iPad, even from the brief shots we can see. If I were walking down the street and passed someone using one, I wouldn't think it was an iPad. The differences are obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
To what?
A direct democracy, swayed easily by the latest celebrity gossip and completely ignoring the general consensus of the relevant scientific communities?
An oligarchy, where only well-respected scholars are granted the privilege of participating in government?
A dictatorship, where one person's guidance would lead the nation to either greatness or despair?
Or how about a representative democracy, where the decisions are made by people who can judge whether their constituents' recommendations are being made from reason or reaction, and can choose to follow or reject those recommendations appropriately?
Every form of government is broken by the simple fact that there are humans involved. Humans are easily-corrupted creatures, and the system can only work around our failures.
Maybe a theocracy would work, where the guidance comes from a particular chosen deity, through the interpretation of its priests...
As opposed to a system without patents, where your idea is quickly copied by anyone who already has the production facilities to do so and you have no legal recourse.
I don't blame you. I blame the phone call that made me think "good enough" and hit submit.
My comment was in no way intended to excuse the actions of bad programmers. I am a firm believer in minimal programming, but that wasn't really clear in my post.
Instead, please consider my example as a harrowing illustration of just how much we accomplished with so little, and questioning why we now accomplish so little with so much.
More processing power is used to watch Youtube videos than it took to land on the Moon. More instructions are used to compose and print a corporate memo to authorize moving an office chair than it took to send astronauts 380,000 kilometers away through space - and bring them back safely. In the past 40 years, we've gone from epic journeys of exploration to grinding raids to buy epic mounts.
This makes me sad.
Instead, we are using more processing and memory cability to run solitaire than entire mega corps had in their computing labs from that period. (That dx10 certified gpu you have rendering aero for you, so that solitaire can present pixel shaded 3d cards to you is able to crank out more flops than a cray supercomputer from the 90s. Think about what that means, when it is a requirement to play solitaire.)
As I understand it, the Apollo 11 guidance computer could process a maximum of 6x10^10 operations during the course of the whole mission. That's assuming only simple instructions were run, nonstop. In comparison, that many instructions can be run in under one second on even the slowest model of Intel Core i7. Think about what that means.
My complaint with interfaces like Unity is that they try hard to be good, but fail so badly. I recently (within the past week) sat down and tried using Unity from a live CD to play with a new machine I'm setting up. My goals were simple: Install VirtualBox, make a test VM, and identify the contents of a few old hard disks.
What I found was that from Ubuntu's main frame (I'm not even sure what it should be called... it's the interface where you pick what application to run, from ones that aren't listed on the side), I could install and launch any application I wanted, as long as I knew exactly what it was named, or where in the classification it was placed. I quickly gave up on directly looking at the contents of the drive, when a few minutes of clicking around showed me no sign that the disk was even recognized. I ended up using a terminal session to list the drive contents. Installing a new application meant hitting a button, and being presented with an entirely differently-designed interface, which I then had to figure out in order to use.
That's when I realized that Unity was not a good interface for me. I dislike Microsoft's vaunted Ribbons for the same reason: There is no consistency between levels of classification. People make hierarchies well. When a program has lots of commands, it's natural to organize them into a hierarchy. The Ribbon interface uses text labels for the top level of the hierarchy, unnamed segments for the next level, icons for the next, and an assortment of widgets (sometimes menus, sometimes option buttons, sometimes a color picker, sometimes a table grid thing) for the next, and so on. Consistency between levels is gone, and I see Unity doing the same thing. The top level is buttons, the next level is icons, the next level is a custom "find something to install" design, and so on.
Another problem (or an extension of the same, depending on how deeply you choose to view the issue) is that the interface changes drastically depending on what you're doing. Again, I use Ribbons as an example. I used to be able to tell my mother over the phone "Look along the top of the screen with all the buttons. Find the one that's a bold 'B'. Click that to make your text bold." Now, I have to first have her switch to the "Home" ribbon, hope that nothing's been customized to where the button's missing, then have her look for the bold "B". Explaining things that used to have their own window (like line spacing) is even worse, because I now have to try to describe the icons, rather than using English words.
A program should follow the `Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the way that astonishes him least. --The Tao Of Programming
Once upon a time, commands could be expected to be organized by what they did. If you were looking for a command to change the line spacing of a paragraph, you could look first in a "format" menu, because it's a formatting option. You could then look in a "paragraph" or "line" or even a "spacing" menu, because those are all reasonable categories for the task you want to accomplish. Now, to find the same option, you must look wherever it seemed aesthetically pleasing to put the option's icon, and in each place you look, you must learn how that particular interface is designed. It's tedious to find simple commands, but it sure looks pretty!
The final straw in my Unity experiment was that installing VirtualBox required clicking the disabled "use this source" button to install from the universe. After 15 minutes, I figured out that the button was disabled because I didn't have a working network connection. There was no error message. The intent is there, but the polish that made Ubuntu once a decent distro simply isn't up to the level I expect.
TFA only makes a passing mention of OS X, and doesn't acknowledge its presence on servers at all. TFA is really little more than an advertisement for FreeBSD over Linux, saying "Look! It's more stable and has better features!" while completely missing the point that Linux is stable enough for use and also has ample useful features of its own.
Linux is used more than BSD because there are more available distros, meeting diverse needs without any configuration necessary. Professional support is more readily available, and in my limited experience, even hardware support is somewhat better.
Personally, I think Apple servers don't have much market share because they're so damned expensive, and there's not much in the way of specialization.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Most of the people in this world are pretty smart, individually. Take the time to explain something to them, and they'll think rationally about it. However, when groups get together, they usually just accept that the group has done the thinking for them, and a few people with enough charisma can bend the entire group to their cause, with no concern for any facts supporting their opinions.
Yes, this applies to me as well. I constantly have to stop and think about whether my actions are based in fact, or merely repeating the assumptions of others.
Thing is, people (and corporations, and nonprofit organizations, and universities) with money often do start other companies with the intent of making more money, and that makes more jobs. It just doesn't happen as reliably or on as large a scale as the Republican party would like to believe.
The opposite extreme theory is just as ridiculous. If the rich folks don't make new jobs, who does? I doubt you'll see very many lower- or middle-class entrepreneurs take a few years without income to perfect a product and bring it to market before they see any profit. The only jobs created by someone without enough resources stockpiled to last for a while will be more of the same production jobs we have now, which are rapidly getting cut out by automation.
So let me get this straight... they built a school in a shipping container, with an electronic whiteboard, air purifier, and LED lighting? And they expect this to somehow stay intact in rural Africa? Almost nobody in those villages is going to understand the value of education. From their perspective, it's all just a shiny piece of technology to be sold off by the first person who can steal it.
The sad part is, that statement is not intended to be racist or discriminatory in any way. I personally have volunteered in Africa, and I doubt very much that these folks from Samsung have spent much time at all in the rural villages they want to help so much.
Here's a better idea: Take those solar panels, and build a charging station. Distribute flashlights to the village. Now those villages have a longer usable day, where working on the meager farms is not really feasible. Now they can learn. Spend most of the rest of the money on books. For a chalkboard, use a piece of plywood covered in black paint made from charcoal. It works. Get a few teachers who have actually graduated from college, give them supplies, fund their classes for three years, then rotate them out to avoid apathy.
What I saw (in rural Ghana, which as I understand is well above the continental average) was that among those few students who had a desire to learn, none were paired with teachers who actually cared about teaching. They haven't had schools for the last three generations, so why bother now? In their opinion, it's more important to learn how to cook an egg, so you can sell it to the passengers on buses at the gas station.
The school is "portable" in the sense that it can be manufactured someplace and used someplace else. In rural Africa, traveling between villages takes a few hours. Including set-up and tear-down time, a single classroom mounted on a bus could only reach two or three villages in a day, if there's no mechanical trouble. That also means that the class has to be taught all the same material in the single class each day.
Not when they were studied in 1990, as mentioned in the second link. I'm just partial to Lego mechanisms.
You mean like they do all the time with the "preferred shopper" cards and such? The ones where they aggregate the data, correlate milk sales with cookie sales, and offer promotions to correspond with buyer habits to maximize order efficiency and therefore profits? I like them. They make things cheap right when I'm about to buy them. Yes, sometimes the brands change, but I'm not particularly loyal to brands, so I really don't mind that.
If I may take the liberty of bring up literature, I would like to compare this situation to Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. In short, civilization is optimized to make people happy. Needs are provided for, and people are manipulated into being whatever is needed of them for the good of society. The underlying evil in the society is simply that there is no way out. A rebel who does not want to be a part of the massive self-improving system cannot live a life on their own.
Coming back to the grocery store analogy, it is perfectly possible to opt out of the system. Pay with cash, and do not use any identification cards. Likewise, you can opt out of using Google's services by blocking traffic to their servers and refusing to do business with their partners. I do agree that any entity that wants to collect significant information about someone should be subject to increased scrutiny, but the extreme privacy-above-all view is just as bad as a devil-may-care attitude.
If stalking is "taking pictures everywhere you go", then I can take pictures for an hour, record notes for an hour, draw cartoons of your actions for an hour, then dictate into a recorder for an hour, and I'm fine, right? Or four separate people can do each action on their own, and they're all fine, right?
The nature of what's being done determines the nature of what's being done. Google isn't installing taps on your network. They aren't recording your house continuously. They aren't doing anything to single you out or work around any attempts to hide yourself (more or less). They aren't seeking you out in any way. You are instructing you computer to talk to Google, and somehow it's expected that Google should forget everything that happens? If you don't want Google to know about you, poison your online identity with misinformation, and configure your firewall to block all traffic to Google's servers. In other words, go back inside your house and don't worry about the photographer down the street. He doesn't really care about you.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar, but if it helps, many of my posts are written with the following set of people in mind:
The preceding post was written mostly from the perspective of person number two.
This is old news.
Everyone pays the same, except for those who can afford to shuffle money out of (whatever your particular country is) to somewhere else, those who have disproportionately high or low profit margins, and anybody else with a some disparity between their actual situation and the particular number chosen for taxation.
The system (whatever your particular country is) has is a monster because it's the government's attempt to model real life in nice easy-to-compute numbers. Life is complex, and so are taxes.
Would you have the same objection to an individual person taking a single picture in public, or a store salesman recommending a product that fits your needs? Does it matter that the guy taking a picture of your house is a Google employee, rather than a random person from the next town over? On a more global scale, does it matter that somebody in Tunisia can now know what color your front door is? Google, like many companies that are now assaulted for "violating privacy" like it was some innate right, just did often what is perfectly fine to do rarely.
What I would consider evil are actions like buying up competitors, only to shut them down to preserve one's own market share. I find it wrong to knowingly mislead people into investing in something that will never bring a return. It offends me to see people (including executives, managers, and shareholders of a company) attacked because they provide a service for a profit.
Doing something neutral extensively is not evil.
According to TFA:
...the absence of the sea wall extension measure would have led to a similar disaster
"Most", being comparative, isn't a perfectly appropriate word here, but that's just being pedantic. The wall prevented the plant from losing power to two of its three pumps. I assume they take one pump down at a time regularly for maintenance. Lucky or not, there is still no newsworthy story in the fact that a safety system did its job admirably, just like it isn't newsworthy every time an airplane lands safely because its tires compressed as weight was applied. Flinging accusations of suppressing knowledge is pure FUD.
It seems that since the wall held most of the water out, and the pumps functioned correctly, the plant was not "in trouble" so there was no news to report.
It wasn't a cover-up, because there wasn't anything to cover up.
The "impossible" particles are likely due to miscalculation of relativity effects due to GPS satellites moving. The "impossible" star is possible under the laws of physics, but so improbable that it goes against theories of the exact sequence of events leading to a star's formation, and has nothing to do with relativity. The Pioneer anomaly has many possible causes, few of which involve a new cosmological theory.
Sorry, but worship of Tesla is just as bad as worship of Einstein.
The techno remix will be awesome!
The point where it's no longer an infringement is the point where someone walking by can take a casual glance and see that you are or are not using an Apple iPad. Your GPS unit is probably much smaller than an iPad, and likely would be used mounted in a car. A casual observer would not look at it and say "Oh, is that an iPad?", so it's not damaging to Apple's brand recognition.
Apple didn't patent a rectangle. They patented a particular appearance, and Samsung has copied most of the details of that appearance (and note that the 10.1 tab is even worse than what's in that comparison, being the same size and having the logo less obvious). Samsung could have differentiated by adding a few more buttons, or putting a pattern on the bezel, or any number of other things. They didn't.
That's a big post full of ad hominem, so I'll respond to the meaningful parts:
i actually thought ... that was a real ipad in that movie and they just took decades to release it.
The point of a trademark or design patent is to establish a distinctive appearance, so that it is clear at a quick glance what product you're seeing. It could be the logo, or the shape of a bottle, or something more general, like a color or a particular plaid. In essence, a trademark protects a distinctive aspect of a product, and a design patent protects a distinctive product in particular.
The entire point of this thread is to point out that the design patent for the iPad really only applies to the iPad, and the Galaxy Tab is clearly a copy. The "prior art" in 2001 is so different, even from a large distance, that it is not enough to invalidate the design patent.
So we see a difference between the ipad and the 2001 device, which we accept differentiates them. We also have the beveled edge which differs significantly between the ipad and the galaxy, yet only you fail to accept that as a difference.
It's certainly a difference, just not one that matters. The Galaxy Tab is also missing a large apple on the back, but nobody's going to notice that when walking past a user on the street. Similarly, the only way to notice the different bevel is a close comparison. The appearance of an iPad is iconic. The different bevel does not significantly differentiate the two. Yes, a blind person could tell the difference, but the iPad isn't being heavily marketed for blind people, is it?
i was saying there is a very obvious difference in profile between the 2001 device and the ipad just as there is a very obvious difference between the aspect ratio of the ipad and galaxy.
This is actually the first time I realized they had different aspect ratios. Thanks for the information. Given that it's taken over a year for a potential customer (who was looking into buying a tablet this past spring, then decided against it) to notice, I'm going to go ahead and lump this in the "subtle difference" category as well.
it's a square on the button, not a fucking house you blind idiot
Oh hey, it is. Sorry about that. The extent of my Apple product ownership is an iPod Touch that I keep out in my car. I've used an iPad, and as mentioned earlier I was looking at buying one. I must not have been paying close attention to the exact picture used, and my references from this thread have been found through Google.
Again, that's the whole idea behind a patented design: A potential customer should be able to recognize the product by its appearance from a casual glance.
The point is...
The point is there are a number of similarities and differences between the two real devices, but on the whole the differences are far smaller than the similarities. The similarities outweigh the differences so much that the two are indistinguishable at a distance of only 10 feet. Conversely, the differences between the modern devices and the tablets from 2001 are much more pronounced, to the point where even from 10 feet away they are clearly not the same product.
It's not a question of whether there are differences or not. It's a question of whether the differences are significant enough to distinguish the pro
That's the closest to prior art yet, but still not quite there. I don't see any iPads. I see small computers that are about an inch thick, with a stylus interface. It's clearly not an iPad, even from the brief shots we can see. If I were walking down the street and passed someone using one, I wouldn't think it was an iPad. The differences are obvious.