You seem to be suffering some confusion about what is being restricted:
Those APIs are descriptions of how to make a request from Google's servers. If you don't pay them for the service, they limit the number of times that their servers will respond to you. The restriction isn't on the API itself; but a description of the terms under which their hardware will talk to you.
A restriction on the API itself, analogous to what Oracle is claiming in this case, would be an assertion by Google that implementing a compatible API for access to my search engine(analogous to Google's Dalvik, which implements a java-compatible API).
To the best of my knowledge, Google has never made such an assertion, nor have such assertions been historically made about compatible implementations of various historical and current APIs.
The real fun begins when Alan Turing's vengeful ghost returns to assert that his invention of the stack renders all implementors of push and pop infringing...
Any word, as yet, on what eventually happens to the cells thus saved from early death?
Obviously, having your neurons die isn't a win; but the buildup of malformed proteins that started the shutdown process is presumably still developing if you bring protein synthesis back online.
Are the malformed proteins not a serious issue, so long as the spurious shutdown signal is ignored, or do they eventually hose the cell as well?
Voice 911 services typically work even if the phone isn't provisioned for billing(I'm sure there are some models that are so sim-locked that they just won't boot or similar; but US GSM handsets with the SIM pulled can usually still make 911 calls if there is a network available, as can CDMA phones that have had whatever the equivalent de-provisioning done to them), so I would assume that 911 texts would also work without charge, and would cut through any text blocking.
Historically, the deaf have made use of TTY relay services(funded by some obscure telco fee or other). If you can find a herd of payphones(increasingly difficult these days), you may see one of the fixed-line units lurking in a drawer-style enclosure under one of the phones.
With cell phones, you can use a TTY unit connected to the headset jack of a compliant handset, and I assume that some phones support using the built-in text entry capabilities to communicate with a deaf relay.
(More pragmatically, given the minimal information provided by many 911 callers, and the fact that 911 services include location data, anybody capable of dialing 911 and making some sort of frantic-sounding noise can probably get a fair percentage of the benefits offered...)
Unfortunately, there generally isn't a good alternative. Problems are not, alas, required to have satisfactory solutions.
Asking nicely never hurts; but helps approximately as often. Armed intervention typically has consequences that make economic sanctions look like a polite humanitarian gesture, so you have to really have a good reason to use it.
The 'argument' I was referring to was the question of whether sanctions are effective, even marginally, or whether they are actually counterproductive. If they simply don't do what you want them to, you don't really need an alternative in order to not use them. Simply doing nothing is better. If they do work, somewhat, doing nothing becomes less compelling, and so the question of whether you should be doing sanctions or something else can arise.
I have strong doubts about the Syrian situation being 'solvable' in any way that we would prefer(particularly given that years of being downright nasty about suppressing dissent have not given the government significant trouble, and they've been good buddies with Iran for years, despite that not being something we approve of). What I don't know is how much our sanctions hurt the state, and its supporters, vs. how much they hurt the state's potential opponents.
Do I believe in the conceptual verbiage? No. I view that as a part of the marketing effort that goes into getting one design adopted over another(and, possibly, an honest reflection of the designer's thought process, possibly not; it could be that their solution to a particular set of design constraints was, psychologically, inspired by the 'concept'. It could also be that an entirely different person rationalized the design after the fact. Hard to say and not terribly relevant.)
However, I do believe that this game of aesthetic and conceptual rationalization is, undeniably, part of the process by which architecture gets done. Designs have to be 'sold', both within an architecture firm to coworkers and bosses, and to customers in order to be built. Since the buildings that actually exist are the ones that were successfully pitched, it is very likely that most of the newer ones have this 'conceptual' package produced for them at some point, likely along with some nice little scale models of the area, high-quality prints of 3D rendering from a variety of angles, and similar.
The Kinect had a bit more going on than that: it both had an ordinary webcam and a projected IR dot field and IR camera for depth calculations(along with an array mic, for noise cancellation and some degree of audio location)...
In this case, my impression is that the 'sonar' data are intended to be combined with a webcam image, with the 'sonar' providing a cue about what is foreground and what is background, and the webcam providing the detail.
Smug satisfaction is enormously pleasurable; but there is an open line of argument about the question of the efficacy of economic sanctions, which this story serves as a case of(along with the not-really-news that serious violence usually drives off and/or kills off the local human capital)...
Depending on the local economy, how the local government is funded, how effective or ineffective a set of economic sanctions is, and probably enough other variables that only a hardened social scientist would be comfortable drawing conclusions, there is the potential for sanctions to hurt the local despot's local enemies more than his local allies and critical supply sources. It's also possible that you end up hurting both, or that your sanctions are so porous as to be irrelevant.
My suspicion is that the only 19th century thing about them is their brand of social policy(the parts that aren't 12th century, of course); but without a detailed knowledge of Australian politics I wanted to leave open the possibility that they weren't actually lying abhumans who leave a slime trail when they move...
In his defense, a childish sense of spite, narcissistic fury in defense of self-image(ideally delusional), and spiteful vindictiveness in the face of criticism are very strong qualifications for most positions of authority...
Combine that with running on the 'war hero with strong ties to extraction industries' platform and a dose of good, old-fashioned Values, and we could have a real winner!
A cynical observer noting the noble progress of technology in service of the defense industries might say the same of humans, only dumber and less cute...
It's a bit of a shock, I know, but those strange and barbarous foreign people are allowed to use words in a way that is different than their use in the US. I'm not sure why Jesus allows it; but it happens.
In this case, the Tasmanian Liberals are more or less similar to those American 'Conservatives' who are still pretending to endorse the 'compassionate conservative' label.
Note key phrases such as "We believe in the importance of the family and that the standards of a free society should support family ideals.", "We further believe government should not compete with an efficient private sector", "We believe that Australia has a constructive role to play in maintaining international peace in alliance with other free nations", and "We further believe that competitive enterprise, the free choice of consumers in the marketplace and individual effort will maximise economic growth and national prosperity.".
You'd need a local observer to say to what degree these reflect genuine classical 'Liberalism', in something resembling the 19th century sense, and to what degree they reflect the rhetorical coating of a group of privatization-crazed crony capitalists with strong ties to local extraction industries and an enthusiasm for foreign policy adventurism; but these are not the 'liberals' in the American sense of the term...
This is the most exquisitely retarded thing I've heard in a long time.
It would utterly fail to surprise me if this 'hashtag inspired' thing is not so much the original plan(Hey guys! Let's substantially reduce the salable volume of the building, while making the engineering more complex and the construction potentially more expensive!) as a creative justification for design choices enforced by some mixture of local zoning requirements concerning density, light-blocking, or other building/city integration variables and the customer's desire to have a particular mixture of interior and windowed space to sell...
You don't generally deviate from building a big box covered in glass just because you are that enthusiastic about twitter or whatnot, you do it because you can't get away with putting up a big box covered in glass. The artistic side of architecture demands that there be an aesthetic 'concept' for the design, to go along with the renders and the scale model display; but it comes down to being an optimization problem in the face of local constraints...
They revoke your journalism license if you don't make at least one egregious and unnecessary error when writing about some scientific happening, particularly if the subject area is emotive and ill-understood by your readership. Extra credit, of course, is awarded if you choose to fuck it up despite having the option of copy-pasting from press material provided by the research group or their affiliated university(s)...
If you look in your handbook of popular science journalism, this rule should be on the same page as the one requiring you to report on any basic research vaguely related to some disease as though it will be showing up in pill form at the ER within a month or two. It's just after the style guide that ensures that all not-yet-fully-settled research areas are described as 'controversial'.
There is a pretty significant difference between the (well supported but rather vague) hypothesis that human intelligence is the result of some mutation(s) in our evolutionary history and a hypothesis about a specific mutation, of a specific type(there are a number of distinct types of copying errors that tend to occur, and obviously plenty of different locations for them to occur within the genome), with a demonstration that that particular tweak makes for a notable change in the neurons of an animal model...
I'm certainly no pollster or focus-group junkie(nor do I doubt that there are better options than 'Pirate Party'); but there have been a number of stories in the past year or two about entertainment-industry flacks complaining that 'pirate', the term of abuse that they had worked so hard to assign to copyright infringers, had acquired a too-positive public image through some combination of the PR effects of genuine ideological sympathy, Johnny Depp, and Captain Morgan...
I'm pretty sure that the parent's point is that the problems of transparency, regulatory capture, questionably-representative democracy, and such are also at play in the context of many issues aside from copyright. Given the involvement of those issues in such minor matters as the EU's ugly 'austerity vs. popular opinion' and 'web censorship and surveillance: awesome or mega awesome?' controversies, this isn't a hard point to argue for...
(Also, in the context of a parliamentary system, it is much more usual to have assorted issue-focused parties that don't need to have an opinion on all matters because their expected outcome is to end up as part of a coalition government with one or more other parties that bring other positions to the table. Given voter inertia, it is as illogical as it is unproductive to form a new party with too significant an overlap with an existing one, so you expect upstart parties to be mainly focused on some issue they feel to have been previously unaddressed or mis-handled, with the assumption that whatever coalition they end up in will take care of issues on which they don't differ significantly from the mainstream.)
While the assorted techie shenanigans of the previous thread are all good fun, this sort of (much more difficult, and much less entertaining) work is arguably a much better strategy to keep your intertubes open.
Dodging the man is fun and all, and certainly can beat the alternatives; but playing cat-and-mouse with state power can be a poor long term strategy. You have to get away with it every time. They only have to catch you once...
Generally, for HR-type purposes, 'teachers' and 'administrators' are distinct groups(different salary structures, different hiring processes, administrators are frequently not unionized where teachers are, etc.). In practice, much of admin in a school district will have been drawn from the pool of teachers at some point in the past, and will have education and experience in teaching, some fresher than others.
I don't dispute the priority of WinCE devices, which predated iPhones by bloody ages; my point was just that Apple's entry is perhaps the most extreme example(with a possible case to be made for RIM, back in their good days) of a single handset vendor having a device so desirable that they were able to extract substantial carrier concessions(direct monetary, carrier non-branding, elimination of carrier sales of applications and ringtones, etc.) in exchange for exclusivity.
The WinCE devices didn't have the same sales volume(not that anything at the time did, given the cost of mobile hardware and data plans at the time) and, importantly, MS was licensing WinCE more or less the same way they license their desktop OSes at that time. Any carrier could get a roughly similar WinCE handset from one of a number of different vendors, which gave the carrier the upper hand.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be suffering some confusion about what is being restricted:
Those APIs are descriptions of how to make a request from Google's servers. If you don't pay them for the service, they limit the number of times that their servers will respond to you. The restriction isn't on the API itself; but a description of the terms under which their hardware will talk to you.
A restriction on the API itself, analogous to what Oracle is claiming in this case, would be an assertion by Google that implementing a compatible API for access to my search engine(analogous to Google's Dalvik, which implements a java-compatible API).
To the best of my knowledge, Google has never made such an assertion, nor have such assertions been historically made about compatible implementations of various historical and current APIs.
The real fun begins when Alan Turing's vengeful ghost returns to assert that his invention of the stack renders all implementors of push and pop infringing...
Any word, as yet, on what eventually happens to the cells thus saved from early death?
Obviously, having your neurons die isn't a win; but the buildup of malformed proteins that started the shutdown process is presumably still developing if you bring protein synthesis back online.
Are the malformed proteins not a serious issue, so long as the spurious shutdown signal is ignored, or do they eventually hose the cell as well?
Voice 911 services typically work even if the phone isn't provisioned for billing(I'm sure there are some models that are so sim-locked that they just won't boot or similar; but US GSM handsets with the SIM pulled can usually still make 911 calls if there is a network available, as can CDMA phones that have had whatever the equivalent de-provisioning done to them), so I would assume that 911 texts would also work without charge, and would cut through any text blocking.
Historically, the deaf have made use of TTY relay services(funded by some obscure telco fee or other). If you can find a herd of payphones(increasingly difficult these days), you may see one of the fixed-line units lurking in a drawer-style enclosure under one of the phones.
With cell phones, you can use a TTY unit connected to the headset jack of a compliant handset, and I assume that some phones support using the built-in text entry capabilities to communicate with a deaf relay.
(More pragmatically, given the minimal information provided by many 911 callers, and the fact that 911 services include location data, anybody capable of dialing 911 and making some sort of frantic-sounding noise can probably get a fair percentage of the benefits offered...)
Unfortunately, there generally isn't a good alternative. Problems are not, alas, required to have satisfactory solutions.
Asking nicely never hurts; but helps approximately as often. Armed intervention typically has consequences that make economic sanctions look like a polite humanitarian gesture, so you have to really have a good reason to use it.
The 'argument' I was referring to was the question of whether sanctions are effective, even marginally, or whether they are actually counterproductive. If they simply don't do what you want them to, you don't really need an alternative in order to not use them. Simply doing nothing is better. If they do work, somewhat, doing nothing becomes less compelling, and so the question of whether you should be doing sanctions or something else can arise.
I have strong doubts about the Syrian situation being 'solvable' in any way that we would prefer(particularly given that years of being downright nasty about suppressing dissent have not given the government significant trouble, and they've been good buddies with Iran for years, despite that not being something we approve of). What I don't know is how much our sanctions hurt the state, and its supporters, vs. how much they hurt the state's potential opponents.
It depends on what you mean by 'believe'.
Do I believe in the conceptual verbiage? No. I view that as a part of the marketing effort that goes into getting one design adopted over another(and, possibly, an honest reflection of the designer's thought process, possibly not; it could be that their solution to a particular set of design constraints was, psychologically, inspired by the 'concept'. It could also be that an entirely different person rationalized the design after the fact. Hard to say and not terribly relevant.)
However, I do believe that this game of aesthetic and conceptual rationalization is, undeniably, part of the process by which architecture gets done. Designs have to be 'sold', both within an architecture firm to coworkers and bosses, and to customers in order to be built. Since the buildings that actually exist are the ones that were successfully pitched, it is very likely that most of the newer ones have this 'conceptual' package produced for them at some point, likely along with some nice little scale models of the area, high-quality prints of 3D rendering from a variety of angles, and similar.
The Kinect had a bit more going on than that: it both had an ordinary webcam and a projected IR dot field and IR camera for depth calculations(along with an array mic, for noise cancellation and some degree of audio location)...
In this case, my impression is that the 'sonar' data are intended to be combined with a webcam image, with the 'sonar' providing a cue about what is foreground and what is background, and the webcam providing the detail.
I wonder if he turns into a mean little bastard with something to prove when he's had a couple too many drinks?
TFA mentions a few, none with any name recognition to speak of in the US market; but apparently they moved a fair number of units regionally.
Smug satisfaction is enormously pleasurable; but there is an open line of argument about the question of the efficacy of economic sanctions, which this story serves as a case of(along with the not-really-news that serious violence usually drives off and/or kills off the local human capital)...
Depending on the local economy, how the local government is funded, how effective or ineffective a set of economic sanctions is, and probably enough other variables that only a hardened social scientist would be comfortable drawing conclusions, there is the potential for sanctions to hurt the local despot's local enemies more than his local allies and critical supply sources. It's also possible that you end up hurting both, or that your sanctions are so porous as to be irrelevant.
My suspicion is that the only 19th century thing about them is their brand of social policy(the parts that aren't 12th century, of course); but without a detailed knowledge of Australian politics I wanted to leave open the possibility that they weren't actually lying abhumans who leave a slime trail when they move...
In his defense, a childish sense of spite, narcissistic fury in defense of self-image(ideally delusional), and spiteful vindictiveness in the face of criticism are very strong qualifications for most positions of authority...
Combine that with running on the 'war hero with strong ties to extraction industries' platform and a dose of good, old-fashioned Values, and we could have a real winner!
A cynical observer noting the noble progress of technology in service of the defense industries might say the same of humans, only dumber and less cute...
It's a bit of a shock, I know, but those strange and barbarous foreign people are allowed to use words in a way that is different than their use in the US. I'm not sure why Jesus allows it; but it happens.
In this case, the Tasmanian Liberals are more or less similar to those American 'Conservatives' who are still pretending to endorse the 'compassionate conservative' label.
Note key phrases such as "We believe in the importance of the family and that the standards of a free society should support family ideals.", "We further believe government should not compete with an efficient private sector", "We believe that Australia has a constructive role to play in maintaining international peace in alliance with other free nations", and "We further believe that competitive enterprise, the free choice of consumers in the marketplace and individual effort will maximise economic growth and national prosperity.".
You'd need a local observer to say to what degree these reflect genuine classical 'Liberalism', in something resembling the 19th century sense, and to what degree they reflect the rhetorical coating of a group of privatization-crazed crony capitalists with strong ties to local extraction industries and an enthusiasm for foreign policy adventurism; but these are not the 'liberals' in the American sense of the term...
This is the most exquisitely retarded thing I've heard in a long time.
It would utterly fail to surprise me if this 'hashtag inspired' thing is not so much the original plan(Hey guys! Let's substantially reduce the salable volume of the building, while making the engineering more complex and the construction potentially more expensive!) as a creative justification for design choices enforced by some mixture of local zoning requirements concerning density, light-blocking, or other building/city integration variables and the customer's desire to have a particular mixture of interior and windowed space to sell...
You don't generally deviate from building a big box covered in glass just because you are that enthusiastic about twitter or whatnot, you do it because you can't get away with putting up a big box covered in glass. The artistic side of architecture demands that there be an aesthetic 'concept' for the design, to go along with the renders and the scale model display; but it comes down to being an optimization problem in the face of local constraints...
They revoke your journalism license if you don't make at least one egregious and unnecessary error when writing about some scientific happening, particularly if the subject area is emotive and ill-understood by your readership. Extra credit, of course, is awarded if you choose to fuck it up despite having the option of copy-pasting from press material provided by the research group or their affiliated university(s)...
If you look in your handbook of popular science journalism, this rule should be on the same page as the one requiring you to report on any basic research vaguely related to some disease as though it will be showing up in pill form at the ER within a month or two. It's just after the style guide that ensures that all not-yet-fully-settled research areas are described as 'controversial'.
I vote for those adorable tiny monkeys! They are already pretty sharp, and could no doubt perform even more entertaining monkey antics if smarter...
There is a pretty significant difference between the (well supported but rather vague) hypothesis that human intelligence is the result of some mutation(s) in our evolutionary history and a hypothesis about a specific mutation, of a specific type(there are a number of distinct types of copying errors that tend to occur, and obviously plenty of different locations for them to occur within the genome), with a demonstration that that particular tweak makes for a notable change in the neurons of an animal model...
I'm certainly no pollster or focus-group junkie(nor do I doubt that there are better options than 'Pirate Party'); but there have been a number of stories in the past year or two about entertainment-industry flacks complaining that 'pirate', the term of abuse that they had worked so hard to assign to copyright infringers, had acquired a too-positive public image through some combination of the PR effects of genuine ideological sympathy, Johnny Depp, and Captain Morgan...
I'm pretty sure that the parent's point is that the problems of transparency, regulatory capture, questionably-representative democracy, and such are also at play in the context of many issues aside from copyright. Given the involvement of those issues in such minor matters as the EU's ugly 'austerity vs. popular opinion' and 'web censorship and surveillance: awesome or mega awesome?' controversies, this isn't a hard point to argue for...
(Also, in the context of a parliamentary system, it is much more usual to have assorted issue-focused parties that don't need to have an opinion on all matters because their expected outcome is to end up as part of a coalition government with one or more other parties that bring other positions to the table. Given voter inertia, it is as illogical as it is unproductive to form a new party with too significant an overlap with an existing one, so you expect upstart parties to be mainly focused on some issue they feel to have been previously unaddressed or mis-handled, with the assumption that whatever coalition they end up in will take care of issues on which they don't differ significantly from the mainstream.)
http://www.piratenpartei.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/parteiprogramm-englisch.pdf
They don't seem to have an overt foreign policy platform; but I'm going to take the wild guess that they aren't particularly hawkish.
While the assorted techie shenanigans of the previous thread are all good fun, this sort of (much more difficult, and much less entertaining) work is arguably a much better strategy to keep your intertubes open.
Dodging the man is fun and all, and certainly can beat the alternatives; but playing cat-and-mouse with state power can be a poor long term strategy. You have to get away with it every time. They only have to catch you once...
Generally, for HR-type purposes, 'teachers' and 'administrators' are distinct groups(different salary structures, different hiring processes, administrators are frequently not unionized where teachers are, etc.). In practice, much of admin in a school district will have been drawn from the pool of teachers at some point in the past, and will have education and experience in teaching, some fresher than others.
I don't dispute the priority of WinCE devices, which predated iPhones by bloody ages; my point was just that Apple's entry is perhaps the most extreme example(with a possible case to be made for RIM, back in their good days) of a single handset vendor having a device so desirable that they were able to extract substantial carrier concessions(direct monetary, carrier non-branding, elimination of carrier sales of applications and ringtones, etc.) in exchange for exclusivity.
The WinCE devices didn't have the same sales volume(not that anything at the time did, given the cost of mobile hardware and data plans at the time) and, importantly, MS was licensing WinCE more or less the same way they license their desktop OSes at that time. Any carrier could get a roughly similar WinCE handset from one of a number of different vendors, which gave the carrier the upper hand.