Pay no attention to those Apple fanbois, or the fandroids neither. It's only the loyal BB partisans who have The Truth.
(Hmmm... We could use an official site to inform us of the current buzzwords for properly insulting the users of various successful commercial products. Anyone know what the BB loyalists are actually disparaged these days?)
"BB loyalist" is about as disparaging as you need to be...
Hey armchair astrophysicists... A thought occurred to me when watching this video. Since the moon has a negligible atmosphere, how close can a spacecraft reliably orbit it? Other than the ability to make sure eccentricity is near 0, what would stop a satellite from orbiting a few hundred meters above the tallest peak?
It's also possible the younger coder learned a trick developed since the older coder got his skills fairly solidified, and the older coder never saw, or came up with in his own experiences.
Just because the new guy is disagreeing and less experienced, doesn't make him wrong. Yes, 9 times out of 10, the new, less experienced guy will be wrong, but that 1 time out of 10, makes it worth giving the other 9 times a fair hearing as well.
But the thing is that, unless the code has a testable bug in it then it can only be "right" or "wrong" in the opinion of the person looking at it. All in all, I would quickly trust someone with 10 years of experience to determine what is "wrong" sooner than I would an intern. Sure he might have a good idea, but until that idea is adopted by others and proves itself, it is only "right" in his opinion.
And a follow up question: do you have any internship openings?
Seriously, if he was hired as an intern I take it he has little/no real experience, and may not have even finished his formal education. He thinks your code is bad because it doesn't look like the code of whatever professor he most admired in school, or it violates some rule of some particular coding sect that he subscribes to. Tell him to write his objections down in a safe place, and come back to them after a year of working "for Real" and you will gladly sit down and listen to what he has to say then.
There must be serious flaws in HTTPS if they can decrypt the traffic for hosts that they don't control the certs for.
They control the browser. According to the article, the necessary certificate is installed on phones as Nokia ships them.
This is exactly what i was thinking/fearing. This is some scary shit, basically you ought to treat HTTPS on your Nokia device like HTTP, unless you really really trust that Nokia knows what they are doing and how to keep a secret. The striking thing is that users obviously have no idea they are handshaking with Nokia instead of their bank, doctor, etc. Are there at least alternate browsers available?
My brother is a math teacher who convinced the board of his school system to let him try it in two of his classes. Now the entire school system is moving to Khan for the math program.
The major change in his teaching format is that learning a new concept is now homework (through Khan Academy), rather than him droning on about it in class. Then every morning he gets a report for each student and can see who did well and who didn't. That allows him to concentrate on the students that didn't get the concept in class. Overall he has seen a major improvement in the class as a whole since fewer kids get left without a good understanding of the fundamental concepts.
This is such a simple idea but has so much promise. It's usually called Flip Teaching, where the kids perform exploratory learning at home (what is commonly done during in class time today) and show up to class to do "homework" with the intention that if the work proves difficult, the teacher can step in to educate and make sure the students all have the same capability at the end, instead of simply giving them a failing grade on their homework and skipping on to the next section. It make a lot more sense than a teacher spending 45 minutes reading to the students out of a book (lets be honest, very few teachers are more original than that) and then turning kids loose to figure it out on their own via the take home assignment. The teacher can then do what they (hopefully) do best and actually work with students 1 on 1 to aid understanding.
That's a really cynical view. You must work at a really crummy place if that's how concern for long-term code quality is treated.
Where I work, this kind of behavior (helping others with their code quality, even those more senior than you) would be more likely to get you recognized/promoted.
Says the man so proud of his employer that he is posting anon...
This makes the erroneous assumption that only those things are worthy of attention of government that a large percentage of the public agrees with. That is a disturbing view of how government should work.
If 25000 people bother to petition the White House about some issue, the president's staff should damned well pay attention and consider it. It doesn't matter whether any of the other 330 million people in the country approve or not. And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
It does separate issues that are polarized (as almost all issues are these days) with issues that are simply pop-culture jokes. He doesn't indicate that it should be used to decide which issue is "the most agreed upon" but merely to decide which issue is debatable (legalize marijuana) vs which issue is worthless (the death star) although about 5 minutes and any sane person could tell you that anyway.
That being said, the whole petition site is really just a mouthpiece in a slightly different form, so trying to use this method to "get it right" really doesn't match up simply because the White House is already "getting it right"; they are providing canned responses that favor their viewpoint for *any* issue that meets the threshold.
It is kind of funny that he decides to point out that Hotornot.com is the only site to use such a "sophisticated" form of sampling. Maybe this method is only used for deciding which blurry, poorly lit picture of a woman/man/whoknows you would consider hooking up with because the unbiased opinions of the masses really aren't worth crap anyway?
To be fair, if you assume 4% of annual inflation, the original Xbox launch price ($300) is equivalent to ~$460 today. The SNES ($199 in 1991) would be about the same. The Neo Geo ($649 in 1990) would be ~$1500.
Of course purchasing power has also increased, so although I do believe that $1000 is a bit out of range, consoles do not have to be sub $500 to sell to avid gamers. Add in a 'year free Xbox Live with access to all your favorite music/sports/VoD!' and they might stand a chance.
Hopefully your point was that anything over about $500 in today's dollars is a non-starter; the Neo Geo was a complete flop sales-wise.
Traditional game consoles will not be able to keep up with the pace of innovation now that a Kickstarter project can come along and do this.
Sony and Microsoft are going to have their work cut out for them. If their console is not significantly more powerful than the average PC then Google or any third party company can come along and take their asses to the bank. The linux, steam and android combination really is a game changer and with truly state of the art hardware they could get the hardcore gamers this way.
If a console were released for $1000 but it had massive graphics and computer power I would seriously consider buying it over the traditional $300 console. I think the reason people would be willing to pay is people now want gaming super computers and not just consoles. The first company to offer a true gaming supercomputer will get my money. They say graphics don't matter but obviously they do if people are always trying to buy the latest PC and latest graphics card.
What someone needs to do is create a console which somehow links up multiple graphics cards for under $1000. Call it a gaming supercomputer, and target hardcore gamers via Kickstarter. See how much funds can be raised. See if a custom chip can be designed for the project if enough funds can be raised to be used along side the Nvidia GeForce GTX 590. Allow for upgrading the card or cards and you have it.
Today, you can get a very cheap (around $50 US) bluetooth ready, 3d accelerated HD Android device in a tiny package, add a controller of your choice ($30-50), and plug it in to your TV to play anything that will run on Android (which as of now is either touch-screen oriented titles, or emulators of very old systems, hence the lack of appeal).
It has never been about innovation per se, but about getting enough software developers on the same page (similar to the dev ecosystem Apple grew around the iPhone) so that the games were plentiful enough to appeal to a huge market. The sea change will be a demand for games with more sophisticated controls, and enough devs all working on the same platform (screen size, controller type, accelerators, etc).
Expansion Headers MK802: N/A RPi: Yes. Provide access to GPIO, I2C, SPI, etc DSI (for LCD display) and CSI-2 (for camera) interfaces are also available
In addition, the MK802 runs the "source available, but developed in secret" Android OS, while the RPi runs the truly open source Debian by default and a zillion other true open source Linux distros with easy download.
The RPi is for the tinkerer. The MK802 is for someone who wants pre-packaged plastic to do one of a limited number of preordained things.
Let's be honest though; unless you are talented and/or have a lot of time on your hands, Debian and other Linuxes are filled with nothing but "preordained things" on them as well. If you are indeed talented or are so inclined, you probably are going for the Pi or a similar setup (since you don't really "need" something small to play around with) and GPIO is the only other dividing line here; if you need it then the raspberry pi is clearly for you. If you don't, then it is a toss up with vastly more powerful "toys" (a quick search reveals dual core 1.6ghz with 1g ram, gpu accel, etc) on the Android side. If you are interested in the Pi for it's media or more desktop-like functionality, you are well off to investigate the Android options instead as they are VERY capable and packaged very nicely (the units often come in a small chassis with enough cables to hide completely out of sight behind a TV.)
They cancelled it because without the lightning connector, although still useful to many people, it would not be the device people pledged money for.
How could they pledge money for a device promising the Lightning connector when the connector had not been officially announced when the project began?
Were they pledging for a rumoured product? I guess they can receive a rumour in the mail after paying up.
While some (many in the tech community) share your complete lack of scruples, apparently Mr. Siminoff does not and did the morally acceptable thing which is to not take someone's money when he cannot deliver what he promised.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm actually wondering if they fscked up somehow and are trying to set Apple up as a scapegoat. What is stopping them from just pressing ahead with every connector except the Lightning port and simply saying "we'd like to have done that, but Apple didn't let us" if they really want to draw attention to Apple's supposed monopolistic behaviour. It would still have been useful to everyone who doesn't have one of Apple's latest devices and if Apple ever changed their minds then a v2.0 version of the device, or maybe they could just make the connectors modular like some PSU connectors are and enable a potential compatability upgrade later?
Very odd indeed.
Really? You wonder why they aren't going to go ahead selling their lightning-capable dock when they aren't allowed to, by instead saying "hey it has a USB port on it instead!" Talk about mislabeling, you must be in marketing. That's like selling an extension cord as "iPhone 5 compatible" with a tiny asterisk pointing to the footnote that "your own dc brick and cable are required". If I were in on this kickstarter (I don't own any lightning-equipped Apple shit so...) I would want my money back too. I have plenty of USB ports around.
Good try on the car analogy though, somebody had to do it.
Thanks:-)
You can't add electronics to a simple mechanical device and make it more reliable. Electronics are less reliable than simple mechanical things, so any such change is a step backward.
Okay, even if it is a step backward in theory, in practice, are we really not able to engineer something to an acceptable level of reliability? Guns already do not work 100% of the time. They occasionally jam and misfire. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it.
You're arguing into the void for the most part, you are sooner going to convince a christian of the sanctity of Mohammed than a gun proponent of the value of any safety mechanisms outside of the operator's brain.
But I will give you one thing to noodle on; for ammo failure the solution (which is easy and fun to practice) is to advance the gun to the next round and fire again (For a semiauto this takes very little time). The recovery is assured and the shot will only be taken a second later than would have been possible without the "Failure". When you have a black box inside the gun deciding when to not fire, you can't hit a reset button and have the odds of firing go up significantly, just like when your car breaks down an electrical reboot is rarely a solution to resolve the problem. This is the challenge, and so long as the device is sophisticated enough to distinguish one user to the next, it will be too sophisticated to ever be trusted by someone in a life and death situation.
In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.
Don't forget, that if you are short on cash you can sell the improvements for half their price, flip the deed over and mortgage it.
Oops, this is about the moon, sorry, I had it confused with a different fictional scenario.
What Intellectual Ventures is trying to do (as they suggest) is create a patent environment where at least the relevant property can be bought/sold for proper licensing purposes. Consider instead the model where the Apples or Microsofts of the world hold patents and refuse to license (or do so reluctantly and at an extorted price) and ask yourself which you prefer. If reform isn't coming (and no signs would suggest that it is) then this might be the lesser of two evils.
Or maybe not, who knows.
Re:A good example of a bad summary
on
Qt 5.0 Released
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· Score: 1
If you don't know exactly what QT is/does since the first time you compiled it in order to run kvirc back in 1998... Then I don't know what you are even doing here.
You must be trolling... the 8% has no magnified impact on the bottom line because it is already AT THE BOTTOM. Samsung's revenue just from the new S3 sales will more than make up for it, so they are sitting back thinking "hell if that's all it cost us to copy the iphone we should have done it 5 years ago!"
Well, go find some tech CEOs and ask them how they feel about giving up 1 month of profit and get back to us.
My guess that you won't find any who are as nonchalant about the idea as you are. And Samsung will be no different. Because regardless of what percentage it is of their total profit, $1 billion is still real money.
The premise was that Steve Jobs' aforementioned "thermonuclear war" was essentially a loss from this court decision... And if you are really delusional enough to think that an 8% drop in operating profit is the equivalent of nuclear devastation, then so be it and have a nice day (no one in the business world would agree with you though, fyi.)
Samsung electronics had $148Bn in revenue last year. So let's just say you earned $50k last year; this is like losing a court case about how your work was supposedly derived totally on the designs of someone else, and you being ordered to pay $335 and being told you are OK to keep "doin' your thang".
So the question is, how big of a deal is $335?
Revenue isn't the important number. Any damages that Samsung has to pay to Apple will come out of their *operating profit*. For Q1-Q3 2012, Samsung reported an operating profit of $18.3 billion. Assume another $5 billion for Q4 (not yet announced) and their total 2012 profit comes to ~$23 billion. So a $1 billion payout to Apple would be about 4% of Samsung's total 2012 profit. No company wants to cough up 4% of its total profits to a competitor. It wouldn't bankrupt them, but it would hurt.
To use your analogy, that would be the equivalent of somebody making $50k having to pony up $2k. Not enough to bankrupt, but certainly enough to sting.
Bad analogy guy would even disagree with you there. My conversion to a base of $50k was to make it similar to the average US salary (this is gross revenue, not net, so the $335 was appropriate). But let's play it your way... Their electronics division had a net of $12Bn last year (nice and round since there are 12 months in a year). That means they were ordered to basically forego 1 month of profit. So if you think about how much money you blow on worthless things every month (like going to the movies, saving up for a vacation, etc) and you are asked to give that up as a one-time penalty for infringement, how damaging is that?
I think that "fondleslab" (ipad) and jesusphone (iphone) are excellent sobriquets for those devices given the worship and adoration your average iSheep's (apple user) view of those devices.
And here I was thinking that "fondleslab" was the best new word I would learn today, and you go and throw "sobriquet" out there...
Unfortunately Steve Jobs is not alive to celebrate his thermonuclear war flops.
Yeah... they could only squeeze a billion dollars in damages out of that verdict... I mean... it's like a token verdict... I mean, Apple technically won, but reality is the damages they were awarded really means they lost. What can you even buy with a billion dollars these days? a cup of coffee? a gumball? a postage stamp? A billion dollars isn't even worth the ink and paper it's printed on! So maybe they can recycle the paper in the money and get something for their troubles... recycled note pads or something...
Samsung electronics had $148Bn in revenue last year. So let's just say you earned $50k last year; this is like losing a court case about how your work was supposedly derived totally on the designs of someone else, and you being ordered to pay $335 and being told you are OK to keep "doin' your thang".
Slashdot Mirror
But, RIM's dead! The interblogs told me so!
Pay no attention to those Apple fanbois, or the fandroids neither. It's only the loyal BB partisans who have The Truth.
(Hmmm ... We could use an official site to inform us of the current buzzwords for properly insulting the users of various successful commercial products. Anyone know what the BB loyalists are actually disparaged these days?)
"BB loyalist" is about as disparaging as you need to be...
Hey armchair astrophysicists... A thought occurred to me when watching this video. Since the moon has a negligible atmosphere, how close can a spacecraft reliably orbit it? Other than the ability to make sure eccentricity is near 0, what would stop a satellite from orbiting a few hundred meters above the tallest peak?
It's also possible the younger coder learned a trick developed since the older coder got his skills fairly solidified, and the older coder never saw, or came up with in his own experiences.
Just because the new guy is disagreeing and less experienced, doesn't make him wrong. Yes, 9 times out of 10, the new, less experienced guy will be wrong, but that 1 time out of 10, makes it worth giving the other 9 times a fair hearing as well.
But the thing is that, unless the code has a testable bug in it then it can only be "right" or "wrong" in the opinion of the person looking at it. All in all, I would quickly trust someone with 10 years of experience to determine what is "wrong" sooner than I would an intern. Sure he might have a good idea, but until that idea is adopted by others and proves itself, it is only "right" in his opinion.
And a follow up question: do you have any internship openings?
Seriously, if he was hired as an intern I take it he has little/no real experience, and may not have even finished his formal education. He thinks your code is bad because it doesn't look like the code of whatever professor he most admired in school, or it violates some rule of some particular coding sect that he subscribes to. Tell him to write his objections down in a safe place, and come back to them after a year of working "for Real" and you will gladly sit down and listen to what he has to say then.
There must be serious flaws in HTTPS if they can decrypt the traffic for hosts that they don't control the certs for.
They control the browser. According to the article, the necessary certificate is installed on phones as Nokia ships them.
This is exactly what i was thinking/fearing. This is some scary shit, basically you ought to treat HTTPS on your Nokia device like HTTP, unless you really really trust that Nokia knows what they are doing and how to keep a secret. The striking thing is that users obviously have no idea they are handshaking with Nokia instead of their bank, doctor, etc. Are there at least alternate browsers available?
That's just silly, since the fix can be easily applied. It really nothing compared to all the wordpress exploits out the that never get patched.
And a lot of governmental operations rely on Wordpress, do they?
(same girl who after a whole semester of C++ took several hours to implement the most basic version of "cat" in C).
Just because she couldn't think of a good way to do it without using a struct she is automatically a bad programmer?
My brother is a math teacher who convinced the board of his school system to let him try it in two of his classes. Now the entire school system is moving to Khan for the math program.
The major change in his teaching format is that learning a new concept is now homework (through Khan Academy), rather than him droning on about it in class. Then every morning he gets a report for each student and can see who did well and who didn't. That allows him to concentrate on the students that didn't get the concept in class. Overall he has seen a major improvement in the class as a whole since fewer kids get left without a good understanding of the fundamental concepts.
This is such a simple idea but has so much promise. It's usually called Flip Teaching, where the kids perform exploratory learning at home (what is commonly done during in class time today) and show up to class to do "homework" with the intention that if the work proves difficult, the teacher can step in to educate and make sure the students all have the same capability at the end, instead of simply giving them a failing grade on their homework and skipping on to the next section. It make a lot more sense than a teacher spending 45 minutes reading to the students out of a book (lets be honest, very few teachers are more original than that) and then turning kids loose to figure it out on their own via the take home assignment. The teacher can then do what they (hopefully) do best and actually work with students 1 on 1 to aid understanding.
That's a really cynical view. You must work at a really crummy place if that's how concern for long-term code quality is treated.
Where I work, this kind of behavior (helping others with their code quality, even those more senior than you) would be more likely to get you recognized/promoted.
Says the man so proud of his employer that he is posting anon...
This makes the erroneous assumption that only those things are worthy of attention of government that a large percentage of the public agrees with. That is a disturbing view of how government should work.
If 25000 people bother to petition the White House about some issue, the president's staff should damned well pay attention and consider it. It doesn't matter whether any of the other 330 million people in the country approve or not. And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
It does separate issues that are polarized (as almost all issues are these days) with issues that are simply pop-culture jokes. He doesn't indicate that it should be used to decide which issue is "the most agreed upon" but merely to decide which issue is debatable (legalize marijuana) vs which issue is worthless (the death star) although about 5 minutes and any sane person could tell you that anyway.
That being said, the whole petition site is really just a mouthpiece in a slightly different form, so trying to use this method to "get it right" really doesn't match up simply because the White House is already "getting it right"; they are providing canned responses that favor their viewpoint for *any* issue that meets the threshold.
It is kind of funny that he decides to point out that Hotornot.com is the only site to use such a "sophisticated" form of sampling. Maybe this method is only used for deciding which blurry, poorly lit picture of a woman/man/whoknows you would consider hooking up with because the unbiased opinions of the masses really aren't worth crap anyway?
To be fair, if you assume 4% of annual inflation, the original Xbox launch price ($300) is equivalent to ~$460 today.
The SNES ($199 in 1991) would be about the same.
The Neo Geo ($649 in 1990) would be ~$1500.
Of course purchasing power has also increased, so although I do believe that $1000 is a bit out of range, consoles do not have to be sub $500 to sell to avid gamers. Add in a 'year free Xbox Live with access to all your favorite music/sports/VoD!' and they might stand a chance.
Hopefully your point was that anything over about $500 in today's dollars is a non-starter; the Neo Geo was a complete flop sales-wise.
Traditional game consoles will not be able to keep up with the pace of innovation now that a Kickstarter project can come along and do this.
Sony and Microsoft are going to have their work cut out for them. If their console is not significantly more powerful than the average PC then Google or any third party company can come along and take their asses to the bank. The linux, steam and android combination really is a game changer and with truly state of the art hardware they could get the hardcore gamers this way.
If a console were released for $1000 but it had massive graphics and computer power I would seriously consider buying it over the traditional $300 console. I think the reason people would be willing to pay is people now want gaming super computers and not just consoles. The first company to offer a true gaming supercomputer will get my money. They say graphics don't matter but obviously they do if people are always trying to buy the latest PC and latest graphics card.
What someone needs to do is create a console which somehow links up multiple graphics cards for under $1000. Call it a gaming supercomputer, and target hardcore gamers via Kickstarter. See how much funds can be raised. See if a custom chip can be designed for the project if enough funds can be raised to be used along side the Nvidia GeForce GTX 590. Allow for upgrading the card or cards and you have it.
Today, you can get a very cheap (around $50 US) bluetooth ready, 3d accelerated HD Android device in a tiny package, add a controller of your choice ($30-50), and plug it in to your TV to play anything that will run on Android (which as of now is either touch-screen oriented titles, or emulators of very old systems, hence the lack of appeal).
It has never been about innovation per se, but about getting enough software developers on the same page (similar to the dev ecosystem Apple grew around the iPhone) so that the games were plentiful enough to appeal to a huge market. The sea change will be a demand for games with more sophisticated controls, and enough devs all working on the same platform (screen size, controller type, accelerators, etc).
indeed... from the comparison:
Expansion Headers
MK802: N/A
RPi: Yes. Provide access to GPIO, I2C, SPI, etc DSI (for LCD display) and CSI-2 (for camera) interfaces are also available
In addition, the MK802 runs the "source available, but developed in secret" Android OS, while the RPi runs the truly open source Debian by default and a zillion other true open source Linux distros with easy download.
The RPi is for the tinkerer. The MK802 is for someone who wants pre-packaged plastic to do one of a limited number of preordained things.
Let's be honest though; unless you are talented and/or have a lot of time on your hands, Debian and other Linuxes are filled with nothing but "preordained things" on them as well. If you are indeed talented or are so inclined, you probably are going for the Pi or a similar setup (since you don't really "need" something small to play around with) and GPIO is the only other dividing line here; if you need it then the raspberry pi is clearly for you. If you don't, then it is a toss up with vastly more powerful "toys" (a quick search reveals dual core 1.6ghz with 1g ram, gpu accel, etc) on the Android side. If you are interested in the Pi for it's media or more desktop-like functionality, you are well off to investigate the Android options instead as they are VERY capable and packaged very nicely (the units often come in a small chassis with enough cables to hide completely out of sight behind a TV.)
They cancelled it because without the lightning connector, although still useful to many people, it would not be the device people pledged money for.
How could they pledge money for a device promising the Lightning connector when the connector had not been officially announced when the project began?
Were they pledging for a rumoured product? I guess they can receive a rumour in the mail after paying up.
While some (many in the tech community) share your complete lack of scruples, apparently Mr. Siminoff does not and did the morally acceptable thing which is to not take someone's money when he cannot deliver what he promised.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm actually wondering if they fscked up somehow and are trying to set Apple up as a scapegoat. What is stopping them from just pressing ahead with every connector except the Lightning port and simply saying "we'd like to have done that, but Apple didn't let us" if they really want to draw attention to Apple's supposed monopolistic behaviour. It would still have been useful to everyone who doesn't have one of Apple's latest devices and if Apple ever changed their minds then a v2.0 version of the device, or maybe they could just make the connectors modular like some PSU connectors are and enable a potential compatability upgrade later?
Very odd indeed.
Really? You wonder why they aren't going to go ahead selling their lightning-capable dock when they aren't allowed to, by instead saying "hey it has a USB port on it instead!" Talk about mislabeling, you must be in marketing. That's like selling an extension cord as "iPhone 5 compatible" with a tiny asterisk pointing to the footnote that "your own dc brick and cable are required". If I were in on this kickstarter (I don't own any lightning-equipped Apple shit so...) I would want my money back too. I have plenty of USB ports around.
Good try on the car analogy though, somebody had to do it.
Thanks :-)
You can't add electronics to a simple mechanical device and make it more reliable. Electronics are less reliable than simple mechanical things, so any such change is a step backward.
Okay, even if it is a step backward in theory, in practice, are we really not able to engineer something to an acceptable level of reliability? Guns already do not work 100% of the time. They occasionally jam and misfire. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it.
You're arguing into the void for the most part, you are sooner going to convince a christian of the sanctity of Mohammed than a gun proponent of the value of any safety mechanisms outside of the operator's brain.
But I will give you one thing to noodle on; for ammo failure the solution (which is easy and fun to practice) is to advance the gun to the next round and fire again (For a semiauto this takes very little time). The recovery is assured and the shot will only be taken a second later than would have been possible without the "Failure". When you have a black box inside the gun deciding when to not fire, you can't hit a reset button and have the odds of firing go up significantly, just like when your car breaks down an electrical reboot is rarely a solution to resolve the problem. This is the challenge, and so long as the device is sophisticated enough to distinguish one user to the next, it will be too sophisticated to ever be trusted by someone in a life and death situation.
In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.
Don't forget, that if you are short on cash you can sell the improvements for half their price, flip the deed over and mortgage it.
Oops, this is about the moon, sorry, I had it confused with a different fictional scenario.
Sorry Steve Ballmer, didn't mean to belittle all that good work you are doing over there...
What Intellectual Ventures is trying to do (as they suggest) is create a patent environment where at least the relevant property can be bought/sold for proper licensing purposes. Consider instead the model where the Apples or Microsofts of the world hold patents and refuse to license (or do so reluctantly and at an extorted price) and ask yourself which you prefer. If reform isn't coming (and no signs would suggest that it is) then this might be the lesser of two evils.
Or maybe not, who knows.
If you don't know exactly what QT is/does since the first time you compiled it in order to run kvirc back in 1998... Then I don't know what you are even doing here.
You must be trolling... the 8% has no magnified impact on the bottom line because it is already AT THE BOTTOM. Samsung's revenue just from the new S3 sales will more than make up for it, so they are sitting back thinking "hell if that's all it cost us to copy the iphone we should have done it 5 years ago!"
Well, go find some tech CEOs and ask them how they feel about giving up 1 month of profit and get back to us.
My guess that you won't find any who are as nonchalant about the idea as you are. And Samsung will be no different. Because regardless of what percentage it is of their total profit, $1 billion is still real money.
The premise was that Steve Jobs' aforementioned "thermonuclear war" was essentially a loss from this court decision... And if you are really delusional enough to think that an 8% drop in operating profit is the equivalent of nuclear devastation, then so be it and have a nice day (no one in the business world would agree with you though, fyi.)
Samsung electronics had $148Bn in revenue last year. So let's just say you earned $50k last year; this is like losing a court case about how your work was supposedly derived totally on the designs of someone else, and you being ordered to pay $335 and being told you are OK to keep "doin' your thang".
So the question is, how big of a deal is $335?
Revenue isn't the important number. Any damages that Samsung has to pay to Apple will come out of their *operating profit*. For Q1-Q3 2012, Samsung reported an operating profit of $18.3 billion. Assume another $5 billion for Q4 (not yet announced) and their total 2012 profit comes to ~$23 billion. So a $1 billion payout to Apple would be about 4% of Samsung's total 2012 profit. No company wants to cough up 4% of its total profits to a competitor. It wouldn't bankrupt them, but it would hurt.
To use your analogy, that would be the equivalent of somebody making $50k having to pony up $2k. Not enough to bankrupt, but certainly enough to sting.
Bad analogy guy would even disagree with you there. My conversion to a base of $50k was to make it similar to the average US salary (this is gross revenue, not net, so the $335 was appropriate). But let's play it your way... Their electronics division had a net of $12Bn last year (nice and round since there are 12 months in a year). That means they were ordered to basically forego 1 month of profit. So if you think about how much money you blow on worthless things every month (like going to the movies, saving up for a vacation, etc) and you are asked to give that up as a one-time penalty for infringement, how damaging is that?
I think that "fondleslab" (ipad) and jesusphone (iphone) are excellent sobriquets for those devices given the worship and adoration your average iSheep's (apple user) view of those devices.
And here I was thinking that "fondleslab" was the best new word I would learn today, and you go and throw "sobriquet" out there...
Unfortunately Steve Jobs is not alive to celebrate his thermonuclear war flops.
Yeah... they could only squeeze a billion dollars in damages out of that verdict... I mean... it's like a token verdict... I mean, Apple technically won, but reality is the damages they were awarded really means they lost. What can you even buy with a billion dollars these days? a cup of coffee? a gumball? a postage stamp? A billion dollars isn't even worth the ink and paper it's printed on! So maybe they can recycle the paper in the money and get something for their troubles... recycled note pads or something...
Samsung electronics had $148Bn in revenue last year. So let's just say you earned $50k last year; this is like losing a court case about how your work was supposedly derived totally on the designs of someone else, and you being ordered to pay $335 and being told you are OK to keep "doin' your thang".
So the question is, how big of a deal is $335?