I'd be willing to bet that fatalities correlates at least as well with speed differences as it does with absolute speeds. Raising the limit could easily see the slowest speed on the road move closer to the highest speed on the road, resulting in fewer accidents. Imagine how few accidents there could be if everyone went exactly 85 mph, with only small and temporary changes to let cars merge on and off.
It's like George Carlin said: no matter how fast you are driving, everyone going faster than you is a maniac and everyone going slower than you is an idiot. If there were a "do the speedlimit" button on cars, that assured to cut fatalities in half if everyone used it (basically stopping a "9/11 grade" fatality event every four months), you can still bet that only about 10% of the people would do so; the rest would be out there causing a mess shouting one of the following: "you cant expect me to go slow just because everyone else is", "you cant tell me how fast to drive" or "you have to be crazy to think i will go that fast".
Ultimately, I feel the real problem is that people have been trained to rely on the government to tell them what's right and wrong, what's safe and what's dangerous. It's total bullshit.
Oh and one more thing: People are VERY bad at judging risk, even when they don't take the government's word for it. It's in our nature to be really bad at it, and it's basically insurmountable unless you DO put your trust in some external resource (like a group dedicated to collecting and interpreting risk data about travel, i.e. the NTSB, NHTSA, etc.) If there were no speedlimit people would, for the most part, drive INCREDIBLY riskily. Look at any other practice involving risk (before it got limited/banned) and you will see the same pattern emerge. When it comes to life threatening situations, we are just utterly horrible at figuring out what our acceptable level of risk is and then acting accordingly. Look at FOUR LOKO for a very recent example, but they dot history since time immemorial.
I agree that it increases the potential for Darwinism,>
I think if you look at the whole situation, it is complete Darwinism. This is a toll road, no one is making you use it, and there are other ways (although perhaps not as desirable) to get from Austin to San Antonio. There are also well published statistics about how fatalities increase as a result of going at a higher speed (which should be pretty obvious if you give it more than a few minutes of thought). This all adds up to the drivers on that road (all of them) basically accepting the increased risk in exchange for going faster. If you want to preserve yourself (and the others in your car) you will take a different route. Natural selection, plain and simple.
Yes, nothing says "meaningful to most people" like some good old scientific notation... Do you get that 60% of the US doesn't have a college degree, much less multiple degrees, mr. smartass?
You are correct and I don't dispute your understanding of the process... But have you heard of Bitcoin launderers? The trail on the other side of the laundry would be "Dead" since there are so many putting money in and then taking it out in varying transaction sizes to varying numbers of wallets. Unless the particular laundry they used was compromised by the investigators, they would get away scot free (minus the laundry fee, of course).
the end of horror stories about accounts and company pages being shut down arbitrarily by Facebook
And the beginning of horror stories about fake accounts, porn pics getting scattered about willy-nilly, and countless "what if the password reset gets hijacked?" claims, problems, attempted (bad) solutions, etc. Yes, the decentralized model is clearly the way to go.
Fat chance. What is needed is a "new" centralized Facebook, but by a company that doesn't have to justify a $100B valuation (perhaps built purely on open source code) with the only stated goal of being "good to users". If Google+ can't gain critical mass (although it might, eventually) then I doubt any other such concoction has a chance. You are more likely to see Facebook "utilitied" by the government after being convicted of having a de facto monopoly. Maybe then, some of those things that Facebook seems to do wrong can get changed for the better (with a heaping helping of things changing for the worse).
I will leave the hard science to good books or documentary shows (as mentioned by others).
The benefit to some sort of entanglement-based communication option (like between a ground station and a satellite, as mentioned) is that it would not be subject to eavesdropping/weather (since the information travels in some sort of quantum ether that we don't understand) and that the delay would be exactly that of the speed of light (as demonstrated by other experiments) whereas currently, radio waves traveling through the atmosphere experience a speed slower than light due to all the dang atoms in the way.
You CAN create bitcoins out of nothing. It's called mining. Thats part of the whole deal with Bitcoins. A bitcoin is nothing but a really hard to create crypto string (the factor of some unimaginably large number). Transaction control (to prevent double spending) takes place on anonymous nodes, so when you say "i am giving these coins to that person" the transaction is queued up and carried out by god-knows-who, and the resulting bitcoins are *nothing like the original*. At least, that's the theory behind it. The only way to "follow the money" is to have access to the records of each individual in the chain. If the perps create a few anonymous accounts, "launder" the money, and then transfer it to a final account for spending, it would be nigh impossible to figure out where the $1M in the final account came from (to say conclusively that it was from the original $1M paid in ransom, like in this case.)
Flaws and government "influence", of course, may or may not exist to completely negate all of that.
The thing about Bitcoins is you can "transact" them into something completely unattached to the original. So, $1M worth of crypto codes gets sent to the blackmailer, they immediately turn it into $1M worth of equally valid, but completely different crypto codes (probably using servers scattered around the world) and poof, the trail is dead. That's the good, bad, and ugly of Bitcoin in a nutshell.
In North America, Teachers are consistently one of the least respected, poorest paid professionals, yet they work some of the longest hours (out of altruism) of anyone. Those teachers who don't burn out after their first few years, and continue to make it a career are the true heroes.
And yet, somehow they (or at least a plurality of them) still feel that the unions are doing them a service by being around to protect them from abuse! Despite the fact that the unions soak up untold millions of dollars every year for their own (mostly political) purposes, and protect the teachers that work way less instead of way more (there are plenty of those types around too) they willingly still get behind such a detrimental organization...
Something is really wrong with the way that works.
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!"
Yeah, that's pretty bad. It will take cases like this for people to realize that anything they say online is instantly public and viewable by the entire world.
Speech has consequences. If you threaten to blow up airports, you will probably be prosecuted.
People comfortable with twitter just presume that nothing on it is to be taken seriously (and they would almost always be correct). However if you are some security manager who doesnt know a tweet from a poke, and someone says to you "hey someone broadcast on the internet that they are going to blow up the airport" you are going to treat it just like a phone call to the same effect, or a guy outside with a megaphone, or any other direct display of a threat. Us internet-savvy know-it-alls can easily discount just about anything we read, but not everyone is as comfortable doing that. I think that's the real lesson to be learned; online actions have very real consequences and unless you are prepared for them, maybe you should keep your "jokes" to yourself.
Do we want to live in a world where it's perfectly acceptable to broadcast threats of mass violence with the expectation of no reprisal at all? Or put another way, the next time some threat is made, and it is summarily ignored but it IS carried out, are we going to be OK with the conclusion that "well there was nothing we could do, who knew the guy who tweeted to tell us he was going to shoot up the place was serious?"
The saddest part of this story is that it could've been stopped before it began: the manager who discovered the tweet, the airport police, the police, none of them thought there was a credible threat but rather than assume responsibility they decided to pass the buck to someone else effectively pushing the case further and further up the chain.
Like you would sit at your job and say "hey, some guy threatened to blow up my building, via a tweet... I am so sure this is not credible that I am willing to literally bet my (and many others') life that it isn't credible. I think i will willfully ignore it, and tell everyone that contrary to what THEY might think, there is no threat." Come on.
The saddest part of the story is that some idiot thought it would be funny to joke about blowing up an airport. That is really it in a nutshell. If he had come up with some other joke, ANY other joke, maybe even a funny one, he wouldnt be in this predicament.
The patent system has been bubkis for a long time now. It is merely a feeding ground for the way too many lawyers that graduate each year with nothing to do. It's original purpose was to protect the hard work of engineers and inventors while providing the governments with a way to track the technological explosion of the last few centuries. It unfortunately is not designed to handle the fact that ideas can be separately developed in isolation. This weakness combined with the overpopulation of lawyers has lead us to this point where we have to deal with these worthless legal battles over and over again.
The sad thing is that pretty much any politician, on either side (or in the middle) will tell you the same thing: the patent system protects our innovators. Never mind that almost all politicians are/were lawyers themselves, and that lawyers as a professional group have more influence than any other when it comes to the political process... We must keep the laws because they protect our innovators!
Because you can't make calls from a device that is set to vibrate and not ring on an incoming call, right?
If the patent for "the process for setting a mobile phone to only vibrate during an incoming call when in a particular location" was really granted to them, I think the prior art for that was seen about 20 minutes after the first mobile phone was put into a consumer's hand. Really, who signs off on this shit?
The average high in Mountain View never gets below 57F, and the average low never below freezing. Shut up about cold. And what is it with everything north of LA being "northern california"? You are as bad as "upstate" new yorkers. You live in the middle of California, and still at a lower latitude than most of the US.
At the same time, a lot of people see the verdict as Apple == Samsung, or more importantly, Samsung == Apple. Why bother shelling out extra for the Apple device and pay the Apple Tax if the Samsung one is exactly the same.
That would only work if there was a perception that the prices on Apple products are somehow artificially high (or that the features are non equivalent and lacking in the iPhone)... Seeing as how you can get "the best" iPhone 4S 16GB for the exact same price, and with the exact same contract, as you can get the Samsung Galaxy S3 16GB (oddly, not even in question for import restrictions as of now,) if this is a factor at all it must be some sort of subconscious price discrimination because the numbers themselves match up.
Maybe Apple really managed to convince its customers that Samsung phones are equivalent or better, so they are being overcharged? Or is it a rush to buy the currently best smartphone in the market in case there is an injunction on its sale in the US any time soon?"
It's the latter. Hell, I have been asked (as someone who is known for reading a tech blog or two) if one should worry about their *existing* handset being taken away or somehow immobilized, thanks to the verdict. People just don't get what is going on, and some of them who interpreted the news coverage as an ad for Samsung, saw the "banned sales" headlines and rushed out to buy devices. Hey, if they are worth banning, they must be good right? Just like (make-believe) gun bans threatened in the wake of certain political parties, or bans on the sale of incandescent light bulbs. People react strangely, and they almost NEVER react in favor of whatever it is that the government/courts/etc. threaten to, they do the opposite.
so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California
Yes, and for free, if you order now, you will also receive: *Crushingly high real estate prices *Monstrously overcrowded prisons *Bankrupt schools
BUT WAIT! THERES MORE! Be one of the first 100 callers and receive, as our special gift to you: *Shortages of electricity and water! *Political leadership totally devoid of morality, consistency, or backbone!
But seriously, California is a "hotbed" for ONE single reason: The weather is nice pretty much all year long. Anyone who lives there and tries to sell you on something else is lying to themselves. People go for the nice weather, and they put up with the constant bullshit because hey, it like never snows, unless you live in the mountains, which are only like 2 hours' drive away from the beaches... So why not live there? Right? And once you get enough smart people in one place (they are bound to turn up when you have 30 million people to start with) things just sort of take shape.
So, UK, you want your own Silicon Valley? Get a warm-weather generator, a couple of nice schools, a semi-pristine coastline, then fill it over the top with people, and wait 50 years. You will probably get something like that, or hey maybe you will end up with something like Haiti. Could go either way.
To be fair, some things do "magically" get out of their way like curtains, pets, most other humans, soft furniture like pillows, etc. When you are 10 months old, these are mostly indistinguishable so it's a real chore to remember what moves and what doesn't. Isn't watching babies learn just the coolest thing?
If the baby is really going to learn, they need something to run that robot in to. The key feature of the robot, if it an extension of the physical self, is to provide proper (not too harsh, not too soft) feedback when the baby runs into something that wants to block its attempts at doing something... like overprotective parents.
Kidding aside, the earliest learning that takes place is the simplest form of "this works, that doesn't" which is why kids spend so much time hitting things against other things just to see what happens. Recreating that experience in a mobility-limited child is not easy, but also very important.
You don't read the news on the intarwebs much do you?
No, I'm just no so egotistical that I think I'm superior to a jury when I've only seen a tiny fraction of the evidence as presented on opinion sites.
Actually the jury was shown LESS than is available from "opinion sites" like little old slashdot. It's up to the judge to decide what's admissible (and for what reason) when it comes to the jury. When it comes to "opinion sites", anything goes. What sounds more thorough to you?
It's funny how you hear so much about tort reform and other such garbage from politicians but you don't hear a peep about patent trolling or the abuse of IP rights which is more of a hampering force on our economy than all of the malpractice lawsuits in the history of forever ever have been or will be.
Apple is an American company, the reason is pretty obvious. You can be sure that if the IP lawsuit traction *against* them overseas continues, the US politicians and media will be up in arms about how foreign countries are being anti-competitive and monopoly-enforcing and basically anti-American. National interest is determined solely by self-perceived "justice" (or lack thereof) so when it goes against us (even though this trend doesnt really benefit anyone but lawyers) that's when you will start to hear about it.
Given the millions upon millions spent by both Apple and Samsung in this up to this point, and the millions more to be spent on appeals, I suspect a reasonable compromise could be had whereby each side pledges a stipend for the expert pool. There might even be a "loser pays" clause in there somewhere to add a little extra incentive to not be overly litigious.
Patents are basically a protection racket. Companies (like Apple, Samsung, etc.) shovel money at attorneys, into the patent office, into litigation, into licensing rights etc. in order to maintain an air of exclusivity over what is really a kind of pathetic "innovation" (rounded corners? wtf?) The narrowness threshold needs to be raised a LOT if the current system is to be kept tenable. If not, the precedent we see here (where a jury can be swayed on a pro-patent line with flimsy evidence) will cause a firestorm across the industry as every company sues every other company that hasn't bought enough protection through licensing rights. Innovation will cease to be important since every company will profit when someone buys any given smartphone (or other smartgadget).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be willing to bet that fatalities correlates at least as well with speed differences as it does with absolute speeds. Raising the limit could easily see the slowest speed on the road move closer to the highest speed on the road, resulting in fewer accidents. Imagine how few accidents there could be if everyone went exactly 85 mph, with only small and temporary changes to let cars merge on and off.
It's like George Carlin said: no matter how fast you are driving, everyone going faster than you is a maniac and everyone going slower than you is an idiot. If there were a "do the speedlimit" button on cars, that assured to cut fatalities in half if everyone used it (basically stopping a "9/11 grade" fatality event every four months), you can still bet that only about 10% of the people would do so; the rest would be out there causing a mess shouting one of the following: "you cant expect me to go slow just because everyone else is", "you cant tell me how fast to drive" or "you have to be crazy to think i will go that fast".
>
Ultimately, I feel the real problem is that people have been trained to rely on the government to tell them what's right and wrong, what's safe and what's dangerous. It's total bullshit.
Oh and one more thing: People are VERY bad at judging risk, even when they don't take the government's word for it. It's in our nature to be really bad at it, and it's basically insurmountable unless you DO put your trust in some external resource (like a group dedicated to collecting and interpreting risk data about travel, i.e. the NTSB, NHTSA, etc.) If there were no speedlimit people would, for the most part, drive INCREDIBLY riskily. Look at any other practice involving risk (before it got limited/banned) and you will see the same pattern emerge. When it comes to life threatening situations, we are just utterly horrible at figuring out what our acceptable level of risk is and then acting accordingly. Look at FOUR LOKO for a very recent example, but they dot history since time immemorial.
I agree that it increases the potential for Darwinism,>
I think if you look at the whole situation, it is complete Darwinism. This is a toll road, no one is making you use it, and there are other ways (although perhaps not as desirable) to get from Austin to San Antonio. There are also well published statistics about how fatalities increase as a result of going at a higher speed (which should be pretty obvious if you give it more than a few minutes of thought). This all adds up to the drivers on that road (all of them) basically accepting the increased risk in exchange for going faster. If you want to preserve yourself (and the others in your car) you will take a different route. Natural selection, plain and simple.
Yes, nothing says "meaningful to most people" like some good old scientific notation... Do you get that 60% of the US doesn't have a college degree, much less multiple degrees, mr. smartass?
You are correct and I don't dispute your understanding of the process... But have you heard of Bitcoin launderers? The trail on the other side of the laundry would be "Dead" since there are so many putting money in and then taking it out in varying transaction sizes to varying numbers of wallets. Unless the particular laundry they used was compromised by the investigators, they would get away scot free (minus the laundry fee, of course).
the end of horror stories about accounts and company pages being shut down arbitrarily by Facebook
And the beginning of horror stories about fake accounts, porn pics getting scattered about willy-nilly, and countless "what if the password reset gets hijacked?" claims, problems, attempted (bad) solutions, etc. Yes, the decentralized model is clearly the way to go.
Fat chance. What is needed is a "new" centralized Facebook, but by a company that doesn't have to justify a $100B valuation (perhaps built purely on open source code) with the only stated goal of being "good to users". If Google+ can't gain critical mass (although it might, eventually) then I doubt any other such concoction has a chance. You are more likely to see Facebook "utilitied" by the government after being convicted of having a de facto monopoly. Maybe then, some of those things that Facebook seems to do wrong can get changed for the better (with a heaping helping of things changing for the worse).
I will leave the hard science to good books or documentary shows (as mentioned by others).
The benefit to some sort of entanglement-based communication option (like between a ground station and a satellite, as mentioned) is that it would not be subject to eavesdropping/weather (since the information travels in some sort of quantum ether that we don't understand) and that the delay would be exactly that of the speed of light (as demonstrated by other experiments) whereas currently, radio waves traveling through the atmosphere experience a speed slower than light due to all the dang atoms in the way.
You CAN create bitcoins out of nothing. It's called mining. Thats part of the whole deal with Bitcoins. A bitcoin is nothing but a really hard to create crypto string (the factor of some unimaginably large number). Transaction control (to prevent double spending) takes place on anonymous nodes, so when you say "i am giving these coins to that person" the transaction is queued up and carried out by god-knows-who, and the resulting bitcoins are *nothing like the original*. At least, that's the theory behind it. The only way to "follow the money" is to have access to the records of each individual in the chain. If the perps create a few anonymous accounts, "launder" the money, and then transfer it to a final account for spending, it would be nigh impossible to figure out where the $1M in the final account came from (to say conclusively that it was from the original $1M paid in ransom, like in this case.)
Flaws and government "influence", of course, may or may not exist to completely negate all of that.
The thing about Bitcoins is you can "transact" them into something completely unattached to the original. So, $1M worth of crypto codes gets sent to the blackmailer, they immediately turn it into $1M worth of equally valid, but completely different crypto codes (probably using servers scattered around the world) and poof, the trail is dead. That's the good, bad, and ugly of Bitcoin in a nutshell.
"you all" = "top level plutocrats
No, we can't use Pluto any more, it's not a planet. Uranuscrats?
Neptocrats sounds appropriate...
In North America, Teachers are consistently one of the least respected, poorest paid professionals, yet they work some of the longest hours (out of altruism) of anyone. Those teachers who don't burn out after their first few years, and continue to make it a career are the true heroes.
And yet, somehow they (or at least a plurality of them) still feel that the unions are doing them a service by being around to protect them from abuse! Despite the fact that the unions soak up untold millions of dollars every year for their own (mostly political) purposes, and protect the teachers that work way less instead of way more (there are plenty of those types around too) they willingly still get behind such a detrimental organization...
Something is really wrong with the way that works.
Here is his tweet:
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!"
Yeah, that's pretty bad. It will take cases like this for people to realize that anything they say online is instantly public and viewable by the entire world.
Speech has consequences. If you threaten to blow up airports, you will probably be prosecuted.
People comfortable with twitter just presume that nothing on it is to be taken seriously (and they would almost always be correct). However if you are some security manager who doesnt know a tweet from a poke, and someone says to you "hey someone broadcast on the internet that they are going to blow up the airport" you are going to treat it just like a phone call to the same effect, or a guy outside with a megaphone, or any other direct display of a threat. Us internet-savvy know-it-alls can easily discount just about anything we read, but not everyone is as comfortable doing that. I think that's the real lesson to be learned; online actions have very real consequences and unless you are prepared for them, maybe you should keep your "jokes" to yourself.
Do we want to live in a world where it's perfectly acceptable to broadcast threats of mass violence with the expectation of no reprisal at all? Or put another way, the next time some threat is made, and it is summarily ignored but it IS carried out, are we going to be OK with the conclusion that "well there was nothing we could do, who knew the guy who tweeted to tell us he was going to shoot up the place was serious?"
The saddest part of this story is that it could've been stopped before it began: the manager who discovered the tweet, the airport police, the police, none of them thought there was a credible threat but rather than assume responsibility they decided to pass the buck to someone else effectively pushing the case further and further up the chain.
Like you would sit at your job and say "hey, some guy threatened to blow up my building, via a tweet... I am so sure this is not credible that I am willing to literally bet my (and many others') life that it isn't credible. I think i will willfully ignore it, and tell everyone that contrary to what THEY might think, there is no threat." Come on.
The saddest part of the story is that some idiot thought it would be funny to joke about blowing up an airport. That is really it in a nutshell. If he had come up with some other joke, ANY other joke, maybe even a funny one, he wouldnt be in this predicament.
The patent system has been bubkis for a long time now. It is merely a feeding ground for the way too many lawyers that graduate each year with nothing to do. It's original purpose was to protect the hard work of engineers and inventors while providing the governments with a way to track the technological explosion of the last few centuries. It unfortunately is not designed to handle the fact that ideas can be separately developed in isolation. This weakness combined with the overpopulation of lawyers has lead us to this point where we have to deal with these worthless legal battles over and over again.
The sad thing is that pretty much any politician, on either side (or in the middle) will tell you the same thing: the patent system protects our innovators. Never mind that almost all politicians are/were lawyers themselves, and that lawyers as a professional group have more influence than any other when it comes to the political process... We must keep the laws because they protect our innovators!
Because you can't make calls from a device that is set to vibrate and not ring on an incoming call, right?
If the patent for "the process for setting a mobile phone to only vibrate during an incoming call when in a particular location" was really granted to them, I think the prior art for that was seen about 20 minutes after the first mobile phone was put into a consumer's hand. Really, who signs off on this shit?
The average high in Mountain View never gets below 57F, and the average low never below freezing. Shut up about cold. And what is it with everything north of LA being "northern california"? You are as bad as "upstate" new yorkers. You live in the middle of California, and still at a lower latitude than most of the US.
At the same time, a lot of people see the verdict as Apple == Samsung, or more importantly, Samsung == Apple. Why bother shelling out extra for the Apple device and pay the Apple Tax if the Samsung one is exactly the same.
That would only work if there was a perception that the prices on Apple products are somehow artificially high (or that the features are non equivalent and lacking in the iPhone)... Seeing as how you can get "the best" iPhone 4S 16GB for the exact same price, and with the exact same contract, as you can get the Samsung Galaxy S3 16GB (oddly, not even in question for import restrictions as of now,) if this is a factor at all it must be some sort of subconscious price discrimination because the numbers themselves match up.
Maybe Apple really managed to convince its customers that Samsung phones are equivalent or better, so they are being overcharged? Or is it a rush to buy the currently best smartphone in the market in case there is an injunction on its sale in the US any time soon?"
It's the latter. Hell, I have been asked (as someone who is known for reading a tech blog or two) if one should worry about their *existing* handset being taken away or somehow immobilized, thanks to the verdict. People just don't get what is going on, and some of them who interpreted the news coverage as an ad for Samsung, saw the "banned sales" headlines and rushed out to buy devices. Hey, if they are worth banning, they must be good right? Just like (make-believe) gun bans threatened in the wake of certain political parties, or bans on the sale of incandescent light bulbs. People react strangely, and they almost NEVER react in favor of whatever it is that the government/courts/etc. threaten to, they do the opposite.
so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California
Yes, and for free, if you order now, you will also receive:
*Crushingly high real estate prices
*Monstrously overcrowded prisons
*Bankrupt schools
BUT WAIT! THERES MORE! Be one of the first 100 callers and receive, as our special gift to you:
*Shortages of electricity and water!
*Political leadership totally devoid of morality, consistency, or backbone!
But seriously, California is a "hotbed" for ONE single reason: The weather is nice pretty much all year long. Anyone who lives there and tries to sell you on something else is lying to themselves. People go for the nice weather, and they put up with the constant bullshit because hey, it like never snows, unless you live in the mountains, which are only like 2 hours' drive away from the beaches... So why not live there? Right? And once you get enough smart people in one place (they are bound to turn up when you have 30 million people to start with) things just sort of take shape.
So, UK, you want your own Silicon Valley? Get a warm-weather generator, a couple of nice schools, a semi-pristine coastline, then fill it over the top with people, and wait 50 years. You will probably get something like that, or hey maybe you will end up with something like Haiti. Could go either way.
To be fair, some things do "magically" get out of their way like curtains, pets, most other humans, soft furniture like pillows, etc. When you are 10 months old, these are mostly indistinguishable so it's a real chore to remember what moves and what doesn't. Isn't watching babies learn just the coolest thing?
If the baby is really going to learn, they need something to run that robot in to. The key feature of the robot, if it an extension of the physical self, is to provide proper (not too harsh, not too soft) feedback when the baby runs into something that wants to block its attempts at doing something... like overprotective parents.
Kidding aside, the earliest learning that takes place is the simplest form of "this works, that doesn't" which is why kids spend so much time hitting things against other things just to see what happens. Recreating that experience in a mobility-limited child is not easy, but also very important.
You don't read the news on the intarwebs much do you?
No, I'm just no so egotistical that I think I'm superior to a jury when I've only seen a tiny fraction of the evidence as presented on opinion sites.
Actually the jury was shown LESS than is available from "opinion sites" like little old slashdot. It's up to the judge to decide what's admissible (and for what reason) when it comes to the jury. When it comes to "opinion sites", anything goes. What sounds more thorough to you?
It's funny how you hear so much about tort reform and other such garbage from politicians but you don't hear a peep about patent trolling or the abuse of IP rights which is more of a hampering force on our economy than all of the malpractice lawsuits in the history of forever ever have been or will be.
Apple is an American company, the reason is pretty obvious. You can be sure that if the IP lawsuit traction *against* them overseas continues, the US politicians and media will be up in arms about how foreign countries are being anti-competitive and monopoly-enforcing and basically anti-American. National interest is determined solely by self-perceived "justice" (or lack thereof) so when it goes against us (even though this trend doesnt really benefit anyone but lawyers) that's when you will start to hear about it.
Given the millions upon millions spent by both Apple and Samsung in this up to this point, and the millions more to be spent on appeals, I suspect a reasonable compromise could be had whereby each side pledges a stipend for the expert pool. There might even be a "loser pays" clause in there somewhere to add a little extra incentive to not be overly litigious.
Patents are basically a protection racket. Companies (like Apple, Samsung, etc.) shovel money at attorneys, into the patent office, into litigation, into licensing rights etc. in order to maintain an air of exclusivity over what is really a kind of pathetic "innovation" (rounded corners? wtf?) The narrowness threshold needs to be raised a LOT if the current system is to be kept tenable. If not, the precedent we see here (where a jury can be swayed on a pro-patent line with flimsy evidence) will cause a firestorm across the industry as every company sues every other company that hasn't bought enough protection through licensing rights. Innovation will cease to be important since every company will profit when someone buys any given smartphone (or other smartgadget).