Except that is an article from 2010 about possible insider trading, not about the alleged market manipulation by driving down the stock price through rumors and FUD like seemed to start happening in 2012.
I thought I read somewhere that they were already expecting to use 39A for Falcon Heavy launches. And they'll need a big pad like 39A/B to launch their even bigger rockets in planning like the Falcon X.
Without your pixelated screens, flickery 24fps movies, and scratchy phonograph records, you won't know what's real and what's virtual anymore? We can't have that, now can we?
Let me make it even simpler. Anything that hurts a bully is a good thing, so whenever a company that makes over a few billion in revenue gets screwed, whether it's Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, etc. you should rejoice. You don't think any of them got to their dominant position by being nice guys, especially the Korean Chaebol and the privacy invading ad company, do you?
Why does this stupid fandroid argument still get modded insightful on/.? Set aside the ignorance on the difference between design patents (which shouldn't really be patents in the first place, but have to be registered as patents because you can't copyright an industrial design for some reason) and FRAND patents. Apple did not generically patent all "rounded corners" as the fandroids claim. They patented which corners were rounded, and by how much. Compare the iPhone to the Nokia Lumia. Both are minimalist designs. Both have rounded corners. But the Lumia doesn't look anything like the iPhone, thus not infringing on the "rounded corners" design patent, while also clearly showing that having the exact same rounded corners as the iPhone is not a necessity for a smartphone.
Personally, I don't think FRAND goes far enough, because it just leads to squabbling about what is "fair" and "reasonable". Obviously, the party who owns the patent and the party who wants to make a new standards compliant device will disagree as to how much is fair. From the perspective of the new entrant, the patent owner may have fleeced all previous licensees with regards to the "F" and the "R" in order to maintain a higher across-the-board licencing rate under the guise of "ND". Of course, from the perspective of the patent owner, this is not the case at all.
So in my opinion to avoid this sort of thing in the future, if a patented technology is to be included in a standards-body ratified standard, the patent in question should be made royalty-free. You have to choose: either you can keep your invention to yourself, you can license your invention to others for a fee, or you can have your invention included in an industry standard. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. I don't care if it's Samsung, Apple, Nokia, or whoever, nobody should be able to hold an industry ransom over a feature required by all participants in that industry, even for a "fair and reasonable" amount.
I completely understand defending one's territory, but Apple is *clearly* not actually threatened by the rest of the industry. Their success is only somewhat based on their technology - they should have been more gracious about sharing/selling it. Instead, they aggressively pursued an entire industry. Now, they have no friends and are trapped in a room with a bunch of scared dogs. Not position I'd like to be in literally or metaphorically.
It might help to gain some perspective as to why the iPhone was so heavily patented in the first place. In 2007, while Apple was making some progress with their recovery from almost ceasing to exist in the late 90's, the Mac was still very much a niche device, and the strength of the company was largely based on a single-purpose device which while trendy and popular, was a bit to limited to base the company's future on. So when the iPhone was announced in the summer of 2007, it was as important to the company as the release of the original Macintosh in 1984. It wasn't just a simple device like the iPod whose success was only based on it being trendy, but a platform that the company could base its whole existence on.
When the Macintosh was released, it quickly became the dominant personal computer, due to it being the only computer to speak of that you could buy with a useful GUI. Yes, there was the Xerox Star that came before it, but the Star was an absolute flop in the marketplace, and while it was the first to have a GUI, it was relatively primitive. For the Macintosh, Apple invented several important enhancements to the GUI, such as drag and drop, to make it truly useful to non computer experts. But then in 1995, Microsoft came along with Windows 95, which was a direct imitation of the Macintosh, plus a start menu. Apple sued Microsoft, and probably could have won except for the fact that Apple's incompetent management failed to protect the Mac OS properly, instead opting for a license deal with Microsoft that was overly favorable to Microsoft. Many believed that it was a direct consequence of this botched licensing deal that caused Windows to become dominant, pushing the formerly dominant Macintosh to niche status and nearly destroying Apple in the process.
When the iPhone was released, even though Apple was recovering, it was still struggling. And Apple fans still remembered why Apple was struggling. So Apple was determined to not repeat in 2007 the mistake that it had made with the Macintosh in 1995, and they patented the heck out of the thing. If you watch the iPhone announcement video, you can see how the crowd reacts to Steve Job's statement about the patents. And Jobs makes sure to tell the crowd about the patents because everyone still remembered Microsoft in 1995. I think that at the time, Apple was probably expecting that it would be Microsoft who would seek to copy the iPhone, like they did the Macintosh. Nobody foresaw that Microsoft would be blindsided by the iPhone, and that the threat would come from Google instead. At the time, Android was just a poor knockoff of the blackberry, which was the type of device the iPhone was intended to make obsolete anyway. So I think that the patent arsenal was amassed with the expectation that they would have to use it in a single-front war against Microsoft.
I think Steve Jobs was truly surprised that the competition to the iPhone came from Google instead of Microsoft. And it may be in the context of that genuine surprise that he decided to "go thermonuclear". He didn't know the extent of the new threat, and had no idea of how dangerous it might be. The fact that the CEO of Google happened to sit on his board probably didn't help his state of mind either. So with an arsenal at hand, and a perceived betrayal of a partner who was now a giant unknown, he felt he had no choice but to attack. I don't think Tim Cook likes this state of affairs at all. He would rather be done with all the patent battles, and just focus on making cool products people want to buy. But as the war
The best part of Robot Wars/BattleBots was the fact that the teams designed and built their own robots. It was a competition of ingenuity as well as skill. If the competitors don't get to design their robots, this is nothing more than a gimmick, and will probably (hopefully) flop.
That definition seems a bit pedantic. A better fine art analogy would be to compare a CD to a cast bronze sculpture. The artist initially works in one medium (clay/wax, recording tape), and then a process is undertaken to copy that work to a more permanent medium (bronze, record/CD). The actual final work of art is the durable copy, and the malleable original is just the means to create it.
As well as BALLOONS! Balloons are actually marketed and sold to children, whereas magnetic spheres were not. And there have been many more cases of children dying from choking on balloons than from swallowing magnets. It is the fact that buckyballs are banned and balloons are not that makes this asinine, not whether or not the magnets are hazardous at all.
To be honest, the coating on my genuine Buckeballs (tm) brand neodymium spherical magnets chips and flakes off as well. Not much can hold up to the force of those magnets clicking together. I haven't had any break myself, but I know people who have.
No, he's going to purge the previous leadership and replace them with his friends and/or lackeys.
If that was the case, he would have canned Ive, and wouldn't have bothered convincing Mansfield to come back when he wanted to retire this summer. And Federighi, who was promoted to SVP by Cook this summer is an insider who worked at Jobs's NeXT.
No, Forstall was canned because he didn't get along with the rest of the executives, pushed for over the top skeuomorphism that everyone else in the company and even the rabid fanboys hate, and fucked up the maps thing. He was holding the company back.
Down 15% because the wall street analysts are playing shenanigans. Amazon posts a $274 million LOSS, and there isn't a single article in the news about it. Apple posts profits that are a little bit less than the made up numbers the analysts pulled out of their asses, and all the news sources practically shit themselves over the 'disappointing' news, conveniently ignoring the fact that the record 8.2 billion in profits happen to be 26% up over the year ago quarter and their best 4th quarter ever.
It's pure cost benefit analysis. Sending people out to do planetary science costs a lot more than sending robots out to do science. If science is the goal, then for every manned science mission to a single destination, they could send ten robotic missions to multiple destinations. A manned mission has to carry all the stuff to keep people alive as well as carrying all the science stuff, and the more you carry, the more it costs.
Now I like Apple products as much as your average/. poster doesn't, but this namedrop almost makes me want to swear off Apple and go Linux and Android for the rest of my life.
Lithium is found in batteries for small electronics. For instance, lithium-based batteries are found inside the Apple iPhone 5.
Considering every piece of electronics that exists uses a lithium chemistry of one sort or another, singling out the iPhone was thoroughly unnecessary and just pandering to a popular product.
Not only is TFA not talking about Hawking radiation, Hawking radiation doesn't even technically escape. Hawking radiation particles are actually formerly virtual particles that are generated just outside of the event horizon. Virtual particles are created in particle-antiparticle pairs which then instantly self-annihilate before the universe notices. But when the pair appears just outside of a black hole, sometimes one particle falls into the hole allowing the other to continue existing. This produces the illusion that radiation is coming out of the hole, where none actually is.
What about automation? If fully automated robotic assembly lines can build cars, why can't they build smartphones? Or any assembly line product for that matter? With an automated factory in the US, they could hire a tenth of the workers, and pay them ten times as much.
What makes this a big deal, is that prior to this it was an open question whether the Alpha Centauri system could support planets orbiting the individual stars or not. Now that it has been shown that planets can orbit the individual stars in this system, as opposed to orbiting outside both stars around the common center of gravity as is the case for most planets in binary systems, the probability of their being more planets including possible ones in the habitable zones of the stars just got a whole lot bigger.
Having RTFA (I know), this planet is very close in to one of the stars, in this case Alpha Centauri B. There are two possibilities for planets in a binary system, either orbiting close in to one of the stars, or far away from both. I think I remember reading once that Alpha Centauri A and B are far enough apart from each other that there is a good chance that planets in either star's habitable zone would have stable orbits.
The last time Apple was without Steve, the board forced Apple out, and instituted policies that were the opposite of what Steve would have done. It was these policies that made Apple nearly go bankrupt. This time, the CEO and top executives were all hand picked by Steve for their ability and willingness to continue his policies in his absence. Remember, Tim Cook was effectively acting-CEO for the last year or so that Steve officially held that post due to Steve's health issues. Apple did perfectly fine during that period, if I recall.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that is an article from 2010 about possible insider trading, not about the alleged market manipulation by driving down the stock price through rumors and FUD like seemed to start happening in 2012.
I thought I read somewhere that they were already expecting to use 39A for Falcon Heavy launches. And they'll need a big pad like 39A/B to launch their even bigger rockets in planning like the Falcon X.
Without your pixelated screens, flickery 24fps movies, and scratchy phonograph records, you won't know what's real and what's virtual anymore? We can't have that, now can we?
Let me make it even simpler. Anything that hurts a bully is a good thing, so whenever a company that makes over a few billion in revenue gets screwed, whether it's Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, etc. you should rejoice. You don't think any of them got to their dominant position by being nice guys, especially the Korean Chaebol and the privacy invading ad company, do you?
Why does this stupid fandroid argument still get modded insightful on /.? Set aside the ignorance on the difference between design patents (which shouldn't really be patents in the first place, but have to be registered as patents because you can't copyright an industrial design for some reason) and FRAND patents. Apple did not generically patent all "rounded corners" as the fandroids claim. They patented which corners were rounded, and by how much. Compare the iPhone to the Nokia Lumia. Both are minimalist designs. Both have rounded corners. But the Lumia doesn't look anything like the iPhone, thus not infringing on the "rounded corners" design patent, while also clearly showing that having the exact same rounded corners as the iPhone is not a necessity for a smartphone.
Personally, I don't think FRAND goes far enough, because it just leads to squabbling about what is "fair" and "reasonable". Obviously, the party who owns the patent and the party who wants to make a new standards compliant device will disagree as to how much is fair. From the perspective of the new entrant, the patent owner may have fleeced all previous licensees with regards to the "F" and the "R" in order to maintain a higher across-the-board licencing rate under the guise of "ND". Of course, from the perspective of the patent owner, this is not the case at all.
So in my opinion to avoid this sort of thing in the future, if a patented technology is to be included in a standards-body ratified standard, the patent in question should be made royalty-free. You have to choose: either you can keep your invention to yourself, you can license your invention to others for a fee, or you can have your invention included in an industry standard. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. I don't care if it's Samsung, Apple, Nokia, or whoever, nobody should be able to hold an industry ransom over a feature required by all participants in that industry, even for a "fair and reasonable" amount.
I completely understand defending one's territory, but Apple is *clearly* not actually threatened by the rest of the industry. Their success is only somewhat based on their technology - they should have been more gracious about sharing/selling it. Instead, they aggressively pursued an entire industry. Now, they have no friends and are trapped in a room with a bunch of scared dogs. Not position I'd like to be in literally or metaphorically.
It might help to gain some perspective as to why the iPhone was so heavily patented in the first place. In 2007, while Apple was making some progress with their recovery from almost ceasing to exist in the late 90's, the Mac was still very much a niche device, and the strength of the company was largely based on a single-purpose device which while trendy and popular, was a bit to limited to base the company's future on. So when the iPhone was announced in the summer of 2007, it was as important to the company as the release of the original Macintosh in 1984. It wasn't just a simple device like the iPod whose success was only based on it being trendy, but a platform that the company could base its whole existence on.
When the Macintosh was released, it quickly became the dominant personal computer, due to it being the only computer to speak of that you could buy with a useful GUI. Yes, there was the Xerox Star that came before it, but the Star was an absolute flop in the marketplace, and while it was the first to have a GUI, it was relatively primitive. For the Macintosh, Apple invented several important enhancements to the GUI, such as drag and drop, to make it truly useful to non computer experts. But then in 1995, Microsoft came along with Windows 95, which was a direct imitation of the Macintosh, plus a start menu. Apple sued Microsoft, and probably could have won except for the fact that Apple's incompetent management failed to protect the Mac OS properly, instead opting for a license deal with Microsoft that was overly favorable to Microsoft. Many believed that it was a direct consequence of this botched licensing deal that caused Windows to become dominant, pushing the formerly dominant Macintosh to niche status and nearly destroying Apple in the process.
When the iPhone was released, even though Apple was recovering, it was still struggling. And Apple fans still remembered why Apple was struggling. So Apple was determined to not repeat in 2007 the mistake that it had made with the Macintosh in 1995, and they patented the heck out of the thing. If you watch the iPhone announcement video, you can see how the crowd reacts to Steve Job's statement about the patents. And Jobs makes sure to tell the crowd about the patents because everyone still remembered Microsoft in 1995. I think that at the time, Apple was probably expecting that it would be Microsoft who would seek to copy the iPhone, like they did the Macintosh. Nobody foresaw that Microsoft would be blindsided by the iPhone, and that the threat would come from Google instead. At the time, Android was just a poor knockoff of the blackberry, which was the type of device the iPhone was intended to make obsolete anyway. So I think that the patent arsenal was amassed with the expectation that they would have to use it in a single-front war against Microsoft.
I think Steve Jobs was truly surprised that the competition to the iPhone came from Google instead of Microsoft. And it may be in the context of that genuine surprise that he decided to "go thermonuclear". He didn't know the extent of the new threat, and had no idea of how dangerous it might be. The fact that the CEO of Google happened to sit on his board probably didn't help his state of mind either. So with an arsenal at hand, and a perceived betrayal of a partner who was now a giant unknown, he felt he had no choice but to attack. I don't think Tim Cook likes this state of affairs at all. He would rather be done with all the patent battles, and just focus on making cool products people want to buy. But as the war
The best part of Robot Wars/BattleBots was the fact that the teams designed and built their own robots. It was a competition of ingenuity as well as skill. If the competitors don't get to design their robots, this is nothing more than a gimmick, and will probably (hopefully) flop.
That definition seems a bit pedantic. A better fine art analogy would be to compare a CD to a cast bronze sculpture. The artist initially works in one medium (clay/wax, recording tape), and then a process is undertaken to copy that work to a more permanent medium (bronze, record/CD). The actual final work of art is the durable copy, and the malleable original is just the means to create it.
Wow, straw-man and ad-hominem in one shot! Impressive!
As well as BALLOONS! Balloons are actually marketed and sold to children, whereas magnetic spheres were not. And there have been many more cases of children dying from choking on balloons than from swallowing magnets. It is the fact that buckyballs are banned and balloons are not that makes this asinine, not whether or not the magnets are hazardous at all.
To be honest, the coating on my genuine Buckeballs (tm) brand neodymium spherical magnets chips and flakes off as well. Not much can hold up to the force of those magnets clicking together. I haven't had any break myself, but I know people who have.
Care to tell me where I can get my hands on one of these free Galaxy S IIIs you speak of? Everywhere I have looked they cost quite a bit.
No, he's going to purge the previous leadership and replace them with his friends and/or lackeys.
If that was the case, he would have canned Ive, and wouldn't have bothered convincing Mansfield to come back when he wanted to retire this summer. And Federighi, who was promoted to SVP by Cook this summer is an insider who worked at Jobs's NeXT.
No, Forstall was canned because he didn't get along with the rest of the executives, pushed for over the top skeuomorphism that everyone else in the company and even the rabid fanboys hate, and fucked up the maps thing. He was holding the company back.
Down 15% because the wall street analysts are playing shenanigans. Amazon posts a $274 million LOSS, and there isn't a single article in the news about it. Apple posts profits that are a little bit less than the made up numbers the analysts pulled out of their asses, and all the news sources practically shit themselves over the 'disappointing' news, conveniently ignoring the fact that the record 8.2 billion in profits happen to be 26% up over the year ago quarter and their best 4th quarter ever.
It's pure cost benefit analysis. Sending people out to do planetary science costs a lot more than sending robots out to do science. If science is the goal, then for every manned science mission to a single destination, they could send ten robotic missions to multiple destinations. A manned mission has to carry all the stuff to keep people alive as well as carrying all the science stuff, and the more you carry, the more it costs.
Now I like Apple products as much as your average /. poster doesn't, but this namedrop almost makes me want to swear off Apple and go Linux and Android for the rest of my life.
Lithium is found in batteries for small electronics. For instance, lithium-based batteries are found inside the Apple iPhone 5.
Considering every piece of electronics that exists uses a lithium chemistry of one sort or another, singling out the iPhone was thoroughly unnecessary and just pandering to a popular product.
Not only is TFA not talking about Hawking radiation, Hawking radiation doesn't even technically escape. Hawking radiation particles are actually formerly virtual particles that are generated just outside of the event horizon. Virtual particles are created in particle-antiparticle pairs which then instantly self-annihilate before the universe notices. But when the pair appears just outside of a black hole, sometimes one particle falls into the hole allowing the other to continue existing. This produces the illusion that radiation is coming out of the hole, where none actually is.
Let me guess, this case was prosecuted by Giuliano Mignini, who argued that the defendants must have belonged to a dangerous satanic cult?
What about automation? If fully automated robotic assembly lines can build cars, why can't they build smartphones? Or any assembly line product for that matter? With an automated factory in the US, they could hire a tenth of the workers, and pay them ten times as much.
As mentioned by SecurityTheatre, it would be (earth + moon + impactor) - (sum of material accelerated to escape velocity by impact)
What makes this a big deal, is that prior to this it was an open question whether the Alpha Centauri system could support planets orbiting the individual stars or not. Now that it has been shown that planets can orbit the individual stars in this system, as opposed to orbiting outside both stars around the common center of gravity as is the case for most planets in binary systems, the probability of their being more planets including possible ones in the habitable zones of the stars just got a whole lot bigger.
Then, there is this:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/09/17/2229257/warp-drive-might-be-less-impossible-than-previously-thought
Having RTFA (I know), this planet is very close in to one of the stars, in this case Alpha Centauri B. There are two possibilities for planets in a binary system, either orbiting close in to one of the stars, or far away from both. I think I remember reading once that Alpha Centauri A and B are far enough apart from each other that there is a good chance that planets in either star's habitable zone would have stable orbits.
The last time Apple was without Steve, the board forced Apple out, and instituted policies that were the opposite of what Steve would have done. It was these policies that made Apple nearly go bankrupt. This time, the CEO and top executives were all hand picked by Steve for their ability and willingness to continue his policies in his absence. Remember, Tim Cook was effectively acting-CEO for the last year or so that Steve officially held that post due to Steve's health issues. Apple did perfectly fine during that period, if I recall.