It seems to me that the solution to that would have been to call "4.0" "4-alpha". I'm not a big KDE user myself (I'm mostly forced to use Windows machines for my day to day workstations, and as often as not I just SSH into the servers to admin them), so I don't know what the issues are/were beyond what I've seen on/. comments, but it sure seem like they released a ".0" release without really finishing it. Which is what everyone screams at Microsoft for doing all the time. this little comment war breaks out every so often, and it always come back to "Well they/we admitted it was crap when they/we released it!". So why release it? Release the alpha as an alpha and release what is now 4.2 as the 4.0 release.
Not being either a developer or a (significant) user of the project I don't really have a horse in the race, but it sure seems like if a commercial product had done this kind of thing it would have been held up by the community as an example of why FOSS is better. Granted I don't usually pay $unspecified_large_amount_of_money to use KDE, so I guess that's something, but shouldn't a flag ship FOSS project hold itself to the same standards that it expects from its competitors?
Apple isn't that unreasonable about outside services working on iTunes and iPods. At a minimum I know that Audible.com has a tie in to Apple's i* DRM, you can activate iTunes and iPods to play their books. Surely the music industry could have worked something similar out (especially early on, before iTunes itself became a Juggernaut.)
Yeah, I wasn't necessarily agreeing with what the GP was talking about. He's got points, but there's more to it than he is letting on. I was just trying to clarify what he meant.
I think he talking about things like VOIP. In theory you could, for no additional cost over what you already pay for high speed Internet do all of your telephony over your computer, or use a system like Vonage to create a "phone" system that piggie backs off of your Internet. The problem is that patents prevent or limit this kind of thing. Vonage, IIRC, paid a fairly large settlement to Verizon for patent infringement and now has to pay royalties to operate. This is almost certainly increasing their overall prices and making them more likely to fail in the middle term.
This kind of thing remain possible to do, but very often you're stuck with a more crippled system than it could be, or companies simply choose not to enter the market. At least in theory if software patents disappeared tomorrow, more VOIP type solutions might become available and the current player might be able to lower prices and become more competitive.
It's a matter of scale. When dealing with less than, say 25-30 computers, most people find cute names easy to remember and useful. Start talking hundreds or thousands of systems in 10's or dozens of worldwide locations, and naming standards start to seem important.
I've always loved cute names for computers, but lets' face it: If you have a 4 racks, each with 32 blade servers in them, and they're in one of your 6 offices, would you rather look for "Medusa" or "AL-US-DC4-R2-B21" (Alabama, US, Data Center 4, Rack 2, Blade 21)?
We have the worst of both worlds. Printers are named for their asset tag IDs. No way to know where they are from their name, but impossible to remember to boot.
Ok, I use lots of GPL software, and almost no BSD software (at least not explicitly, there's a fair amount of BSD code in OS X I realize), so I'm hardly a Zealot of the BSD cause, but:
"The BSD license gives freedom to the developer; the GNU license gives freedom to the code itself."
I've seen this sentiment before and I don't get it. Developers are people, hence they can have, use, and value freedom. Code is an object. It's not even a physical object. It's a collection of bits ordered in such a way as to (hopefully) do something in a computer's logic system. Who cares if it has freedom? I've heard that the GPL protects the end user's freedom, and that makes some sense (Not so much that I plan to run out and join the FSF, but some sense), but the CODE'S freedom? I'm more interested in the rights of Central Park pigeons than in the rights of a piece of code. At least the pigeons are sentient.
Blizzard has been dual releasing for Mac and Windows for years and Id used to for Linux and Windows (they may still, I don't know). That's two big shops, yet no one seems to be rushing out to follow their leads.
No to mention that many of the people who cry that Vista is "incompatible" are the same people who complain about Windows Security. You can't have it both ways. They're making some efforts to improve security, and that's broken some insecurely (or just poorly) coded apps in some cases. It's been said before on this forum that the only way MS is going to get a truly secure OS is to break backward compatibility. Well, look what happens when they put a small dent in backward compatibility. Now imagine if they broke it completely. This is why they're never going to break it.
People send me MMSes, and I can't see them. The AT&T web pagey thing might work, but since I can't copy/paste it's a PITA to get uid/password into the web page. It's not a huge deal, and I still like the phone, but it has annoyed me on a few occasions.
You might be right, but IIRC you don't have to use the SDK provided functions to get your approved for the store. There may, in fact, be a rule that your can't capture video with the camera in App Store apps, but going beyond the functions provided by the SDK does not per se violate what Apple allows on the store.
Louisiana post-Katrina was like that for a month or two tops (and then not even close to everywhere). I lived in New Orleans for more than a year after Katrina, and I was an SSE for SGI at the time so I drove all over the state that whole time. New Orleans is no where near "recovered" even now, but it was well past the "rivers of shit in front of your house" stage by about two months after the storm.
Had he not been calling a whole class of people stupid I wouldn't have commented on his composition. I'm not a grammar Nazi and normally they bore me to tears; but if you're going to comment on the intelligence of a whole class of people, it behooves you to demonstrate your own intelligence in the post. I wouldn't even have commented if it was one or two mistakes. It happens, we all make them. This post, while trying to argue that people who don't like math are inherently less smart than those who do, displayed an obvious lack of a certain type of intelligence. It's both ironic and serves to show that "Intelligence" is about more things than the ability to solve complex equations. I personally know many people who don't like math and are extremely intelligent otherwise. The GGP represents the idea of a person who is good at math (I assume), but unable to write well. Not everyone is "smart" in the same way. Certainly it's true that there are dumb teachers. There are also dumb engineers. Neither of these prove that "teachers are dumb" or "engineers are dumb".
In short, write all the tortured barely literate prose you want, but if you're using your tortured barely literate prose to insult someone else's intelligence, expect me to say some thing about people who live in glass houses.
BTW, no I'm not a teacher. I'm a systems administrator and programmer, and I have made it through several advanced math classes. I do however know teachers, and other math-phobes who are not teachers. Many are quite bright. One speaks six languages, but can't seem to grasp higher math. It's a shame, but hardly makes her stupid.
If it were the title of a class, like "Math for Non-Science Majors" (Amusing that's the actually the course title and not just what people call it), or the title of say the "Math Department" then it would be capitalized. Here's it's just a subject in a list, so it shouldn't be.
My Chem teacher in HS had a PhD in Chemistry too. Course he'd had a nervous breakdown trying to deal with the publish or perish lifestyle of university life. He just decided that high school was lower stress. Having taught for a year since then, I can't imagine how he thought that.
Teacher's make a reasonable entry level income in most cases, the problem is that it doesn't scale. I taught for a year in the New Orleans Public Schools a number f years ago. This was the early 90's and the 24K salary I started with was reasonable for a recent college grad. No one I knew was making much more. I wound up leaving after a year, but had I not the maximum I could ever have hoped to make after years of service and a masters degree was around 50K. That's a bit more than half of what of what I make now and I am no where near the top of my field. It doesn't matter how brilliant a teacher I was, how much education I got, I would never have made any more money than a mid level sys admin.
Your point was mortally wounded by your inability to spell (or apparently use a spell checker), and total lack of basic English grammar. I'll be the first to admit that I occasionally make typos or fail in the grammar department; but to have a post so full of mistakes as to be nearly incomprehensible, and (irony or ironies) to have that post be a diatribe about the lack of intelligence and education among an entire field of people is just bad. In the future, when calling other people idiots, I highly recommend that you at least employ a spell checker.
Here is the paragraph where you talk about how math and engineering educations are superior to those of most teachers:
Because people go into teaching as it is a degree that you don't need to take Advanced Math and Science class. They don't even have to take pre-calculus (Depending on the college and state). All their courses are taught in a similar fashion mush like English classes. While Science and Engineering Majors need to take some of those type of classes and more Math/Science driven classes, we actually get a more robust education then the teachers do. The people who are not afraid of math and science go to a degree that will pay better.
First, you begin a sentence with "Because", which is a grammatical no-no. None of "Advanced", "Math", or "Science" should be capitalized. You almost certainly intended "classes" in stead of "class" in the first sentence, as likely you would prefer them to take more than one. Their classes are either "taught in a similar fashion to" or "much like", using both is redundant and it's "much" not "mush". None of the subject names in the next sentence should be capitalized, they still aren't proper nouns. Your point about getting a "more robust education" in this sentence is made extremely debatable by your continuing inability to express yourself in writing. Your last sentence actually has no errors! Go you. Though "go to a degree" is probably not the most understandable way to express the idea, it's not actually wrong either.
This is just one paragraph of your diatribe, and not the worst of them. I'm not a grammar Nazi. Indeed, as I said earlier, I'm even guilty of some serious typos myself. Really though, to spend the amount of time and effort you did trying to tear apart someone else's education while making the number and quality of errors you did is asking for trouble. Please go take something "mush like English classes" and try again.
Well, that is typically how innovation happens. Most of the time "inventions" don't make something entirely from scratch, they build on existent ideas. Could the car exist without the wheel? The internal combustion engine? The guy who invented the car just took a bunch of existing ideas and combined them in a new way. Nothing in early cars hadn't already been "invented" but the combination of all them was "new". The airplane had a legitimately new concept (moving air over the properly shaped "wing" to provide lift), but again cannibalized several existing ideas to implement.
The idea of "gestures" is going to be fairly difficult to "innovate around". It's a very intuitive way to interact with a touch screen device, a potential building block to many other even more intuitive methods. Apple deserves props for having come up with a useful system, but giving them 20 years to sit on it seem excessive. Having said that, the length of Apples patent application seem to indicate a VERY specific patent. It may be that this isn't as big a deal as people are making out. A sufficiently specific patent allow others to innovate without infringing. I haven't read it though (and at 250+ pages i don't intend to), so I can't say.
It's nice that everyone in universe 1 is all good and stuff and no big corporations steal ideas from people as soon they release them, and companies don't hide the secret to HOW they did something so deeply in the ground that now one will ever know how it all works. I'm not saying that the current patent system is great or anything, but your hypothetical universes seem full of good people in the patentless one and only evil people in the patent having one. Patents DO have a function and often they accomplish that function. This is not to say that the current system is perfect, or even all that great, but to pretend that getting rid of patents is going to suddenly turn the world into utopia is silly. We'd just have different problems caused by human greed.
I think the drug companies illustrate two interesting point about the current patent system. Not just what is wrong, but what is right as well.
First, drug patents are awarded for the same 20 years as technology patents, but exclusivity is only for 7 years in most cases. This is to improve innovation in a field where we have a pretty clear public interest in keeping things moving. The original point here was not so much that patents were a bad idea per se, but more that they should probably be shorter. The exclusivity stuff for drugs kinda show how that could be a very good this for innovation.
Second, drug patents are VERY specific. If company A has a patent to reduce heart irregularities by combining compound XYZ with compound CZF, and company B comes along and tries to patent controlling heart irregularities by combining compound XYZ with compound ABC, no one is going to argue that Company B's patent is infringing on Company A's. Both companies had reason to think that with the right additive XYZ could control heart irregularities, both were right, and since they used different additives it's not a problem. If these same two patents were for software, there'd be all kinds of arguments about how similar or dissimilar they were, whether one was derived from the other, etc.
This shows two points in my mind. First, it seems likely that in a world where product cycles can be measured in years or even months, 20 years is too long for a patent. The iPhone will be an obsolete brick in 20 years, why not allow others to benefit from its innovations after it is no longer a commodity itself (and I say this as an iPhone owner and moderate fan of Apple's work). Second, patents should be granted in such a way as to maximize addition innovation in the field. Granting very general "A method for entering data with your fingers" kind of patent hurts innovation more than it helps. Now, Apple's application for this patent is over 250 pages, so it is probably is very specific. I don't know that this point necessarily applies to this particular patent (at over 250 pages I didn't read it), but we HAVE seen some very obvious and VERY general patents granted in this field. That creates situations where companies are afraid to innovate because they can't tell if they're in violation of a patent or not. If software patents looked more like drug patents, it might be a lot better for everyone.
He never said it was. In fact he mentioned that it was an extremely uncommon temperature here on Earth (not really possible outside of human engineered environments). He said Celsius was a common every day measurement and that -242C was a valid and legal temperature.
Maybe it's just the way I buy phones. I had my Treo for three and half years, and I don't plan to replace my iPhone anytime soon. I can handle having to reacquire software every 3-4 years. Unless things change drastically I'll probably just replace the iPhone with whatever the current version of it is, so in theory I should be able to keep all of my applications (We'll see though, two years is a long time and something else may come up that I like more). I could never really get used to carrying a PDA, so integrating it into my phone was nice. Adding in the MP3 player was a nice bonus. Now I have one device that does everything I need on a day to day basis. This is good, as my phone is the one device I can reliably say I won't lose.
Maybe it's just me then. I carry debit card, library card, Barnes and Noble card, Sam's club card (going away after it expires in a few months), Costco card (replaced the former), medical insurance card, dental insurance card, library card, a credit card, video store card, and drivers license. That's 11 cards, they aren't fitting in a pocket on my cell, and I can't not carry most of them. In an average week I use all of them except the insurance cards, and I have to carry those for emergencies. I don't see this allowing me to avoid carrying my wallet.
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It seems to me that the solution to that would have been to call "4.0" "4-alpha". I'm not a big KDE user myself (I'm mostly forced to use Windows machines for my day to day workstations, and as often as not I just SSH into the servers to admin them), so I don't know what the issues are/were beyond what I've seen on /. comments, but it sure seem like they released a ".0" release without really finishing it. Which is what everyone screams at Microsoft for doing all the time. this little comment war breaks out every so often, and it always come back to "Well they/we admitted it was crap when they/we released it!". So why release it? Release the alpha as an alpha and release what is now 4.2 as the 4.0 release.
Not being either a developer or a (significant) user of the project I don't really have a horse in the race, but it sure seems like if a commercial product had done this kind of thing it would have been held up by the community as an example of why FOSS is better. Granted I don't usually pay $unspecified_large_amount_of_money to use KDE, so I guess that's something, but shouldn't a flag ship FOSS project hold itself to the same standards that it expects from its competitors?
Apple isn't that unreasonable about outside services working on iTunes and iPods. At a minimum I know that Audible.com has a tie in to Apple's i* DRM, you can activate iTunes and iPods to play their books. Surely the music industry could have worked something similar out (especially early on, before iTunes itself became a Juggernaut.)
Yeah, I wasn't necessarily agreeing with what the GP was talking about. He's got points, but there's more to it than he is letting on. I was just trying to clarify what he meant.
I think he talking about things like VOIP. In theory you could, for no additional cost over what you already pay for high speed Internet do all of your telephony over your computer, or use a system like Vonage to create a "phone" system that piggie backs off of your Internet. The problem is that patents prevent or limit this kind of thing. Vonage, IIRC, paid a fairly large settlement to Verizon for patent infringement and now has to pay royalties to operate. This is almost certainly increasing their overall prices and making them more likely to fail in the middle term.
This kind of thing remain possible to do, but very often you're stuck with a more crippled system than it could be, or companies simply choose not to enter the market. At least in theory if software patents disappeared tomorrow, more VOIP type solutions might become available and the current player might be able to lower prices and become more competitive.
It's a matter of scale. When dealing with less than, say 25-30 computers, most people find cute names easy to remember and useful. Start talking hundreds or thousands of systems in 10's or dozens of worldwide locations, and naming standards start to seem important.
I've always loved cute names for computers, but lets' face it: If you have a 4 racks, each with 32 blade servers in them, and they're in one of your 6 offices, would you rather look for "Medusa" or "AL-US-DC4-R2-B21" (Alabama, US, Data Center 4, Rack 2, Blade 21)?
We have the worst of both worlds. Printers are named for their asset tag IDs. No way to know where they are from their name, but impossible to remember to boot.
Given how many fantasy names are based on vaguely Celtic spellings/names, I might be forced to ask you "Which one?"
Ok, I use lots of GPL software, and almost no BSD software (at least not explicitly, there's a fair amount of BSD code in OS X I realize), so I'm hardly a Zealot of the BSD cause, but:
"The BSD license gives freedom to the developer; the GNU license gives freedom to the code itself."
I've seen this sentiment before and I don't get it. Developers are people, hence they can have, use, and value freedom. Code is an object. It's not even a physical object. It's a collection of bits ordered in such a way as to (hopefully) do something in a computer's logic system. Who cares if it has freedom? I've heard that the GPL protects the end user's freedom, and that makes some sense (Not so much that I plan to run out and join the FSF, but some sense), but the CODE'S freedom? I'm more interested in the rights of Central Park pigeons than in the rights of a piece of code. At least the pigeons are sentient.
Blizzard has been dual releasing for Mac and Windows for years and Id used to for Linux and Windows (they may still, I don't know). That's two big shops, yet no one seems to be rushing out to follow their leads.
No to mention that many of the people who cry that Vista is "incompatible" are the same people who complain about Windows Security. You can't have it both ways. They're making some efforts to improve security, and that's broken some insecurely (or just poorly) coded apps in some cases. It's been said before on this forum that the only way MS is going to get a truly secure OS is to break backward compatibility. Well, look what happens when they put a small dent in backward compatibility. Now imagine if they broke it completely. This is why they're never going to break it.
People send me MMSes, and I can't see them. The AT&T web pagey thing might work, but since I can't copy/paste it's a PITA to get uid/password into the web page. It's not a huge deal, and I still like the phone, but it has annoyed me on a few occasions.
You might be right, but IIRC you don't have to use the SDK provided functions to get your approved for the store. There may, in fact, be a rule that your can't capture video with the camera in App Store apps, but going beyond the functions provided by the SDK does not per se violate what Apple allows on the store.
Louisiana post-Katrina was like that for a month or two tops (and then not even close to everywhere). I lived in New Orleans for more than a year after Katrina, and I was an SSE for SGI at the time so I drove all over the state that whole time. New Orleans is no where near "recovered" even now, but it was well past the "rivers of shit in front of your house" stage by about two months after the storm.
Had he not been calling a whole class of people stupid I wouldn't have commented on his composition. I'm not a grammar Nazi and normally they bore me to tears; but if you're going to comment on the intelligence of a whole class of people, it behooves you to demonstrate your own intelligence in the post. I wouldn't even have commented if it was one or two mistakes. It happens, we all make them. This post, while trying to argue that people who don't like math are inherently less smart than those who do, displayed an obvious lack of a certain type of intelligence. It's both ironic and serves to show that "Intelligence" is about more things than the ability to solve complex equations. I personally know many people who don't like math and are extremely intelligent otherwise. The GGP represents the idea of a person who is good at math (I assume), but unable to write well. Not everyone is "smart" in the same way. Certainly it's true that there are dumb teachers. There are also dumb engineers. Neither of these prove that "teachers are dumb" or "engineers are dumb".
In short, write all the tortured barely literate prose you want, but if you're using your tortured barely literate prose to insult someone else's intelligence, expect me to say some thing about people who live in glass houses.
BTW, no I'm not a teacher. I'm a systems administrator and programmer, and I have made it through several advanced math classes. I do however know teachers, and other math-phobes who are not teachers. Many are quite bright. One speaks six languages, but can't seem to grasp higher math. It's a shame, but hardly makes her stupid.
If it were the title of a class, like "Math for Non-Science Majors" (Amusing that's the actually the course title and not just what people call it), or the title of say the "Math Department" then it would be capitalized. Here's it's just a subject in a list, so it shouldn't be.
My Chem teacher in HS had a PhD in Chemistry too. Course he'd had a nervous breakdown trying to deal with the publish or perish lifestyle of university life. He just decided that high school was lower stress. Having taught for a year since then, I can't imagine how he thought that.
Teacher's make a reasonable entry level income in most cases, the problem is that it doesn't scale. I taught for a year in the New Orleans Public Schools a number f years ago. This was the early 90's and the 24K salary I started with was reasonable for a recent college grad. No one I knew was making much more. I wound up leaving after a year, but had I not the maximum I could ever have hoped to make after years of service and a masters degree was around 50K. That's a bit more than half of what of what I make now and I am no where near the top of my field. It doesn't matter how brilliant a teacher I was, how much education I got, I would never have made any more money than a mid level sys admin.
Your point was mortally wounded by your inability to spell (or apparently use a spell checker), and total lack of basic English grammar. I'll be the first to admit that I occasionally make typos or fail in the grammar department; but to have a post so full of mistakes as to be nearly incomprehensible, and (irony or ironies) to have that post be a diatribe about the lack of intelligence and education among an entire field of people is just bad. In the future, when calling other people idiots, I highly recommend that you at least employ a spell checker.
Here is the paragraph where you talk about how math and engineering educations are superior to those of most teachers:
Because people go into teaching as it is a degree that you don't need to take Advanced Math and Science class. They don't even have to take pre-calculus (Depending on the college and state). All their courses are taught in a similar fashion mush like English classes. While Science and Engineering Majors need to take some of those type of classes and more Math/Science driven classes, we actually get a more robust education then the teachers do. The people who are not afraid of math and science go to a degree that will pay better.
First, you begin a sentence with "Because", which is a grammatical no-no. None of "Advanced", "Math", or "Science" should be capitalized. You almost certainly intended "classes" in stead of "class" in the first sentence, as likely you would prefer them to take more than one. Their classes are either "taught in a similar fashion to" or "much like", using both is redundant and it's "much" not "mush". None of the subject names in the next sentence should be capitalized, they still aren't proper nouns. Your point about getting a "more robust education" in this sentence is made extremely debatable by your continuing inability to express yourself in writing. Your last sentence actually has no errors! Go you. Though "go to a degree" is probably not the most understandable way to express the idea, it's not actually wrong either.
This is just one paragraph of your diatribe, and not the worst of them. I'm not a grammar Nazi. Indeed, as I said earlier, I'm even guilty of some serious typos myself. Really though, to spend the amount of time and effort you did trying to tear apart someone else's education while making the number and quality of errors you did is asking for trouble. Please go take something "mush like English classes" and try again.
I was totally trying to figure out why they needed a 2/3 majority for such a minor matter. Thanks for doing my research for em :-)
Well, that is typically how innovation happens. Most of the time "inventions" don't make something entirely from scratch, they build on existent ideas. Could the car exist without the wheel? The internal combustion engine? The guy who invented the car just took a bunch of existing ideas and combined them in a new way. Nothing in early cars hadn't already been "invented" but the combination of all them was "new". The airplane had a legitimately new concept (moving air over the properly shaped "wing" to provide lift), but again cannibalized several existing ideas to implement.
The idea of "gestures" is going to be fairly difficult to "innovate around". It's a very intuitive way to interact with a touch screen device, a potential building block to many other even more intuitive methods. Apple deserves props for having come up with a useful system, but giving them 20 years to sit on it seem excessive. Having said that, the length of Apples patent application seem to indicate a VERY specific patent. It may be that this isn't as big a deal as people are making out. A sufficiently specific patent allow others to innovate without infringing. I haven't read it though (and at 250+ pages i don't intend to), so I can't say.
It's nice that everyone in universe 1 is all good and stuff and no big corporations steal ideas from people as soon they release them, and companies don't hide the secret to HOW they did something so deeply in the ground that now one will ever know how it all works. I'm not saying that the current patent system is great or anything, but your hypothetical universes seem full of good people in the patentless one and only evil people in the patent having one. Patents DO have a function and often they accomplish that function. This is not to say that the current system is perfect, or even all that great, but to pretend that getting rid of patents is going to suddenly turn the world into utopia is silly. We'd just have different problems caused by human greed.
I think the drug companies illustrate two interesting point about the current patent system. Not just what is wrong, but what is right as well.
First, drug patents are awarded for the same 20 years as technology patents, but exclusivity is only for 7 years in most cases. This is to improve innovation in a field where we have a pretty clear public interest in keeping things moving. The original point here was not so much that patents were a bad idea per se, but more that they should probably be shorter. The exclusivity stuff for drugs kinda show how that could be a very good this for innovation.
Second, drug patents are VERY specific. If company A has a patent to reduce heart irregularities by combining compound XYZ with compound CZF, and company B comes along and tries to patent controlling heart irregularities by combining compound XYZ with compound ABC, no one is going to argue that Company B's patent is infringing on Company A's. Both companies had reason to think that with the right additive XYZ could control heart irregularities, both were right, and since they used different additives it's not a problem. If these same two patents were for software, there'd be all kinds of arguments about how similar or dissimilar they were, whether one was derived from the other, etc.
This shows two points in my mind. First, it seems likely that in a world where product cycles can be measured in years or even months, 20 years is too long for a patent. The iPhone will be an obsolete brick in 20 years, why not allow others to benefit from its innovations after it is no longer a commodity itself (and I say this as an iPhone owner and moderate fan of Apple's work). Second, patents should be granted in such a way as to maximize addition innovation in the field. Granting very general "A method for entering data with your fingers" kind of patent hurts innovation more than it helps. Now, Apple's application for this patent is over 250 pages, so it is probably is very specific. I don't know that this point necessarily applies to this particular patent (at over 250 pages I didn't read it), but we HAVE seen some very obvious and VERY general patents granted in this field. That creates situations where companies are afraid to innovate because they can't tell if they're in violation of a patent or not. If software patents looked more like drug patents, it might be a lot better for everyone.
He never said it was. In fact he mentioned that it was an extremely uncommon temperature here on Earth (not really possible outside of human engineered environments). He said Celsius was a common every day measurement and that -242C was a valid and legal temperature.
Maybe it's just the way I buy phones. I had my Treo for three and half years, and I don't plan to replace my iPhone anytime soon. I can handle having to reacquire software every 3-4 years. Unless things change drastically I'll probably just replace the iPhone with whatever the current version of it is, so in theory I should be able to keep all of my applications (We'll see though, two years is a long time and something else may come up that I like more). I could never really get used to carrying a PDA, so integrating it into my phone was nice. Adding in the MP3 player was a nice bonus. Now I have one device that does everything I need on a day to day basis. This is good, as my phone is the one device I can reliably say I won't lose.
Maybe it's just me then. I carry debit card, library card, Barnes and Noble card, Sam's club card (going away after it expires in a few months), Costco card (replaced the former), medical insurance card, dental insurance card, library card, a credit card, video store card, and drivers license. That's 11 cards, they aren't fitting in a pocket on my cell, and I can't not carry most of them. In an average week I use all of them except the insurance cards, and I have to carry those for emergencies. I don't see this allowing me to avoid carrying my wallet.