The patent office gets a cut for each patent it accepts. They have no incentive whatsoever to deliver less patents, and all the incentive to deliver as many patents as possible. Once in a while when there is a trial a dozen patents or so may be invalidated. No big deal. To actually reduce the number of patents would need new legislation, but the IP lobby is very powerful with big corporations, attorneys, and deep pockets to make sure this doesn't happen.
It depends a lot on the climate. From personal experience in a tropical climate 2 to 3 years is enough to seriously degrade oxidizable surfaces. And it gets shorter if you manipulate the connector often, like jack connectors for example. Furthermore, gold plating is extremely thin and not very expensive (a few cents per connector). This totally justifies plating connectors, IMHO.
He complains that developers can't reply to user comments, but it's not possible to do that in Google's market either, so it's not a valid argument to ditch one in favor of the other. The other complaints are valid, but the Android market has issues of it's own, so it's not clear cut. The support is especially bad (actually it is inexistent). For example if your app violates one of the guidelines, or if Google thinks it does, it gets pulled and your account can even get terminated, and there is nothing you can do about it. There is no such thing as an appeal process. And since all the interaction you get from Google is automated forms, you might as well create a new account and buy a new developer license. This issue is very real in the developer community and one of the main reasons developers are attracted the the alternative markets.
Describing the application of this technique to humans:
anyone modified in this way would only be able to conceive children naturally with a partner whose genome had been altered in exactly the same way.
That would be creating a new human species, by definition. I must admit I find the idea fascinating, and I'm quite sure this is inevitable, but it's also worrying for us standard, non "enhanced" humans.
What they want to create (implicitly) is an organism immune to all *existing* viruses, by using a different genetic code. Of course it would be possible to create a virus using this new genetic code, but none exists in nature (yet).
JavaScript is actually a very fine language. It is a fully object language (unlike Java), it allows class prototypes (like Ruby), it has first-class functions, closures, exceptions, etc... many features you'd find in modern dynamic weakly typed languages.
The actual issues with JavaScript are the lack of tools (modern IDE with completion, debugger, testing) and the browser environment you usually have to work with. But you can't really blame the language itself for that.
Android OS is open source but the Google APIs, including Maps, and the Market, are not. They also rely on features not included in the public sdk, ensuring they would easily break on non Google-sanctionned Android releases. The platform becomes much less attractive without these.
The SI unit is officially defined as the weight of a 130-year-old platinum-iridium cylinder in France.
NO, it's not. It is defined as the mass of that cylinder. The weight is the force of attraction between Earth and the cylinder, it's not an intrinsic property of the body. I'd have hoped an article about mass would at least have that right.
in any small town in the world, privacy basically doesn`t exist, everyone knows who everyone is by sight, and it's not the end of the world
Except in this case it's reciprocal. Everyone knows you and you know everyone, and you still have the privacy of your home. In "our" world large centralized systems watch you, but you don't know exactly who they are, what they know, and what they use this information for.
If knowledge is power, I'm not convinced we should allow governments, corporations, etc. to have too much.
Well are you in France? If so, you must obey French law.
A better solution would be to rent a server in a safe country and do some VPN. Or, subscribe to one of the VPN services which have opportunistically appeared recently, if you trust them.
Well, actually they won't ever force you to install it. But if the private copyright police (the corporate entities which will monitor the networks and send the reports to the HADOPI) finds out you're using your line to violate copyright, you'll have no way to prove otherwise without this software installed on your computer and logging that you, in fact, didn't.
Anyone with a clue sees how this is completely idiotic and probably unconstitutional, but our moronic government will do anything to please the lobbyists.
It's natural in the sense that it is a process that naturally and spontaneously occurs, only steered in one direction or another by human interaction. On the other hand, introducing bacterial or insect genes in plants is NOT something that occurs naturally at all.
So, you don't like the definitions universally adopted by mathematicians, and you've decided to make up your own. Fine, but don't expect the rest of the world to agree with you.
Exactly, they basically admitted that the censorship commonly done doesn't fool anyone and is not different from using the actual words. Now if they would just accept that these words exist, and that they're not offensive only by themselves...
"The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of paragraph 1: [...] (c) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;"
As far as I know one of the principes of IP laws is that if you know that your IP is infringed upon, and do nothing about it in a timely manner, you lose the right to sue against it later. MPEG-LA has moved a lot of air about Theora but has not been able to name a single infringed patent, so I'd like to think Theora should be clear in this regard.
However the existence of patent trolls is in total contradiction with this principle, so what do I know.
So are you saying that we should code everything from the bottom up since frameworks aka "black boxes" cannot be trusted? Unless you have infinite resources building more and more complex software requires to abstract more and more. You need to free your mind from the repetitive, low-level tasks to allow focusing only on what gives value to your software. And yes, writing stuff that as already done by hundreds of developers is a waste of time, and that should not be redone.
About this "Farbrausch" thing, do you really think this kind of software can be compared to a webapp ? How easy would it be for a new developer do dive into the code? How does it scale? How easy would it be to fix a bug, of add a new feature? I bet it wouldn't be easy. These are often the main issues of "large" applications.
The language is not the issue here, it's the framework. There are plenty of lightweight, easy to use frameworks in Java as well (wicket, scooter, play!...). No need to wait to run into performance issues to use a scalable JVM language.
I'd like to point out that the 3 operators in question are the former state monopolies of Spain, France and Germany. They long for the good old times when they could charge as much as they wanted while pretending to do a good job. Their opinions are not necessarily shared by the governments, and even some other ISPs are perfectly fine being the 'dumb pipes' they always have been.
Also they're not really fighting with Google since discrimination is currently not allowed (in France at least), and the matter is currently debated and will be solved only by new legislation.
Last thing, the summary is a bit US-centric in this regard but not only Google is the subject of their criticisms, local content distributors are targeted as well.
So what we have is a tragic case of mistaken identity.
You seem to conveniently forget the second phase of the attack, when the van shows up to aid the wounded man on the ground, and was attacked too. This did not pose even the eventuality of a threat, and the way the men in the helicopter whined to be allowed to shoot, like children who would like to play with a new tow ("Come on, let us shoot!") is disgusting. The way the tank ran over one of the bodies later, and how they laughed about it, shows the contempt they have for these people.
You're right when you say it's war : it is a war crime.
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The patent office gets a cut for each patent it accepts. They have no incentive whatsoever to deliver less patents, and all the incentive to deliver as many patents as possible. Once in a while when there is a trial a dozen patents or so may be invalidated. No big deal.
To actually reduce the number of patents would need new legislation, but the IP lobby is very powerful with big corporations, attorneys, and deep pockets to make sure this doesn't happen.
It depends a lot on the climate. From personal experience in a tropical climate 2 to 3 years is enough to seriously degrade oxidizable surfaces. And it gets shorter if you manipulate the connector often, like jack connectors for example. Furthermore, gold plating is extremely thin and not very expensive (a few cents per connector). This totally justifies plating connectors, IMHO.
He complains that developers can't reply to user comments, but it's not possible to do that in Google's market either, so it's not a valid argument to ditch one in favor of the other. The other complaints are valid, but the Android market has issues of it's own, so it's not clear cut. The support is especially bad (actually it is inexistent). For example if your app violates one of the guidelines, or if Google thinks it does, it gets pulled and your account can even get terminated, and there is nothing you can do about it. There is no such thing as an appeal process. And since all the interaction you get from Google is automated forms, you might as well create a new account and buy a new developer license. This issue is very real in the developer community and one of the main reasons developers are attracted the the alternative markets.
Describing the application of this technique to humans :
anyone modified in this way would only be able to conceive children naturally with a partner whose genome had been altered in exactly the same way.
That would be creating a new human species, by definition. I must admit I find the idea fascinating, and I'm quite sure this is inevitable, but it's also worrying for us standard, non "enhanced" humans.
What they want to create (implicitly) is an organism immune to all *existing* viruses, by using a different genetic code. Of course it would be possible to create a virus using this new genetic code, but none exists in nature (yet).
JavaScript is actually a very fine language. It is a fully object language (unlike Java), it allows class prototypes (like Ruby), it has first-class functions, closures, exceptions, etc ... many features you'd find in modern dynamic weakly typed languages.
The actual issues with JavaScript are the lack of tools (modern IDE with completion, debugger, testing) and the browser environment you usually have to work with. But you can't really blame the language itself for that.
Android OS is open source but the Google APIs, including Maps, and the Market, are not. They also rely on features not included in the public sdk, ensuring they would easily break on non Google-sanctionned Android releases. The platform becomes much less attractive without these.
The SI unit is officially defined as the weight of a 130-year-old platinum-iridium cylinder in France.
NO, it's not. It is defined as the mass of that cylinder. The weight is the force of attraction between Earth and the cylinder, it's not an intrinsic property of the body. I'd have hoped an article about mass would at least have that right.
When you say 90 degrees to the Sun, is it 90 degrees to the ecliptic plane?
Could you upload a higher quality version somewhere? The Youtube video has a lot of compression artifacts.
in any small town in the world, privacy basically doesn`t exist, everyone knows who everyone is by sight, and it's not the end of the world
Except in this case it's reciprocal. Everyone knows you and you know everyone, and you still have the privacy of your home. In "our" world large centralized systems watch you, but you don't know exactly who they are, what they know, and what they use this information for.
If knowledge is power, I'm not convinced we should allow governments, corporations, etc. to have too much.
Well are you in France? If so, you must obey French law.
A better solution would be to rent a server in a safe country and do some VPN. Or, subscribe to one of the VPN services which have opportunistically appeared recently, if you trust them.
Well, actually they won't ever force you to install it. But if the private copyright police (the corporate entities which will monitor the networks and send the reports to the HADOPI) finds out you're using your line to violate copyright, you'll have no way to prove otherwise without this software installed on your computer and logging that you, in fact, didn't.
Anyone with a clue sees how this is completely idiotic and probably unconstitutional, but our moronic government will do anything to please the lobbyists.
One Card to rule them all, One Card to find them,
One Card to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Why do your portable apps need an installer? Can't you just provide a simple zip file?
It's natural in the sense that it is a process that naturally and spontaneously occurs, only steered in one direction or another by human interaction. On the other hand, introducing bacterial or insect genes in plants is NOT something that occurs naturally at all.
Yeah, I know, we've seen Scala and Clojure, but they're rather shitty and impractical for large-scale real-world software development.
Ever heard of Twitter? Their back-end is written in Scala. How's that for a large-scale real-world application?
Their letters come with prepaid reply envelopes. I always take some time to inform them of the other great opportunities I receive along in the mail.
So, you don't like the definitions universally adopted by mathematicians, and you've decided to make up your own. Fine, but don't expect the rest of the world to agree with you.
Exactly, they basically admitted that the censorship commonly done doesn't fool anyone and is not different from using the actual words. Now if they would just accept that these words exist, and that they're not offensive only by themselves ...
Article 52, Patentable Inventions, abstract :
"The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of paragraph 1: [...]
(c) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;"
Original text : http://www.epo.org/patents/law/legal-texts/html/epc/2000/e/ar52.html
But who cares about the actual word of the law ? All you need is a suitable interpretation.
As far as I know one of the principes of IP laws is that if you know that your IP is infringed upon, and do nothing about it in a timely manner, you lose the right to sue against it later.
MPEG-LA has moved a lot of air about Theora but has not been able to name a single infringed patent, so I'd like to think Theora should be clear in this regard.
However the existence of patent trolls is in total contradiction with this principle, so what do I know.
So are you saying that we should code everything from the bottom up since frameworks aka "black boxes" cannot be trusted?
Unless you have infinite resources building more and more complex software requires to abstract more and more. You need to free your mind from the repetitive, low-level tasks to allow focusing only on what gives value to your software.
And yes, writing stuff that as already done by hundreds of developers is a waste of time, and that should not be redone.
About this "Farbrausch" thing, do you really think this kind of software can be compared to a webapp ? How easy would it be for a new developer do dive into the code? How does it scale? How easy would it be to fix a bug, of add a new feature? I bet it wouldn't be easy. These are often the main issues of "large" applications.
The language is not the issue here, it's the framework. There are plenty of lightweight, easy to use frameworks in Java as well (wicket, scooter, play! ...).
No need to wait to run into performance issues to use a scalable JVM language.
I'd like to point out that the 3 operators in question are the former state monopolies of Spain, France and Germany. They long for the good old times when they could charge as much as they wanted while pretending to do a good job. Their opinions are not necessarily shared by the governments, and even some other ISPs are perfectly fine being the 'dumb pipes' they always have been.
Also they're not really fighting with Google since discrimination is currently not allowed (in France at least), and the matter is currently debated and will be solved only by new legislation.
Last thing, the summary is a bit US-centric in this regard but not only Google is the subject of their criticisms, local content distributors are targeted as well.
So what we have is a tragic case of mistaken identity.
You seem to conveniently forget the second phase of the attack, when the van shows up to aid the wounded man on the ground, and was attacked too. This did not pose even the eventuality of a threat, and the way the men in the helicopter whined to be allowed to shoot, like children who would like to play with a new tow ("Come on, let us shoot!") is disgusting. The way the tank ran over one of the bodies later, and how they laughed about it, shows the contempt they have for these people.
You're right when you say it's war : it is a war crime.