The function of time zones is that humans generally operate on Diurnal schedule. So wherever we are, we are going to wake in the morning and sleep at night. As such it makes sense to calibrate time to that. 08:00 is "morning", 20:00 is "evening". Change that, and it gets confusing any time someone travels. Even just across the US and you'd find everything gets thrown off.
Historically that isn't true. Personal clocks are relatively quite recent, and prior to that people didn't figure time in the way that you claim. Usually dawn was the first hour, though some groups picked sunset. Saying 08:00 is "morning" is just a convention, and an arbitrary one at that. ANY number that you get used to will work equivalently. (For that matter, you should check around the edges of the timezones now in summer of winter. Timezones were established for the convenience of railroad schedules.)
Because it's already defined, it already exists, and it's already in wide usage. This idea isn't going anywhere anyway, but why put additional obstacles in it's path. (If it were done, it would be useful.)
The conversion to UTC may happen eventually. But probably not this century. The switch to a metric time, however, is just a "bad idea"(tm). Stretching the hours and switching to a 20 hour day would be practical, but a 120 minute hour is just not as useful as a 60 minute hour. In the current system we already use "a couple of hours", "half and hour", and "a quarter hour" frequently. And four hours is the time between starting work and lunch. So we go just about as far up as down...though when we get to quarter hours we're already as likely to call it 15 minutes.
FWIW, and IIRC there was a time when days were 12 hours long (and different hours were of different length). At that time most people only told time by the strikes of the bell in the tower. And most people didn't bother. As more people started caring about time, the hours shrank until 12 hours is now half a day. So I don't think you can expect the hours to get longer.
It *is* the best reason I've heard. But it isn't sufficient. The date changing in the middle of the day is just something we aren't used to. One standard time would be better. But it's not enough better to be worth the hassle of switching.
For that matter, Daylight Saving Time is also useful, especially if you live far from the equator. It would be better to avoid it and replace it with variable hours of business, but not enough better that it will happen. (OTOH, the common justifications used to promote it are wrong. It does cost more money than it saves. But not all convenience is measured in money. And it's not clear that variable hours of business would be less expensive. It would, however, decentralize the decision of when the hours would change and by how much, and that's worth something in and of itself.)
Not broken? I'm sorry, but I *must* disagree. But I think the conversion might be worse than the conversion to metric. Yeah, metric is better, but I'm *used to* feet, inches, yards, rods, chains, furlongs, pounds, poundals, etc.
What, you don't know the poundal? Under standard conditions the poundal is a one pound mass. (It's the same mass anyway, but if the conditions aren't standard it may not equal the mass of something that weights a pound, i.e. produces a one pound force.)
But conversion to metric is difficult. Did you know that the US is officially metric? What this means is that feet are defined in terms of kilometers, etc. But getting people to talk about distance in kilometers isn't something you want to try.
So, yes, it would be desirable to use a standard time. But it ain't gonna happen. If for no other reason, think what it would do to Daylight Saving Time. Double daylight saving time, War time, etc. That's a lot of laws that would need to change.
Quite possibly. But did that mouse have ANY effect on the course of history? Independent invention happens quite frequently, once something becomes both possible and desirable. This is one of the reasons why patent laws need to be either just scrapped, or completely redone. And even if it mattered, with current patent laws proving a clean-room reimplementation would be nigh unto impossible. So I *do* mean completely redone. (Software patents, however, should just be scrapped. Copyright is the correct protection for software. And I doubt that business methods deserve even THAT protection. More of them seem to be socially detrimental that beneficial. Give then trademark protection and be done with it.)
Monopolies are not generally beneficial to society. There should be a strong proof (of being beneficial) required before a monopoly is granted, and it should require being proven again at every renewal, much less extension. And the proof should be open to public and available for criticism. AND the proof should not be either done or paid for by a party biased in favor of the grant of a monopoly. Monopolies are dangerous, and should be tightly constrained. Socially mandated monopolies should require extreme care both in the grant, and in the terms of the grant. And the bias should be towards either elimination of the monopoly, or at least the reduction in the period of time for which it is allowed to exist.
That said, in cases where there are large sunk costs required to produce an invention, then patents do have justificaiton. *IF* the invention is socially useful. But this shouldn't exclude others who independently invent the invention from using it or selling it. (That *independently* is the stickler, and requires great care in implementation.)
Please note that what I'm proposing as "justifiable patents" only applies to a quite small minority of the patents granted, even when software and business patents are excluded.
OTOH, patents should also not be a profit center for the government. It should cost the government money to issue patents. They should be free, if they meet the qualifications. (The question occurs as to how to limit the number of frivolous patent applications. Perhaps those *should* have a fee attached. Say 0.1% of the applicant's yearly income tax.)
There's also the matter that patents should reveal in a meaningful way sufficient that those "skilled in the art" should be able to reproduce the invention. This should be a required test. For this the applicant should be allowed, if they choose, to have the patent office hire selected individuals unaffiliated with the applicant to reproduce the invention. If they do, then they will, of course, be billed for the cost incurred by hiring those individuals. If they don't, then the patent office should have staff specialists who will attempt to reproduce the invention. If three try and none succeed, than the patent should be ruled invalid.
For design patents, definitely. In fact for design patents movies should present a stronger case than an actual existing product, because more people have been exposed to the design.
If that "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report" is the one I heard of, many professionals were complaining because the predictions had been toned down to be more politically acceptable. OTOH that 30 foot projection was a wild outlier. Just about as much as the 1 foot projection. (I think that thermal expansion of the oceans accounted for that, and perhaps a bit more, without any ice melting needed.)
Warning: I'm talking off the top of my head, and I'm no expert, but:
Which current projections? I would have put the range at 1-30 feet, though I guess I consider 3 feet more reasonable. Of course, It's hard to be specific since a lot of what the result is depends on what we do. (I think the 30 foot range was predicting massive use of shale-oil, and poor conservation/pollution controls. Which, unfortunately, isn't at all an unreasonable projection.)
N.B.: It's quite unlikely that China/India/etc. aren't going to use the same energy sources that we use. And will probably be aiming for the same per capita usage. So perhaps that 30 foot projection isn't all THAT unreasonable.
FWIW, these are projections presuming only nominal antarctic melting. If Antarctica starts seriously melting we can expect much worse. I've been told that this probably won't happen. OTOH, there are presuming substantial Greenland melting...but then that's already underway.
Gas prices are rising rapidly. I'd be quite surprised if the airplane industry doesn't implode. I'd actually be less surprised if dirigibles became popular than if the airplane industry continued along it's current path. And, frankly, I'm not really impressed at the attempts at fuel efficient airplanes. It think it's probably an intractable problem.
You are making some assumptions that may not be true. Amino acids work as elements of life at temperatures around the melting point/boiling point of water under what seem to be normal planetary atmospheres. It's not clear that they would work on, e.g., Titan. You'd probably want something a bit more active. Maybe life isn't possible there, but I don't think that's the way to bet. (It could, of course, be more improbable, but then we don't know just how likely life was to arise on earth. It seems, in retrospect, to have been quite likely, but this could easily be a mistake.)
So. Amino acids are AN element from which life can be built. Possibly, however, not the only one. And we probably don't know what else to go looking for.
I do agree, however, that given what is currently known calling the extant space-born molecules "seeds of life" is overstating the case.
E.g., what if each office was wired, but had a femtocell wireless router? Then all the computers could be connected wirelessly without overusing the frequency spectrum. Of course, the auditorium would need the speakers devices to be registered, and to block all other devices, or maybe even to use a separate frequency spectrum. (Need special plug-in dongles to broadcast at the right frequencies.)
N.B.: I'm not saying it wouldn't be a lot of work. I'm saying that everyone could feel that they were wirelessly connected. Except in large meeting rooms.
An electronic subscription is essentially worthless to me. This means I paid for something I'm not going to get, and I'm not real pleased about the thieves.
I'll admit that I already didn't read all of it, but this way I'm not going to read any. Reading on a monitor is much more stressful than reading a book or a magazine, and not even worth it for fiction.
Article reading is a quite different activity from "looking something up", which is something I do on a monitor. I don't, however, follow ANY on-line magazine. And I don't read on-line books. Or pdfs. If I try, all I get out of it is a headache. And as for those who say I should get a Kindel, you are just bat-shit crazy. I'm not going to invest in something where after I've bought something the vendor can yank it back without my consent. And I'm not about to consent. Because of that I'm not likely to ever find out if the claims that it's screen is clear enough that it won't cause eye-strain are correct. And without proof I'm not about to believe it. (Younger eyes tend to be more flexible, so what works for an average 20 year old can't reasonably be expected to be evidence that it would work for me.)
At one point this made sense, because the patent required the effective disclosure of the idea, including how to implement it. Sufficient that "one skilled in the art" could reproduce the invention. And also because there were only a few people working on developing any particular area.
Now, however, patents are designed to be incomprehensible to anyone but patent lawyers, inventors are cautioned to avoid reading existing patents, because if they have a chance of understanding what the patent is about they are subject to triple damages, even if they thing they've avoided it...as long as the patent holder's lawyer can convince the court that they didn't avoid it. And there's LOTS of people working on every feasible idea (and lots that aren't feasible).
Currently the only domain in which patents make ANY sense is where there are extensive up-front costs to development. Even there, the diminished requirement for effective disclosure makes their desirability quite questionable. Yes, they are desirable to the patent holder (in such a case), but it's not at all clear that they are in the public interest. There needs to be EFFECTIVE DISCLOSURE before patents are *ever* in the public interest.
Wouldn't bet on that. It will, however, probably be impossible to disentangle the effects. There's a synergistic combination.
E.g., As tech jobs are outsourced, more tech innovation evolves in the countries to which it was outsourced. (There's a time delay here, but it's probably not much more than a decade.) And it *might* have happened anyway. Anyway, these new innovators patent things where it's most profitable to do so. (This probably means the US, but it can also include other places. N.B. that innovators here doesn't refer to individuals, who probably can't afford US patents, but to the local companies that hire them.) The things don't even need to be patentable locally, in fact if they aren't, then local innovation will be faster. So they get the benefits of patents without the drawbacks.
Compare this to US copyright law before the 1970's, when a work published outside the country before being published within the country did not have copyright protection within the US. There are both similarities and differences.
It's not slick, but it's not bad either. However if Objective-C couldn't handle "Hello World" reasonably, I wouldn't consider it at all interesting.
My interest if more along the lines of converting back and forth between utf-8 strings and ubyte arrays, reading and writing contiguous areas of memory to disk files at defined initial byte offsets, allocation and initialization of instance variables in classes, syntax of passing class items between routines, garbage collection independent of GnuStep/AppleStep/Cocoa/etc. (I.e., language facilities for garbage collection, not that of libraries that presume classes that require features that interfere with what I'm doing. Etc.
FWIW, after reading the documentation that I could find on NSString I couldn't decide on whether I could get a C array of unsigned bytes out of it. Did it try to convert the multi-byte characters or not? Etc. (I could have gone digging, but I preferred to switch to a language where it was easier to figure out how to do what I wanted. D. But D lacks easy two-way access to C libraries, so at some point I'll need to convert it to Ada, C, Objective-C, Vala, or something I haven't figured out. Because of the heavy use of class instance variable, C is implausible. (I also don't like the x->y syntax, but I suppose I could adapt to (*x).y, even though it *is* incredibly ugly.) Ada is verbose, Vala is too beta, so Objective-C is something I'm strongly considering. But my classes would descend from Object, not from NSObject, unless I come to a radically different understanding than I currently have. Does Objective-C, as opposed to NSObject, have something similar to smart-pointers and weak-pointers? If not, I'll need to look into how easy they would be to port. Real garbage collection is probably impractical in any C descendant language, due to the ability to convert pointers back and forth between integers, but smart-pointers combined with weak-pointers could suffice for my purposes (if they have usable syntax).
The so what is, it's basically unapproachable unless you are coming from a C/glib background. And the last time I checked the documentation didn't even tell you how to build a struct, or why you should want to. (I presume for the same reason that you would want to in C, but that's a guess!)
As for the bindings.... Some of them are decently documented, and other times you are left with the name of a function, and NO description of what it does, why you might want to use it, or when you definitely shouldn't use it. So you trace them back to try to find things out and...well, eventually you end up at C code. That's poorly documented in the code. (Yes, that is the authoritative source. but this doesn't make it an "easy read" when you're trying to decide if this is the function you need.)
I'm sorry. Compare this with Java, Python, C, C++, D, or even Lisp documentation OTOH, Vala doesn't claim to have reached the 1.0 version yet. Last I checked it was 0.12. So that the documentation should be incomplete isn't surprising, but it does mean that it's MUCH too soon to start pushing the language.
You left out: C: Fairly simple, lots of bug opportunities, very verbose, very fast, suitable for system programming
I suppose you could argue with the "very verbose" part. It depends on how you analyze things. If you're doing the same thing in C and C++ I guess "incredibly verbose" would be a better way to put it.
Also: C# is suitable for systems programming? I find it quite a questionable assertion that ANY language running in a virtual machine is suitable for systems programming...except, perhaps, on that same virtual machine.
Vala is a probably incomplete language with definitely incomplete documentation. Whenever I tried to look up how to do something, the documentation didn't cover it.
Objective C is quite interesting, but also suffers from poor documentation. Lots better than Vala, but... well, poor. Possibly this isn't true if you're programming on an Apple machine. (I *am* quite interested in Objective C, but the last time I tried to use it the examples wouldn't compile for reasons that I couldn't determine. OTOH, at that same time C++ was throwing fits, so it may just have been Debian Sid breaking things.)
??? Garbage doesn't, and is not intended to, release in a timely fashion. OTOH, it will release anything that has a delete method (as defined by the language).
You do, in certain circumstances, need to be able to disable a garbage collector. So what? You don't always use enums either.
And "freeing resources is mostly a non-issue in C++"??? I'm sorry, but this just sounds too strange to understand.
OTOH, the structure of the C/C++ language does make garbage collection extremely inefficient, because it's impossible to determine whether some integer will turn out to hold a pointer. This means that huge amounts of extra analysis need to be undertaken. (Personally, I think that C/C++ should have standard garbage collector that can be turned off either for sections of code or for the entire program. And that it should immediately disable itself if an integer is ever cast to a pointer.)
But "smart pointers" of various flavors are, to speak as favorably as I can about them, hideous kludges. They don't really solve the problem, though they certainly reduce it.
Native is excellent. Unfortunately, C/C++ has some very bad failings...basically due to pointer arithmetic, but also due to being able to cast pointers to integers and vice versa.
FWIW, I consider garbage collection to be almost essential in a decent language, and the conversion of pointers (and pointer arithmetic) mean that it cannot be efficiently done in C/C++ style languages. There are also other reasons why this is a bad idea, but that's the, for me, primary one.
Note that before I started using Object Oriented Programming I didn't worry about garbage collection. Now that I use it I find the lack of it in C/C++ to be a constant pain. The compiler should be able to determine at any point which objects are still "live" (i.e., reachable) and reclaim those that aren't. Unfortunately in C/C++ this is impossible, as they could be stored on disk files as integers. Generally this is "worked around", partially by saying "You should be smart enough not to do that", but also by guessing whether certain integers in RAM are or are not pointers in disguise. It generally works, but it imposes a tremendous overhead that usually isn't worth the cost.
I suppose that this isn't a "native code vs. interpreter" comment, but it's relevant given that the example they chose for a native language is C++. (Reasonable as it's quite a popular language.)
Maybe it's only rubber stamping things filed by US companies? Whatever the reason there are HUGE numbers of totally silly, obvious, or clearly invalid patents granted. And it costs millions of $ to fight each one through in court to invalidate it, *IF* you dare take the risk.
The HP you're remembering was run by engineers. Good ones. It doesn't bear much resemblance at all to the current company of the same name.
P.S.: Remember what happened to Apple the last time Steve Jobs left? The Steves were what made Apple what it became. Jobs has a passion for elegant design. And that's made Apple what it currently is. Now he's in the process of leaving, and I expect Apple to translate into just another company run by quarter-to-quarter bean counters.
Management that's only expert in management can't run a star company. And only sometimes can it keep a really good company from failing totally. But that's *NOT* what they teach people in management school.
You are right that it's not surprising that the details are secret. It is, however, interesting as the implication is that it's a more generous license than the publicly offered one. This could well have a large effect on the case...if not on past damages, certainly on what Google is allowed to do in the future.
FWIW, I *suspect* that the main hidden point will be that Motorola was allowed to produce modified versions of the Java system to work with their equipment or software. But this is just a suspicion. Details may well be important, even if this is the case.
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The function of time zones is that humans generally operate on Diurnal schedule. So wherever we are, we are going to wake in the morning and sleep at night. As such it makes sense to calibrate time to that. 08:00 is "morning", 20:00 is "evening". Change that, and it gets confusing any time someone travels. Even just across the US and you'd find everything gets thrown off.
Historically that isn't true. Personal clocks are relatively quite recent, and prior to that people didn't figure time in the way that you claim. Usually dawn was the first hour, though some groups picked sunset. Saying 08:00 is "morning" is just a convention, and an arbitrary one at that. ANY number that you get used to will work equivalently. (For that matter, you should check around the edges of the timezones now in summer of winter. Timezones were established for the convenience of railroad schedules.)
Why set it to UTC?
Because it's already defined, it already exists, and it's already in wide usage. This idea isn't going anywhere anyway, but why put additional obstacles in it's path. (If it were done, it would be useful.)
The conversion to UTC may happen eventually. But probably not this century. The switch to a metric time, however, is just a "bad idea"(tm). Stretching the hours and switching to a 20 hour day would be practical, but a 120 minute hour is just not as useful as a 60 minute hour. In the current system we already use "a couple of hours", "half and hour", and "a quarter hour" frequently. And four hours is the time between starting work and lunch. So we go just about as far up as down...though when we get to quarter hours we're already as likely to call it 15 minutes.
FWIW, and IIRC there was a time when days were 12 hours long (and different hours were of different length). At that time most people only told time by the strikes of the bell in the tower. And most people didn't bother. As more people started caring about time, the hours shrank until 12 hours is now half a day. So I don't think you can expect the hours to get longer.
It *is* the best reason I've heard. But it isn't sufficient. The date changing in the middle of the day is just something we aren't used to. One standard time would be better. But it's not enough better to be worth the hassle of switching.
For that matter, Daylight Saving Time is also useful, especially if you live far from the equator. It would be better to avoid it and replace it with variable hours of business, but not enough better that it will happen. (OTOH, the common justifications used to promote it are wrong. It does cost more money than it saves. But not all convenience is measured in money. And it's not clear that variable hours of business would be less expensive. It would, however, decentralize the decision of when the hours would change and by how much, and that's worth something in and of itself.)
Not broken? I'm sorry, but I *must* disagree. But I think the conversion might be worse than the conversion to metric. Yeah, metric is better, but I'm *used to* feet, inches, yards, rods, chains, furlongs, pounds, poundals, etc.
What, you don't know the poundal? Under standard conditions the poundal is a one pound mass. (It's the same mass anyway, but if the conditions aren't standard it may not equal the mass of something that weights a pound, i.e. produces a one pound force.)
But conversion to metric is difficult. Did you know that the US is officially metric? What this means is that feet are defined in terms of kilometers, etc. But getting people to talk about distance in kilometers isn't something you want to try.
So, yes, it would be desirable to use a standard time. But it ain't gonna happen. If for no other reason, think what it would do to Daylight Saving Time. Double daylight saving time, War time, etc. That's a lot of laws that would need to change.
Quite possibly. But did that mouse have ANY effect on the course of history? Independent invention happens quite frequently, once something becomes both possible and desirable. This is one of the reasons why patent laws need to be either just scrapped, or completely redone. And even if it mattered, with current patent laws proving a clean-room reimplementation would be nigh unto impossible. So I *do* mean completely redone. (Software patents, however, should just be scrapped. Copyright is the correct protection for software. And I doubt that business methods deserve even THAT protection. More of them seem to be socially detrimental that beneficial. Give then trademark protection and be done with it.)
Monopolies are not generally beneficial to society. There should be a strong proof (of being beneficial) required before a monopoly is granted, and it should require being proven again at every renewal, much less extension. And the proof should be open to public and available for criticism. AND the proof should not be either done or paid for by a party biased in favor of the grant of a monopoly. Monopolies are dangerous, and should be tightly constrained. Socially mandated monopolies should require extreme care both in the grant, and in the terms of the grant. And the bias should be towards either elimination of the monopoly, or at least the reduction in the period of time for which it is allowed to exist.
That said, in cases where there are large sunk costs required to produce an invention, then patents do have justificaiton. *IF* the invention is socially useful. But this shouldn't exclude others who independently invent the invention from using it or selling it. (That *independently* is the stickler, and requires great care in implementation.)
Please note that what I'm proposing as "justifiable patents" only applies to a quite small minority of the patents granted, even when software and business patents are excluded.
OTOH, patents should also not be a profit center for the government. It should cost the government money to issue patents. They should be free, if they meet the qualifications. (The question occurs as to how to limit the number of frivolous patent applications. Perhaps those *should* have a fee attached. Say 0.1% of the applicant's yearly income tax.)
There's also the matter that patents should reveal in a meaningful way sufficient that those "skilled in the art" should be able to reproduce the invention. This should be a required test. For this the applicant should be allowed, if they choose, to have the patent office hire selected individuals unaffiliated with the applicant to reproduce the invention. If they do, then they will, of course, be billed for the cost incurred by hiring those individuals. If they don't, then the patent office should have staff specialists who will attempt to reproduce the invention. If three try and none succeed, than the patent should be ruled invalid.
For design patents, definitely. In fact for design patents movies should present a stronger case than an actual existing product, because more people have been exposed to the design.
If that "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment
Report" is the one I heard of, many professionals were complaining because the predictions had been toned down to be more politically acceptable. OTOH that 30 foot projection was a wild outlier. Just about as much as the 1 foot projection. (I think that thermal expansion of the oceans accounted for that, and perhaps a bit more, without any ice melting needed.)
Warning: I'm talking off the top of my head, and I'm no expert, but:
Which current projections? I would have put the range at 1-30 feet, though I guess I consider 3 feet more reasonable. Of course, It's hard to be specific since a lot of what the result is depends on what we do. (I think the 30 foot range was predicting massive use of shale-oil, and poor conservation/pollution controls. Which, unfortunately, isn't at all an unreasonable projection.)
N.B.: It's quite unlikely that China/India/etc. aren't going to use the same energy sources that we use. And will probably be aiming for the same per capita usage. So perhaps that 30 foot projection isn't all THAT unreasonable.
FWIW, these are projections presuming only nominal antarctic melting. If Antarctica starts seriously melting we can expect much worse. I've been told that this probably won't happen. OTOH, there are presuming substantial Greenland melting...but then that's already underway.
Gas prices are rising rapidly. I'd be quite surprised if the airplane industry doesn't implode. I'd actually be less surprised if dirigibles became popular than if the airplane industry continued along it's current path. And, frankly, I'm not really impressed at the attempts at fuel efficient airplanes. It think it's probably an intractable problem.
You are making some assumptions that may not be true. Amino acids work as elements of life at temperatures around the melting point/boiling point of water under what seem to be normal planetary atmospheres. It's not clear that they would work on, e.g., Titan. You'd probably want something a bit more active. Maybe life isn't possible there, but I don't think that's the way to bet. (It could, of course, be more improbable, but then we don't know just how likely life was to arise on earth. It seems, in retrospect, to have been quite likely, but this could easily be a mistake.)
So. Amino acids are AN element from which life can be built. Possibly, however, not the only one. And we probably don't know what else to go looking for.
I do agree, however, that given what is currently known calling the extant space-born molecules "seeds of life" is overstating the case.
There are ways and there are ways.
E.g., what if each office was wired, but had a femtocell wireless router? Then all the computers could be connected wirelessly without overusing the frequency spectrum. Of course, the auditorium would need the speakers devices to be registered, and to block all other devices, or maybe even to use a separate frequency spectrum. (Need special plug-in dongles to broadcast at the right frequencies.)
N.B.: I'm not saying it wouldn't be a lot of work. I'm saying that everyone could feel that they were wirelessly connected. Except in large meeting rooms.
An electronic subscription is essentially worthless to me. This means I paid for something I'm not going to get, and I'm not real pleased about the thieves.
I'll admit that I already didn't read all of it, but this way I'm not going to read any. Reading on a monitor is much more stressful than reading a book or a magazine, and not even worth it for fiction.
Article reading is a quite different activity from "looking something up", which is something I do on a monitor. I don't, however, follow ANY on-line magazine. And I don't read on-line books. Or pdfs. If I try, all I get out of it is a headache. And as for those who say I should get a Kindel, you are just bat-shit crazy. I'm not going to invest in something where after I've bought something the vendor can yank it back without my consent. And I'm not about to consent. Because of that I'm not likely to ever find out if the claims that it's screen is clear enough that it won't cause eye-strain are correct. And without proof I'm not about to believe it. (Younger eyes tend to be more flexible, so what works for an average 20 year old can't reasonably be expected to be evidence that it would work for me.)
At one point this made sense, because the patent required the effective disclosure of the idea, including how to implement it. Sufficient that "one skilled in the art" could reproduce the invention. And also because there were only a few people working on developing any particular area.
Now, however, patents are designed to be incomprehensible to anyone but patent lawyers, inventors are cautioned to avoid reading existing patents, because if they have a chance of understanding what the patent is about they are subject to triple damages, even if they thing they've avoided it...as long as the patent holder's lawyer can convince the court that they didn't avoid it. And there's LOTS of people working on every feasible idea (and lots that aren't feasible).
Currently the only domain in which patents make ANY sense is where there are extensive up-front costs to development. Even there, the diminished requirement for effective disclosure makes their desirability quite questionable. Yes, they are desirable to the patent holder (in such a case), but it's not at all clear that they are in the public interest. There needs to be EFFECTIVE DISCLOSURE before patents are *ever* in the public interest.
Wouldn't bet on that. It will, however, probably be impossible to disentangle the effects. There's a synergistic combination.
E.g., As tech jobs are outsourced, more tech innovation evolves in the countries to which it was outsourced. (There's a time delay here, but it's probably not much more than a decade.) And it *might* have happened anyway. Anyway, these new innovators patent things where it's most profitable to do so. (This probably means the US, but it can also include other places. N.B. that innovators here doesn't refer to individuals, who probably can't afford US patents, but to the local companies that hire them.) The things don't even need to be patentable locally, in fact if they aren't, then local innovation will be faster. So they get the benefits of patents without the drawbacks.
Compare this to US copyright law before the 1970's, when a work published outside the country before being published within the country did not have copyright protection within the US. There are both similarities and differences.
It's not slick, but it's not bad either. However if Objective-C couldn't handle "Hello World" reasonably, I wouldn't consider it at all interesting.
My interest if more along the lines of converting back and forth between utf-8 strings and ubyte arrays, reading and writing contiguous areas of memory to disk files at defined initial byte offsets, allocation and initialization of instance variables in classes, syntax of passing class items between routines, garbage collection independent of GnuStep/AppleStep/Cocoa/etc. (I.e., language facilities for garbage collection, not that of libraries that presume classes that require features that interfere with what I'm doing. Etc.
FWIW, after reading the documentation that I could find on NSString I couldn't decide on whether I could get a C array of unsigned bytes out of it. Did it try to convert the multi-byte characters or not? Etc. (I could have gone digging, but I preferred to switch to a language where it was easier to figure out how to do what I wanted. D. But D lacks easy two-way access to C libraries, so at some point I'll need to convert it to Ada, C, Objective-C, Vala, or something I haven't figured out. Because of the heavy use of class instance variable, C is implausible. (I also don't like the x->y syntax, but I suppose I could adapt to (*x).y, even though it *is* incredibly ugly.) Ada is verbose, Vala is too beta, so Objective-C is something I'm strongly considering. But my classes would descend from Object, not from NSObject, unless I come to a radically different understanding than I currently have. Does Objective-C, as opposed to NSObject, have something similar to smart-pointers and weak-pointers? If not, I'll need to look into how easy they would be to port. Real garbage collection is probably impractical in any C descendant language, due to the ability to convert pointers back and forth between integers, but smart-pointers combined with weak-pointers could suffice for my purposes (if they have usable syntax).
The so what is, it's basically unapproachable unless you are coming from a C/glib background. And the last time I checked the documentation didn't even tell you how to build a struct, or why you should want to. (I presume for the same reason that you would want to in C, but that's a guess!)
As for the bindings.... Some of them are decently documented, and other times you are left with the name of a function, and NO description of what it does, why you might want to use it, or when you definitely shouldn't use it. So you trace them back to try to find things out and...well, eventually you end up at C code. That's poorly documented in the code. (Yes, that is the authoritative source. but this doesn't make it an "easy read" when you're trying to decide if this is the function you need.)
I'm sorry. Compare this with Java, Python, C, C++, D, or even Lisp documentation
OTOH, Vala doesn't claim to have reached the 1.0 version yet. Last I checked it was 0.12. So that the documentation should be incomplete isn't surprising, but it does mean that it's MUCH too soon to start pushing the language.
OK. My first step would be a closed cycle ecology. One that operated via recycling rather than just use once and replace from new supplies.
We have made STARTS in that direction, but we haven't gotten very far. Certainly not to anything that I'd want my life to depend on.
You left out:
C: Fairly simple, lots of bug opportunities, very verbose, very fast, suitable for system programming
I suppose you could argue with the "very verbose" part. It depends on how you analyze things. If you're doing the same thing in C and C++ I guess "incredibly verbose" would be a better way to put it.
Also:
C# is suitable for systems programming? I find it quite a questionable assertion that ANY language running in a virtual machine is suitable for systems programming...except, perhaps, on that same virtual machine.
Vala is a probably incomplete language with definitely incomplete documentation. Whenever I tried to look up how to do something, the documentation didn't cover it.
Objective C is quite interesting, but also suffers from poor documentation. Lots better than Vala, but ... well, poor. Possibly this isn't true if you're programming on an Apple machine. (I *am* quite interested in Objective C, but the last time I tried to use it the examples wouldn't compile for reasons that I couldn't determine. OTOH, at that same time C++ was throwing fits, so it may just have been Debian Sid breaking things.)
???
Garbage doesn't, and is not intended to, release in a timely fashion. OTOH, it will release anything that has a delete method (as defined by the language).
You do, in certain circumstances, need to be able to disable a garbage collector. So what? You don't always use enums either.
And "freeing resources is mostly a non-issue in C++"??? I'm sorry, but this just sounds too strange to understand.
OTOH, the structure of the C/C++ language does make garbage collection extremely inefficient, because it's impossible to determine whether some integer will turn out to hold a pointer. This means that huge amounts of extra analysis need to be undertaken. (Personally, I think that C/C++ should have standard garbage collector that can be turned off either for sections of code or for the entire program. And that it should immediately disable itself if an integer is ever cast to a pointer.)
But "smart pointers" of various flavors are, to speak as favorably as I can about them, hideous kludges. They don't really solve the problem, though they certainly reduce it.
Native is excellent. Unfortunately, C/C++ has some very bad failings...basically due to pointer arithmetic, but also due to being able to cast pointers to integers and vice versa.
FWIW, I consider garbage collection to be almost essential in a decent language, and the conversion of pointers (and pointer arithmetic) mean that it cannot be efficiently done in C/C++ style languages. There are also other reasons why this is a bad idea, but that's the, for me, primary one.
Note that before I started using Object Oriented Programming I didn't worry about garbage collection. Now that I use it I find the lack of it in C/C++ to be a constant pain. The compiler should be able to determine at any point which objects are still "live" (i.e., reachable) and reclaim those that aren't. Unfortunately in C/C++ this is impossible, as they could be stored on disk files as integers. Generally this is "worked around", partially by saying "You should be smart enough not to do that", but also by guessing whether certain integers in RAM are or are not pointers in disguise. It generally works, but it imposes a tremendous overhead that usually isn't worth the cost.
I suppose that this isn't a "native code vs. interpreter" comment, but it's relevant given that the example they chose for a native language is C++. (Reasonable as it's quite a popular language.)
Maybe it's only rubber stamping things filed by US companies? Whatever the reason there are HUGE numbers of totally silly, obvious, or clearly invalid patents granted. And it costs millions of $ to fight each one through in court to invalidate it, *IF* you dare take the risk.
The HP you're remembering was run by engineers. Good ones. It doesn't bear much resemblance at all to the current company of the same name.
P.S.: Remember what happened to Apple the last time Steve Jobs left? The Steves were what made Apple what it became. Jobs has a passion for elegant design. And that's made Apple what it currently is. Now he's in the process of leaving, and I expect Apple to translate into just another company run by quarter-to-quarter bean counters.
Management that's only expert in management can't run a star company. And only sometimes can it keep a really good company from failing totally. But that's *NOT* what they teach people in management school.
You are right that it's not surprising that the details are secret. It is, however, interesting as the implication is that it's a more generous license than the publicly offered one. This could well have a large effect on the case...if not on past damages, certainly on what Google is allowed to do in the future.
FWIW, I *suspect* that the main hidden point will be that Motorola was allowed to produce modified versions of the Java system to work with their equipment or software. But this is just a suspicion. Details may well be important, even if this is the case.