You can undercut them on price but only at the expense of quality. When it became sort of common knowledge apple where releasing an OS based on ios, a *lot* of very crappy android tablets rushed to the market to try and beat it, and the quality generally as so damn bad it basically destroyed androids rep on the tablet.
Those who DID go for high build quality either went for a windows based Tablet that still missed the entire damn point of what made the ipad so good: Fat clumy fingers need simple foolproof OS. The rare few full price android ones just felt like an expensive second rate ipad clone. There was no value equasion in it.
Its all changed a bit now, the samsung pads are actually reasonably decent quality and the app ecosystem sucks a lot less for pads then it did then, but the momentum behind the ipad is going to be very difficult to circumvent, and ultimately to hit iPad quality you'll end up having to make something with an iPad cost unless your prepared to eat some very big losses for a long enough time to survive a market punchup with apple.
The problem is scientists are not PR people and if the "climategate" frameup is anything to go on, loose words from scientists shitcanning opponents or using slang to describe things (Ie the 'fudge' in the modelling , that conservatives flipped out as being "fraud" despite the lead scientist having published multiple papers at the time explaining the reason behind the calibration re post 1960s tree ring divergence) can be used to construct a case that might seem plausible to people outside the field that something fishy is going on.
Now we all know how that ended up. The committies that investigated could find no evidence of wrongdoing and thus the scientists where exonerated with a mild warning to the scientists not to play so loosely with FOI laws in future, but to this day political and public relations hacks still angrily denounce the scientists involved despite their proven innocence, and largely the inquiry results where barely reported because "is innocent" is a far less sexy headline than "smoking gun".
This had disastrous consequences, with a large percent of the population now distrust climate science based on completely incorrect understandings of the incident, and the scientists involved have endured years of death threats, defamation, shitty double-triple-quadruple-jepardy witchhunt inquiries (Dont like what your panel of experts found? Convene yet ANOTHER panel and try again!) and all at a huge toll.
I think THIS is what scientists want protection from. Climate researchers didn't sign on to be punching bags from defamatory assholes. They signed on to be scientists to research and publish in peace. But many are now being intimidated out of research by a rather organized and vicious campaign , and this is BAD for science, BAD for democray, and if some of the predictions of the science come true, BAD for humans if this bullying and defamation stop us from acting as we should on the problem.
I almost brought one of those damn things hoping to cash in on a "goldmine" of app development, but the only telco here that offered them had absurd terms, and there where , I believe , some onerous requirements for devs.
I'm glad I didn't , they where fairly absurd devices retrospectively.
I'm sure if it wasn't his friends son, he would have. But friends dont put friends kids in jail. More to the point, because the kid WASNT a stranger he had other less destructive options available than ruining the kids life in revenge.
It really doesnt matter if its a US corporation. If its operating in Germany, then its operations in germany are under German juristiction no ifs no buts.
We've had a few instances here in australia where a US court "overrules" an australian one from having juristiction. The australian court, naturally, systematically ignores it. Those clauses of "All disagreements must be heard in x state" you see in american contracts have no validity here. To quote a lawyer friend, "Us lawyers dont actually get to invent laws or nullify them with our contracts, no matter how clever we think we are".
The big problem for me is I mostly use the google map for its *excellent* bus and train routing. I can just drop in an address, let it pull my current location from the GPS and have it give me really great bus/train combinations. Apple has dropped this feature
Until theres an alternative I simply cant upgrade. Which is a problem for me, being a full time IOS developer and all that.
Oh trust me. That lock out is enforced server side. Banks are not THAT stupid. Mine actually locks my account l after 4 attempts and I need to phone the bank and provide a tonne of personal details to unlock it.
I dont think thats a very useful definition. There are many lawfirms that merely act on the request of clients, and largely this is an honorable thing, even if the clients are scumbags (And as has been said, in a just society, even scumbags deserve a lawyer). I dont think such law firms are "trolls", but their primary source of income is patent legal shenanigans.
I'd suggest a better definition. 1) Does the IP originate with the litigant? if it doesnt 2) Is it being used abusively.
If 1 and 2 is true, then its a troll. An example of this might be the MPEG-LA. It fits your description too. It puts call outs trying to get its hands on as many patents over video compression as possible, then proceeds to sue or extort rent from everybody. Another example of an IP-Troll in my definition (although not a patent troll) would be Caldera/SCO. It asserted copyrights and licences over stuff it did not originate and attempted to sue everyone. But it did have a product, SCO Unix. Its just that it used acquired IP abusively, so its a troll.
Microsoft - Where handset manufacturers go to die.
Kind of sad really. Nokia, for all the horrors symbian provoked on the world, has always made sound and solid handsets, and really deserve most of the credit for the mobile phone revolution in the third world.
Except, of course, that there's no natural explanation for existence. Or even a scrap of that "LOT of evidence".
The thing is though theres no equally plausible reason why we shouldn't exist. It might puzzle us that stuff should exist, but the chain of logic for any explanation you put in front of it doesn't improve by adding more first causes on.
What caused the big bang? Well god did. Right what caused god? Seems a pointless step when we cant really find any evidence of god, but we can point a radio telescope at the sky and hear a big old wad of background radiation pointing to a big bang.
But more to the point, if time *starts* at the moment of inception, then there is logically no time before it, and if there is no time before it, then there is no "before it" at all. And if there is no "before", nothing could have caused it. Meaning that it has no cause.
In fact arguably we might even say that even if theres no explaination as to a cause, its because there was no cause. Shit just is.
Linux in general is a pretty fast booter, but its the dependencies that are the problem.
A ubuntu server on its own is snappy as heck to boot, but once you load it up with a bunch of services each with its own dependencies for other services, no distribution is going to fix that.
SCO have nothing to sell. One thing that came out in these trials is that SCO never really owned anything. Rather they where the prime licensors of *NOVELs* IP, and where effectively acting as re-sellers of NOVEL's unix IP.
The case was really the equivilent of a large Ford dealership suing General Motors because GMs have engines. Ford themselves might have other opinions than the precocious startup.
In the case of this litigation NOVEL's agreement with SCO was that SCO had to get approval from NOVEL before starting any litigatin like this, after all it wasnt SCO's IP in the first place.
And finally SCO themselves hadn't been paying *their* fees to NOVEL for the rights to sell UNIX products.
And finally what little SCO *had* contributed in the way of IP, they themselves had GPLed long before, mostly just shitty redundant code that had little of value in the modern era.
SCO had no IP worth spitting on. Its a worthless company who realising they didn't have much to trade on anymore decided to go IP troll with a shotgun, and in the process blew off their own foot.
Because Rand was adamant that morals where not the business of business, only self interest. And she claimed that selfish "fuck you got mine" behavior from business was *good*.
My buggy old ASUS laptop and thier attrocious repair policies for australian customers (3 months to get a replacement laptop?!) was what pushed my over the edge to switch to the mac in the first place. The thing was a high specced low build quality piece of plastic junk.
Its not an interpretation. It literally says "States". And since the constitution is very speciic in language about states vs the fed, there isn't any scope for "alternative" interpretations.
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
So yeah.... thats not ambiguous. Especially when the Section 8 enumerated powers says;-
8.1 The Congress shall have Power To (...)
8.5 To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
And so there you have it. The cosntitution FIRST says that the federal legislature can coin money and give it a value, THEN it says that the states are forbidden to. The states thus may use the *federal* currency to engage in trade, or if it wishes it may use gold or silver coins only.
Any alternative interpretation is incorrect. The constitution is not ambiguous about this.
Yeah Its fucking bizare the movie industry is still doing this.
I havent pirated an album in years thanks to itunes more or less solving the music availability puzzle for me. I can afford to blow a tenner here or there for a decent album, and now I do.
But netflix is blocked, hula is blocked, itunes has terrible movie availability here, and AMV etc just do the shitty "Not available in your region" crap.
What other options do we have in australia? Sweet fuck all. So australians pirate movies.
Surely fixing that problem should be a priority but this shits being going on for the better part of a decade.
Shoot the lawyers, offer the services here, problem solved the studios get fat cash and we get to have the movies and TV shows we want.
Isaac Newton was also a paranoid bible bash who believed the world was going to end in 2060, and was secretly trying to figure out how to transmute lead into gold using alchemy.
Heck through most of history genius's have believed in the philosophers stone and alchemy, but ask any dumb kid on the net, and he'll tell you alchemy is hogwash.
What you think "opressing minorities" would be considered a negative in australia. Boy do you have some things to learn about this messed up country.....
Dude, seriously, don't post links from the "wattsupwiththat" site. Its almost as bad as posting links from creation science ministries or a homeopathy site.
Bad cranky un-science from a noted pseudoscience peddler.
Slashdot Mirror
This post was removed due to Dice content standards violations.
What the heck? Has this been happening for real?
You can undercut them on price but only at the expense of quality. When it became sort of common knowledge apple where releasing an OS based on ios, a *lot* of very crappy android tablets rushed to the market to try and beat it, and the quality generally as so damn bad it basically destroyed androids rep on the tablet.
Those who DID go for high build quality either went for a windows based Tablet that still missed the entire damn point of what made the ipad so good: Fat clumy fingers need simple foolproof OS. The rare few full price android ones just felt like an expensive second rate ipad clone. There was no value equasion in it.
Its all changed a bit now, the samsung pads are actually reasonably decent quality and the app ecosystem sucks a lot less for pads then it did then, but the momentum behind the ipad is going to be very difficult to circumvent, and ultimately to hit iPad quality you'll end up having to make something with an iPad cost unless your prepared to eat some very big losses for a long enough time to survive a market punchup with apple.
The problem is scientists are not PR people and if the "climategate" frameup is anything to go on, loose words from scientists shitcanning opponents or using slang to describe things (Ie the 'fudge' in the modelling , that conservatives flipped out as being "fraud" despite the lead scientist having published multiple papers at the time explaining the reason behind the calibration re post 1960s tree ring divergence) can be used to construct a case that might seem plausible to people outside the field that something fishy is going on.
Now we all know how that ended up. The committies that investigated could find no evidence of wrongdoing and thus the scientists where exonerated with a mild warning to the scientists not to play so loosely with FOI laws in future, but to this day political and public relations hacks still angrily denounce the scientists involved despite their proven innocence, and largely the inquiry results where barely reported because "is innocent" is a far less sexy headline than "smoking gun".
This had disastrous consequences, with a large percent of the population now distrust climate science based on completely incorrect understandings of the incident, and the scientists involved have endured years of death threats, defamation, shitty double-triple-quadruple-jepardy witchhunt inquiries (Dont like what your panel of experts found? Convene yet ANOTHER panel and try again!) and all at a huge toll.
I think THIS is what scientists want protection from. Climate researchers didn't sign on to be punching bags from defamatory assholes. They signed on to be scientists to research and publish in peace. But many are now being intimidated out of research by a rather organized and vicious campaign , and this is BAD for science, BAD for democray, and if some of the predictions of the science come true, BAD for humans if this bullying and defamation stop us from acting as we should on the problem.
I almost brought one of those damn things hoping to cash in on a "goldmine" of app development, but the only telco here that offered them had absurd terms, and there where , I believe , some onerous requirements for devs.
I'm glad I didn't , they where fairly absurd devices retrospectively.
I'm sure if it wasn't his friends son, he would have. But friends dont put friends kids in jail. More to the point, because the kid WASNT a stranger he had other less destructive options available than ruining the kids life in revenge.
It really doesnt matter if its a US corporation. If its operating in Germany, then its operations in germany are under German juristiction no ifs no buts.
We've had a few instances here in australia where a US court "overrules" an australian one from having juristiction. The australian court, naturally, systematically ignores it. Those clauses of "All disagreements must be heard in x state" you see in american contracts have no validity here. To quote a lawyer friend, "Us lawyers dont actually get to invent laws or nullify them with our contracts, no matter how clever we think we are".
You could use up your monthly bit-cap in about five seconds... USA! USA! USA!
I dunno, I'd be pretty happy with a 655360 gigabyte bit-cap if it'd take 5 whole seconds to chew it up at this speed.
The big problem for me is I mostly use the google map for its *excellent* bus and train routing. I can just drop in an address, let it pull my current location from the GPS and have it give me really great bus/train combinations. Apple has dropped this feature
Until theres an alternative I simply cant upgrade. Which is a problem for me, being a full time IOS developer and all that.
Oh trust me. That lock out is enforced server side. Banks are not THAT stupid. Mine actually locks my account l after 4 attempts and I need to phone the bank and provide a tonne of personal details to unlock it.
Well whoever started it, the outcome is the same. We the consumer get bent over and reamed for something that has nothing to do with us.
Its evil and it needs to stop/
Only if Ubisoft first sells off Assasins creed to another company. Ubisoft suck, but I frigging love assasins creed.
I dont think thats a very useful definition. There are many lawfirms that merely act on the request of clients, and largely this is an honorable thing, even if the clients are scumbags (And as has been said, in a just society, even scumbags deserve a lawyer). I dont think such law firms are "trolls", but their primary source of income is patent legal shenanigans.
I'd suggest a better definition.
1) Does the IP originate with the litigant?
if it doesnt
2) Is it being used abusively.
If 1 and 2 is true, then its a troll. An example of this might be the MPEG-LA. It fits your description too. It puts call outs trying to get its hands on as many patents over video compression as possible, then proceeds to sue or extort rent from everybody. Another example of an IP-Troll in my definition (although not a patent troll) would be Caldera/SCO. It asserted copyrights and licences over stuff it did not originate and attempted to sue everyone. But it did have a product, SCO Unix. Its just that it used acquired IP abusively, so its a troll.
Microsoft - Where handset manufacturers go to die.
Kind of sad really. Nokia, for all the horrors symbian provoked on the world, has always made sound and solid handsets, and really deserve most of the credit for the mobile phone revolution in the third world.
Except, of course, that there's no natural explanation for existence. Or even a scrap of that "LOT of evidence".
The thing is though theres no equally plausible reason why we shouldn't exist. It might puzzle us that stuff should exist, but the chain of logic for any explanation you put in front of it doesn't improve by adding more first causes on.
What caused the big bang? Well god did. Right what caused god? Seems a pointless step when we cant really find any evidence of god, but we can point a radio telescope at the sky and hear a big old wad of background radiation pointing to a big bang.
But more to the point, if time *starts* at the moment of inception, then there is logically no time before it, and if there is no time before it, then there is no "before it" at all. And if there is no "before", nothing could have caused it. Meaning that it has no cause.
In fact arguably we might even say that even if theres no explaination as to a cause, its because there was no cause. Shit just is.
No its just a generic science data collection application by the sounds of it/.
The data rate he's describing is absolutely nothing unusual in the sciences.
Linux in general is a pretty fast booter, but its the dependencies that are the problem.
A ubuntu server on its own is snappy as heck to boot, but once you load it up with a bunch of services each with its own dependencies for other services, no distribution is going to fix that.
SCO have nothing to sell. One thing that came out in these trials is that SCO never really owned anything. Rather they where the prime licensors of *NOVELs* IP, and where effectively acting as re-sellers of NOVEL's unix IP.
The case was really the equivilent of a large Ford dealership suing General Motors because GMs have engines. Ford themselves might have other opinions than the precocious startup.
In the case of this litigation NOVEL's agreement with SCO was that SCO had to get approval from NOVEL before starting any litigatin like this, after all it wasnt SCO's IP in the first place.
And finally SCO themselves hadn't been paying *their* fees to NOVEL for the rights to sell UNIX products.
And finally what little SCO *had* contributed in the way of IP, they themselves had GPLed long before, mostly just shitty redundant code that had little of value in the modern era.
SCO had no IP worth spitting on. Its a worthless company who realising they didn't have much to trade on anymore decided to go IP troll with a shotgun, and in the process blew off their own foot.
Because Rand was adamant that morals where not the business of business, only self interest. And she claimed that selfish "fuck you got mine" behavior from business was *good*.
And here we are today.
The woman was a menace.
My buggy old ASUS laptop and thier attrocious repair policies for australian customers (3 months to get a replacement laptop?!) was what pushed my over the edge to switch to the mac in the first place. The thing was a high specced low build quality piece of plastic junk.
Well that and vista.
Its not an interpretation. It literally says "States". And since the constitution is very speciic in language about states vs the fed, there isn't any scope for "alternative" interpretations.
Yeah Its fucking bizare the movie industry is still doing this.
I havent pirated an album in years thanks to itunes more or less solving the music availability puzzle for me. I can afford to blow a tenner here or there for a decent album, and now I do.
But netflix is blocked, hula is blocked, itunes has terrible movie availability here, and AMV etc just do the shitty "Not available in your region" crap.
What other options do we have in australia? Sweet fuck all. So australians pirate movies.
Surely fixing that problem should be a priority but this shits being going on for the better part of a decade.
Shoot the lawyers, offer the services here, problem solved the studios get fat cash and we get to have the movies and TV shows we want.
Finally more memory for the Stockmarket ticker app!
Isaac Newton was also a paranoid bible bash who believed the world was going to end in 2060, and was secretly trying to figure out how to transmute lead into gold using alchemy.
Heck through most of history genius's have believed in the philosophers stone and alchemy, but ask any dumb kid on the net, and he'll tell you alchemy is hogwash.
Guess what? The dumb kids are right.
What you think "opressing minorities" would be considered a negative in australia. Boy do you have some things to learn about this messed up country.....
Dude, seriously, don't post links from the "wattsupwiththat" site. Its almost as bad as posting links from creation science ministries or a homeopathy site.
Bad cranky un-science from a noted pseudoscience peddler.