Okay, perfectly serious question, and one the game developers and studios are going to ask you: How are you going to protect against piracy if the platform is open? Explain how if it's made trivially-easy for people to download and pirate the games, how their revenue stream benefits from this... because open platforms encourage piracy. Or at least, that's the argument that's going to be made.
Well in case you missed the memo, Steam is pretty successful on open platforms like Windows and OS X. At least "open" as in "doesn't require code signing". Building a "Steambox" would be to lower cost (no MS license) and provide a standardized hardware platform compared to the PC. Compared to the other consoles it'd be an alternative to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo who all have their terms and conditions to sell on their platform. And the Linux kernel is GPLv2 not GPLv3, so you actually can make a locked down box if you want, you just can't keep the source code a secret. Valve could do to consoles what Google has done to cell phones/tablets with Android, I don't see many Android app developers complaining that it runs Linux down below. Why should game developers be complaining if their console runs Linux down below?
Isn't that still an important and useful qualitation, since the vast, vast majority of people can't, shouldn't and don't fucking want to write code? And, I would argue, nor should they ever need to. Writing arbitrary invented languages, with awkward syntax and extremely-non-human thought-structures, to accomplish esoteric tasks has never been an intuitive or optimal way of getting shit done.
Trust me, everybody would loooooooove for the computer to take instructions like a human but it's not going to happen because of everything that's implicitly understood. So you can teach this computer to fold a shirt, if you hand it an XS shirt and an XXL shirt will it figure out that it must adapt the folding action to the size of the shirt? I bet you any 5yo would figure that out all on their own because they've understood the basic concept of folding a shirt. Take a fundamental sentence like "put the black and white pants on the top shelf" did we mean the black pants and the white pants, or the black and white checkered pants?
All that happens is that some really smart people will try really hard to write code that guesses what it was people actually meant but without actually knowing the context and purpose they'll fail miserably. Not to mention all the times they'd have to guess at do what I meant, not what I said because normal people when facing a choice between the reasonable and the absurd pick the reasonable like. Like say you have a knife and a chicken and you ask what to do with the knife and they answer "Cut the chicken to pieces and put it in the oven" most people will understand that you're to put the chicken in the oven, not the knife - even though you didn't ask what to do with the chicken.
Or the TL;DR version: Good luck, I don't think we'll be unemployed any time soon.
True, but you're paying upkeep for a network running 24x7x365 with coverage in all sorts of weird places to send and receive those messages. It's a bit like taking the minimum price of a post card at the post office and multiplying to get cost/kg. At least here in Norway which is pretty expensive you only pay about 8c/message and you can typically buy much cheaper in bulk and/or various "friends & family" packages to a limited set of numbers. I think the cheapest mega-pack I've seen is 5000 texts for 43 USD (250 NOK) or about 0.9 cents/message. The 8 cents include the "called for $5, texted for $2, expects 24x7 coverage everywhere they go" crowd - it's not the MB cost that's the cost of delivering.
You'll laugh until the steps are: 1. Wipe OpenBSD 2. Install Windows 3. Install this government-mandated software
It was one of the nastier suggestions for use of Trusted Computing and Remote Attestation - if your computer can't provide a valid signature saying it's running a trusted, up to date OS with antivirus etc. then you wouldn't get to connect to the Internet. Then again, if ARM takes over it looks like we can kiss the idea of "alternative OS" good-bye as Apple, Microsoft and most Android handsets are locked to one OS to begin with...
That may have been true a decade ago but if you were 15-18 in the dotcom era (1997-2000) you're 27-33 now, I don't think kids can assume their parents are clueless about the Internet anymore. At least not much longer.
He did it on purpose. Google by default has "safe search" and you have to uncheck it to get porn results. Unless grandpa did it.
He would be a she if you read the GP again, you really think little girls intentionally seek bestiality? I think you vastly overrate Google's "safe search", it's pretty good at recognizing human tits, pussy and dick but horses tend to run around naked all the time so if you have a scantily clad woman doing naughty things to a horse that may not be caught. I've certainly seen NSFW images slip through Google's filter from time to time, it's a 99% filter not perfect. Of course this isn't really a good argument for porn filters since Google already has one, any other filter wouldn't be perfect either.
It's the libertarian streak of Slashdot, people here are very fond of "alternative" ways that don't rely on corporations or the government. Like for example crowdfunding which is a massive move of risk over to the "customer", which is what people consider themselves when the reward for donating $X is one copy of product Y. And then I'm not thinking about the outright frauds but more the projects that just don't go according to plan, either because the plan is terrible to begin with, you don't have the people, you don't have the skills, the technology doesn't work out and overall the work and challenges involved are much greater than originally thought and what seemed like a good idea on practice just isn't that great in reality. Everybody who's actually worked with this knows that the both the cost estimates, schedule and deliverables are ballpark estimates.
Personally, I think I'll still wait until there's an actual game/movie/book/whatever you can have in hand and read reviews about. Life's too short for me to actually do QA on crowdsourcing projects and I imagine it is for most other people too, they just throw some money at it and hope it was a good idea based on some superficial ideas and concept art. Except as they say, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution ability that matters and that design needs to be matched with well working code and kept sufficient in check to bring it to market. I know way too many people who'd get too busy improving the product to ever ship 1.0, not sticking to a scope and finishing it is probably the most common failure mode I see. Then the money runs out and you ship a buggy and incomplete version "1.5" instead.
Note that it is rarely 5+ year old material that is 'pirated'
Perhaps people don't want to fund a system they don't think is fair? I buy both BluRays and DVDs sometimes, not because I needed to but because it's good stuff that I like and that I want them to produce more of but I hate that I'm funding DRM. I hate that I'm funding the lobbying groups who want copyright to be infinity minus a day. I hate that I'm funding the people strong-arming ISPs to become their private enforcement branch. I hate that I'm funding the people pushing for copyright enforcement outside the justice system, with no real oversight or due process. I'm a pirate if I download it today, in 5 years or in 50 years. Might as well get it over with...
First of all, it has been my experience that, as ESL speakers, Indians are among the most fluent in the world. It seems to me that they take great care to learn and use English well, unlike the stumbling parody you provided. No doubt a consequence of British colonialism, but perhaps a happy one.
There's a huge selection bias that the people you're likely to communicate with in English are those who know it well. Only about 12% of Indians are considered English-speaking, I'm not sure if a person like the grandparent would be counted to the 12% or the 88% but there's extremely many of them. There's a lot of non-English colonies doing more, for example here in Norway some 89% are now English-speaking and it's a compulsory subject from the first school year (age 6), by the time you've finished high school you'll have had 1800-2000 hours in your primary language and 700 hours of English. Also we don't generally don't dub English-speaking TV series and movies except for small children and at least in higher education you're expected to read English textbooks. I think you'll find the average Indian is far from the most fluent in the world.
This is for the people who won't use Linux because it doesn't run Netflix, not the people who won't use Netflix because it doesn't run on Linux. Netflix don't want you, don't care about supporting you and might in fact hate it because it causes problems with their content providers who demand "robust" DRM. But as usual there's hacktivists that won't take no for an answer and they'll reverse engineer, emulate, patch and prod it until it works, it's how Linux got off the ground in the first place. It certainly wasn't because everyone was handing out hardware specs and driver code, protocol definitions or anything of the sort. You'd probably get more results cheering them on than spitting bile at Netflix, corporations are almost immune to that. Bringing Netflix to Linux is good for Linux even if they are dragged kicking and screaming.
I'll go one better and dismiss all three. To take his definition first, if I were to send a referee software for the legally blind it would surely be considered an act of expression even though distributing software in general is not, so that is clearly insufficient. If I was rolling my eyes as the Great Leader hymn was playing then clearly that was an act of expression even though I didn't mean it as an attempt at communication, so that definition is insufficient too. Finally not answering the question "You don't really think I did it, do you?" means that absence of information transmission is in itself a form of expression. Even total indifference is arguably protected under the first amendment, in case you don't want to join the Two Minute Hate. Of course being a form of expression doesn't mean it's protected, terror is a pretty clear form of communication just not a lawful one.
If it was that simple, Nokia should have been the undisputed ruler of the mobile market since my impression is they put out a dozen models in markets others put out two. Apple might be a little over the top in the other direction but it's easier for developers to only support a few models and customers know each model is popular enough every application will usually work well, both ways have their pros and cons. Of all the choices you don't get with Apple the most obvious is a cheap model. My local price comparison lists 171 cell phone models with a price, sorted from low to high the first Apple model is the iPhone 4 (8 GB) on 128th while the iPhone 5 is 166th, 169th and 171st - the most expensive phone you can buy. Ferrari only produces four models too, but I doubt that's why their market share is low...
Emphasis mine. It doesn't say just customers. It doesn't say just people who have the binaries. It says "any third party". That means any third party, no further restrictions or conditions.
I think your interpretation is wrong. If company A makes a special binary for company B along with an offer for source code, then random company C can't come and demand the source code for company B's version. The FSF FAQ says:
(...) When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. (...) The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you.
That is to say, if you have an offer they must honor it no matter who you are. If you don't have an offer, you get nothing. It's like a cashier's check, whoever holds it can cash it. But no check, no money.
Some of the newer technologies not only allow much smaller feature sizes than the current 20nm, but will also allow stacking of components
Sure we can stack them, but can we cool them? Even the Ivy Bridge chips that lowered power consumption a lot compared to Sandy Bridge increased the watt per mm^2 die size due to the die shrink and now it's up to 77/160 = 0,48 W/mm^2. That is a lot of power you have to dissapate to keep a sane operating temperature. Having a flat chip - ignoring the 3D transistors, which are practically flat for this purpose - connected to a huge heat sink is a pretty effective way of doing that. If you stack the chips many of them won't be on the outside. First they have to transfer all the heat through the other layers, then to the heat sink. Supercomputers have worked on it for decades and they haven't really found a working solution.
It has much higher performance flash and persistence but at a big cost in size, power and money. I think this sounds like good case for using it as write cache for SSDs that you don't need to flush. Imagine for example a log file that's very volatile, a line gets written every few seconds. Or that document or spreadsheet or email you're working on that Office auto-saves all the time or game autosaves for that matter. With this you could commit it to MRAM and it'd be written "for real" even in case of power failure with no supercap to flush to NAND without wasting write cycles on it. They say a 50:1 cost compared to NAND so on a 256 GB SSD a 512 MB cache should add ~10% to the cost.
If you only need to push the most stale writes to NAND you could download a 50MB installer, install it using 100MB writes then delete the installer and it'd never need to touch the NAND at all - it's marked free again before it's ever written to disk once. Oh yes and you'd also get better burst IOPS as a bonus. If it really can't be worn out like RAM that is going to be huge, even if it just comes on top of the technology we already have and doesn't replace anything. After all, most of my SSD is the same from day to day - the "active set" that gets written to is much smaller.
2. This isn't some arbitrary decision by Apple (unlike some other cases), this is because another company owns the trademark to "memory" in the context of games and is threatening to sue Apple if they don't comply with the order to have the apps' names changed.
But the only reason Apple is crumbling like a paper tiger is because it costs them practically nothing since it's not their product being targeted. This is like suing Wal-Mart because you have a trademark dispute with one of the products they sell. The correct response would be "not our business, sue them individually for trademark infringement if you want".
Well I'm pretty sure you'd be screaming bloody murder if they sold you a 5 GB/month package but it turns out you can only use it at 2 kB/s because that's a highly theoretical cap based on 24x7 usage too, so I don't see how they can win. There's nothing wrong with offering "up to 25 Mbit/s, 5 GB/month" as long as one is not a huge screaming headline and the other is buried deep in the terms of service. At least for cell phones/tablets here in Norway they generally only say if it supports 3G/LTE, the theoretical "up to X megabit if you're alone on the net and standing next to the base tower" isn't really that meaningful.
They even replaced all of the copyright licenses and removed his name from every file
That alone is a criminal offense, at least in the US. Specifically USC 17506(d):
(d) Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500.
I do believe they count that per notice - that is per file.
He would always say he had no alternative under the GPL. That there was nothing he could do except take down the public SVN access and mash up all the source into one gigantic file, but even that didn't stop the copiers.
If it was done under the terms of the GPL, then no. If it wasn't, then there's plenty he could have done. Though I can sort of understand that as a coder you don't want to get involved in legal paperwork and just say "fuck it". But it sounds to me that he didn't make any effort to protect his rights legally.
Right, nobody cries when the rich man loses a buck, or the strong guy pulls a muscle, or the beautiful person has a zit. They're in a superior position to the common folk when it comes to X, and when they face a conflict dealing with X, the common folk have less compassion for them. In fact, they often laugh. It's one of those low-level forms irony coupled with schadenfreude where you wouldn't expect the Olympian runner to trip while walking to the fridge.
Yes, except groups are not individuals. If you are a poor person in a rich group and see other people get advantages because on average they have less, that's going to feel very unjust and discriminating. Using that kind of statistics to go from "they have a higher crime rate" to "thieving scum the lot of them" is exactly the kind of sweeping generalization people complain about.
there are already several locked down Android devices out there, remember Android is based on GPL V2 and NO GPL V3 is allowed, that is so they can "TiVo trick" your ass.
Actually pretty much everything that makes up Android is Apache 2.0 licensed. It's only the patched Linux kernel which is GPLv2 - just like the regular kernel. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, since Google is completely powerless to relicense the kernel. Go yell at Linus and the other kernel devs as they've pretty much all rejected the GPLv3.
I don't know that Intel has better engineers. They doubtless have more engineers.
Which is a huge advantage, because they can hedge their bets. They didn't have to put all their eggs in one basket with Netburst or Itanium and they could afford to dedicate a team to make low-power, low-cost Atoms that both made Intel a pretty penny and sapped AMDs strength in the low-end market. Intel also just put up their first Xeon Phi card, the first real result from all the money they've spent on compute/HPC research. And they can still afford to fail miserably. AMD on the other hand can't afford misfires like that and sadly Bulldozer is a gamble that just didn't pay off.
Too bad that servers are pretty much like desktops, the octo-core FX-8350 competes against quad-core i5/i7s and their 16-core server chips compete against Intel's octo-cores. You might as well say AMD is winning the desktop market because they're the only one to offer "lots of cores".
So, AMD 16 core part for $519 per socket for Intel for over $1000 for an 8 core.
A 6200 series CPU with the same cores as "Bulldozer" yes, it's called a fire sale. I'm guessing that price is the Opteron 6272. Well they're selling it for $4 less than AMDs bulk price, probably to get rid of inventory, I doubt Newegg will keep selling these at a loss for very long. If you want the 6300 series CPUs with the same cores as the FX-8350 then
a) You must pay over $700 b) It launched a week ago c) It's nowhere to be found and no review site has gotten a chip for testing
P.S. There are some bizarrely expensive 10-core Intel chips, lots of high end RAS functions etc. but they're in a market where AMD has no offerings at all.
Something does not add up in the summary because no one would "plead guilty" in exchange for a 15 year sentence. That's not much of a plea bargain.
Actually it does.
Every person convicted in this state of a felony who shall have been convicted twice previously of any felony or federal crime upon charges separately brought and arising out of separate incidents at different times and who shall have been sentenced to and served separate terms of one (1) year or more in any state and/or federal penal institution, whether in this state or elsewhere, and where any one (1) of such felonies shall have been a crime of violence shall be sentenced to life imprisonment, and such sentence shall not be reduced or suspended nor shall such person be eligible for parole or probation.
Assaulting a police officer 17 years ago counts as violent, the year in house arrest was his second strike, this is his third strike so if it went to trial he'd go away for life with no chance of release. Compared to that 15 years is a "good" deal.
Could you explain and give examples of racism that is okay because it's "anti-white"?
Not exactly racial but more ethnic at least here in Norway there's been many employers that quite openly say they prefer e.g. Polish workers over Norwegian workers in the construction industry or Swedish workers over Norwegians in the bar and restaurant industry, citing some rather crude ethnic stereotypes like higher work morale and lower sick leave. But try saying you prefer Norwegian workers over Somali workers for the same reasons and you'll be a in a world of hurt over discrimination allegations. My conclusion is that it's perfectly legal to discriminate against native Norwegians, just not against minorities.
Another good example is child custody cases, in pretty much every other area of society women have demanded and received recognition as perfect equals to men, but as caretakers the father is still overwhelmingly considered inferior regardless of the facts of the case. It is only sexist if women are discriminated against, not men. Very often it's not about true equality, it's about a special privilege granted to a group that's defined themselves as victims but the same kind of rules don't apply to themselves. Like many of the racial minorities in this country which are extremely intolerant of women and homosexuals yet with a straight face can complain of racism then turn around and be every bit as bigoted and intolerant themselves.
I guess it's the same as most things, people like the rules when they're in their favor and hate them when they're not. Not surprising just disappointing.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, perfectly serious question, and one the game developers and studios are going to ask you: How are you going to protect against piracy if the platform is open? Explain how if it's made trivially-easy for people to download and pirate the games, how their revenue stream benefits from this... because open platforms encourage piracy. Or at least, that's the argument that's going to be made.
Well in case you missed the memo, Steam is pretty successful on open platforms like Windows and OS X. At least "open" as in "doesn't require code signing". Building a "Steambox" would be to lower cost (no MS license) and provide a standardized hardware platform compared to the PC. Compared to the other consoles it'd be an alternative to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo who all have their terms and conditions to sell on their platform. And the Linux kernel is GPLv2 not GPLv3, so you actually can make a locked down box if you want, you just can't keep the source code a secret. Valve could do to consoles what Google has done to cell phones/tablets with Android, I don't see many Android app developers complaining that it runs Linux down below. Why should game developers be complaining if their console runs Linux down below?
Isn't that still an important and useful qualitation, since the vast, vast majority of people can't, shouldn't and don't fucking want to write code? And, I would argue, nor should they ever need to. Writing arbitrary invented languages, with awkward syntax and extremely-non-human thought-structures, to accomplish esoteric tasks has never been an intuitive or optimal way of getting shit done.
Trust me, everybody would loooooooove for the computer to take instructions like a human but it's not going to happen because of everything that's implicitly understood. So you can teach this computer to fold a shirt, if you hand it an XS shirt and an XXL shirt will it figure out that it must adapt the folding action to the size of the shirt? I bet you any 5yo would figure that out all on their own because they've understood the basic concept of folding a shirt. Take a fundamental sentence like "put the black and white pants on the top shelf" did we mean the black pants and the white pants, or the black and white checkered pants?
All that happens is that some really smart people will try really hard to write code that guesses what it was people actually meant but without actually knowing the context and purpose they'll fail miserably. Not to mention all the times they'd have to guess at do what I meant, not what I said because normal people when facing a choice between the reasonable and the absurd pick the reasonable like. Like say you have a knife and a chicken and you ask what to do with the knife and they answer "Cut the chicken to pieces and put it in the oven" most people will understand that you're to put the chicken in the oven, not the knife - even though you didn't ask what to do with the chicken.
Or the TL;DR version: Good luck, I don't think we'll be unemployed any time soon.
True, but you're paying upkeep for a network running 24x7x365 with coverage in all sorts of weird places to send and receive those messages. It's a bit like taking the minimum price of a post card at the post office and multiplying to get cost/kg. At least here in Norway which is pretty expensive you only pay about 8c/message and you can typically buy much cheaper in bulk and/or various "friends & family" packages to a limited set of numbers. I think the cheapest mega-pack I've seen is 5000 texts for 43 USD (250 NOK) or about 0.9 cents/message. The 8 cents include the "called for $5, texted for $2, expects 24x7 coverage everywhere they go" crowd - it's not the MB cost that's the cost of delivering.
You'll laugh until the steps are:
1. Wipe OpenBSD
2. Install Windows
3. Install this government-mandated software
It was one of the nastier suggestions for use of Trusted Computing and Remote Attestation - if your computer can't provide a valid signature saying it's running a trusted, up to date OS with antivirus etc. then you wouldn't get to connect to the Internet. Then again, if ARM takes over it looks like we can kiss the idea of "alternative OS" good-bye as Apple, Microsoft and most Android handsets are locked to one OS to begin with...
That may have been true a decade ago but if you were 15-18 in the dotcom era (1997-2000) you're 27-33 now, I don't think kids can assume their parents are clueless about the Internet anymore. At least not much longer.
He did it on purpose. Google by default has "safe search" and you have to uncheck it to get porn results. Unless grandpa did it.
He would be a she if you read the GP again, you really think little girls intentionally seek bestiality? I think you vastly overrate Google's "safe search", it's pretty good at recognizing human tits, pussy and dick but horses tend to run around naked all the time so if you have a scantily clad woman doing naughty things to a horse that may not be caught. I've certainly seen NSFW images slip through Google's filter from time to time, it's a 99% filter not perfect. Of course this isn't really a good argument for porn filters since Google already has one, any other filter wouldn't be perfect either.
It's the libertarian streak of Slashdot, people here are very fond of "alternative" ways that don't rely on corporations or the government. Like for example crowdfunding which is a massive move of risk over to the "customer", which is what people consider themselves when the reward for donating $X is one copy of product Y. And then I'm not thinking about the outright frauds but more the projects that just don't go according to plan, either because the plan is terrible to begin with, you don't have the people, you don't have the skills, the technology doesn't work out and overall the work and challenges involved are much greater than originally thought and what seemed like a good idea on practice just isn't that great in reality. Everybody who's actually worked with this knows that the both the cost estimates, schedule and deliverables are ballpark estimates.
Personally, I think I'll still wait until there's an actual game/movie/book/whatever you can have in hand and read reviews about. Life's too short for me to actually do QA on crowdsourcing projects and I imagine it is for most other people too, they just throw some money at it and hope it was a good idea based on some superficial ideas and concept art. Except as they say, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution ability that matters and that design needs to be matched with well working code and kept sufficient in check to bring it to market. I know way too many people who'd get too busy improving the product to ever ship 1.0, not sticking to a scope and finishing it is probably the most common failure mode I see. Then the money runs out and you ship a buggy and incomplete version "1.5" instead.
Note that it is rarely 5+ year old material that is 'pirated'
Perhaps people don't want to fund a system they don't think is fair? I buy both BluRays and DVDs sometimes, not because I needed to but because it's good stuff that I like and that I want them to produce more of but I hate that I'm funding DRM. I hate that I'm funding the lobbying groups who want copyright to be infinity minus a day. I hate that I'm funding the people strong-arming ISPs to become their private enforcement branch. I hate that I'm funding the people pushing for copyright enforcement outside the justice system, with no real oversight or due process. I'm a pirate if I download it today, in 5 years or in 50 years. Might as well get it over with...
First of all, it has been my experience that, as ESL speakers, Indians are among the most fluent in the world. It seems to me that they take great care to learn and use English well, unlike the stumbling parody you provided. No doubt a consequence of British colonialism, but perhaps a happy one.
There's a huge selection bias that the people you're likely to communicate with in English are those who know it well. Only about 12% of Indians are considered English-speaking, I'm not sure if a person like the grandparent would be counted to the 12% or the 88% but there's extremely many of them. There's a lot of non-English colonies doing more, for example here in Norway some 89% are now English-speaking and it's a compulsory subject from the first school year (age 6), by the time you've finished high school you'll have had 1800-2000 hours in your primary language and 700 hours of English. Also we don't generally don't dub English-speaking TV series and movies except for small children and at least in higher education you're expected to read English textbooks. I think you'll find the average Indian is far from the most fluent in the world.
This is for the people who won't use Linux because it doesn't run Netflix, not the people who won't use Netflix because it doesn't run on Linux. Netflix don't want you, don't care about supporting you and might in fact hate it because it causes problems with their content providers who demand "robust" DRM. But as usual there's hacktivists that won't take no for an answer and they'll reverse engineer, emulate, patch and prod it until it works, it's how Linux got off the ground in the first place. It certainly wasn't because everyone was handing out hardware specs and driver code, protocol definitions or anything of the sort. You'd probably get more results cheering them on than spitting bile at Netflix, corporations are almost immune to that. Bringing Netflix to Linux is good for Linux even if they are dragged kicking and screaming.
I'll go one better and dismiss all three. To take his definition first, if I were to send a referee software for the legally blind it would surely be considered an act of expression even though distributing software in general is not, so that is clearly insufficient. If I was rolling my eyes as the Great Leader hymn was playing then clearly that was an act of expression even though I didn't mean it as an attempt at communication, so that definition is insufficient too. Finally not answering the question "You don't really think I did it, do you?" means that absence of information transmission is in itself a form of expression. Even total indifference is arguably protected under the first amendment, in case you don't want to join the Two Minute Hate. Of course being a form of expression doesn't mean it's protected, terror is a pretty clear form of communication just not a lawful one.
If it was that simple, Nokia should have been the undisputed ruler of the mobile market since my impression is they put out a dozen models in markets others put out two. Apple might be a little over the top in the other direction but it's easier for developers to only support a few models and customers know each model is popular enough every application will usually work well, both ways have their pros and cons. Of all the choices you don't get with Apple the most obvious is a cheap model. My local price comparison lists 171 cell phone models with a price, sorted from low to high the first Apple model is the iPhone 4 (8 GB) on 128th while the iPhone 5 is 166th, 169th and 171st - the most expensive phone you can buy. Ferrari only produces four models too, but I doubt that's why their market share is low...
Emphasis mine. It doesn't say just customers. It doesn't say just people who have the binaries. It says "any third party". That means any third party, no further restrictions or conditions.
I think your interpretation is wrong. If company A makes a special binary for company B along with an offer for source code, then random company C can't come and demand the source code for company B's version. The FSF FAQ says:
(...) When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. (...) The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you.
That is to say, if you have an offer they must honor it no matter who you are. If you don't have an offer, you get nothing. It's like a cashier's check, whoever holds it can cash it. But no check, no money.
Some of the newer technologies not only allow much smaller feature sizes than the current 20nm, but will also allow stacking of components
Sure we can stack them, but can we cool them? Even the Ivy Bridge chips that lowered power consumption a lot compared to Sandy Bridge increased the watt per mm^2 die size due to the die shrink and now it's up to 77/160 = 0,48 W/mm^2. That is a lot of power you have to dissapate to keep a sane operating temperature. Having a flat chip - ignoring the 3D transistors, which are practically flat for this purpose - connected to a huge heat sink is a pretty effective way of doing that. If you stack the chips many of them won't be on the outside. First they have to transfer all the heat through the other layers, then to the heat sink. Supercomputers have worked on it for decades and they haven't really found a working solution.
It has much higher performance flash and persistence but at a big cost in size, power and money. I think this sounds like good case for using it as write cache for SSDs that you don't need to flush. Imagine for example a log file that's very volatile, a line gets written every few seconds. Or that document or spreadsheet or email you're working on that Office auto-saves all the time or game autosaves for that matter. With this you could commit it to MRAM and it'd be written "for real" even in case of power failure with no supercap to flush to NAND without wasting write cycles on it. They say a 50:1 cost compared to NAND so on a 256 GB SSD a 512 MB cache should add ~10% to the cost.
If you only need to push the most stale writes to NAND you could download a 50MB installer, install it using 100MB writes then delete the installer and it'd never need to touch the NAND at all - it's marked free again before it's ever written to disk once. Oh yes and you'd also get better burst IOPS as a bonus. If it really can't be worn out like RAM that is going to be huge, even if it just comes on top of the technology we already have and doesn't replace anything. After all, most of my SSD is the same from day to day - the "active set" that gets written to is much smaller.
2. This isn't some arbitrary decision by Apple (unlike some other cases), this is because another company owns the trademark to "memory" in the context of games and is threatening to sue Apple if they don't comply with the order to have the apps' names changed.
But the only reason Apple is crumbling like a paper tiger is because it costs them practically nothing since it's not their product being targeted. This is like suing Wal-Mart because you have a trademark dispute with one of the products they sell. The correct response would be "not our business, sue them individually for trademark infringement if you want".
Well I'm pretty sure you'd be screaming bloody murder if they sold you a 5 GB/month package but it turns out you can only use it at 2 kB/s because that's a highly theoretical cap based on 24x7 usage too, so I don't see how they can win. There's nothing wrong with offering "up to 25 Mbit/s, 5 GB/month" as long as one is not a huge screaming headline and the other is buried deep in the terms of service. At least for cell phones/tablets here in Norway they generally only say if it supports 3G/LTE, the theoretical "up to X megabit if you're alone on the net and standing next to the base tower" isn't really that meaningful.
They even replaced all of the copyright licenses and removed his name from every file
That alone is a criminal offense, at least in the US. Specifically USC 17506(d):
(d) Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500.
I do believe they count that per notice - that is per file.
He would always say he had no alternative under the GPL. That there was nothing he could do except take down the public SVN access and mash up all the source into one gigantic file, but even that didn't stop the copiers.
If it was done under the terms of the GPL, then no. If it wasn't, then there's plenty he could have done. Though I can sort of understand that as a coder you don't want to get involved in legal paperwork and just say "fuck it". But it sounds to me that he didn't make any effort to protect his rights legally.
Right, nobody cries when the rich man loses a buck, or the strong guy pulls a muscle, or the beautiful person has a zit. They're in a superior position to the common folk when it comes to X, and when they face a conflict dealing with X, the common folk have less compassion for them. In fact, they often laugh. It's one of those low-level forms irony coupled with schadenfreude where you wouldn't expect the Olympian runner to trip while walking to the fridge.
Yes, except groups are not individuals. If you are a poor person in a rich group and see other people get advantages because on average they have less, that's going to feel very unjust and discriminating. Using that kind of statistics to go from "they have a higher crime rate" to "thieving scum the lot of them" is exactly the kind of sweeping generalization people complain about.
there are already several locked down Android devices out there, remember Android is based on GPL V2 and NO GPL V3 is allowed, that is so they can "TiVo trick" your ass.
Actually pretty much everything that makes up Android is Apache 2.0 licensed. It's only the patched Linux kernel which is GPLv2 - just like the regular kernel. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, since Google is completely powerless to relicense the kernel. Go yell at Linus and the other kernel devs as they've pretty much all rejected the GPLv3.
I don't know that Intel has better engineers. They doubtless have more engineers.
Which is a huge advantage, because they can hedge their bets. They didn't have to put all their eggs in one basket with Netburst or Itanium and they could afford to dedicate a team to make low-power, low-cost Atoms that both made Intel a pretty penny and sapped AMDs strength in the low-end market. Intel also just put up their first Xeon Phi card, the first real result from all the money they've spent on compute/HPC research. And they can still afford to fail miserably. AMD on the other hand can't afford misfires like that and sadly Bulldozer is a gamble that just didn't pay off.
Too bad that servers are pretty much like desktops, the octo-core FX-8350 competes against quad-core i5/i7s and their 16-core server chips compete against Intel's octo-cores. You might as well say AMD is winning the desktop market because they're the only one to offer "lots of cores".
So, AMD 16 core part for $519 per socket for Intel for over $1000 for an 8 core.
A 6200 series CPU with the same cores as "Bulldozer" yes, it's called a fire sale. I'm guessing that price is the Opteron 6272. Well they're selling it for $4 less than AMDs bulk price, probably to get rid of inventory, I doubt Newegg will keep selling these at a loss for very long. If you want the 6300 series CPUs with the same cores as the FX-8350 then
a) You must pay over $700
b) It launched a week ago
c) It's nowhere to be found and no review site has gotten a chip for testing
P.S. There are some bizarrely expensive 10-core Intel chips, lots of high end RAS functions etc. but they're in a market where AMD has no offerings at all.
Something does not add up in the summary because no one would "plead guilty" in exchange for a 15 year sentence. That's not much of a plea bargain.
Actually it does.
Every person convicted in this state of a felony who shall have been convicted twice previously of any felony or federal crime upon charges separately brought and arising out of separate incidents at different times and who shall have been sentenced to and served separate terms of one (1) year or more in any state and/or federal penal institution, whether in this state or elsewhere, and where any one (1) of such felonies shall have been a crime of violence shall be sentenced to life imprisonment, and such sentence shall not be reduced or suspended nor shall such person be eligible for parole or probation.
Assaulting a police officer 17 years ago counts as violent, the year in house arrest was his second strike, this is his third strike so if it went to trial he'd go away for life with no chance of release. Compared to that 15 years is a "good" deal.
And I notice the /. summary, while it mentiones the 10,500 pirated disks they caught him with, doesn't mention the copying equipment.
I thought that was rather obvious when you have 10k discs, seriously who burns that one by one in a CD/DVD burner?
Could you explain and give examples of racism that is okay because it's "anti-white"?
Not exactly racial but more ethnic at least here in Norway there's been many employers that quite openly say they prefer e.g. Polish workers over Norwegian workers in the construction industry or Swedish workers over Norwegians in the bar and restaurant industry, citing some rather crude ethnic stereotypes like higher work morale and lower sick leave. But try saying you prefer Norwegian workers over Somali workers for the same reasons and you'll be a in a world of hurt over discrimination allegations. My conclusion is that it's perfectly legal to discriminate against native Norwegians, just not against minorities.
Another good example is child custody cases, in pretty much every other area of society women have demanded and received recognition as perfect equals to men, but as caretakers the father is still overwhelmingly considered inferior regardless of the facts of the case. It is only sexist if women are discriminated against, not men. Very often it's not about true equality, it's about a special privilege granted to a group that's defined themselves as victims but the same kind of rules don't apply to themselves. Like many of the racial minorities in this country which are extremely intolerant of women and homosexuals yet with a straight face can complain of racism then turn around and be every bit as bigoted and intolerant themselves.
I guess it's the same as most things, people like the rules when they're in their favor and hate them when they're not. Not surprising just disappointing.