And yet socialised health care works for many countries...
Those countries are quietly making tough choices: beyond a certain age, you don't get expensive treatments anymore, when you're younger, you get cheap treatments even though expensive treatments might be slightly better, etc. Most of those countries can only afford that because they are still benefiting from a post-WWII economic bonus and let the US pay for their defense. And it's still eating a large chunk of their disposable income and is likely unsustainable.
Well, the concept of putting gene X into organism Y is an obvious concept to even a minimally trained molecular biologist, so it should always be unpatentable.
Potentially, you might allow patenting a specific organism (like you can do with some breeds), but that would be pretty pointless since creating them is so easy.
Puppies are cute and do bad things because they don't know any better. Microsoft has been deliberately evil, and they still have plenty of poison left in them as a patent troll even if all their software fails.
if the customer is changing the version requirements mid project, of course, why not.
They're not "changing version requirements", they send you a couple of files for you to work with. If they are in widely used formats in your industry, you don't haggle over version numbers because it makes you look stupid. Of course you can open the latest version of every file format.
make sure to check twice the next time to not look dumb when the client gives you a file you can't open or work with unless you spend additional 2.5k.
Yes, and you do that by upgrading all your software versions and spreading the cost over all your clients. Simple, eh?
the client knew about the excruciating pain of upgrading the tools mid project and after the initial (and paid for) tool evaluation phase versions were set in stone.
Many do, and you can happily commiserate with them and promise them not to spoil their day by sending them versions they can't handle.
Oh, please, you don't have discussions about whether you upgrade your software to the latest version or not with customers. Of course, they are going to assume that if they managed to upgrade to the latest version of some software package, you can too. If you try to charge them for upgrading Photoshop or Office, they aren't even going to bother to laugh at you.
Now, good news is that if you're technically a little savvy, you can usually get by with open source software instead of upgrading to the latest and most expensive version of Microsoft's or Adobe's junk.
Courts judgments are only meaningful if they can be enforced. If the Italian court doesn't have a way of getting at Google's assets, what their judges do becomes pretty much irrelevant.
Going to war with a national government isn't to be taken on lightly. If Italy doesn't fold and decides to play chicken you could see such action getting ugly for both parties quickly.
Google doesn't have to "go to war", they simply have to stop doing business in Italy. If Google has no assets that Italy can seize, then Italy can make one judgment after another and it won't make any difference.
I doubt the sanity of the Gimp interface matters much; Adobe's own interfaces are insanely bad. In fact, if anything, the Gimp interface is considerably more consistent with the rest of Gnome than Photoshop is with the rest of Windows.
What matters is that it is different from what people are used to.
That may work if you're a nerd living in your mother's basement. However, back in the real world, people collaborate, and that's when network effects come in: when your customers send you files in the latest format, you need to be able to read them.
Muybridge died in 1904, long before documents were stored and retrieved electronically.
That's irrelevant; merely replicating a manual process on the computer is not patentable.
As for it seeming common sense, you have to remember that it was filed in 1999, long before what we accept as normal ways to do things, today, just 12 years later.
The patent was ridiculous even when Gelernter got it 12 years ago; people back then already had many ways of arranging and browsing documents and other content graphically very similar to the way Gelernter attempted to patent.
The main thing that seems to have changed over the last decade or two is that more and more dumb and inexperienced people have entered the computer industry so that things that seemed to be obvious to anybody "skilled in the art" all of a sudden are mystifying and novel to people like you.
Besides, the overturning judge ruled the patent valid, somehow, he just wrote off the damages from the infringement.
He ruled that Apple didn't infringe the patent. In effect, he said that the only way the patent is valid is that it is so narrow that Apple didn't infringe. There are lots of narrow patents like that (exact shape of print cartridges, exact shape of connectors, etc.). They can be valuable, but in this case, they probably aren't.
Human stress response evolved in a very different environment; there's a reasonable argument to be made that it isn't just useless but harmful these days. This may give you back your hair and make you healthier. We won't know till we try.
The market was penny-wise and pound-foolish; the idiotic software and window system architecture of Windows and Macintosh meant that companies ended up spending enormous amounts of money on rewriting their software again and again.
Much of what makes modern computers more similar to the Mac than to the Alto are mostly two things: the menu bar and the fact that you can do everything with the left mouse button, and other systems were adopting those features at the same time. Apple was a little quicker to market, but they weren't really ahead of their time.
The ALTO was multitasking. There were also other ways of interacting with multiple programs at once on mainframes and UNIX systems. Even Emacs shell mode may actually be that old.
There were some nice ideas in the BLIT, but overall, I don't think it has had much impact. And it was a pain to program and really not that nice to use.
So... where are you going to put the nuclear waste? There is no permanent waste disposal site yet.
And where are you going to keep getting the Uranium from to run these power plants? Given how inefficient current nuclear power plants are, nuclear energy isn't going to last long.
Driverless cars guided by artificial vision are totally new technology; nobody knows the implications of widespread use of such cars, how they can fail, etc. Furthermore, nobody understands legal and liability issues. It is rational to be reluctant to adopt them. We have centuries of experience with human-driven vehicles. We know what the failure modes are, who is at risk, and who is responsible when something goes wrong.
Furthermore, driverless cars don't solve the basic problems with automobiles: they are inefficient; we should instead invest in better city planning and better public transportation.
Riiiiiiiiight. So let me get this straight: In regard to Java, Gosling did a bad job as a language designer, but Java isn't badly designed? Yeah, that makes sense.
As I was saying: many of Gosling's design mistakes were fixed by other designers who came in after Gosling's initial design. Gosling's initial design was a disaster.
I've been coding for three decades.
You have also been reading English for at least that long and you are obviously no good at that either.
Is it too fucking hard for you to understand that if the language was poorly designed, it wouldn't have succeeded despite all those other entities' input.
If you think that real-world success implies good design, you're extremely naive and inexperienced.
All of Microsoft's considerable resources and corporate lock in failed to make Visual Basic a success outside of their own walled garden.
Visual Basic was a huge success in the 1990's; there was no alternative to it on any platform and people were scared that Microsoft would wipe out all other platforms. Sun initially positioned Java as an alternative to VB: easy, cross-platform application development and delivery over the Internet. That was a total failure because Java as designed by Gosling was totally unsuitable for developing GUI apps (even writing event handlers was a major headache), it took forever to start, and Java's security model had more holes than a Swiss cheese.
And if Java was so poorly designed, why would M$ have copied it, almost verbatim, to create their first version of C#?
I did not say that "Java was poorly designed", I said that Gosling did a piss poor job as a language designer. Many of Gosling's design mistakes had been fixed by other people by the time Microsoft based C# on it. Furthermore, those "differences" that Microsoft introduced represent more fixes.
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And yet socialised health care works for many countries...
Those countries are quietly making tough choices: beyond a certain age, you don't get expensive treatments anymore, when you're younger, you get cheap treatments even though expensive treatments might be slightly better, etc. Most of those countries can only afford that because they are still benefiting from a post-WWII economic bonus and let the US pay for their defense. And it's still eating a large chunk of their disposable income and is likely unsustainable.
Well, the concept of putting gene X into organism Y is an obvious concept to even a minimally trained molecular biologist, so it should always be unpatentable.
Potentially, you might allow patenting a specific organism (like you can do with some breeds), but that would be pretty pointless since creating them is so easy.
Kindle and Nook outsell iPad.
Puppies are cute and do bad things because they don't know any better. Microsoft has been deliberately evil, and they still have plenty of poison left in them as a patent troll even if all their software fails.
They're not "changing version requirements", they send you a couple of files for you to work with. If they are in widely used formats in your industry, you don't haggle over version numbers because it makes you look stupid. Of course you can open the latest version of every file format.
Yes, and you do that by upgrading all your software versions and spreading the cost over all your clients. Simple, eh?
Many do, and you can happily commiserate with them and promise them not to spoil their day by sending them versions they can't handle.
Oh, please, you don't have discussions about whether you upgrade your software to the latest version or not with customers. Of course, they are going to assume that if they managed to upgrade to the latest version of some software package, you can too. If you try to charge them for upgrading Photoshop or Office, they aren't even going to bother to laugh at you.
Now, good news is that if you're technically a little savvy, you can usually get by with open source software instead of upgrading to the latest and most expensive version of Microsoft's or Adobe's junk.
Courts judgments are only meaningful if they can be enforced. If the Italian court doesn't have a way of getting at Google's assets, what their judges do becomes pretty much irrelevant.
You're probably right: "Silvio Berlusconi truff..." doesn't generate any suggestions.
However, "Silvio Berlusconi fasc..." still generates "fascist" and "fascism" as suggestions.
Google doesn't have to "go to war", they simply have to stop doing business in Italy. If Google has no assets that Italy can seize, then Italy can make one judgment after another and it won't make any difference.
And this is good... why? What's next? Making all food bland, making all beverages alcohol free, and eliminating all colors from the environment?
I doubt the sanity of the Gimp interface matters much; Adobe's own interfaces are insanely bad. In fact, if anything, the Gimp interface is considerably more consistent with the rest of Gnome than Photoshop is with the rest of Windows.
What matters is that it is different from what people are used to.
That may work if you're a nerd living in your mother's basement. However, back in the real world, people collaborate, and that's when network effects come in: when your customers send you files in the latest format, you need to be able to read them.
That's irrelevant; merely replicating a manual process on the computer is not patentable.
The patent was ridiculous even when Gelernter got it 12 years ago; people back then already had many ways of arranging and browsing documents and other content graphically very similar to the way Gelernter attempted to patent.
The main thing that seems to have changed over the last decade or two is that more and more dumb and inexperienced people have entered the computer industry so that things that seemed to be obvious to anybody "skilled in the art" all of a sudden are mystifying and novel to people like you.
He ruled that Apple didn't infringe the patent. In effect, he said that the only way the patent is valid is that it is so narrow that Apple didn't infringe. There are lots of narrow patents like that (exact shape of print cartridges, exact shape of connectors, etc.). They can be valuable, but in this case, they probably aren't.
Human stress response evolved in a very different environment; there's a reasonable argument to be made that it isn't just useless but harmful these days. This may give you back your hair and make you healthier. We won't know till we try.
OMG an Amiga vs Atari flame war. We haven't had those in 20 years!
The market was penny-wise and pound-foolish; the idiotic software and window system architecture of Windows and Macintosh meant that companies ended up spending enormous amounts of money on rewriting their software again and again.
Much of what makes modern computers more similar to the Mac than to the Alto are mostly two things: the menu bar and the fact that you can do everything with the left mouse button, and other systems were adopting those features at the same time. Apple was a little quicker to market, but they weren't really ahead of their time.
The ALTO was multitasking. There were also other ways of interacting with multiple programs at once on mainframes and UNIX systems. Even Emacs shell mode may actually be that old.
There were some nice ideas in the BLIT, but overall, I don't think it has had much impact. And it was a pain to program and really not that nice to use.
So... where are you going to put the nuclear waste? There is no permanent waste disposal site yet.
And where are you going to keep getting the Uranium from to run these power plants? Given how inefficient current nuclear power plants are, nuclear energy isn't going to last long.
You mean... like on a train?
Driverless cars guided by artificial vision are totally new technology; nobody knows the implications of widespread use of such cars, how they can fail, etc. Furthermore, nobody understands legal and liability issues. It is rational to be reluctant to adopt them. We have centuries of experience with human-driven vehicles. We know what the failure modes are, who is at risk, and who is responsible when something goes wrong.
Furthermore, driverless cars don't solve the basic problems with automobiles: they are inefficient; we should instead invest in better city planning and better public transportation.
Now we only need to figure out how to make drug smuggling to Mars profitable and we'll have manned interplanetary space flight in no time.
As I was saying: many of Gosling's design mistakes were fixed by other designers who came in after Gosling's initial design. Gosling's initial design was a disaster.
You have also been reading English for at least that long and you are obviously no good at that either.
You shouldn't have to memorize that stuff, you should be able to figure it out.
If you think that real-world success implies good design, you're extremely naive and inexperienced.
Visual Basic was a huge success in the 1990's; there was no alternative to it on any platform and people were scared that Microsoft would wipe out all other platforms. Sun initially positioned Java as an alternative to VB: easy, cross-platform application development and delivery over the Internet. That was a total failure because Java as designed by Gosling was totally unsuitable for developing GUI apps (even writing event handlers was a major headache), it took forever to start, and Java's security model had more holes than a Swiss cheese.
I did not say that "Java was poorly designed", I said that Gosling did a piss poor job as a language designer. Many of Gosling's design mistakes had been fixed by other people by the time Microsoft based C# on it. Furthermore, those "differences" that Microsoft introduced represent more fixes.