Asus has absolutely nothing to gain by locking out Linux - they don't profit from Microsoft Xbox or OS sales. MS doesn't want the Kinect hardware to be used on anything but the Xbox 360 - they won't even like the Asus hardware to work with Windows.
For MS it makes perfect sense to put up roadblocks for driver development.
Asus on the other hand, might not particularly care about Linux but they have no motivation to make it hard for someone to write Linux drivers.
Patents must be respected internationally due to treaties
That's not quite correct, actually. Patents apply only in the country in which they are granted. However the Paris convention provides that filing an application in one member state gives you an exclusive right for one year, to file in any other member state. However your patent still needs to fulfill the requirements of the country you are filing in. So if you have a weak patent in the US, you may not be able to successfully apply in e.g. the UK (assuming they are more strict for the purpose of this example).
If you are based in the UK, the US patent could still be relevant for you though - e.g. if you are exporting to the US. That's one of the reasons why many foreign companies file for US patents, even for "inventions" which wouldn't be patentable in their home countries.
I don't think that makes sense. Would you apply the same criteria everywhere else, or is that specific to China? Let's say there is a baker in your town - he sells his goods cheaply, but you happen to know that he beats his wife. You are purchasing your baked goods there. Who carries the main responsibility there - you or the baker? Is it a sensible course of action to stop shopping there - what's the result, will he stop beating his wife? Should you try to do something about this situation, or should you sit on your ass doing nothing, because by buying his bread you are just as responsible, so you don't have the moral high ground required to act?
I can't help feeling that the only beneficiary of your logic is the baker (or China respectively).
So by collaborating with China to an extent, the US is more responsible for evil done by China, then China itself? That's absurd.
Certainly the US has a long history of imperialism and genocide, criticizing that is reasonable. It's not reasonable to use that as an excuse for China to do the same now. If it was evil then, then it's important to stop it from happening again.
and what respect for human rights has the US government shown?
Not a lot, but that doesn't prevent China from being worse. Sure there is the dubious foreign policy of the US, but China has a dubious foreign policy all of it's own. It makes territorial claims on basically everyone of it's neighbors (e.g. India, Japan, Taiwan) it supports the worst regimes in the world (e.g. Burma, North Korea) and it's approach to exploit Africa is even more unscrupulous than that of western countries. There is plenty of room to criticize China
The scientific opinion on AGW is well documented. There is a joint declaration by 32 national academies of sciences supporting AGW - there is not a single scientific organization anywhere in the world which opposes it. So 32 national academies of sciences believe AGW to be good science - on the other hand we have some oil industry lobbyists and some anti-science people driven by wishful thinking and religious fundamentalism. Gee I wonder who we should believe.
I don't know how long it should take. Let's give it twice that time. Or three times. So do 360 years sound ok? I'll let my descendants worry about it.
So is the IRC channel empty? Doesn't really matter - if there is a considerable benefit in learning the target language, then someone needs to study that and quantify it. Once it's in a national curriculum there'll be plenty of speakers within a short time, no matter which helper language is employed.
In any case, how hard would it really be for Google to pack up their Milan office?
Hard enough - they sell advertising and the Italian market is a nice source of income. They could do without it, but they won't want to lose it if they can somehow avoid it. It's certainly worth their time to find a way to work with these regulations, and looking at their history - that's likely what they are going to do. Just like they found a way to limit streetview in Germany (even though there was no legal requirement, and rendering it close to unusable IMO) they'll find some way to stay on the legal side.
In which way? There are 2 million Esperanto speakers after 120 years (and that's a very generous estimate). (For comparison: there are 5 million non-native speakers of Dutch.) That's proven to be a complete failure in any honest assessment.
The only use anyone appears to have found for Esperanto, is as a teaching-tool for other languages. If that actually works - great. However then it would make sense to investigate whether other constructed languages fulfill that purpose even better. Whether anyone speaks it or not would be irrelevant - it's a throw-away language from the point of the learner. If Lojban is better (or even easier to learn) then it would be more beneficial to use that.
Maybe, but that would start to swing as the bus moves, and it wouldn't let you adjust the viewing angle - given the iPad's reflecting display, I don't see how that would be satisfactory. Anyway - quite obviously some kind of case/attachment could be build to give you a satisfactory viewing experience, I'm just curious how people actually use it.
and I should point out that I consider evangelism to be doing harm... if Yahweh wants to send me the word, there's a perfectly good bush in the back yard for him to set on fire... though I'm equally bothered by evangelical atheists, too. Live and let live, yeah?
Arguing with others, trying to convince them of your point of view - that seems to be fundamental to the workings of an open society. I'm perfectly ok with someone coming to my door and asking me whether I'd like to talk to them about Yahweh, provided they are willing to accept a "no I'm busy" and don't hassle me once I've indicated that I don't want to talk to them. Also it shouldn't be at a time which is bound to be inconvenient. In turn they ought to accept that I can ring their doorbell and ask them to consider atheism. Like this.
Well watching a video while traveling is nice, but how do you handle that - do you hold the iPad in your hands for the duration of the whole movie? That's the sort of application where I can't imagine giving up my netbook - even balancing this on my knees (if there is no fold-out table) seems more comfortable than that.
I wonder if I would get a bill? After all it would be an unsolicited commercial email.
I don't think so. From his website:
[...] our federal government passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which [...] attempts to pre-empt the state laws [...]. But, there is an exception to preemption. CAN-SPAM does not pre-empt anti-spam state laws that prohibit falsity & deception, [...] and so I continue to file lawsuits.
So looks like you would need to be deceptive (or falsify the headers or something like that) in order to get the bill.
However, as we are persons thus far unknown to you, in a country thus far unknown
So what? He makes a comfortable living from the people he can easily catch. It doesn't matter to him if he doesn't catch everybody. Besides, for a sales-based spam you need some way to get money to someone, some way to order something, some way to get something shipped to you. All of these are traceable - it doesn't matter if you can't trace the PC the mail was sent from.
Nope, Schadenfreude just means to derive joy from another's misfortune. It doesn't have to be an ironic misfortune. Schadenfreude is when you laugh as a spammer's house burns down - reducing his ill-gotten gains to rubble. If previously he'd sent so much spam to the fire department that the server broke down, making the department unable to coordinate their activities and get to the house in time... Well that would add to it, but it's not required to feel Schadenfreude.
Different justifications are possible, I grant you that. Nevertheless - in the US the likelihood that citizens own arms is used as justifications, that's just a fact.
I'm not arguing against the right to bear arms, just that such a right implies that citizens will have arms and that this by itself may not be used as justification to reduce other rights. Clearly the constitutional intention here was that the right to bear arms weighs higher than the desire of policemen to do their job as safely as possible. And that's fair, because nobody is forced to become a policeman in the US.
Actually gun ownership is legal in France and many other European countries. In France gun ownership is a right (though not an unrestricted right) but not having a right to arms doesn't mean it's forbidden or that it would necessarily be difficult to legally own one. (E.g. join a shooting club in Germany or get a license from the police in Italy.)
I think the point is that he distinguishes between pedophiles (people sexually attracted to children) and child molesters (people who harm children). Assuming the article is correct in it's claims, it appears that there is no correlation between pedophilia and violence - i.e. only a tiny minority would act on their desires.
The right to bear arms (or more accurately the fact that many people own them) is used as justification to take people's rights away as well. Cops can taser citizens for asking questions - because "he might have a gun", and the same excuse is used for the "resisting a police officer" law.
No yet, I think. The "garbage patch" is a huge area of the ocean which consists of a mixture of plastic particles and sea water. Getting the plastic out of that corrosive sea water, in an inaccessible location - that's going to be a lot more expensive than recycling plastic which would otherwise be transported to a landfill. You'd probably start mining closed landfills first before you'd consider the garbage patch.
I think you would have to get paid in order to take the plastic - putting plastic in a landfill is not free. So 1 tonne of plastic costs $x to store in a landfill - residue costs $y to store in a landfill - so $x-$y would contribute to your margin.
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Well how much effort do you think that took them?
For MS it makes perfect sense to put up roadblocks for driver development. Asus on the other hand, might not particularly care about Linux but they have no motivation to make it hard for someone to write Linux drivers.
That's not quite correct, actually. Patents apply only in the country in which they are granted. However the Paris convention provides that filing an application in one member state gives you an exclusive right for one year, to file in any other member state. However your patent still needs to fulfill the requirements of the country you are filing in. So if you have a weak patent in the US, you may not be able to successfully apply in e.g. the UK (assuming they are more strict for the purpose of this example).
If you are based in the UK, the US patent could still be relevant for you though - e.g. if you are exporting to the US. That's one of the reasons why many foreign companies file for US patents, even for "inventions" which wouldn't be patentable in their home countries.
I can't help feeling that the only beneficiary of your logic is the baker (or China respectively).
Certainly the US has a long history of imperialism and genocide, criticizing that is reasonable. It's not reasonable to use that as an excuse for China to do the same now. If it was evil then, then it's important to stop it from happening again.
So you had a chance to vote but you'd rather not do anything for your country - not even a little trip down to the voting booth.
settle down in a (hopefully) slightly more civilised western country.
Because they urgently need more people who will do fuck all for the country they live in?
Not a lot, but that doesn't prevent China from being worse. Sure there is the dubious foreign policy of the US, but China has a dubious foreign policy all of it's own. It makes territorial claims on basically everyone of it's neighbors (e.g. India, Japan, Taiwan) it supports the worst regimes in the world (e.g. Burma, North Korea) and it's approach to exploit Africa is even more unscrupulous than that of western countries. There is plenty of room to criticize China
The scientific opinion on AGW is well documented. There is a joint declaration by 32 national academies of sciences supporting AGW - there is not a single scientific organization anywhere in the world which opposes it. So 32 national academies of sciences believe AGW to be good science - on the other hand we have some oil industry lobbyists and some anti-science people driven by wishful thinking and religious fundamentalism. Gee I wonder who we should believe.
So is the IRC channel empty? Doesn't really matter - if there is a considerable benefit in learning the target language, then someone needs to study that and quantify it. Once it's in a national curriculum there'll be plenty of speakers within a short time, no matter which helper language is employed.
They don't. It's the voters who permit that. It was always known that the guy owns most of Italy's media - people still voted for him.
Hard enough - they sell advertising and the Italian market is a nice source of income. They could do without it, but they won't want to lose it if they can somehow avoid it. It's certainly worth their time to find a way to work with these regulations, and looking at their history - that's likely what they are going to do. Just like they found a way to limit streetview in Germany (even though there was no legal requirement, and rendering it close to unusable IMO) they'll find some way to stay on the legal side.
So are you a US citizen? Just curious.
In which way? There are 2 million Esperanto speakers after 120 years (and that's a very generous estimate). (For comparison: there are 5 million non-native speakers of Dutch.) That's proven to be a complete failure in any honest assessment.
The only use anyone appears to have found for Esperanto, is as a teaching-tool for other languages. If that actually works - great. However then it would make sense to investigate whether other constructed languages fulfill that purpose even better. Whether anyone speaks it or not would be irrelevant - it's a throw-away language from the point of the learner. If Lojban is better (or even easier to learn) then it would be more beneficial to use that.
Maybe, but that would start to swing as the bus moves, and it wouldn't let you adjust the viewing angle - given the iPad's reflecting display, I don't see how that would be satisfactory. Anyway - quite obviously some kind of case/attachment could be build to give you a satisfactory viewing experience, I'm just curious how people actually use it.
Arguing with others, trying to convince them of your point of view - that seems to be fundamental to the workings of an open society. I'm perfectly ok with someone coming to my door and asking me whether I'd like to talk to them about Yahweh, provided they are willing to accept a "no I'm busy" and don't hassle me once I've indicated that I don't want to talk to them. Also it shouldn't be at a time which is bound to be inconvenient. In turn they ought to accept that I can ring their doorbell and ask them to consider atheism. Like this.
Well watching a video while traveling is nice, but how do you handle that - do you hold the iPad in your hands for the duration of the whole movie? That's the sort of application where I can't imagine giving up my netbook - even balancing this on my knees (if there is no fold-out table) seems more comfortable than that.
I don't think so. From his website:
[...] our federal government passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which [...] attempts to pre-empt the state laws [...]. But, there is an exception to preemption. CAN-SPAM does not pre-empt anti-spam state laws that prohibit falsity & deception, [...] and so I continue to file lawsuits.
So looks like you would need to be deceptive (or falsify the headers or something like that) in order to get the bill.
So what? He makes a comfortable living from the people he can easily catch. It doesn't matter to him if he doesn't catch everybody. Besides, for a sales-based spam you need some way to get money to someone, some way to order something, some way to get something shipped to you. All of these are traceable - it doesn't matter if you can't trace the PC the mail was sent from.
Nope, Schadenfreude just means to derive joy from another's misfortune. It doesn't have to be an ironic misfortune. Schadenfreude is when you laugh as a spammer's house burns down - reducing his ill-gotten gains to rubble. If previously he'd sent so much spam to the fire department that the server broke down, making the department unable to coordinate their activities and get to the house in time ... Well that would add to it, but it's not required to feel Schadenfreude.
I'm not arguing against the right to bear arms, just that such a right implies that citizens will have arms and that this by itself may not be used as justification to reduce other rights. Clearly the constitutional intention here was that the right to bear arms weighs higher than the desire of policemen to do their job as safely as possible. And that's fair, because nobody is forced to become a policeman in the US.
Actually gun ownership is legal in France and many other European countries. In France gun ownership is a right (though not an unrestricted right) but not having a right to arms doesn't mean it's forbidden or that it would necessarily be difficult to legally own one. (E.g. join a shooting club in Germany or get a license from the police in Italy.)
I think the point is that he distinguishes between pedophiles (people sexually attracted to children) and child molesters (people who harm children). Assuming the article is correct in it's claims, it appears that there is no correlation between pedophilia and violence - i.e. only a tiny minority would act on their desires.
The right to bear arms (or more accurately the fact that many people own them) is used as justification to take people's rights away as well. Cops can taser citizens for asking questions - because "he might have a gun", and the same excuse is used for the "resisting a police officer" law.
No yet, I think. The "garbage patch" is a huge area of the ocean which consists of a mixture of plastic particles and sea water. Getting the plastic out of that corrosive sea water, in an inaccessible location - that's going to be a lot more expensive than recycling plastic which would otherwise be transported to a landfill. You'd probably start mining closed landfills first before you'd consider the garbage patch.
I think you would have to get paid in order to take the plastic - putting plastic in a landfill is not free. So 1 tonne of plastic costs $x to store in a landfill - residue costs $y to store in a landfill - so $x-$y would contribute to your margin.