Most of the nuclear restrictions against India from western aligned countries have melted away as the reality of the second most populous country maintaining a nuclear deterrent seemed as reasonable as it is, and because they have a significant demand for legitimate nuclear power anyway.
This really is about money, it's about places like Australia being able to sell uranium to places like Iran and Pakistan without the secondary wrangling over nuclear weapons.
I don't really think Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan pakistan or afghanistan feel threatened any more or less by a nuclear powered Iran. It's really the Israelis, via Iranian proxies, for want of a better way of putting it the 'wrong kind' of iranians, who don't conform to the central government (including ones looking to overthrow the ayatollahs naturally), potentially opponents of Iranian allies (e.g. the people trying to out assad) and the Sunni arab states like Saudi - who are worried about Iran.
That, admittedly, includes a lot of people within 1000Km to the west and south west of Iran but not so much to the north or east.
They have some, they're just not mining it much. And in the case of brazil, who no one is particularly accusing of building nuclear bombs, there's no reason to pay above market rates if it can be avoided. They pretty much exemplify the 'we have a legitimate reason to want some', and would rather not see nuclear weapons proliferation.
If you're going to quote both lines you should probably pay attention to the last one, just sayin'
I parroted the propaganda precisely because that's the argument being made - and I said why it's absurd.
Also, Iran, since the revolution, has been funding attacks against the Israeli's, that's pretty much the root of the whole disagreement between the lot of them. They might even have been funding/contributing to various elements of the Iraqi resistance to the US re-colonization effort.
Sure, which is why this is kind of silly, compared to the cost of a single nuclear reactor overpaying by a factor of 5 for uranium isn't really a problem.
A big UN marketplace just could not work, because of the reasons uranium trading is going on now
In the same way that you can't have wheat board that just buys all the wheat, and resells it for the same price it paid (give or take)? (e.g. the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board, which survived quite successfully for 77 years until it was shut down for purely political reasons?).
I'm not saying it's going to work, but you certainly could create a controlled market for low enriched uranium overseen by the 'rich reliable' countries who benefit by being the only ones doing the enriching (free money!) and everyone else gets reactor fuel, which means they have power, to you you know, use all the electronics and software that runs on electronics that we want to sell them.
Uranium isn't sold like any other, the problem is enriched uranium, where you can't buy uranium if someone thinks you're going to enrich it. There are some broadly similar problems, pharmaceuticals that can be used for lethal injections for example cannot be sold if they're going to be used for lethal injections. The broad verifiable regulatory framework for uranium belongs with the UN, because no one trusts the Russians (who are claiming to do it for Iran for example), and for everyone else the added transparency elsewhere won't matter. Of course that makes it harder for Russia to supply nuclear weapons supplies to their friends, so it's not likely to go anywhere.
except that they're already dependent on someone for the uranium. That's the issue. Canada, australia, Russia, Niger, Namibia, Kazakhistan are the big net exporters, with south africa, communist china, the US, germany/czech republic, romania all have some mines, or at least reserves, but unless you're one of the big 5 (for want of a better phrase), you're at their mercy to actually get the uranium.
Which leads to say, Iran, South Africa or Japan (or others, such as india, brazil, israel, the UK, France etc.). They all want nuclear power (or at least might want it), have no domestic source of the uranium, and they rely on someone to sell it to them. If the US vigorously objects to Iran getting uranium of any sort them well, they can't even have a civilian nuclear power programme, if china and north korea and russia make enough of a stink the same could happen to Japan and South korea. The Israeli's bank on being able to get their supplies from the US, and the US can always buy from Canada or australia, so they're safe, but everyone else that has a legitimate need for civilian nuclear power has a tough time saying 'I'm only interested in civilian nuclear power, but that other guy really just wants bombs".
If you're talking about oil then sure, I agree, oil is in total worth so much money, and many of the producers so small that they can be forced into particular spheres of influence and the controllers of those spheres have no real vested interest in giving them up. Uranium is basically worthless in terms of total dollar value, 50 000 tonnes a year at $132k/tonne = 6.6 billion dollars a year as total worldwide production. Worldwide oil production is about 8 billion dollars per day.
It's not like the people at question are energy independent with nuclear power now, this is about finding a way to expand that market so that lots more people can get access to supply without (further) threatening the security of the world with more nuclear bombs. Obviously it's sort of an absurd proposition, if north korea can build nuclear weapons anyone can, but it's an honest effort.
Er sorry... guess I missed a / on a quote but that wasn't what I thought the preview looked like.
What sounds more thorough to you
Therein lies one of the great challenges of the legal system. In any other discipline you could do your own research, and realize if a lawyer is just bad and didn't find something, you could consider all evidence and reasoned advice on a topic without confining yourself to only that presented based on an artificial timeframe, you could pass the problem to someone more appropriate (should this be patentable at all, rather than did they infringe on it). Unfortunately that also means you could find information that's wrong, biased, obtained improperly, is cherry picked, is paid for etc. Hence the judge demanding disclosure on who is getting paid to write positive stories in Oracle vs Google.
Broadly speaking it's obvious this ruling is bad; design patents are valid and this is part of it, trivial things are patentable, a company that independently invents something is still considered to have stolen it from someone who filed a patent for it and so on. Those are decidedly bigger issues than what jury was actually looking at. Assuming these these things are patentable, were the patents valid, and if so did samsung willfully violate those patents? It's a series of absurd steps, the most basic assumption by the far the most important, and not addressed, whether or not a patent was valid should take as long to decide as it takes to actually get a patent, and be reviewed by the people who actually granted the patent (so they are discouraged from granting bad ones), and asking if some south korean engineer could willfully violate a patent in a foreign (albeit officially allied) country is a broad matter of international trade and an almost absurd notion at all (it's not even remotely sensible that patents are nation specific in this day and age, 100 years ago... maybe, 200 years ago.. probably, today, it's just silly).
In a sense legal systems are backwards, it would make more logical, if not economic. sense if everything started in parliament/congress - should this have been patentable, should this 'evidence' be valid, are these potential punishments permissible, what protections does this case establish a defendant should have, and then work down the chain from there. But the legal system works up the chain instead, so you have layers upon layers of rulings about things with the caveat that 'we assume his rights weren't violated based on our interpretation of existing precedent, we assume these things should actually be patentable based on how we read the law' etc.
Therein lies one of the great challenges of the legal system. In any other discipline you could do your own research, and realize if a lawyer is just bad and didn't find something, you could consider all evidence and reasoned advice on a topic without confining yourself to only that presented based on an artificial timeframe, you could pass the problem to someone more appropriate (should this be patentable at all, rather than did they infringe on it). Unfortunately that also means you could find information that's wrong, biased, obtained improperly, is cherry picked, is paid for etc. Hence the judge demanding disclosure on who is getting paid to write positive stories in Oracle vs Google.
Broadly speaking it's obvious this ruling is bad; design patents are valid and this is part of it, trivial things are patentable, a company that independently invents something is still considered to have stolen it from someone who filed a patent for it and so on. Those are decidedly bigger issues than what jury was actually looking at. Assuming these these things are patentable, were the patents valid, and if so did samsung willfully violate those patents? It's a series of absurd steps, the most basic assumption by the far the most important, and not addressed, whether or not a patent was valid should take as long to decide as it takes to actually get a patent, and be reviewed by the people who actually granted the patent (so they are discouraged from granting bad ones), and asking if some south korean engineer could willfully violate a patent in a foreign (albeit officially allied) country is a broad matter of international trade and an almost absurd notion at all (it's not even remotely sensible that patents are nation specific in this day and age, 100 years ago... maybe, 200 years ago.. probably, today, it's just silly).
In a sense legal systems are backwards, it would make more logical, if not economic. sense if everything started in parliament/congress - should this have been patentable, should this 'evidence' be valid, are these potential punishments permissible, what protections does this case establish a defendant should have, and then work down the chain from there. But the legal system works up the chain instead, so you have layers upon layers of rulings about things with the caveat that 'we assume his rights weren't violated based on our interpretation of existing precedent, we assume these things should actually be patentable based on how we read the law' etc.
Sure, but lots of christians don't recognize the catholic church (arguably they aren't even recognized as christians by the eastern orthodox because they view themselves as the successors of the Papacy), most notably protestants who have a somewhat different interpretation of the bible than catholics.
That is, in a way, one of the few redeeming things about the catholic church, they've realized (eventually, somewhere along the line) that they can't try and take the bible literally, and they can't try and ignore scientific reality, because scientific reality will persist long past the people disagreeing with it. If you stake your credibility on something that is demonstrably not true you will eventually disappear - the question remains how long they can cling to a belief in a god when no one sensible believes in one. The protestant faiths that are ignoring evolution have all had to give up or move to the US, because no one takes them seriously anywhere else.
Ah, but they *can* patent it. It's prior art and the patent should be invalid, but that doesn't mean it didn't get patented, and if the jury feels 'prior art' isn't central to the process or is just bogging them down they can then not consider the prior art and then what mess do you have?
It is the responsibility of the prosecution and defense to make sure they can come to an informed opinion given the necessary information as presented by both sides.
The primary argument being that this an intractable problem. You are banking on the ability of lawyers to teach a jury portions of law they will understand enough to rule the way each side is advocating. That fundamentally mistreats jurors and the law, it limits the ability of jurors to recognize information outside the scope presented by a lawyer (who might be bad, or simply underestimates the jury), and it supposes that laws can be considered in piecemeal isolation.
Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to
That is a truly profound assumption, which is the basis of much of jury based legal systems. It's quite possible this assumption is wrong. Whether it's demonstrably right or wrong is harder to say, because legal systems that don't have juries are different from ones that do on more than just the existence of juries.
we would only have lawyers for jurors, and I think we can all agree that's not a great idea;)
um.... That's actually a good idea. In effect it is what your supreme court is, which is a 9 rather than 12 person jury of professional legal experts. Just about every country has the most important cases decided by a collection of lawyers or lawmakers for precisely the reason that it is simply not appropriate to have common people establishing definitive precedents.
The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus and the less likely you are to be able to look at a case objectively
A lack of consensus may be preferable to decisions based on purely superficial understandings of problems. Broadly speaking the thrust of the article is that Juries aren't capable of making good decisions about patent law, in part because of jurors themselves and in part because the legal system is constrained by having to work around these 'common people' where you are burdening them and their employers to resolve a dispute that justifies far more time and far more expertise than is available to a jury, and may broadly require addressing much deeper questions. Should rectangles be patentable at all is a question that should be addressed before a jury is ever told 'assume they are patentable and work based on that assumption', because that's an absurdly stupid process.
The three basic points he makes: 1. Juries start biased, and are being asked to overcome that bias. Which is certainly true of both professional and non professionals.
2. It's harder to prove a negative than a positive, even if the negative is better. 'He copied me, that's why I have a patent on this and he doesn't' is easier to understand than 'we knew that too, but we didn't patent it because it shouldn't be patentable at all' is an inherently worse argument to make. I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's a psychological argument about how juries perceive information and there are valid underlying psychological principles about how people perceive information that have to be considered.
3. Patent problems specifically should be handled by the people who actually issue patents. Whatever you think about juries, you should be able to have a discussion with the people who granted the patent at all about whether or not that should have happened, and the patent system itself may need to pass information up the chain to their government managers about things that are causing them problems. The thing is, patents sort of exist in their own sub legal domain already, I guess the argument about apple vs samsung is that it was outside that sub domain, but that's more of a specific problem than a problem in general with the patents appeal process.
The more science you put in the courtroom the more juries are going to b
It's not like everyone else hasn't gone through this either. We spent the better part of 100 years with the majority of people believing in creationism in all of the developed countries. Trying to overcome the entrenched beliefs of politicians is not particularly easy, the US system is especially bad, but this is a problem other places managed to solve eventually.
Catholicism officially recognizes evolution to be correct. They're still having trouble with realizing there isn't a god, but you can see why that one is a bit harder for them.
that Assange is subject to political persecution by the US
Just because you claim it to be so doesn't mean it actually is in any legal sense.
Seriously. From the perspective of the UK legal system that is completely irrelevant and just the opinion of a bunch of complainers on the internet.
You have to be careful here, you're claiming that Assange is being political persecuted by the US, except what he did would almost certainly be Illegal in both the UK and Australia - that's not political persecution, and you'd have a tough time making the case to the UK (or anyone in NATO) that the US politically persecutes anyone. Claiming something to be so on the internet does not give it standing in a court of law. No matter how true it is perceived to be.
They're refusing to guarantee no re-extradition because he may well justifiably deserve to be extradited to the US. He set foot in US allied countries - anything that happens to him after that is his own stupidity.
He knew they wanted him but he assumed they would have to play fair
In what way has the UK not played fair? He has done a disservice to the UK through this nonsense, because they have had to waste a pile of money deciding whether or not he should be extradited to another EU country - a standard for which he had almost no chance of winning from the get go. The UK is then obliged, by their own laws, to extradite him, which is creating a mess for them, because he decided to fuck some women he'd just met. The UK is fairly upholding their treaty obligations, and fairly assessed his extradition request.
Outside the existing legal situation we can have all the theories we want about him being immediately re-extradited from Sweden to the US, and about the validity of the Swedish case, but if anything this highlights that extradition from one EU country to another is still more complicated than it needs to be, and that you should keep your dick away from hangers on. Both of which are things we knew already.
I think it took a while for anyone to decide if it was actually a problem (it's not) as the stated policy of the UK government is that Assange is to be arrested immediately if he leaves the embassy, this is the official written order, and they might even go into the embassy and drag him out.
With a day of reflection we can recognize this as proof that you shouldn't keep documents face up that you don't want people to see. At least it happened with something that was already stated official policy, and the details that weren't official policy aren't exactly anything surprising.
Well that, and you entered into an arrangement with MS when you chose to install their operating system, whatever you may think of that arrangement, microsoft kinda needs to know what you're doing on the computer to know what's causing problems, because lets face it there are a lot of copies of windows in the world an even rare errors can cause huge chaos.
That doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) opt out of anything you're not comfortable with, but if you want stuff to work microsoft needs to know what's breaking.
The fact that it was a US company against a south korean one, in a court in close proximity to Apple HQ risks stacking the jury to the favour of the home team.
And 'stacking' the jury is part of jury selection, both sides are trying to find people likely to be sympathetic to their cause and unsympathetic to the other side.
There will probably be more complaints about judicial bias going forward and hopefully somewhere along the lines someone blames the Samsung legal team for doing a shitty job, and the patent system for being designed badly enough that this could happen and so on.
Part of what might come out of this could be interviews with jurors, and we'll get to find out if they were actually clueless, upholding rules they thought were stupid, but ultimately the rules they had to work with, or whether they clearly felt Apple innovated and Samsung copied.
We should all buy the absolute cheapest shittiest stuff since it'll be out of date next month anyway
That's out of left field. And somewhat divorced from what I said. I said you get a more or less linear performance increase for dollars spent up to an i5 2500k, including from AMD parts, and after that you get basically nothing out of having a faster CPU (not actually nothing, but very little).
, it was DirectX 10 and 11 that hampered more than any actual specs
Right. Right now PC versions support DX11 as an add on to the DX9 path they use for consoles. Whether or not the PS4/Xbox3 will do something that requires dx 12 (i.e. features that don't exist yet) is hard to say. There certainly are a lot of things I can think of that we could add software wise.
But if you wanna see what the devs are gonna target look at the Steam spec
Lol.
Sorry. I teach devs and AM a dev. And no. Not even close. Not even remotely connected to reality. You target consoles, and then you figure out how you can manage that to work on PC. That's why all of this revolves around what, if anything, interesting is going to be in the PS4/Xbox3 pipeline.
.you really can't look back when it comes to PCs and predict the future
Uh... actually you can. And as I showed, sometimes 5 years makes a huge difference, and sometimes it doesn't. Despite how I managed to massacre one of the paragraphs in my post that ended up in between the system requirements section.
Before that each CPU manufacturer was leapfrogging the other by leaps and bounds
They still are. It just doesn't matter as much. It's much more about capabilities, and probably GPU capabilities at that rather than performance of those capabilities.
This is why you see both Intel and AMD worried more about heat and battery life
Uh... this has nothing to do with the consumer desktop market. Both companies have been making 130ish TDP CPU's for over a decade. This is for tablets, laptops and data centres. Well that and trying to squeeze as much as they can into a particular TDP, but that's nothing new and mostly a die shrink thing. The 'power' problem they had was leakage current, which is a serious but not really related problem to TDP.
because frankly for the vast majority of tasks that C2Q or Phenom II X4 is already major overkill.
ya definitely. And they're about on par with each other. The Sandy bridge series are linear benefit jump up, and anything beyond that is not getting anything.
At this point I'll have to leave you to it. The evidence speaks for itself, going from any of the AMD to sandy bridge parts is a pretty linear performance per dollar speedup, that may not actually matter much, but it is measurably there. Until we know what the next gen of consoles is going to look like we can't reasonably predict 5 years from now, given where OpenCL is in terms of support I wouldn't look at any gpu older than a 400 series nvidia or a 6000 AMD series amd parts, and I'd be skeptical of any of the current parts (600/7000 series) being capable, but I also wouldn't be shocked to a version of the 660 and 7800 in next gen consoles.
Then your employers should probably find someone else, or you should hire assistants to deal with support calls.
The most valuable thing about Windows is that everyone uses it. If some 50 year old lady has a problem the 45 year old next to her might have a solution, or the 18 year old intern might. With linux, every problem becomes your problem, you installed it, you suffer the consequences.
For an end user, especially an end user who is either cheap or ideologically driven the time wasted figuring out how to do any given thing in linux is a worthwhile learning experience, for everyone else the difference between 100 dollars for an operating system versus 2 hours of lost productivity (not per day, total) for an employee and you pay the 100 dollars for an operating system they know how to use.
This is, by the way, the prime criticism of windows 8, no one knows how to use it and the first time you want to log off or restart you'll waste an hour trying to figure out how, so right there every copy of windows 8 without anything else is half way to being a waste of money.
non-working Software on Linux
It's not that linux doesn't have equivalents for just about everything that isn't a custom job, it does, there are even a lot of tools for things you just can't do easily on windows. But if your billing software is on windows, your accounting software, your payroll, your calendering, your...... suddenly you've asked them to incur a significant expense to try and get new software. The vast majority of custom small business programmers work in.net and windows, it's quick it's 'good enough' and they don't port to linux because it's not worth the effort.
The main reason an end user would switch from linux to windows is games, even if you can get stuff running under wine it's never as good as native dx 11 support, and yes, lots of big titles work reasonably well if not perfectly, but lots of small titles don't, and then you're SOL. If a game patches you could easily be stuck waiting for a fix and so on. Unless you are really strongly ideologically driven, or really poor, linux isn't really worth the effort for home users.
which as is demonstrably the case with gaming, they don't. But carry on.
And yes, terrible was a bit hyperbolic, but 30% performance between a 200 dollar old generation intel CPU and a top performing AMD one is less than encouraging.
GPU's used to be fixed function devices, on some of the x1000 series ATI parts you could write native assembler for them and do very limited things, but it wasn't really until the nvidia 8000 series that you started seeing computing elements that could execute arbitrary code, and from the moment you could do that we've had GPU computing.
If you sort of run down the history of 3D accelerators from the late 90's to 2008 they start out as very limited capability products, what they could do worked blazingly fast, but there wasn't any way to program most of the computing power, you sent it a series of triangles, verticies and surfaces and it basically spit out the result, you might have been able to set a flag or two for a few different hardware paths but that was it.
Then came programmable shaders, which could execute code but only a very limited set of functions with some really troublesome constraints on I/O. And after that came the fully programmable shaders we have now, which can, in theory at least, execute any arbitrary C++.
This is one of those cases where computer scientists were at the mercy of computer engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the nuclear restrictions against India from western aligned countries have melted away as the reality of the second most populous country maintaining a nuclear deterrent seemed as reasonable as it is, and because they have a significant demand for legitimate nuclear power anyway.
This really is about money, it's about places like Australia being able to sell uranium to places like Iran and Pakistan without the secondary wrangling over nuclear weapons.
I don't really think Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan pakistan or afghanistan feel threatened any more or less by a nuclear powered Iran. It's really the Israelis, via Iranian proxies, for want of a better way of putting it the 'wrong kind' of iranians, who don't conform to the central government (including ones looking to overthrow the ayatollahs naturally), potentially opponents of Iranian allies (e.g. the people trying to out assad) and the Sunni arab states like Saudi - who are worried about Iran.
That, admittedly, includes a lot of people within 1000Km to the west and south west of Iran but not so much to the north or east.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining
They have some, they're just not mining it much. And in the case of brazil, who no one is particularly accusing of building nuclear bombs, there's no reason to pay above market rates if it can be avoided. They pretty much exemplify the 'we have a legitimate reason to want some', and would rather not see nuclear weapons proliferation.
If you're going to quote both lines you should probably pay attention to the last one, just sayin'
I parroted the propaganda precisely because that's the argument being made - and I said why it's absurd.
Also, Iran, since the revolution, has been funding attacks against the Israeli's, that's pretty much the root of the whole disagreement between the lot of them. They might even have been funding/contributing to various elements of the Iraqi resistance to the US re-colonization effort.
Sure, which is why this is kind of silly, compared to the cost of a single nuclear reactor overpaying by a factor of 5 for uranium isn't really a problem.
A big UN marketplace just could not work, because of the reasons uranium trading is going on now
In the same way that you can't have wheat board that just buys all the wheat, and resells it for the same price it paid (give or take)? (e.g. the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board, which survived quite successfully for 77 years until it was shut down for purely political reasons?).
I'm not saying it's going to work, but you certainly could create a controlled market for low enriched uranium overseen by the 'rich reliable' countries who benefit by being the only ones doing the enriching (free money!) and everyone else gets reactor fuel, which means they have power, to you you know, use all the electronics and software that runs on electronics that we want to sell them.
Uranium isn't sold like any other, the problem is enriched uranium, where you can't buy uranium if someone thinks you're going to enrich it. There are some broadly similar problems, pharmaceuticals that can be used for lethal injections for example cannot be sold if they're going to be used for lethal injections. The broad verifiable regulatory framework for uranium belongs with the UN, because no one trusts the Russians (who are claiming to do it for Iran for example), and for everyone else the added transparency elsewhere won't matter. Of course that makes it harder for Russia to supply nuclear weapons supplies to their friends, so it's not likely to go anywhere.
except that they're already dependent on someone for the uranium. That's the issue. Canada, australia, Russia, Niger, Namibia, Kazakhistan are the big net exporters, with south africa, communist china, the US, germany/czech republic, romania all have some mines, or at least reserves, but unless you're one of the big 5 (for want of a better phrase), you're at their mercy to actually get the uranium.
Which leads to say, Iran, South Africa or Japan (or others, such as india, brazil, israel, the UK, France etc.). They all want nuclear power (or at least might want it), have no domestic source of the uranium, and they rely on someone to sell it to them. If the US vigorously objects to Iran getting uranium of any sort them well, they can't even have a civilian nuclear power programme, if china and north korea and russia make enough of a stink the same could happen to Japan and South korea. The Israeli's bank on being able to get their supplies from the US, and the US can always buy from Canada or australia, so they're safe, but everyone else that has a legitimate need for civilian nuclear power has a tough time saying 'I'm only interested in civilian nuclear power, but that other guy really just wants bombs".
If you're talking about oil then sure, I agree, oil is in total worth so much money, and many of the producers so small that they can be forced into particular spheres of influence and the controllers of those spheres have no real vested interest in giving them up. Uranium is basically worthless in terms of total dollar value, 50 000 tonnes a year at $132k/tonne = 6.6 billion dollars a year as total worldwide production. Worldwide oil production is about 8 billion dollars per day.
It's not like the people at question are energy independent with nuclear power now, this is about finding a way to expand that market so that lots more people can get access to supply without (further) threatening the security of the world with more nuclear bombs. Obviously it's sort of an absurd proposition, if north korea can build nuclear weapons anyone can, but it's an honest effort.
Er sorry... guess I missed a / on a quote but that wasn't what I thought the preview looked like.
What sounds more thorough to you
Therein lies one of the great challenges of the legal system. In any other discipline you could do your own research, and realize if a lawyer is just bad and didn't find something, you could consider all evidence and reasoned advice on a topic without confining yourself to only that presented based on an artificial timeframe, you could pass the problem to someone more appropriate (should this be patentable at all, rather than did they infringe on it). Unfortunately that also means you could find information that's wrong, biased, obtained improperly, is cherry picked, is paid for etc. Hence the judge demanding disclosure on who is getting paid to write positive stories in Oracle vs Google.
Broadly speaking it's obvious this ruling is bad; design patents are valid and this is part of it, trivial things are patentable, a company that independently invents something is still considered to have stolen it from someone who filed a patent for it and so on. Those are decidedly bigger issues than what jury was actually looking at. Assuming these these things are patentable, were the patents valid, and if so did samsung willfully violate those patents? It's a series of absurd steps, the most basic assumption by the far the most important, and not addressed, whether or not a patent was valid should take as long to decide as it takes to actually get a patent, and be reviewed by the people who actually granted the patent (so they are discouraged from granting bad ones), and asking if some south korean engineer could willfully violate a patent in a foreign (albeit officially allied) country is a broad matter of international trade and an almost absurd notion at all (it's not even remotely sensible that patents are nation specific in this day and age, 100 years ago... maybe, 200 years ago.. probably, today, it's just silly).
In a sense legal systems are backwards, it would make more logical, if not economic. sense if everything started in parliament/congress - should this have been patentable, should this 'evidence' be valid, are these potential punishments permissible, what protections does this case establish a defendant should have, and then work down the chain from there. But the legal system works up the chain instead, so you have layers upon layers of rulings about things with the caveat that 'we assume his rights weren't violated based on our interpretation of existing precedent, we assume these things should actually be patentable based on how we read the law' etc.
What sounds more thorough to you?
Therein lies one of the great challenges of the legal system. In any other discipline you could do your own research, and realize if a lawyer is just bad and didn't find something, you could consider all evidence and reasoned advice on a topic without confining yourself to only that presented based on an artificial timeframe, you could pass the problem to someone more appropriate (should this be patentable at all, rather than did they infringe on it). Unfortunately that also means you could find information that's wrong, biased, obtained improperly, is cherry picked, is paid for etc. Hence the judge demanding disclosure on who is getting paid to write positive stories in Oracle vs Google.
Broadly speaking it's obvious this ruling is bad; design patents are valid and this is part of it, trivial things are patentable, a company that independently invents something is still considered to have stolen it from someone who filed a patent for it and so on. Those are decidedly bigger issues than what jury was actually looking at. Assuming these these things are patentable, were the patents valid, and if so did samsung willfully violate those patents? It's a series of absurd steps, the most basic assumption by the far the most important, and not addressed, whether or not a patent was valid should take as long to decide as it takes to actually get a patent, and be reviewed by the people who actually granted the patent (so they are discouraged from granting bad ones), and asking if some south korean engineer could willfully violate a patent in a foreign (albeit officially allied) country is a broad matter of international trade and an almost absurd notion at all (it's not even remotely sensible that patents are nation specific in this day and age, 100 years ago... maybe, 200 years ago.. probably, today, it's just silly).
In a sense legal systems are backwards, it would make more logical, if not economic. sense if everything started in parliament/congress - should this have been patentable, should this 'evidence' be valid, are these potential punishments permissible, what protections does this case establish a defendant should have, and then work down the chain from there. But the legal system works up the chain instead, so you have layers upon layers of rulings about things with the caveat that 'we assume his rights weren't violated based on our interpretation of existing precedent, we assume these things should actually be patentable based on how we read the law' etc.
Sure, but lots of christians don't recognize the catholic church (arguably they aren't even recognized as christians by the eastern orthodox because they view themselves as the successors of the Papacy), most notably protestants who have a somewhat different interpretation of the bible than catholics.
That is, in a way, one of the few redeeming things about the catholic church, they've realized (eventually, somewhere along the line) that they can't try and take the bible literally, and they can't try and ignore scientific reality, because scientific reality will persist long past the people disagreeing with it. If you stake your credibility on something that is demonstrably not true you will eventually disappear - the question remains how long they can cling to a belief in a god when no one sensible believes in one. The protestant faiths that are ignoring evolution have all had to give up or move to the US, because no one takes them seriously anywhere else.
Perhaps it's one because it's the other?
Ah, but they *can* patent it. It's prior art and the patent should be invalid, but that doesn't mean it didn't get patented, and if the jury feels 'prior art' isn't central to the process or is just bogging them down they can then not consider the prior art and then what mess do you have?
It is the responsibility of the prosecution and defense to make sure they can come to an informed opinion given the necessary information as presented by both sides.
The primary argument being that this an intractable problem. You are banking on the ability of lawyers to teach a jury portions of law they will understand enough to rule the way each side is advocating. That fundamentally mistreats jurors and the law, it limits the ability of jurors to recognize information outside the scope presented by a lawyer (who might be bad, or simply underestimates the jury), and it supposes that laws can be considered in piecemeal isolation.
Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to
That is a truly profound assumption, which is the basis of much of jury based legal systems. It's quite possible this assumption is wrong. Whether it's demonstrably right or wrong is harder to say, because legal systems that don't have juries are different from ones that do on more than just the existence of juries.
we would only have lawyers for jurors, and I think we can all agree that's not a great idea ;)
um....
That's actually a good idea. In effect it is what your supreme court is, which is a 9 rather than 12 person jury of professional legal experts. Just about every country has the most important cases decided by a collection of lawyers or lawmakers for precisely the reason that it is simply not appropriate to have common people establishing definitive precedents.
The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus and the less likely you are to be able to look at a case objectively
A lack of consensus may be preferable to decisions based on purely superficial understandings of problems. Broadly speaking the thrust of the article is that Juries aren't capable of making good decisions about patent law, in part because of jurors themselves and in part because the legal system is constrained by having to work around these 'common people' where you are burdening them and their employers to resolve a dispute that justifies far more time and far more expertise than is available to a jury, and may broadly require addressing much deeper questions. Should rectangles be patentable at all is a question that should be addressed before a jury is ever told 'assume they are patentable and work based on that assumption', because that's an absurdly stupid process.
The three basic points he makes:
1. Juries start biased, and are being asked to overcome that bias. Which is certainly true of both professional and non professionals.
2. It's harder to prove a negative than a positive, even if the negative is better. 'He copied me, that's why I have a patent on this and he doesn't' is easier to understand than 'we knew that too, but we didn't patent it because it shouldn't be patentable at all' is an inherently worse argument to make. I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's a psychological argument about how juries perceive information and there are valid underlying psychological principles about how people perceive information that have to be considered.
3. Patent problems specifically should be handled by the people who actually issue patents. Whatever you think about juries, you should be able to have a discussion with the people who granted the patent at all about whether or not that should have happened, and the patent system itself may need to pass information up the chain to their government managers about things that are causing them problems. The thing is, patents sort of exist in their own sub legal domain already, I guess the argument about apple vs samsung is that it was outside that sub domain, but that's more of a specific problem than a problem in general with the patents appeal process.
The more science you put in the courtroom the more juries are going to b
It's not like everyone else hasn't gone through this either. We spent the better part of 100 years with the majority of people believing in creationism in all of the developed countries. Trying to overcome the entrenched beliefs of politicians is not particularly easy, the US system is especially bad, but this is a problem other places managed to solve eventually.
Catholicism officially recognizes evolution to be correct. They're still having trouble with realizing there isn't a god, but you can see why that one is a bit harder for them.
that Assange is subject to political persecution by the US
Just because you claim it to be so doesn't mean it actually is in any legal sense.
Seriously. From the perspective of the UK legal system that is completely irrelevant and just the opinion of a bunch of complainers on the internet.
You have to be careful here, you're claiming that Assange is being political persecuted by the US, except what he did would almost certainly be Illegal in both the UK and Australia - that's not political persecution, and you'd have a tough time making the case to the UK (or anyone in NATO) that the US politically persecutes anyone. Claiming something to be so on the internet does not give it standing in a court of law. No matter how true it is perceived to be.
They're refusing to guarantee no re-extradition because he may well justifiably deserve to be extradited to the US. He set foot in US allied countries - anything that happens to him after that is his own stupidity.
He knew they wanted him but he assumed they would have to play fair
In what way has the UK not played fair? He has done a disservice to the UK through this nonsense, because they have had to waste a pile of money deciding whether or not he should be extradited to another EU country - a standard for which he had almost no chance of winning from the get go. The UK is then obliged, by their own laws, to extradite him, which is creating a mess for them, because he decided to fuck some women he'd just met. The UK is fairly upholding their treaty obligations, and fairly assessed his extradition request.
Outside the existing legal situation we can have all the theories we want about him being immediately re-extradited from Sweden to the US, and about the validity of the Swedish case, but if anything this highlights that extradition from one EU country to another is still more complicated than it needs to be, and that you should keep your dick away from hangers on. Both of which are things we knew already.
I think it took a while for anyone to decide if it was actually a problem (it's not) as the stated policy of the UK government is that Assange is to be arrested immediately if he leaves the embassy, this is the official written order, and they might even go into the embassy and drag him out.
With a day of reflection we can recognize this as proof that you shouldn't keep documents face up that you don't want people to see. At least it happened with something that was already stated official policy, and the details that weren't official policy aren't exactly anything surprising.
Well that, and you entered into an arrangement with MS when you chose to install their operating system, whatever you may think of that arrangement, microsoft kinda needs to know what you're doing on the computer to know what's causing problems, because lets face it there are a lot of copies of windows in the world an even rare errors can cause huge chaos.
That doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) opt out of anything you're not comfortable with, but if you want stuff to work microsoft needs to know what's breaking.
The fact that it was a US company against a south korean one, in a court in close proximity to Apple HQ risks stacking the jury to the favour of the home team.
And 'stacking' the jury is part of jury selection, both sides are trying to find people likely to be sympathetic to their cause and unsympathetic to the other side.
There will probably be more complaints about judicial bias going forward and hopefully somewhere along the lines someone blames the Samsung legal team for doing a shitty job, and the patent system for being designed badly enough that this could happen and so on.
Part of what might come out of this could be interviews with jurors, and we'll get to find out if they were actually clueless, upholding rules they thought were stupid, but ultimately the rules they had to work with, or whether they clearly felt Apple innovated and Samsung copied.
and samsung for violating one of apples or so said BBC news last night.
We should all buy the absolute cheapest shittiest stuff since it'll be out of date next month anyway
That's out of left field. And somewhat divorced from what I said. I said you get a more or less linear performance increase for dollars spent up to an i5 2500k, including from AMD parts, and after that you get basically nothing out of having a faster CPU (not actually nothing, but very little).
, it was DirectX 10 and 11 that hampered more than any actual specs
Right. Right now PC versions support DX11 as an add on to the DX9 path they use for consoles. Whether or not the PS4/Xbox3 will do something that requires dx 12 (i.e. features that don't exist yet) is hard to say. There certainly are a lot of things I can think of that we could add software wise.
But if you wanna see what the devs are gonna target look at the Steam spec
Lol.
Sorry. I teach devs and AM a dev. And no. Not even close. Not even remotely connected to reality. You target consoles, and then you figure out how you can manage that to work on PC. That's why all of this revolves around what, if anything, interesting is going to be in the PS4/Xbox3 pipeline.
Uh... actually you can. And as I showed, sometimes 5 years makes a huge difference, and sometimes it doesn't. Despite how I managed to massacre one of the paragraphs in my post that ended up in between the system requirements section.
Before that each CPU manufacturer was leapfrogging the other by leaps and bounds
They still are. It just doesn't matter as much. It's much more about capabilities, and probably GPU capabilities at that rather than performance of those capabilities.
This is why you see both Intel and AMD worried more about heat and battery life
Uh... this has nothing to do with the consumer desktop market. Both companies have been making 130ish TDP CPU's for over a decade. This is for tablets, laptops and data centres. Well that and trying to squeeze as much as they can into a particular TDP, but that's nothing new and mostly a die shrink thing. The 'power' problem they had was leakage current, which is a serious but not really related problem to TDP.
because frankly for the vast majority of tasks that C2Q or Phenom II X4 is already major overkill.
ya definitely. And they're about on par with each other. The Sandy bridge series are linear benefit jump up, and anything beyond that is not getting anything.
At this point I'll have to leave you to it. The evidence speaks for itself, going from any of the AMD to sandy bridge parts is a pretty linear performance per dollar speedup, that may not actually matter much, but it is measurably there. Until we know what the next gen of consoles is going to look like we can't reasonably predict 5 years from now, given where OpenCL is in terms of support I wouldn't look at any gpu older than a 400 series nvidia or a 6000 AMD series amd parts, and I'd be skeptical of any of the current parts (600/7000 series) being capable, but I also wouldn't be shocked to a version of the 660 and 7800 in next gen consoles.
My choice is Linux
Then your employers should probably find someone else, or you should hire assistants to deal with support calls.
The most valuable thing about Windows is that everyone uses it. If some 50 year old lady has a problem the 45 year old next to her might have a solution, or the 18 year old intern might. With linux, every problem becomes your problem, you installed it, you suffer the consequences.
For an end user, especially an end user who is either cheap or ideologically driven the time wasted figuring out how to do any given thing in linux is a worthwhile learning experience, for everyone else the difference between 100 dollars for an operating system versus 2 hours of lost productivity (not per day, total) for an employee and you pay the 100 dollars for an operating system they know how to use.
This is, by the way, the prime criticism of windows 8, no one knows how to use it and the first time you want to log off or restart you'll waste an hour trying to figure out how, so right there every copy of windows 8 without anything else is half way to being a waste of money.
non-working Software on Linux
It's not that linux doesn't have equivalents for just about everything that isn't a custom job, it does, there are even a lot of tools for things you just can't do easily on windows. But if your billing software is on windows, your accounting software, your payroll, your calendering, your ...... suddenly you've asked them to incur a significant expense to try and get new software. The vast majority of custom small business programmers work in .net and windows, it's quick it's 'good enough' and they don't port to linux because it's not worth the effort.
The main reason an end user would switch from linux to windows is games, even if you can get stuff running under wine it's never as good as native dx 11 support, and yes, lots of big titles work reasonably well if not perfectly, but lots of small titles don't, and then you're SOL. If a game patches you could easily be stuck waiting for a fix and so on. Unless you are really strongly ideologically driven, or really poor, linux isn't really worth the effort for home users.
On the other hand, if more cores matter to you
which as is demonstrably the case with gaming, they don't. But carry on.
And yes, terrible was a bit hyperbolic, but 30% performance between a 200 dollar old generation intel CPU and a top performing AMD one is less than encouraging.
Uh... Not sure what you're getting at.
GPU's used to be fixed function devices, on some of the x1000 series ATI parts you could write native assembler for them and do very limited things, but it wasn't really until the nvidia 8000 series that you started seeing computing elements that could execute arbitrary code, and from the moment you could do that we've had GPU computing.
If you sort of run down the history of 3D accelerators from the late 90's to 2008 they start out as very limited capability products, what they could do worked blazingly fast, but there wasn't any way to program most of the computing power, you sent it a series of triangles, verticies and surfaces and it basically spit out the result, you might have been able to set a flag or two for a few different hardware paths but that was it.
Then came programmable shaders, which could execute code but only a very limited set of functions with some really troublesome constraints on I/O. And after that came the fully programmable shaders we have now, which can, in theory at least, execute any arbitrary C++.
This is one of those cases where computer scientists were at the mercy of computer engineers.