It's probably because the popular media talks way too much about Mars but then never actually discusses its physical characteristics much. Venus is almost the size of the Earth, and has 0.9g gravity. Mars is quite small, and only has 1/3g gravity. It's really not that much better than the Moon. If Venus weren't so inhospitable, we wouldn't even be wasting much time on Mars (the USSR sent some robotic spacecraft to Venus back in the 70s, and they only lasted maybe an hour before they were rendered inoperable by the extreme conditions on the surface there).
If we could figure out a way to start a terraforming process on Venus, it'd be a perfect place to establish human colonies. But they need to get rid of the thick atmosphere and stop the runaway greenhouse effect. Perhaps seeding the atmosphere with some kind of microbes would do it.
Mars is not earth-like enough to support life. It can't even hang onto an atmosphere; IIRC its atmosphere is about 1/100 as dense as ours. It has no magnetosphere to protect it from solar winds. It's also a bit too small, and only has 1/3 of earth's gravity (which may be another reason it can't hold its atmosphere). Maybe Mars had life at one point, but it's a dead, barren world now.
Our communicators may not have the range that Star Trek communicators did, but they have far more functions than just talking like a walkie-talkie: full-color touchscreens, text messaging (so the other party doesn't have to drop what they're doing to engage you in conversation), internet browsing, looking up various information (I have a weather application on mine I use a lot to see the forecast and current temperature), voice mail, playing music, watching videos, playing games, turn-by-turn navigation, etc. ST communicators couldn't do any of those things, they were just walkie-talkies that could supposedly communicate over long distances and through rocks, and perhaps help the ship establish your location. The only thing our smartphones are missing out of that is a radio channel as effective as "subspace".
Getting to other stars isn't that hard; with modern technology we can probably do it in a half-century or so, maybe more. The problem is that this is too long for humans, with our short lifespans; the solution is simple: cryogenics. If you freeze the crew for most of the trip, then they won't age significantly during the voyage. The only problem after that is that hundreds of years will have passed when the crew returns to Earth (if they return at all), but if you pick people without any significant family ties this shouldn't be a big problem. For instance, if there were such a mission being set up, and the odds for success were good (and the cryo technology really worked that well, so I wouldn't age during the voyage), I'd probably be happy to join the mission as long as my wife came with me. I don't have any other family that I care much about who'll be around that much longer anyway, so I won't be missing much. I'm sure there's plenty of other people just like me out there in today's Western culture.
I don't know about the tax aspects of it, but as far as historical buildings go, sometimes there's laws in place that forbid the demolishing of historic buildings in particular places, so the owner may not be allowed to demolish it and rebuild a replica.
I'm not disputing your assertion, but why the hell would a city provide tax breaks for unoccupied buildings? All that does is create an incentive to leave useful buildings standing empty, not generating taxable income for the city (both through tax on the rent itself, and also if the renter is a business, taxes from the business's income, plus also the network effects on the economy of that business). It doesn't make any sense at all. Of course, government officials aren't exactly known to be the sharpest tools in the shed, but this concept is so basic that the government of NYC, one of the premier cities of the world, should be able to grasp it.
Posts don't need citations. This isn't Wikipedia or any other peer-reviewed article, it's a chat forum. You're right that posts with incorrect information routinely get modded up to +5, but leave the citation stuff out of it. IMO, it's OK to ask for (or even demand) a citation if someone is spewing bullshit, and you're calling them on it, but don't expect people to provide citations right off the bat. I don't see any citations in your post backing your claims, for instance.
BS. For one thing, there's no automatic rifle involved here, only a semi-auto rifle; pistols are semi-auto too, so the rifle's only advantages are much greater range, greater penetrating ability (to go through doors and such, however a.223 is notoriously bad at this kind of thing, the round is so low-mass it doesn't have much penetration ability unlike, say, a.308), and probably greater magazine capacity (20-30 rounds typ. vs 10-15 rounds). The rifle's main advantage is really the range. However, it also has a giant drawback: it's big and long and unwieldy, unlike a handgun. On a battlefield, that's not a problem, but this isn't a battlefield, it's a building with hallways, doorways, etc. There's a good reason the US military has almost entirely moved to the M4 and away from the M16: the barrel is a few inches shorter, so it's easier to handle in close-quarters combat, and getting in and out of vehicles.
In a building, you don't need 800 yards of effective killing range; no target is going to be that far away, unless you're shooting at people from the opposite side of the gymnasium. And in a building, people tend to hide around corners so you can't just pick them off from a distance. Cho in the Virginia Tech massacre killed more people than this guy, and he did it with two pistols. Some skilled person with their own pistol would easily be a severe threat to anyone carrying a rifle in a school.
Now of course, any armed defenders need to actually be skilled to be of any use. Unfortunately, many "first responders" (cops) are not; many of them have never fired their weapon at a human, and many of them can barely hit the broad side of a barn. Look at the NYC cops, who ended up hitting a bunch of bystanders when they were shooting at a single armed man in Manhattan. I wouldn't want those morons trying to defend me; I'm better off dodging the nutjob's bullets by myself. There was an armed cop at Columbine that day too, and he wasn't of any use either.
Maybe what we should do is withdraw all our troops from the middle east (since we're never going to solve that region's problems), and take our battle-tested combat troops and put them in schools as coaches and other positions, carrying concealed weapons. It'd be a much better use of our taxpayer dollars then sending them across the planet, and they'd actually be effective in stopping a madman, unlike some cop who can't shoot or some teacher with a gun who'll end up letting it get stolen by a student.
It's not just families with boys; my wife tells me she used to beg her parents for a BB gun when she was little (and of course they never got her one, and instead got her "girl toys" which she hated).
What bothers me is that I used to draw guns on my notebooks all the time when I was in high school. No one cared; in fact, I don't remember anyone even looking at my doodles except my best friend who thought them funny. Now, it seems like there's people going around snooping on kids' doodling to see if they might be the next Eric or Dylan. I truly worry about how I'll ever handle things if I have my own kid, the way public education is in this country these days. I suppose I'll have to pony up for private school tuition, because I wouldn't want my kids going through the hell that modern American public schools are.
The big problem I have with this post is that it's an Anonymous Coward posting it, which really makes me thing it's just some moron who's making this up, and still lives in the USA in his mother's basement and certainly hasn't renounced his citizenship since he wouldn't be able to work as a barista without it.
If this were posted by someone with a real account, especially a low UID, it'd be much harder-hitting.
You've taken the analogy too far. The Captain of the Costa Concordia was a captain of a real ship, and when he fucked up, it had real, fatal results.
We're talking about companies where there's programming work being done. No one's life is on the line, and no one is going to die when a project implodes due to mismanagement (I'm assuming this is not an avionics company, and even if it is, that kind of stuff is rigorously tested, so a project fuck-up is probably only going to result in financial disaster for the company). So the ship analogy is fine, as long as you don't take it too far like you just did.
And obviously, choice A is the probably best (bail out before it's too late). But not always. Sometimes it's a good idea to stick around and go down with the ship, because again the analogy fails: "going down with the ship" means you lose your job, but not your life, and it may be beneficial to lose your job this way rather than bail out early. This happened to me about 4 years ago; I was working at Freescale Semiconductor in a doomed division. We all knew it was a matter of time before they pink-slipped everyone there, because the project was being so badly mismanaged. However, the job situation was pretty bad at the time, so it made sense to stick around until they gave us the boot. Finally, one day, they did, with no warning at all: I walked into work and was shuffled into a conference room to fill out my lay-off papers and sign a contract. The contract was, of course, to promise not to sue for wrongful termination (in a right-to-work state, no less), in return for a generous severance bonus, which IIRC came out to 3 or 4 months' worth of salary. This is one of the benefits of working for a really big company; when they lay you off because they're morons, they give you a big bonus (when you're a salaried employee, like an engineer), so you need to take this into account if things are looking bad where you are. Of course, if your company is some little 20 or 100-person outfit, this probably isn't going to happen, so you should probably avoid going down with the ship at a place like that. To extend the ship analogy, we could probably say that giant companies are like ships with plenty of extra lifeboats, and they're all stocked with lots of food, supplies, and some money too, so you don't need to worry about getting your lifeboat before everyone else, whereas tiny companies are like poorly-run ships with far too few lifeboats for the number of passengers.
It's probably not simply the arrangement of pins that's patented, it's specific novel traits inside the connector itself (e.g. the design of the pins, which can be fairly complex springs themselves, or the design of the latching mechanism), without which the connector simply won't work reliably. What electrical signals correspond to what pins is not a patentable idea (and if there are any patents like this, they fall into the "trivial patent" category like the one-click patent, IMO).
BTW, I didn't get anything wrong about engines. No, a whole car engine or jet engine isn't patented (I was being brief there), but novel traits inside those engines routinely are, such as the design of a compressor wheel or the design of a variable-valve-timing system.
If you personally like clear / readable code, then no standard will ever be a replacement for you.
In my experience as a software engineer, clear and readable code is a rarity in the corporate world, and most programmers just don't care about code being readable or clear. It's usually a complete mess following no standard at all, even when it's written by one person.
You have the wrong mind-set, and that's why you don't like it.
I, to this day, cannot figure out how to actually close a tile app or whatever. If I "make it go away" I don't know if it's minimized and still running or not.
See, you're not supposed to worry about such things. You're just supposed to minimize it, and it'll automatically figure out if it needs to be closed or not. As "DrGamez" says two posts above, "They have their own memory-management/PLM processes, and when they haven't been used for a set time - they Suspend and close in the background."
FFS, "shut down" is solely located under "Settings." There is no logic and no excuse for that.
Again, you're being too technical. Microsoft copied the GNOME devs here, and made shutdown well-hidden, because normal users don't need to worry about such things.
Your problem is you're trying to micromanage your computer, instead of letting it figure out how to do things for you. Microsoft has always been excellent at making the computer figure out what's best for you, as seen long ago with Clippy and Bob, and you should just trust them. You don't need to worry about how many apps are running in memory, because memory is limitless, and you don't need to worry about shutting down your computer, because you'll never have a situation where it won't be powered.
you can disallow me from buying something and reselling it.
I think you meant to write "can't". In any case, you're wrong. If, for instance, I'm the manufacturer (or rights-holder) to product X, and you're another manufacturer that wants to buy X and integrate it with their product and resell it, I absolutely can refuse to sell you my product if I don't like you for some reason.
Of course, you could try to go around to all the retail stores in the country and buy up their stock of X, but that would be pretty stupid: you'd be getting it at full retail price (instead of a giant bulk discount), and it'd cost a fortune to send a small army of people out to buy all this stuff in person. Worse, that's not a very good way to source parts for an assembled product; you'd have a very hard time getting the quantities you need in stock in time to do manufacturing. You'd never be able to sell your product profitably doing this.
they cant stop me from buying all of them that newegg has on hand.
Which isn't enough for a large production run, and costs too much at retail prices. Newegg isn't going to give you 50% or 75% off just because you're buying up all their stock. When you're a manufacturer, you have to buy your parts from those manufacturers, not retail stores.
The problem with this is that it can be argued that there's much less incentive to design anything complex if anyone can cheaply copy it and sell it without paying you for the privilege. It costs money to do R&D, so if you spend all that money employing engineers for man-years, and then give away the results of their work and a Chinese company copies it and sells it for less than you can afford to sell it for, you're not going to stay in business for long; because of this, it becomes unprofitable to do R&D, so it only gets done when there's no alternative.
The present problems with the patent system are that trivial things are being patented, like rounded corners on a rectangular product, purchasing something with one click, etc. I haven't seen any convincing arguments that being able to patent, for instance, the copper-on-silicon semiconductor manufacturing process, is hindering progress. IBM spent a boatload of money developing that, and continues to develop advances like that because they get an enormous amount of money in patent fees for it.
WTF are you talking about? I never said any such thing. The original ~1996 USB spec is clearly outdated and unsuitable in today's world: 500mA is simply not enough, just like 640K is not enough memory. There's nothing wrong with USB phone chargers exceeding this ridiculously small limit. Apple does the same thing. The only thing wrong with Apple is that they added some resistors to their USB chargers/cables so that third-party chargers couldn't be used, a move clearly designed to break compatibility. Exceeding 500mA is totally different; if your USB device only needs 500mA, you can still plug it into a 2A phone charger, it'll just use 500mA. If your device needs less than 500mA by design, yet uses more than that when plugged into a higher-capacity charger, then your device is broken. And phones can still charge at 500mA (like if you plug them into a PC USB port), it just takes them a week to do so at that rate.
Not true; every Android phone out there has a USB charger which provides at least 1A, maybe 2A. Yes, the original spec was 500mA, but there's nothing preventing you from making a charger that supplies more. The spec is only important if you're dealing with a USB port on a computer; those generally still are stuck at 500mA (and only if the device requests 500mA from the OS, otherwise it only gets 100mA). With a charger, there is no OS and no USB data communication, so it just supplies 5A at whatever current the charger can handle.
That might not be allowed for this particular connector. There could be some agreements in place forbidding Belkin from selling their Lightning-connector cables in bulk, to prevent this very thing. Obviously, this won't stop anyone from buying them off store shelves at retail price and including them, but that's expensive and impractical for anything that ships in large quantities, but companies frequently have contracts which govern how they sell items.
This is an interesting argument, but a case can be made against it. Connectors are not trivial inventions, especially modern high-density connectors. There's a lot of mechanical engineering expertise that goes into those things. So, do you think a new car engine should be allowed to be patented? Or a new jet engine design? How about a really clever new mousetrap design? These are the kinds of things most anti-software-patent people are usually OK with. If you're OK with those things being patented, then it's probably unreasonable to exclude connectors from patent protection. (If you're not OK with those things being patented, then you're probably against patents completely.)
Yes. KDE's major version number has always followed Qt's major version number. Don't worry, however; this isn't going to be like the KDE3->KDE4 transition at all. Instead, it'll look much like the KDE2->KDE3 transition (where they just updated the KDE code to compile against Qt3 instead of Qt2, and there were few major user-visible changes). KDE's only had two really huge revisions, and they were KDE2 and KDE4.
Re:A good example of a bad summary
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Qt 5.0 Released
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As someone who's been on Slashdot since the 90s, I think you're tilting at windmills. When was the last time you saw a really good summary on Slashdot? Shitty summaries are the norm here, and they're frequently downright misleading and contradicted by the articles linked. There is NO editorial control here, just sensationalism.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a US Citizen, "we" is the correct term, like it or not. The US Citizens elect the US government.
It's probably because the popular media talks way too much about Mars but then never actually discusses its physical characteristics much. Venus is almost the size of the Earth, and has 0.9g gravity. Mars is quite small, and only has 1/3g gravity. It's really not that much better than the Moon. If Venus weren't so inhospitable, we wouldn't even be wasting much time on Mars (the USSR sent some robotic spacecraft to Venus back in the 70s, and they only lasted maybe an hour before they were rendered inoperable by the extreme conditions on the surface there).
If we could figure out a way to start a terraforming process on Venus, it'd be a perfect place to establish human colonies. But they need to get rid of the thick atmosphere and stop the runaway greenhouse effect. Perhaps seeding the atmosphere with some kind of microbes would do it.
Mars is not earth-like enough to support life. It can't even hang onto an atmosphere; IIRC its atmosphere is about 1/100 as dense as ours. It has no magnetosphere to protect it from solar winds. It's also a bit too small, and only has 1/3 of earth's gravity (which may be another reason it can't hold its atmosphere). Maybe Mars had life at one point, but it's a dead, barren world now.
Our communicators may not have the range that Star Trek communicators did, but they have far more functions than just talking like a walkie-talkie: full-color touchscreens, text messaging (so the other party doesn't have to drop what they're doing to engage you in conversation), internet browsing, looking up various information (I have a weather application on mine I use a lot to see the forecast and current temperature), voice mail, playing music, watching videos, playing games, turn-by-turn navigation, etc. ST communicators couldn't do any of those things, they were just walkie-talkies that could supposedly communicate over long distances and through rocks, and perhaps help the ship establish your location. The only thing our smartphones are missing out of that is a radio channel as effective as "subspace".
Getting to other stars isn't that hard; with modern technology we can probably do it in a half-century or so, maybe more. The problem is that this is too long for humans, with our short lifespans; the solution is simple: cryogenics. If you freeze the crew for most of the trip, then they won't age significantly during the voyage. The only problem after that is that hundreds of years will have passed when the crew returns to Earth (if they return at all), but if you pick people without any significant family ties this shouldn't be a big problem. For instance, if there were such a mission being set up, and the odds for success were good (and the cryo technology really worked that well, so I wouldn't age during the voyage), I'd probably be happy to join the mission as long as my wife came with me. I don't have any other family that I care much about who'll be around that much longer anyway, so I won't be missing much. I'm sure there's plenty of other people just like me out there in today's Western culture.
I don't know about the tax aspects of it, but as far as historical buildings go, sometimes there's laws in place that forbid the demolishing of historic buildings in particular places, so the owner may not be allowed to demolish it and rebuild a replica.
I'm not disputing your assertion, but why the hell would a city provide tax breaks for unoccupied buildings? All that does is create an incentive to leave useful buildings standing empty, not generating taxable income for the city (both through tax on the rent itself, and also if the renter is a business, taxes from the business's income, plus also the network effects on the economy of that business). It doesn't make any sense at all. Of course, government officials aren't exactly known to be the sharpest tools in the shed, but this concept is so basic that the government of NYC, one of the premier cities of the world, should be able to grasp it.
Posts don't need citations. This isn't Wikipedia or any other peer-reviewed article, it's a chat forum. You're right that posts with incorrect information routinely get modded up to +5, but leave the citation stuff out of it. IMO, it's OK to ask for (or even demand) a citation if someone is spewing bullshit, and you're calling them on it, but don't expect people to provide citations right off the bat. I don't see any citations in your post backing your claims, for instance.
BS. For one thing, there's no automatic rifle involved here, only a semi-auto rifle; pistols are semi-auto too, so the rifle's only advantages are much greater range, greater penetrating ability (to go through doors and such, however a .223 is notoriously bad at this kind of thing, the round is so low-mass it doesn't have much penetration ability unlike, say, a .308), and probably greater magazine capacity (20-30 rounds typ. vs 10-15 rounds). The rifle's main advantage is really the range. However, it also has a giant drawback: it's big and long and unwieldy, unlike a handgun. On a battlefield, that's not a problem, but this isn't a battlefield, it's a building with hallways, doorways, etc. There's a good reason the US military has almost entirely moved to the M4 and away from the M16: the barrel is a few inches shorter, so it's easier to handle in close-quarters combat, and getting in and out of vehicles.
In a building, you don't need 800 yards of effective killing range; no target is going to be that far away, unless you're shooting at people from the opposite side of the gymnasium. And in a building, people tend to hide around corners so you can't just pick them off from a distance. Cho in the Virginia Tech massacre killed more people than this guy, and he did it with two pistols. Some skilled person with their own pistol would easily be a severe threat to anyone carrying a rifle in a school.
Now of course, any armed defenders need to actually be skilled to be of any use. Unfortunately, many "first responders" (cops) are not; many of them have never fired their weapon at a human, and many of them can barely hit the broad side of a barn. Look at the NYC cops, who ended up hitting a bunch of bystanders when they were shooting at a single armed man in Manhattan. I wouldn't want those morons trying to defend me; I'm better off dodging the nutjob's bullets by myself. There was an armed cop at Columbine that day too, and he wasn't of any use either.
Maybe what we should do is withdraw all our troops from the middle east (since we're never going to solve that region's problems), and take our battle-tested combat troops and put them in schools as coaches and other positions, carrying concealed weapons. It'd be a much better use of our taxpayer dollars then sending them across the planet, and they'd actually be effective in stopping a madman, unlike some cop who can't shoot or some teacher with a gun who'll end up letting it get stolen by a student.
It's not just families with boys; my wife tells me she used to beg her parents for a BB gun when she was little (and of course they never got her one, and instead got her "girl toys" which she hated).
What bothers me is that I used to draw guns on my notebooks all the time when I was in high school. No one cared; in fact, I don't remember anyone even looking at my doodles except my best friend who thought them funny. Now, it seems like there's people going around snooping on kids' doodling to see if they might be the next Eric or Dylan. I truly worry about how I'll ever handle things if I have my own kid, the way public education is in this country these days. I suppose I'll have to pony up for private school tuition, because I wouldn't want my kids going through the hell that modern American public schools are.
The big problem I have with this post is that it's an Anonymous Coward posting it, which really makes me thing it's just some moron who's making this up, and still lives in the USA in his mother's basement and certainly hasn't renounced his citizenship since he wouldn't be able to work as a barista without it.
If this were posted by someone with a real account, especially a low UID, it'd be much harder-hitting.
You've taken the analogy too far. The Captain of the Costa Concordia was a captain of a real ship, and when he fucked up, it had real, fatal results.
We're talking about companies where there's programming work being done. No one's life is on the line, and no one is going to die when a project implodes due to mismanagement (I'm assuming this is not an avionics company, and even if it is, that kind of stuff is rigorously tested, so a project fuck-up is probably only going to result in financial disaster for the company). So the ship analogy is fine, as long as you don't take it too far like you just did.
And obviously, choice A is the probably best (bail out before it's too late). But not always. Sometimes it's a good idea to stick around and go down with the ship, because again the analogy fails: "going down with the ship" means you lose your job, but not your life, and it may be beneficial to lose your job this way rather than bail out early. This happened to me about 4 years ago; I was working at Freescale Semiconductor in a doomed division. We all knew it was a matter of time before they pink-slipped everyone there, because the project was being so badly mismanaged. However, the job situation was pretty bad at the time, so it made sense to stick around until they gave us the boot. Finally, one day, they did, with no warning at all: I walked into work and was shuffled into a conference room to fill out my lay-off papers and sign a contract. The contract was, of course, to promise not to sue for wrongful termination (in a right-to-work state, no less), in return for a generous severance bonus, which IIRC came out to 3 or 4 months' worth of salary. This is one of the benefits of working for a really big company; when they lay you off because they're morons, they give you a big bonus (when you're a salaried employee, like an engineer), so you need to take this into account if things are looking bad where you are. Of course, if your company is some little 20 or 100-person outfit, this probably isn't going to happen, so you should probably avoid going down with the ship at a place like that. To extend the ship analogy, we could probably say that giant companies are like ships with plenty of extra lifeboats, and they're all stocked with lots of food, supplies, and some money too, so you don't need to worry about getting your lifeboat before everyone else, whereas tiny companies are like poorly-run ships with far too few lifeboats for the number of passengers.
It's probably not simply the arrangement of pins that's patented, it's specific novel traits inside the connector itself (e.g. the design of the pins, which can be fairly complex springs themselves, or the design of the latching mechanism), without which the connector simply won't work reliably. What electrical signals correspond to what pins is not a patentable idea (and if there are any patents like this, they fall into the "trivial patent" category like the one-click patent, IMO).
BTW, I didn't get anything wrong about engines. No, a whole car engine or jet engine isn't patented (I was being brief there), but novel traits inside those engines routinely are, such as the design of a compressor wheel or the design of a variable-valve-timing system.
If you personally like clear / readable code, then no standard will ever be a replacement for you.
In my experience as a software engineer, clear and readable code is a rarity in the corporate world, and most programmers just don't care about code being readable or clear. It's usually a complete mess following no standard at all, even when it's written by one person.
You have the wrong mind-set, and that's why you don't like it.
I, to this day, cannot figure out how to actually close a tile app or whatever. If I "make it go away" I don't know if it's minimized and still running or not.
See, you're not supposed to worry about such things. You're just supposed to minimize it, and it'll automatically figure out if it needs to be closed or not. As "DrGamez" says two posts above, "They have their own memory-management/PLM processes, and when they haven't been used for a set time - they Suspend and close in the background."
FFS, "shut down" is solely located under "Settings." There is no logic and no excuse for that.
Again, you're being too technical. Microsoft copied the GNOME devs here, and made shutdown well-hidden, because normal users don't need to worry about such things.
Your problem is you're trying to micromanage your computer, instead of letting it figure out how to do things for you. Microsoft has always been excellent at making the computer figure out what's best for you, as seen long ago with Clippy and Bob, and you should just trust them. You don't need to worry about how many apps are running in memory, because memory is limitless, and you don't need to worry about shutting down your computer, because you'll never have a situation where it won't be powered.
you can disallow me from buying something and reselling it.
I think you meant to write "can't". In any case, you're wrong. If, for instance, I'm the manufacturer (or rights-holder) to product X, and you're another manufacturer that wants to buy X and integrate it with their product and resell it, I absolutely can refuse to sell you my product if I don't like you for some reason.
Of course, you could try to go around to all the retail stores in the country and buy up their stock of X, but that would be pretty stupid: you'd be getting it at full retail price (instead of a giant bulk discount), and it'd cost a fortune to send a small army of people out to buy all this stuff in person. Worse, that's not a very good way to source parts for an assembled product; you'd have a very hard time getting the quantities you need in stock in time to do manufacturing. You'd never be able to sell your product profitably doing this.
they cant stop me from buying all of them that newegg has on hand.
Which isn't enough for a large production run, and costs too much at retail prices. Newegg isn't going to give you 50% or 75% off just because you're buying up all their stock. When you're a manufacturer, you have to buy your parts from those manufacturers, not retail stores.
The problem with this is that it can be argued that there's much less incentive to design anything complex if anyone can cheaply copy it and sell it without paying you for the privilege. It costs money to do R&D, so if you spend all that money employing engineers for man-years, and then give away the results of their work and a Chinese company copies it and sells it for less than you can afford to sell it for, you're not going to stay in business for long; because of this, it becomes unprofitable to do R&D, so it only gets done when there's no alternative.
The present problems with the patent system are that trivial things are being patented, like rounded corners on a rectangular product, purchasing something with one click, etc. I haven't seen any convincing arguments that being able to patent, for instance, the copper-on-silicon semiconductor manufacturing process, is hindering progress. IBM spent a boatload of money developing that, and continues to develop advances like that because they get an enormous amount of money in patent fees for it.
WTF are you talking about? I never said any such thing. The original ~1996 USB spec is clearly outdated and unsuitable in today's world: 500mA is simply not enough, just like 640K is not enough memory. There's nothing wrong with USB phone chargers exceeding this ridiculously small limit. Apple does the same thing. The only thing wrong with Apple is that they added some resistors to their USB chargers/cables so that third-party chargers couldn't be used, a move clearly designed to break compatibility. Exceeding 500mA is totally different; if your USB device only needs 500mA, you can still plug it into a 2A phone charger, it'll just use 500mA. If your device needs less than 500mA by design, yet uses more than that when plugged into a higher-capacity charger, then your device is broken. And phones can still charge at 500mA (like if you plug them into a PC USB port), it just takes them a week to do so at that rate.
Tell that to every Android phone maker out there. It isn't possible to recharge a modern phone in any decent amount of time at 0.5A.
Not true; every Android phone out there has a USB charger which provides at least 1A, maybe 2A. Yes, the original spec was 500mA, but there's nothing preventing you from making a charger that supplies more. The spec is only important if you're dealing with a USB port on a computer; those generally still are stuck at 500mA (and only if the device requests 500mA from the OS, otherwise it only gets 100mA). With a charger, there is no OS and no USB data communication, so it just supplies 5A at whatever current the charger can handle.
That might not be allowed for this particular connector. There could be some agreements in place forbidding Belkin from selling their Lightning-connector cables in bulk, to prevent this very thing. Obviously, this won't stop anyone from buying them off store shelves at retail price and including them, but that's expensive and impractical for anything that ships in large quantities, but companies frequently have contracts which govern how they sell items.
This is an interesting argument, but a case can be made against it. Connectors are not trivial inventions, especially modern high-density connectors. There's a lot of mechanical engineering expertise that goes into those things. So, do you think a new car engine should be allowed to be patented? Or a new jet engine design? How about a really clever new mousetrap design? These are the kinds of things most anti-software-patent people are usually OK with. If you're OK with those things being patented, then it's probably unreasonable to exclude connectors from patent protection. (If you're not OK with those things being patented, then you're probably against patents completely.)
Yes. KDE's major version number has always followed Qt's major version number. Don't worry, however; this isn't going to be like the KDE3->KDE4 transition at all. Instead, it'll look much like the KDE2->KDE3 transition (where they just updated the KDE code to compile against Qt3 instead of Qt2, and there were few major user-visible changes). KDE's only had two really huge revisions, and they were KDE2 and KDE4.
As someone who's been on Slashdot since the 90s, I think you're tilting at windmills. When was the last time you saw a really good summary on Slashdot? Shitty summaries are the norm here, and they're frequently downright misleading and contradicted by the articles linked. There is NO editorial control here, just sensationalism.