Even then, it is useful - the most recent federal election had a record number of informal votes, indicative of a populace who was deeply apathetic about both primary party candidates.
So, did that change anything in the way the politicians behave? I don't think so, since those votes don't have any negative impact on them.
iOS5 implements a way to solve this for the iPad: AirPlay mirroring. You just have to buy the $99 Apple TV, connect it wirelessly to the iPad you already have, and you have a full touch screen controller and a 1080p display to play on, and the games cost less than the battery of a traditional game controller.
Because in Germany or Japan, when the government wants to obtain some land, the owners are usually willing to move.
In my city in central Europe, whenever a public transport route is planned where land will be force-obtained, the politicians involved privately buy up all the land before the plans are publicized, so they can sell it above the real value (which is required by law in exchange for the forcing) to the transportation company.
Bethesda has treated PC gamers very well with the Fall Out and Elder Scrolls games.
If by "very well" you meant "released buggy games and a few patches that fixed a small percentage of those bugs, and then left it to the community of players to fix everything else" then yes, you are correct.
How is that different to the console versions (minus the option for community patches)? I'm currently playing Skyrim on the PS3, and it has crashed on me three times now, and had multiple visual and AI glitches inbetween, one of them forcing me to reload the last savegame so I'm able to progress in the quest. Console games should NEVER crash, the console makers usually reject games that exhibit this behavior (I wonder what happened there...?).
My main reason for not liking the Java plugin to this date is that applets take ages to start up. My MacBook Air literally takes less time to boot than an applet takes time to start up after opening its webpage. Back when they were rather popular, Mac OS 9 would block the whole computer while the VM was loaded up, which would take about a minute or more.
If the VM would be part of the browser, that problem would be gone.
Well, they added some kind of push notifications to it, but that feature was broken (and it announced this fact right at first launch). How this app got past the app store review, we will never know...
It's not a "pretty useless protection". It's not just checking that the certificate is valid, it's also checking that the certificate authority has a corresponding root certificate installed on the iPhone. It stops anyone who doesn't have access to the phone from eavesdropping or manipulating the data.
That would be true if it weren't for the dozens of CAs that have been hacked and are still in the list of roots on every iPhone.
Simply embedding a site in a webview and calling it an app (what was implied to be happening upthread) is pretty much a 100% guaranteed way to get your app rejected.
I'm pretty sure 99% of developers visiting Slashdot know the patent system is broken. You should not be able to patent mathematics.
That's the wrong way to approach the argument. In the end, every patent is mathematics, every mechanism. The problem with software patents is something else:
* Unlike basic mechanics, software is completely incomprehensible to the common man. A nonprogrammer or even a programmer from a different field cannot judge whether a piece of software is truly innovative or just an application of well-known knowledge. For example, the h.264 codec really is an achievement, but why are there patents on basic stuff like the combination of long and short file names in FAT?
* Unlike machinery, software contains thousands of features, every one of them potentially patent-worthy in the current US system. This means that you'd have to do thousands of patent checks when developing even simple programs. That's simply impossible.
* Unlike traditional patents, software patents are constructed in a way to protect ideas, not implementations. The idea of buying items with a single click is not an implementation by itself, but it's still protected. This means that unlike with traditional patents, there is no way to work around those, because every single way of implementing a certain feature is protected by that single patent. The only way to solely protect implementations would be to allow patents on a piece of specific code, nothing else. But we have copyright for that already.
Something tells me that if we were to be depopulated by about 50%, mankind's "quality of life" would improve drastically. The earth would be much happier!
I don't think so. The issues that look like overpopulation are entirely man-made. There is enough food for everyone, but it's not distributed in an equal fashion. Keeping some regions poor allows the rich regions to rule over them (cheap labor and raw materials) and keep them poor. It's a stable economic system, ruled by the IMF.
So, if you reduce the world population by 50% (with equal distribution, which also means that slashdot's active user base will be halved, and you yourself have a 50% chance to be killed by force), the number of starving people will be reduced by about 50%, that's it.
Uh, if you want to go open protocol, why not use XMPP + Jingle? It's way more powerful and unlike protocols originating in the telephony sector not a PITA to use.
I don't know any non-nerd who uses Vorbis or FLAC.
Actually, a lot of non-nerds do, they just don't know it. Nearly all games (on the consoles and PC/Mac) use ogg vorbis for the background music. The reason is that it doesn't cost anything (as opposed to mp3), and the game has to supply the music files and the decoder to play them anyways.
SSL doesn't have to be abandoned. The US government can already generate a certificate for any domain they want due to the brokenness of the CA trust system, and it's accepted in every major OS without any warning. Then they can check the decrypted stream for any undesirable content.
Slashdot Mirror
Even then, it is useful - the most recent federal election had a record number of informal votes, indicative of a populace who was deeply apathetic about both primary party candidates.
So, did that change anything in the way the politicians behave? I don't think so, since those votes don't have any negative impact on them.
I'm interested. Can you give some details of the debunking?
There's some detailed discussion on the topic on John Gruber's blog.
2) As mentioned above: Screen size.
iOS5 implements a way to solve this for the iPad: AirPlay mirroring. You just have to buy the $99 Apple TV, connect it wirelessly to the iPad you already have, and you have a full touch screen controller and a 1080p display to play on, and the games cost less than the battery of a traditional game controller.
He knew he was talking crap but he had to do it for some reason. He was otherwise a very smart guy.
Maybe a conflict between what was indoctrinated at a young age and what he learned later? Orwell called that phenomenon "doublethink".
Because in Germany or Japan, when the government wants to obtain some land, the owners are usually willing to move.
In my city in central Europe, whenever a public transport route is planned where land will be force-obtained, the politicians involved privately buy up all the land before the plans are publicized, so they can sell it above the real value (which is required by law in exchange for the forcing) to the transportation company.
Bethesda has treated PC gamers very well with the Fall Out and Elder Scrolls games.
If by "very well" you meant "released buggy games and a few patches that fixed a small percentage of those bugs, and then left it to the community of players to fix everything else" then yes, you are correct.
How is that different to the console versions (minus the option for community patches)? I'm currently playing Skyrim on the PS3, and it has crashed on me three times now, and had multiple visual and AI glitches inbetween, one of them forcing me to reload the last savegame so I'm able to progress in the quest. Console games should NEVER crash, the console makers usually reject games that exhibit this behavior (I wonder what happened there...?).
Google's eventual decline has begun sooner than expected.
For me it already started when they stopped being the cool company to work at about a year ago. That's Facebook now apparently.
Why would you want that? While it was pretty enough, it was horribly hard to use (and harder still to use well).
Still better than having to write your own client from scratch.
The folks at Blizzard do have internal deadlines, they just don't communicate them to the outside.
Last year, their timeline was leaked, showing the release dates of several titles for the next few years.
If you remove the deadline, you get something like Duke Nukem Forever. A game is never "done", so you have to make a cut somewhere.
but then you immediately start to run into sandboxing & security issues.
In which way is this different to current JavaScript implementations?
My main reason for not liking the Java plugin to this date is that applets take ages to start up. My MacBook Air literally takes less time to boot than an applet takes time to start up after opening its webpage. Back when they were rather popular, Mac OS 9 would block the whole computer while the VM was loaded up, which would take about a minute or more.
If the VM would be part of the browser, that problem would be gone.
Yeah, people who never had a real job or a had to pay real taxes.
I'd guess that this is true for the rich people running the US political system as well.
Well, they added some kind of push notifications to it, but that feature was broken (and it announced this fact right at first launch). How this app got past the app store review, we will never know...
It's not a "pretty useless protection". It's not just checking that the certificate is valid, it's also checking that the certificate authority has a corresponding root certificate installed on the iPhone. It stops anyone who doesn't have access to the phone from eavesdropping or manipulating the data.
That would be true if it weren't for the dozens of CAs that have been hacked and are still in the list of roots on every iPhone.
Simply embedding a site in a webview and calling it an app (what was implied to be happening upthread) is pretty much a 100% guaranteed way to get your app rejected.
Just like the Gmail app?
What about the Chumby?
Well, in their forums they got told to move to HTML5 about 3 years ago... It's even pretty easy to do, I was able to get a browser running on it back then.
We were very fortunate, in that we had purchased them from a legitimate dealer, who refunded our money.
How is getting a legitimate dealer luck? Isn't that something you should make certain when choosing your supply channels?
I'm pretty sure 99% of developers visiting Slashdot know the patent system is broken. You should not be able to patent mathematics.
That's the wrong way to approach the argument. In the end, every patent is mathematics, every mechanism. The problem with software patents is something else:
* Unlike basic mechanics, software is completely incomprehensible to the common man. A nonprogrammer or even a programmer from a different field cannot judge whether a piece of software is truly innovative or just an application of well-known knowledge. For example, the h.264 codec really is an achievement, but why are there patents on basic stuff like the combination of long and short file names in FAT?
* Unlike machinery, software contains thousands of features, every one of them potentially patent-worthy in the current US system. This means that you'd have to do thousands of patent checks when developing even simple programs. That's simply impossible.
* Unlike traditional patents, software patents are constructed in a way to protect ideas, not implementations. The idea of buying items with a single click is not an implementation by itself, but it's still protected. This means that unlike with traditional patents, there is no way to work around those, because every single way of implementing a certain feature is protected by that single patent. The only way to solely protect implementations would be to allow patents on a piece of specific code, nothing else. But we have copyright for that already.
First to file affects only conflicts between one patent application and another patent application.
IMO, if two patents are filed for the same thing at the same time, both should be rejected due to the obviousness requirement by default.
Something tells me that if we were to be depopulated by about 50%, mankind's "quality of life" would improve drastically. The earth would be much happier!
I don't think so. The issues that look like overpopulation are entirely man-made. There is enough food for everyone, but it's not distributed in an equal fashion. Keeping some regions poor allows the rich regions to rule over them (cheap labor and raw materials) and keep them poor. It's a stable economic system, ruled by the IMF.
So, if you reduce the world population by 50% (with equal distribution, which also means that slashdot's active user base will be halved, and you yourself have a 50% chance to be killed by force), the number of starving people will be reduced by about 50%, that's it.
Uh, if you want to go open protocol, why not use XMPP + Jingle? It's way more powerful and unlike protocols originating in the telephony sector not a PITA to use.
I don't know any non-nerd who uses Vorbis or FLAC.
Actually, a lot of non-nerds do, they just don't know it. Nearly all games (on the consoles and PC/Mac) use ogg vorbis for the background music. The reason is that it doesn't cost anything (as opposed to mp3), and the game has to supply the music files and the decoder to play them anyways.
SSL doesn't have to be abandoned. The US government can already generate a certificate for any domain they want due to the brokenness of the CA trust system, and it's accepted in every major OS without any warning. Then they can check the decrypted stream for any undesirable content.
I also find it especially heart warming that our leaders have time to draft this while the country is literally falling apart.
Uh, that bill is a side effect of that (being ruled by corporations), not some coincidence.