Intel's fabs are the advantage offered by x86. x86 processors are the only processors that can be made by Intel's fabs. If that changes, or if other fabs catch up, then great - use whatever is the best.
I guess I don't remember this as well as I thought I did, but I have been out of school for a while... And hardware never was my thing... I thought chips were burned onto silicon via some sort of lithography process? High intensity light etching the transistors onto a silicon wafer from a VHDL-type specification? What would prevent Intel from burning a 28nm ARM design in their fab?
Android apps are almost all Java - they run on any platform that has a Java runtime, which certainly includes x86.
No they're not and no they don't. They're Dalvik, which is similar enough to Java to make me sound pedantic by pointing it out, but they're not Java.
And while many android apps are written to run against the Dalvik VM, no small amount of them run native code. Opera, for instance by default ships both a ARM5 binary and an ARM7 binary (together) in the app store, and you can download the ARM7 binary by itself directly from them if you're sure your device can run it. Most performance-sensitive apps run natively, and writing native apps is well supported.
If your apps make calls into native code, that native code is shipped by the phone OEM, and you can already buy x86-based Android phones (Motorola sells one using some Intel Atom chip), so it obviously works there too.
Yes, and when that phone shipped you couldn't get Chrome for it, because there was no x86 Android build for Chrome.
In other words, the CPU's ISA is completely invisible to app developers, so I'm not sure what your complaint is there.
Sorry, that's simply not the case. It is invisible if you limit yourself solely to Dalvik apps, but that limits your options.
This makes no sense. Why would Intel have to push an ARM chip for you to be interested? What if Intel pushed a better-performing x86 chip than any ARM chip? Would you not be interested in that because you have some inherent bias against x86?
Hopefully it makes more sense now. No, a better performing x86 chip would not guarantee my interest. I'm not biased enough to completely rule out purchasing an x86-based phone in the future, but as it stands right now x86 looks like a disadvantage as opposed to an advantage.
And from them (and their proxies), the explanations I have generally heard have been:
1) There are things in the code that they do not have sufficient rights to release in an open manner. 2) There are features of the "graphics hardware" implemented in software as part of the driver, and they believe these features give them a competitive advantage which would be lost by opening up the code. 3) There are workarounds for hardware defects in the code, and releasing them would embarrass the company.
I personally think the first reason is the most plausible one. I could see the second one being a possibility, but unlikely based on what I've observed between driver versions and hardware revisions. The third one I find hard to believe.
So, assuming the first one is the reason, it would cost nVidia a significant amount of energy (and probably money) to work out the licensing to release the drivers as open source. What would the benefit be to them in such an undertaking? Based on the results of AMD providing open specs for their chips, it doesn't seem likely they'd see any performance improvements from community contribution to their driver code.
Meanwhile, they provide me a driver that allows me to earn a living. Despite the roadblocks the kernel developers regularly throw in their way.
I'm sorry, but I guess I'm just driven by pragmatism when it comes to my paycheck. For the libraries we depend on in our software, I (successfully) pushed for solutions that provided the source (either by LGPL, or a source license) because having the source for them was most beneficial.
Meanwhile, there are two video card manufacturers with open source drivers I can think of off of the top of my head (Intel and AMD), and neither of them provide a solution that would allow us to do our work.
Hey Bruce, nothing but respect, but if "proprietary drivers" loaded into the kernel is the only way I can get my work done, it's kinda hard for me to jump on the "binary blobs are evil!" bandwagon...
Why do you think this is unlikely? On the contrary, Intel has a massive fab/manufacturing advantage over any ARM chipmaker
Okay, then why don't they license ARM and use that fab advantage to beat the other manufacturers at their own game. Nothing in your comment offers up any advantage offered by x86, just Intel's fabs. I have no interest in running any legacy x86 software on any tablet or smartphone device, but now I do have a vested interest in running "legacy" ARM apps I have purchased for those devices for the foreseeable future. I don't want to have to worry about the instruction set the CPU in my next phone uses, I just want the software to work, and many of the apps I run make use of native code. And as a developer, I don't want to bother to support two platforms. Supporting the menagerie of Android devices is already enough fun without adding an incompatible CPU instruction set. Really, there is absolutely nothing compelling about x86 in the mobile space to me. If Intel pushed better performing and/or lower powered ARM chips, I'd see the benefit of having an Intel chip.
No, because as the desktop becomes less and less relevant and people do more on mobile devices, backwards compatibility with software written for a 80386 just stops mattering. Even if Intel chips had exactly the same power usage as ARM (highly unlikely), what's the benefit of having an Intel chip in your mobile device?
You're forgetting that, until relatively recently, there were tons of dirt-poor people in the US
So what?
African countries haven't struck the lottery like that; there's no way for them to make their citizens wealthy the way we do here.
That's just completely untrue. There's definitely ways for them to become self sufficient. Primarily by getting educated and refusing to allow despots to run their countries. Just giving them food handouts, however, does nothing to help them move toward self-sufficiency.
I have to disagree. Japan and the US have pretty awesome population control. We make our citizens wealthy, educate them, and give them lots of distractions and increase their life expectancies and they willingly choose to practice population control themselves.
In the US, we only have population growth because of immigration. In Japan, their population is declining at a rather frightening pace.
I think the OP was right: Stop concentrating on feeding these people, unless you can also teach them how to feed themselves.
Yeah, and the next time I speak w/ someone at GA I'm going to shake my fist very angrily at them for making my life hard by trying to ride on the branding for their first UAS.
Think about it this way: You all know PHBs that probably refer to all tablet computers as iPads. Imagine they tell you to get "the new iPad," so you buy the 4th gen iPad for them. And then they say "No I wanted the new iPad Samsung put out!" So you get them a Nexus 10 and then they want to know why they can't run their iOS apps on it...
Now replace the iPads with Predator/Reaper 3D models, and you've gotten a small glimpse of what I deal with...:|
You sure? I though the Guardian is a maritime version of the MQ-9 deployed by Customs & Border Patrol out of Cape Canaveral. At least, all the articles I can find about it refer to it as an MQ-9.
And yeah, it's supposedly unarmed, which would make it an RQ-9, unless it still has the mounting brackets to carry weapons... Which would be kinda disturbing...
The 1938 Hurricane wasn't called Bellport, that's where the measurement you're referring to was made. We didn't name storms back then. That storm was known as 'The Long Island Express' or 'Yankee Clipper,' as it was an incredibly powerful storm that reached a ground track speed of 70mph and struck Long Island and New England practically without warning.
Back to your question, however... The data doesn't exist, because we only recently understood what these storms are and had the capability to make these measurements! Flying aircraft into the center of hurricanes and dropping scientific measuring equipment into them is a relatively recent phenomenon. Otherwise, you had to be (un)lucky enough to be a ship or a city that the eye passed over to get an accurate measurement.
That being said, there is a well-documented history of incredibly powerful storms hitting the New England area, going back to the 1600s.
As previously mentioned, the Long Island Express in 1938, which killed 700 people and did $6 billion in damages (2004 dollars). It had a minimum pressure of 947Mbar, compared to Sandy's 946 at landfall. The Express made landfall as a Category 3, however, showing that central pressure isn't everything. It created a couple new islands by breaking new inlets through the existing barrier islands.
Before that was the 1893 New York Hurricane with a minimum pressure of 952. Came ashore as a strong Category 1. Killed 38, uprooted a bunch of trees, smashed some buildings... Completely removed Hog Island from the map. But pretty calm compared to the Express.
The 1869 Saxby Gale also messed up New England pretty good. Killed over 100. Actually created a new land bridge between Nova Scotia and Partridge Island.
The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane flooded NYC as well. It managed a 13-foot storm surge at low tide, compared to Sandy's 9-foot, which hit at high tide. Between Category 3 and 4 strength.
There was also the Great September Gale of 1815. Category 3. Actually created the island of Long Beach, as it used to be part of the Rockaways peninsula. This was actually the storm that apparently lead to the theory that Hurricanes were vortices, instead of just large waves of rushing atmosphere.
The most impressive one, though, and the one we sadly have very little direct data for is probably the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635. It was most likely a Category 4, probably with a central pressure = 930Mbar. Simulations show a landfall pressure of 938Mbar in Long Island, which (if correct) would still beat Sandy for the all-time record above North Carolina. Damage was noticable 50 years later.
So there's the data we have. Doesn't look like a seventy-five year cycle to me. It does show, however, that such storms are unusual but not unheard of in recorded history. And, if I remember my studies correctly, there is evidence in the terrain of New England of even worse storms over the past thousand years.
What's changed? New England is much more densely populated than it used to be, our news is much more up-to-date and instantaneous, and our modeling and predictive capabilities are much better. The same was true of the Gulf Hurricanes a few years back (Katrina and Rita). Much of the areas that were devastated were areas that had been sparsely populated when they were previously destroyed (in Hurricane Camille, for instance), and had been spared destruction long enough for the memories to fade in people's minds.
The WTC towers did survive an aircraft flying into them.
What they didn't survive was the jet fuel fire after the crash knocked the insulation off the girders.
This is stupid fear-mongering, plain and simple.
Fukushima didn't fail until AFTER a catastrophic earthquake, AFTER a catastrophic tsunami, AFTER the reactor was run past its design lifetime, and AFTER the company in charge of it did not make the manufacturer's recommended safety upgrades. Do you have any evidence we're facing anything remotely similar to those circumstances with the 26 nuclear reactors in the storm's affected area?
No there's not. There are superficial differences which do a good job of keeping the rabble roused, but fundamentally there's almost no difference. Both fundamentally favor protection of corporate interests and the expansion of government power. Their list of corporate interests might differ slightly, but are surprisingly similar.
If there were a fundamental difference in the parties, it would be reflected in their rhetoric on things like the NDAA, our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the huge abuses of the financial industry in the U.S., etc. But both parties are CONSPICUOUSLY SILENT on all these issues. Instead they want to argue about what word the other guy used in a press conference, or what the other guy said in a divorce case twenty years ago.
Face it, on the issues that really matter, there is no substantive difference between the parties. Any perceived difference is simply electioneering--saying they'd do it different than the other guy. Even though they probably supported the other guy's position publicly a few years ago...
Apple is of the opinion that they do not owe any licensing fees because those fees have already been paid by their parts supplier. This decision has been affirmed by every court that's reviewed it.
Except, of course, the ITC judge...
The Administrative Law Judge concludes that the evidence is not sufficient to support Apple's patent exhaustion defenseâ¦.And even though Apple claims that {[redacted]}, according to one of the cases Apple relies on, Apple v. Motorola, No. 1:11-cv-03540 (N.D. Ill.), Motorola had requested a 2.25 percent royalty rate of sales, which is closely comparable. (Id. at 17.) While this may be an apples and oranges comparison, the fact is that Apple has offered only attorney argument, rather than substantive evidence, that Samsung breached its FRAND obligations. From all appearances, {[redacted]}, even though there was a mechanism in place under ETSI Guidelines for resolving disputes. Dr. Walker did not testify, nor could he, as to the bona fides of Samsung's licensing offer to Apple; nor did anyone else. Judge Posner, in the Motorola case found the expert evidence offered by the parties with respect to damages inadequate, but similarly, Apple's evidence of what constitutes a FRAND license under the facts of this Investigation is inadequate.
For reasons previously discussed, the Administrative Law Judge finds that there is insufficient evidence to warrant a finding that Samsung breached its obligations with respect to its membership, and participation in ETSI.
For the foregoing reasons, the Administrative Law Judge concludes that Apple has not sustained its burden of proof that Samsung's sales to Qualcomm serve to exhaust Samsung's patent rights with respect to the '348 and the '644 patents.
It may be true that Apple didn't present evidence to that effect, but Samsung was asking for nearly $15 per iPhone, which is probably more than Apple paid for the RF chips that use Samsung's FRAND patents. It's hard to see how you could consider that a reasonable price.
Because it's less than half what Apple was asking per Samsung phone for their bogus patents?
That being said, I don't think $15 is reasonable. But there's a mediation process Apple can use to negotiate this. Instead, they decided to negotiate a lower price by suing Samsung.
Apple wants the product banned because it has rounded corners and lets you search for stuff.
Samsung wants the product banned because it uses an international communication standard that cannot be implemented without a technology that Samsung invented.
I mean, c'mon, can't you see how much better Apple's case is?;)
According to the ITC judge reviewing Apple's complaints about Samsung's standards essential patents, Apple didn't avail themselves to any of the existing remedies when they felt Samsung wasn't offering them a fair licensing deal. They essentially said "You're asking for too much, so we're not paying anything." If Apple really felt the prices were too high, there are processes in place to force Samsung to the negotiating table. They didn't use any of them. There's no evidence they even made a counter-offer. Seems more like Apple just doesn't care about other people's patents than Samsung is offering an unfair deal.
You guys in the states have spent decades building cities that are just too spread out for their own good. Sooner or later you are going to have to build more cities like New York where you have an incredibly high population density. Then you can build a decent mass transit system that takes people most of the way, then lets them walk the remaining few hundred yards.
The reason our cities are generally low-density is that there's just so God damned much empty space in the U.S. I'm guessing you're from Europe, as it seems common for Europeans to not appreciate just how far apart the cities are in the U.S. Heck, I've watched the sun rise and set before I finished crossing Texas alone...
Mass transit is not sensible for 95% of the U.S. There are areas it does make sense (the megalopolises on the east and west coasts, for instance) but it would never work in the spaces between them. And those megalopolises are losing population as people move to less densely populated, less authoritarian, more economically active states.
There are alternatives to fossil fuels to power personal transportation, and with fossil fuel costs going up and the alternatives becoming cheaper, eventually they will be widely deployed. The car isn't going away anytime soon in the U.S, and probably not in my lifetime.
My last two semesters in grad school (Computer Science) saw me spending about 16 hours a day in the lab, usually six days out of the week. Occasionally I wouldn't even go home to sleep. I would pass out for a couple hours on the floor and get back to work. Sometimes someone would kinda nudge me and say "Hey we've got a tour coming through, can you go sleep somewhere else?"
Ended up having a complete mental break one night, after reading a story about a guy who's Mom had died and he found a bunch of gifts from her in Animal Crossing.
All this while being paid $650/mo for a "20-hour a week" job, when my apartment cost $475/mo... After all that, all I have to show for it is 200% more debt than when I finished my bachelors, and a "two years equivalent experience" added to my resume when I got my first job.
Don't get me wrong, I still think it was worth it, but you probably have to be a special kinda stupid and/or have Stockholm Syndrome to do something like that...
And in 2001, Internet Explorer was way better than the competition.
I'd disagree with that assertion, but then again I never liked IE.
Microsoft didn't stop anyone from downloading an alternative browser. Didn't make you jump through any hoops to do so. They just made sure that IE was the first browser you had when you installed Windows. Didn't make it any less of a monopolistic action.
The word you're looking for is anti-competitive, not monopolistic. Being a monopoly is not illegal.
Now, with the pedantry out of the way... Where is the equivalent action from Google? Where are they pre-installing Google Maps on their monopoly OS?
They do not have a monopoly on search, and even on Android they don't require you to use their search. My Motorola Backflip defaulted to Yahoo!, for instance, much to my chagrin.
As Google keep saying, if their products are showing up first it's because it's what people want. If they didn't provide the results people wanted, their customers would go elsewhere. Hence the mass-exodus of technical types from Google to DuckDuckGo.
What is the purpose of copyright? To allow a creator to profit from his or her creativity.
The purpose of copyright is "to encourage the sciences and useful arts." A limited monopoly for a creator is just a tool it uses to attempt to achieve that goal.
A big part of the problem with modern copyright is exactly this misunderstanding. Copyright is meant to benefit the public, not creators.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I don't remember this as well as I thought I did, but I have been out of school for a while... And hardware never was my thing... I thought chips were burned onto silicon via some sort of lithography process? High intensity light etching the transistors onto a silicon wafer from a VHDL-type specification? What would prevent Intel from burning a 28nm ARM design in their fab?
No they're not and no they don't. They're Dalvik, which is similar enough to Java to make me sound pedantic by pointing it out, but they're not Java.
And while many android apps are written to run against the Dalvik VM, no small amount of them run native code. Opera, for instance by default ships both a ARM5 binary and an ARM7 binary (together) in the app store, and you can download the ARM7 binary by itself directly from them if you're sure your device can run it. Most performance-sensitive apps run natively, and writing native apps is well supported.
Yes, and when that phone shipped you couldn't get Chrome for it, because there was no x86 Android build for Chrome.
Sorry, that's simply not the case. It is invisible if you limit yourself solely to Dalvik apps, but that limits your options.
Hopefully it makes more sense now. No, a better performing x86 chip would not guarantee my interest. I'm not biased enough to completely rule out purchasing an x86-based phone in the future, but as it stands right now x86 looks like a disadvantage as opposed to an advantage.
Well, in my case, it's nVidia.
And from them (and their proxies), the explanations I have generally heard have been:
1) There are things in the code that they do not have sufficient rights to release in an open manner.
2) There are features of the "graphics hardware" implemented in software as part of the driver, and they believe these features give them a competitive advantage which would be lost by opening up the code.
3) There are workarounds for hardware defects in the code, and releasing them would embarrass the company.
I personally think the first reason is the most plausible one. I could see the second one being a possibility, but unlikely based on what I've observed between driver versions and hardware revisions. The third one I find hard to believe.
So, assuming the first one is the reason, it would cost nVidia a significant amount of energy (and probably money) to work out the licensing to release the drivers as open source. What would the benefit be to them in such an undertaking? Based on the results of AMD providing open specs for their chips, it doesn't seem likely they'd see any performance improvements from community contribution to their driver code.
Meanwhile, they provide me a driver that allows me to earn a living. Despite the roadblocks the kernel developers regularly throw in their way.
I'm sorry, but I guess I'm just driven by pragmatism when it comes to my paycheck. For the libraries we depend on in our software, I (successfully) pushed for solutions that provided the source (either by LGPL, or a source license) because having the source for them was most beneficial.
Meanwhile, there are two video card manufacturers with open source drivers I can think of off of the top of my head (Intel and AMD), and neither of them provide a solution that would allow us to do our work.
Hey Bruce, nothing but respect, but if "proprietary drivers" loaded into the kernel is the only way I can get my work done, it's kinda hard for me to jump on the "binary blobs are evil!" bandwagon...
If you think the UN could add legitimacy to anything, I think you have bigger problems.
Okay, then why don't they license ARM and use that fab advantage to beat the other manufacturers at their own game. Nothing in your comment offers up any advantage offered by x86, just Intel's fabs.
I have no interest in running any legacy x86 software on any tablet or smartphone device, but now I do have a vested interest in running "legacy" ARM apps I have purchased for those devices for the foreseeable future. I don't want to have to worry about the instruction set the CPU in my next phone uses, I just want the software to work, and many of the apps I run make use of native code.
And as a developer, I don't want to bother to support two platforms. Supporting the menagerie of Android devices is already enough fun without adding an incompatible CPU instruction set.
Really, there is absolutely nothing compelling about x86 in the mobile space to me. If Intel pushed better performing and/or lower powered ARM chips, I'd see the benefit of having an Intel chip.
How is x86 software relevant on a mobile device?
No, because as the desktop becomes less and less relevant and people do more on mobile devices, backwards compatibility with software written for a 80386 just stops mattering. Even if Intel chips had exactly the same power usage as ARM (highly unlikely), what's the benefit of having an Intel chip in your mobile device?
So what?
That's just completely untrue. There's definitely ways for them to become self sufficient. Primarily by getting educated and refusing to allow despots to run their countries. Just giving them food handouts, however, does nothing to help them move toward self-sufficiency.
I have to disagree. Japan and the US have pretty awesome population control. We make our citizens wealthy, educate them, and give them lots of distractions and increase their life expectancies and they willingly choose to practice population control themselves.
In the US, we only have population growth because of immigration. In Japan, their population is declining at a rather frightening pace.
I think the OP was right: Stop concentrating on feeding these people, unless you can also teach them how to feed themselves.
Yeah, and the next time I speak w/ someone at GA I'm going to shake my fist very angrily at them for making my life hard by trying to ride on the branding for their first UAS.
Think about it this way: You all know PHBs that probably refer to all tablet computers as iPads. Imagine they tell you to get "the new iPad," so you buy the 4th gen iPad for them. And then they say "No I wanted the new iPad Samsung put out!" So you get them a Nexus 10 and then they want to know why they can't run their iOS apps on it...
Now replace the iPads with Predator/Reaper 3D models, and you've gotten a small glimpse of what I deal with... :|
You sure? I though the Guardian is a maritime version of the MQ-9 deployed by Customs & Border Patrol out of Cape Canaveral. At least, all the articles I can find about it refer to it as an MQ-9.
And yeah, it's supposedly unarmed, which would make it an RQ-9, unless it still has the mounting brackets to carry weapons... Which would be kinda disturbing...
THERE IS NO PREDATOR B!
IT'S AN MQ-9 REAPER!
Calling it "Predator B" just leads to confusion, as the production model of the Predator is the MQ-1B, the follow-on to the prototype RQ-1A.
This causes no end of frustration on an almost daily basis at work...
Besides all this, the aircraft in the article was a Guardian, which makes calling it a "Predator B" even more inane.
The 1938 Hurricane wasn't called Bellport, that's where the measurement you're referring to was made. We didn't name storms back then. That storm was known as 'The Long Island Express' or 'Yankee Clipper,' as it was an incredibly powerful storm that reached a ground track speed of 70mph and struck Long Island and New England practically without warning.
Back to your question, however... The data doesn't exist, because we only recently understood what these storms are and had the capability to make these measurements! Flying aircraft into the center of hurricanes and dropping scientific measuring equipment into them is a relatively recent phenomenon. Otherwise, you had to be (un)lucky enough to be a ship or a city that the eye passed over to get an accurate measurement.
That being said, there is a well-documented history of incredibly powerful storms hitting the New England area, going back to the 1600s.
As previously mentioned, the Long Island Express in 1938, which killed 700 people and did $6 billion in damages (2004 dollars). It had a minimum pressure of 947Mbar, compared to Sandy's 946 at landfall. The Express made landfall as a Category 3, however, showing that central pressure isn't everything. It created a couple new islands by breaking new inlets through the existing barrier islands.
Before that was the 1893 New York Hurricane with a minimum pressure of 952. Came ashore as a strong Category 1. Killed 38, uprooted a bunch of trees, smashed some buildings... Completely removed Hog Island from the map. But pretty calm compared to the Express.
The 1869 Saxby Gale also messed up New England pretty good. Killed over 100. Actually created a new land bridge between Nova Scotia and Partridge Island.
The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane flooded NYC as well. It managed a 13-foot storm surge at low tide, compared to Sandy's 9-foot, which hit at high tide. Between Category 3 and 4 strength.
There was also the Great September Gale of 1815. Category 3. Actually created the island of Long Beach, as it used to be part of the Rockaways peninsula. This was actually the storm that apparently lead to the theory that Hurricanes were vortices, instead of just large waves of rushing atmosphere.
The most impressive one, though, and the one we sadly have very little direct data for is probably the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635. It was most likely a Category 4, probably with a central pressure = 930Mbar. Simulations show a landfall pressure of 938Mbar in Long Island, which (if correct) would still beat Sandy for the all-time record above North Carolina. Damage was noticable 50 years later.
So there's the data we have. Doesn't look like a seventy-five year cycle to me. It does show, however, that such storms are unusual but not unheard of in recorded history. And, if I remember my studies correctly, there is evidence in the terrain of New England of even worse storms over the past thousand years.
What's changed? New England is much more densely populated than it used to be, our news is much more up-to-date and instantaneous, and our modeling and predictive capabilities are much better. The same was true of the Gulf Hurricanes a few years back (Katrina and Rita). Much of the areas that were devastated were areas that had been sparsely populated when they were previously destroyed (in Hurricane Camille, for instance), and had been spared destruction long enough for the memories to fade in people's minds.
The WTC towers did survive an aircraft flying into them.
What they didn't survive was the jet fuel fire after the crash knocked the insulation off the girders.
This is stupid fear-mongering, plain and simple.
Fukushima didn't fail until AFTER a catastrophic earthquake, AFTER a catastrophic tsunami, AFTER the reactor was run past its design lifetime, and AFTER the company in charge of it did not make the manufacturer's recommended safety upgrades. Do you have any evidence we're facing anything remotely similar to those circumstances with the 26 nuclear reactors in the storm's affected area?
No there's not. There are superficial differences which do a good job of keeping the rabble roused, but fundamentally there's almost no difference. Both fundamentally favor protection of corporate interests and the expansion of government power. Their list of corporate interests might differ slightly, but are surprisingly similar.
If there were a fundamental difference in the parties, it would be reflected in their rhetoric on things like the NDAA, our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the huge abuses of the financial industry in the U.S., etc. But both parties are CONSPICUOUSLY SILENT on all these issues. Instead they want to argue about what word the other guy used in a press conference, or what the other guy said in a divorce case twenty years ago.
Face it, on the issues that really matter, there is no substantive difference between the parties. Any perceived difference is simply electioneering--saying they'd do it different than the other guy. Even though they probably supported the other guy's position publicly a few years ago...
Because none of those Nokia devices were phones.
Except, of course, the ITC judge...
Because it's less than half what Apple was asking per Samsung phone for their bogus patents?
That being said, I don't think $15 is reasonable. But there's a mediation process Apple can use to negotiate this. Instead, they decided to negotiate a lower price by suing Samsung.
Oh but it's completely different.
Apple wants the product banned because it has rounded corners and lets you search for stuff.
Samsung wants the product banned because it uses an international communication standard that cannot be implemented without a technology that Samsung invented.
I mean, c'mon, can't you see how much better Apple's case is? ;)
According to the ITC judge reviewing Apple's complaints about Samsung's standards essential patents, Apple didn't avail themselves to any of the existing remedies when they felt Samsung wasn't offering them a fair licensing deal. They essentially said "You're asking for too much, so we're not paying anything."
If Apple really felt the prices were too high, there are processes in place to force Samsung to the negotiating table. They didn't use any of them. There's no evidence they even made a counter-offer.
Seems more like Apple just doesn't care about other people's patents than Samsung is offering an unfair deal.
The word "phablet" may be stupid, but the Galaxy Note II isn't a tablet.
The reason our cities are generally low-density is that there's just so God damned much empty space in the U.S. I'm guessing you're from Europe, as it seems common for Europeans to not appreciate just how far apart the cities are in the U.S. Heck, I've watched the sun rise and set before I finished crossing Texas alone...
Mass transit is not sensible for 95% of the U.S. There are areas it does make sense (the megalopolises on the east and west coasts, for instance) but it would never work in the spaces between them. And those megalopolises are losing population as people move to less densely populated, less authoritarian, more economically active states.
There are alternatives to fossil fuels to power personal transportation, and with fossil fuel costs going up and the alternatives becoming cheaper, eventually they will be widely deployed. The car isn't going away anytime soon in the U.S, and probably not in my lifetime.
My last two semesters in grad school (Computer Science) saw me spending about 16 hours a day in the lab, usually six days out of the week. Occasionally I wouldn't even go home to sleep. I would pass out for a couple hours on the floor and get back to work. Sometimes someone would kinda nudge me and say "Hey we've got a tour coming through, can you go sleep somewhere else?"
Ended up having a complete mental break one night, after reading a story about a guy who's Mom had died and he found a bunch of gifts from her in Animal Crossing.
All this while being paid $650/mo for a "20-hour a week" job, when my apartment cost $475/mo... After all that, all I have to show for it is 200% more debt than when I finished my bachelors, and a "two years equivalent experience" added to my resume when I got my first job.
Don't get me wrong, I still think it was worth it, but you probably have to be a special kinda stupid and/or have Stockholm Syndrome to do something like that...
I'd disagree with that assertion, but then again I never liked IE.
The word you're looking for is anti-competitive, not monopolistic. Being a monopoly is not illegal.
Now, with the pedantry out of the way... Where is the equivalent action from Google? Where are they pre-installing Google Maps on their monopoly OS?
They do not have a monopoly on search, and even on Android they don't require you to use their search. My Motorola Backflip defaulted to Yahoo!, for instance, much to my chagrin.
As Google keep saying, if their products are showing up first it's because it's what people want. If they didn't provide the results people wanted, their customers would go elsewhere. Hence the mass-exodus of technical types from Google to DuckDuckGo.
Too true. And the people who corrupted it now have so many unwitting accomplices...
The purpose of copyright is "to encourage the sciences and useful arts." A limited monopoly for a creator is just a tool it uses to attempt to achieve that goal.
A big part of the problem with modern copyright is exactly this misunderstanding. Copyright is meant to benefit the public, not creators.