weird note: the can of Coke in front of me says caffeine content is 46mg/12 fl oz. Way to go and mix your units!
So, how many grains of caffeine do you want to limit your consumption to in a day? Would it really help you to know that that can contains 0.7 grains of caffeine?
Or, in other words, quantity of caffeine consumption is a medical measurement. Medical measurements are made in metric units; this is just the way it is, because doctors have preferred working in metric just-about since the system first became available. However, the concentration of caffeine is only useful if it is given in units that are easy to relate to the amount you're consuming; if that's specified in imperial units, so must the concentration be, otherwise it's almost useless.
The *only* way to fix this is to switch to metric measurements for retail pack sizes. The medical profession simply is not going to switch back to imperial; it would cost a fortune, and probably more than a few lives. But I can't imagine a US government getting away with proposing metrication, it would just be too unpopular with the idiots^Wvoters.
donate verb (used with object) 1. to present as a gift, grant, or contribution [...] to a fund or cause
Seems to match pretty well to the third subsense of that common definition of donate. I'll allow that it isn't a gift, and "grant" may or may not fit. But it quite clearly is a contribution to a cause.
I think it can be taken as read that if the law requires something to be published, the law requires it to remain published. You can't circumvent it by saying "the correction was there for 30 seconds, it's just somebody changed it." It absolutely will have to remain.
Unfortunately, the law being discussed at the moment simply extends an obligation present in an older law to all Internet sites (it previously only applied to newspsapers). I can't find any detail of the older law, and most of the discussion of the new law revolves around the 12,500 euro fine for not complying within 48 hours.
Perhaps you are unaware of the details of the trolling in question, which was (IALTB) graphically obscene descriptions of the sexual acts the troll wanted to perform on the victims' dead relatives' corpses. Sending unsolicited obscene messages has long been held to not be protected by free speech laws, both in the EU and the US, and I can't say as I see any reason to disagree with this.
Sure, be an asshole if you want, but don't be obscene.
IIRC the UK just sent somebody to prison for trolling
To suggest it was simply for trolling is somewhat understating the matter. While I agree that he shouldn't have gone to prison, we are talking about an extended and targetted campaign of obscene harrassment against individuals who had done nothing at all to the perpetrator. 18 weeks in prison (of which he will only serve 9 unless he reoffends after leaving) seems justifiable. OTOH, as the offence is simply a symptom of the guy's Asperger's syndrome, he probably shouldn't have been punished for it at all.
It is a long-held belief that freedom of speech extends only as far as it does not cause harm to others, which is acknowledged both in the US and here in Europe. Harrassment causes harm, and therefore should not be permitted under the banner of freedom of speech. In the US, this is the relevant statute he could have been prosecuted under, and would have been eligible for a much longer prison sentence had he been convicted.
Holocaust denial, OTOH, is an entirely different matter, and I can see no justification at all in laws that prevent it.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, Italy is a member for a very solid reason: they were one of the founder members of the EEC. It's hard to justify kicking them out of an organisation that was founded by the Treaty of Rome.
9. On information and belief, Innovatio granted Broadcom Corporation (“Broadcom”) a license that includes rights to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale or import products covered by the Patents-In-Suit. To the extent Innovatio’s allegations of infringement are premised on the alleged making, use, sale, offer for sale, or importation of Plaintiffs’ products that incorporate Broadcom parts, such allegations are barred pursuant to such license and/or the doctrine of exhaustion. 10. On information and belief, Broadcom granted Agere Systems (“Agere”) a license that includes rights to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, or import products covered by the Patents-In-Suit. To the extent Innovatio’s allegations of infringement are premised on the alleged making, use, sale, offer for sale, or importation of Plaintiffs’ products that incorporate Agere parts, such allegations are barred pursuant to such license and/or the doctrine of exhaustion.
(and similarly for just about every manufacturer of 802.11 ICs)
Basically, the argument is that the original patent holders licensed these patents to Broadcom, who sublicensed them to the entire rest of the wireless networking industry, therefore they can't sue anyone for using them...
The patents in question cover encoding techniques and similar, so no, voice communication would not be covered.
However, the patents were apparently previously owned by Broadcom. Broadcom are signatories of a letter to the IEEE assuring them that all of their relevant patents for 802.11 will be licensed on a royalty-free non-discriminatory basis (I can't find Broadcom's letter, but the content will be similar to this one signed by Conexant). This would appear to mean that the recipients of these lawsuits *already have a valid licence to the patents in question*.
If you are going to saddle it with a PCI or a single lane PCIe, why do you need a modern GPU? Older technology cards are still available and still supported.
Because the GPU manufacturers actually charge nearly as much for older designs as they do for low-end modern ones. Because the memory for older GPUs is becoming hard to acquire. Because if you're investing large sums of money to design a board for a specialised application that isn't going to sell spectacular numbers, the difference between a $10 GPU and a $15 GPU isn't really going to make a proportionally huge difference to the retail cost of the board, and it might make a difference to whether it's useful for some customers.
Yes. The PCIe 1x variant should be particularly useful for up to 8 monitor systems, as systems with 4 PCIe slots are very easy to find. Beyond that you may find getting enough power to them problematic, but it is theoretically achievable.
I have PCI slots in my Core2 system. It only has 3 PCIe slots. If I wanted 8 monitors (and let's face it, who the hell doesn't???), this card would allow me to get there.
Is there really much use in having a modern GPU on a PCI card?
Probably. And PCIe 1x definitely. There are many GPU applications that do not require high bandwidth to the host processor (i.e. detailed calculations that can be performed with relatively static data sets such as rotating or stepping through static scenes where most of the geometry remains constant, or on the GPGPU side of things performing similar calculations repeatedly, e.g. neural network training). It also allows many-monitor systems on machines that aren't hugely expensive but need latest-generation features (e.g. complex shader programs).
What is the value of a share other than what somebody else will later pay for it? Particularly when we're talking about a company whose aggressive profit-reinvestment strategy means they're unlikely to pay out any dividends in the near future.
OK, then: The ongoing meltdown of MySpace, which was bought by News Corp in 2005 for $580 million, and was sold in 2011 for $35 million.
Yes, but one competitor beating another out of the marketplace by offering a clearly superior service isn't a bubble bursting. That's the normal way of business. Or perhaps we should be arguing that the computer operating system business is dead, I mean, Digital Research hardly make any sales these days.
Besides, everyone who knew anything about the business knew even at the time News Corp bought it that they'd seriously overestimated its value. So they paid $580M for a business that was actually worth maybe $300M, but has since lost about 90% of its customer base due to competition, which seems about right.
Is there a way for a CPU to make mutex handling easier and more efficient?
No. Modern CPUs already support waiting for a spinlock without actually using any execution units (which on a highly-parallel CPU like the Tx processors means the time that would be spent executing them can be allocated to another thread) or any memory bandwidth (by monitoring the cache/memory bus for alterations rather than actively polling). Solaris (and I believe other OSs) will quietly decide whether to use a spinlock or a queue-based system for a mutex lock operation depending on whether the thread that holds it is currently running. Essentially, this is about as efficient as you can get (the queue based system involves a user->kernel->user context switch, but as that's a hotpoint for optimisation for many different scenarios anyway, we can assume that that's already about as good as the CPU designers can get it as well).
You're missing the point: the patent is specifically about amalgamating and presenting results that aren't covered by a single searchable database. Something like metacrawler might be prior art, google search isn't.
No, google only searches one source: its own database of content.
This patent specifically covers pulling matching items from multiple entirely separate sources and presenting them on the same list (allowing them to be either sorted or filtered by metadata, e.g. resolution, cost, etc.)
Not saying that there aren't many, many examples of such applications available; just that Google's web search is not one of them.
Yes. But you can't take a pre-existing word in use by multiple people to describe a particular technology, trademark it, and then prevent those same people using the word they've been using for longer than you to describe the stuff they invented. (Here's some of that UToronto work the OP was talking about, if you're unsure as to whether they were using the same term to describe it).
Sure, it lacks some of the refinement of the iPad (it's not a multitouch screen, for a start), but it should do everthing a kindergarten kid would need.
Slashdot Mirror
weird note: the can of Coke in front of me says caffeine content is 46mg/12 fl oz. Way to go and mix your units!
So, how many grains of caffeine do you want to limit your consumption to in a day? Would it really help you to know that that can contains 0.7 grains of caffeine?
Or, in other words, quantity of caffeine consumption is a medical measurement. Medical measurements are made in metric units; this is just the way it is, because doctors have preferred working in metric just-about since the system first became available. However, the concentration of caffeine is only useful if it is given in units that are easy to relate to the amount you're consuming; if that's specified in imperial units, so must the concentration be, otherwise it's almost useless.
The *only* way to fix this is to switch to metric measurements for retail pack sizes. The medical profession simply is not going to switch back to imperial; it would cost a fortune, and probably more than a few lives. But I can't imagine a US government getting away with proposing metrication, it would just be too unpopular with the idiots^Wvoters.
Seems to match pretty well to the third subsense of that common definition of donate. I'll allow that it isn't a gift, and "grant" may or may not fit. But it quite clearly is a contribution to a cause.
I fail to see how having a JVM is any more of a security hole than having the ability to execute native code.
Desktop java != applets.
I think it can be taken as read that if the law requires something to be published, the law requires it to remain published. You can't circumvent it by saying "the correction was there for 30 seconds, it's just somebody changed it." It absolutely will have to remain.
Unfortunately, the law being discussed at the moment simply extends an obligation present in an older law to all Internet sites (it previously only applied to newspsapers). I can't find any detail of the older law, and most of the discussion of the new law revolves around the 12,500 euro fine for not complying within 48 hours.
Trolling is absolutely Free Speech.
Perhaps you are unaware of the details of the trolling in question, which was (IALTB) graphically obscene descriptions of the sexual acts the troll wanted to perform on the victims' dead relatives' corpses. Sending unsolicited obscene messages has long been held to not be protected by free speech laws, both in the EU and the US, and I can't say as I see any reason to disagree with this.
Sure, be an asshole if you want, but don't be obscene.
IIRC the UK just sent somebody to prison for trolling
To suggest it was simply for trolling is somewhat understating the matter. While I agree that he shouldn't have gone to prison, we are talking about an extended and targetted campaign of obscene harrassment against individuals who had done nothing at all to the perpetrator. 18 weeks in prison (of which he will only serve 9 unless he reoffends after leaving) seems justifiable. OTOH, as the offence is simply a symptom of the guy's Asperger's syndrome, he probably shouldn't have been punished for it at all.
It is a long-held belief that freedom of speech extends only as far as it does not cause harm to others, which is acknowledged both in the US and here in Europe. Harrassment causes harm, and therefore should not be permitted under the banner of freedom of speech. In the US, this is the relevant statute he could have been prosecuted under, and would have been eligible for a much longer prison sentence had he been convicted.
Holocaust denial, OTOH, is an entirely different matter, and I can see no justification at all in laws that prevent it.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, Italy is a member for a very solid reason: they were one of the founder members of the EEC. It's hard to justify kicking them out of an organisation that was founded by the Treaty of Rome.
Yes, there is. It's called Declaratory Judgment.
And Cisco & Motorola have already started the process for you: http://morrisjames.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/cisco-systems-inc-and-motorola-solutions-inc-v-innovatio-ip-ventures-llc.pdf
Oh, yes. Here we go
The important bit:
(and similarly for just about every manufacturer of 802.11 ICs)
Basically, the argument is that the original patent holders licensed these patents to Broadcom, who sublicensed them to the entire rest of the wireless networking industry, therefore they can't sue anyone for using them...
The patents in question cover encoding techniques and similar, so no, voice communication would not be covered.
However, the patents were apparently previously owned by Broadcom. Broadcom are signatories of a letter to the IEEE assuring them that all of their relevant patents for 802.11 will be licensed on a royalty-free non-discriminatory basis (I can't find Broadcom's letter, but the content will be similar to this one signed by Conexant). This would appear to mean that the recipients of these lawsuits *already have a valid licence to the patents in question*.
Personally I can't wait for StringCells.
mmmm, stringy.
Already exists.
If you are going to saddle it with a PCI or a single lane PCIe, why do you need a modern GPU? Older technology cards are still available and still supported.
Because the GPU manufacturers actually charge nearly as much for older designs as they do for low-end modern ones. Because the memory for older GPUs is becoming hard to acquire. Because if you're investing large sums of money to design a board for a specialised application that isn't going to sell spectacular numbers, the difference between a $10 GPU and a $15 GPU isn't really going to make a proportionally huge difference to the retail cost of the board, and it might make a difference to whether it's useful for some customers.
Yes. The PCIe 1x variant should be particularly useful for up to 8 monitor systems, as systems with 4 PCIe slots are very easy to find. Beyond that you may find getting enough power to them problematic, but it is theoretically achievable.
And what are you going to put this in, a PII?
I have PCI slots in my Core2 system. It only has 3 PCIe slots. If I wanted 8 monitors (and let's face it, who the hell doesn't???), this card would allow me to get there.
Is there really much use in having a modern GPU on a PCI card?
Probably. And PCIe 1x definitely. There are many GPU applications that do not require high bandwidth to the host processor (i.e. detailed calculations that can be performed with relatively static data sets such as rotating or stepping through static scenes where most of the geometry remains constant, or on the GPGPU side of things performing similar calculations repeatedly, e.g. neural network training). It also allows many-monitor systems on machines that aren't hugely expensive but need latest-generation features (e.g. complex shader programs).
Since there's no accusation that doesn't have some grain of truth, the accusation is enough to prove guilt.
Yep. As my years of reading the Daily Mail have taught me, there's no smoke without a paedophile.
Because you're running Java servers, which typically use one thread per client?
This is SUN^WOracle, you know?
What is the value of a share other than what somebody else will later pay for it? Particularly when we're talking about a company whose aggressive profit-reinvestment strategy means they're unlikely to pay out any dividends in the near future.
OK, then: The ongoing meltdown of MySpace, which was bought by News Corp in 2005 for $580 million, and was sold in 2011 for $35 million.
Yes, but one competitor beating another out of the marketplace by offering a clearly superior service isn't a bubble bursting. That's the normal way of business. Or perhaps we should be arguing that the computer operating system business is dead, I mean, Digital Research hardly make any sales these days.
Besides, everyone who knew anything about the business knew even at the time News Corp bought it that they'd seriously overestimated its value. So they paid $580M for a business that was actually worth maybe $300M, but has since lost about 90% of its customer base due to competition, which seems about right.
Is there a way for a CPU to make mutex handling easier and more efficient?
No. Modern CPUs already support waiting for a spinlock without actually using any execution units (which on a highly-parallel CPU like the Tx processors means the time that would be spent executing them can be allocated to another thread) or any memory bandwidth (by monitoring the cache/memory bus for alterations rather than actively polling). Solaris (and I believe other OSs) will quietly decide whether to use a spinlock or a queue-based system for a mutex lock operation depending on whether the thread that holds it is currently running. Essentially, this is about as efficient as you can get (the queue based system involves a user->kernel->user context switch, but as that's a hotpoint for optimisation for many different scenarios anyway, we can assume that that's already about as good as the CPU designers can get it as well).
You're missing the point: the patent is specifically about amalgamating and presenting results that aren't covered by a single searchable database. Something like metacrawler might be prior art, google search isn't.
No, google only searches one source: its own database of content.
This patent specifically covers pulling matching items from multiple entirely separate sources and presenting them on the same list (allowing them to be either sorted or filtered by metadata, e.g. resolution, cost, etc.)
Not saying that there aren't many, many examples of such applications available; just that Google's web search is not one of them.
The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.
Here's a paper from 1984: http://www.billbuxton.com/leebuxtonsmith.pdf
Satisfied?
Yes. But you can't take a pre-existing word in use by multiple people to describe a particular technology, trademark it, and then prevent those same people using the word they've been using for longer than you to describe the stuff they invented. (Here's some of that UToronto work the OP was talking about, if you're unsure as to whether they were using the same term to describe it).
You can?
What tablet can you buy that is equivalent to the iPad for half the price?
How about this one?
Sure, it lacks some of the refinement of the iPad (it's not a multitouch screen, for a start), but it should do everthing a kindergarten kid would need.