Of course, doing so would also piss off pretty much the entire planet, because it would likely knock out hundreds of satellites and disrupt world-wide communications for weeks or months afterwards, and space travel for (potentially) years. So anyone who wants to pull something like that off has to be willing to face the military wrath of more or less the entire planet afterwards.
Common law is precedent, which I specifically mentioned. More importantly, common law cannot supersede legislative law. Common law is also usually the practical implementation of legislative law (in this case, existing legislative patent law), and not all judges are even situated to create it (it is only binding in their jurisdiction). I don't know what this judge's placement is in the UK system, so I can't speak to that, obviously, but I would guess that he would be setting a limited precedent with this judgment. The subject is highly subjective, though, so how much force it actually has is questionable.
A judge's decision is not "law". It may serve as precedent, depending, but it is not law. Rather, it is an interpretation (a judgment, hence the term, "judge") of how the law applies or does not apply in this specific case. Since Apple was suing over a design similarity, it is perfectly logical to say the design isn't similar because it isn't as "cool." The judge can't really say "the patent system, which was enacted by the legislature and over which I have no power, is stupid, so I'm going to ignore the law and make up my own!" A judge's job is not to make law, it is to interpret it. They can comment on how stupid they think the law is, directly or indirectly (and in fact this judge may have been doing that subtly), and they can decide if a law breaks other, higher laws, but they cannot make law directly.
No. Get Windows 7 if you haven't already (and are bound to Windows for whatever reason). If you don't need Windows in particular, there are far better alternatives. Only people who haven't used Windows 8 think the Linux desktop is unfriendly.
The Linux desktop isn't unfriendly, per se. The problem is it is difficult to use just the desktop with Linux, because the OS was designed from the ground up to be used from the command line, and tacking on a GUI doesn't really change that. That's really the reason Linux never had its year on the desktop, and probably never will: Linux never was intended to be a desktop OS. Linux is unfriendly to its own desktop (and there isn't anything wrong with that, necessarily, it makes Linux a lot more powerful in many ways, just not for casual users). Windows always was a desktop OS, a fact MS seems to have forgotten. Also, just because Metro is worse wouldn't make the Linux desktop any more friendly.
Guilt about sex is one of the things religion uses to keep people in line. Reduce guilt about sex and you reduce religion's hold over the populace. We can't have that happening, now can we?
Depends: do you consider the future portrayed by Brave New World good or bad?
SI standards specify that a period (or a comma, for that matter, the proper indicator is a space), should not be used for digit grouping, which means the "American" interpretation is actually the internationally accepted scientific/engineering standard.
As far as the government is concerned marriage should be treated like any other contract. They should have no say in the contents. If there is a breech take it to court and let a jury decide. Then purge out of law any benefits or tax considerations based on material status and just people as individuals.
The government should very much be able to say what can and cannot be put into a contract. Otherwise, things like slavery would be legal if it was in a contract. The government can and should be able to decide what can and cannot be in a contract for the good of society.
And revoking marriage benefits is an even worse idea. The concept behind it is that it allows both parents to not have to work (in fact many do, either because they want more money to sustain their lifestyle or because they can't get good enough jobs not to, but the marriage benefits help tremendously). Parents in the US already don't pay enough attention to their kids (with pretty awful results), this would make that far far worse. Unless you want kids being raised by the government. I most certainly do not.
The bigger issue, it seems to be, is feedback. Sure, you can train the machine to "read" certain patterns with attempts to move the arm, and potentially create very advanced interfaces, but the interface is purely one-way: there is no way to tell the human he has "touched" something. Cameras work to some extent to provide visual feedback, but more advanced and more delicate control requires something beyond just that. We need to find a way to provide neural feedback to replicate the sense of touch, at the very least. Sight can be provided easily (without requiring a neural interface), as can hearing, and smell is largely unneeded, but for an arm, touch feedback is essential.
In theory, though, an SDR cell phone could transition from 3G to 4G-LTE to true 4G with nothing but a software update. That is an extremely cool idea. Tt'd also allow fancy things like using it as a true walkie-talkie or CB radio, and 100% world-wide compatibility. I agree it is unlikely to happen anytime soon, but TFA compares the current SDR systems to the Apple I: it's going to take a very long time before the technology sees it's full usage.
I believe OP's point was that the UN issuing a declaration is just about as effective a measure at helping insure free speech rights as trying to stop a bull by yelling at it. The UN is so toothless it can't even stop open genocide: why would you expect it to be able to do anything when mere freedom of speech is at stake?
If bandwidth is bad, the native application will have trouble accessing anything it needs remote data for, but the app itself will run just fine and remain perfectly responsive (assuming it is properly coded), just as your browser doesn't lag everytime it loads a page. The web app, OTOH, will become unresponsive as soon as it needs to load new code. You can witness this in GMail: if you go to the setting tab, for example, it lags according to the time it takes the new resources to load. It is possible, of course, to download the resources for a web app to the local machine, but most web apps I've seen don't (support for it is pretty poor so far).
And yeah, Apple intended the iPhone to be entirely web-app for all third-party programs. They didn't release an SDK until 9 months after the iPhone came out (when they realized that, at least at the time, it was a lousy idea).
It's a matter of scale. Nukes can prevent full-scale war between the countries that hold them. It cannot prevent smaller wars and genocides, just as it cannot prevent gang-wars or serial murderers. There is a minimum threshold before nuclear weapons would even be considered (i.e. an amount beyond which the use or threat to use a nuclear weapon is less than the damage that would be caused by not using one).
Extensibility -> Pretty sure the idea is to just make as much as possible the "original" webpages more usable on a mobile device, instead of requiring the user to install half-assed "apps". There's already API's for pretty much everything in JS.
That was originally what the iPhone was supposed to do. Didn't work too well for them in the long run. You simply can't get the performance and flexibility of a local app with a webpage, and you won't until you get high-bandwidth non-capped connections and better web standards (WebGL/HTML are close, but not quite there yet).
Thus restricted boot environments become a necessity for Microsoft to turn Windows into a DRM-friendly platform. DRM on PCs is not dead, it was just on vacation while the big players worked on a way to sneak in restricted boot environments. No more grabbing secret keys out of running processes, no more replacing WoW DLLs to cheat, no more patching software to evade license checks. That's why Microsoft requires this.
That is also why we need to fight back against this.
And why I am hoping Steam's Linux initiative is both more than a rumor, and successful. Even if they don't get AAA titles, indie games can still appear on Linux, and the big game studios seem to have forgotten one little thing: they were once small studios, making what are now considered indie games. And that was considered the golden age of gaming.
Oh, and even DRM from boot will never work, not completely. Just ask Sony or MS how well that turned out, and they controlled every aspect of the hardware and software.
This is a DARPA project. What that means is they are doing it to see if they can, and what problems will come about if they actually try it not because they actually plan on doing anything with it. Other DARPA projects include: flying tanks, thought-controlled robot arms, high energy lasers, hypersonic aircraft, passive radar, onion routing, and the precursor to the Internet. You'll note that only a few of those are actual, real, working, practical things (ironically, some of them are also the cause of the problem they are trying to solve now).
This project seems like it has a multitude of uses: ways to identify and track the false information, automatic generation tools, and a whole bunch of random security tools that can genuinely be useful in protecting secure networks from intrusion (some of which look extremely useful for private network security, which is most likely where this technology will end up, judging by past DARPA projects)..
That depends. Are we talking about the inertial mass, or the gravitational mass? They may be numerically equal, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
As I understand it, it means that MS effectively says they now have $6.2 billion less in assets. When they bought aQuantive, they spent $6.3 billion, but got an asset that they valued at the same level, meaning their assets stayed more or less the same. Now they recognize that it isn't worth that, so they "write it off" (most of it anyways) in recognition of that fact.
So forgive me if all of my experience points to this being yet another case of that. If it were some technical issue, why would Blizz stick to its guns and alienate customers?
I don't know, why would Blizzard stick to their guns and refuse to put LAN into SC2 or Diablo III? Because they don't care what a (in their eyes, anyways) relatively small number of their customers think if they think they can make money doing something else. They haven't for years: maybe Blizz did once, but not anymore. And, unlike WoW, they don't even really lose money off a banned customer: they've already paid for the game, and there isn't a monthly fee. They might figure they lose a few dollars of RMAH by having fewer players, but they also figure it is better to have an overly aggressive banning system rather than lose even more off of cheaters. It makes sense, from that point of view, it just ends up possibly screwing a few innocent people over.
First of all, you are assuming Blizzard is 100% trustworthy. I, and many others, are not so sure, not after Blizzard's behavior over the past few years. Secondly, Blizzard's setup, pretty much out of necessity, assumes everyone is using 100% default, unmodified software. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (million, literally) for Linux users to be using custom software, in every single component from Wine to their kernel, especially when running 3D Windows software in Wine. And finally, the comparison to WoW is poor: WoW is a pure client-server achitecture, which means the server doesn't have to trust the client for much more than user input. Most of the "cheating" in WoW was, in fact, just using bots to replicate false user-input. Diablo III, OTOH, obviously trusts the client far more than that, probably for Blizzard to lessen their load (and because Diablo, at heart, is a single player game, not an MMO).
Which is the final problem: if people want to cheat at Diablo III, why does Blizzard care? Because they are greedy bastards who want to force people to play online so they can use their RMAH, that is why. And that is the real reason people are pissed: because if even 1 person gets false banned because of that, Blizzard are the ones at fault, from the very beginning, because they were being greedy. And that is why I did not buy Diablo III or SC2, and will not be buying anything from Blizzard in the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, Texas is apparently a country now.
Khan is a Muslim.
Yes, and so was Dr. Abdus Salam.
300km/h is almost exactly 186 mph, not 192 mph, so methinks OP has a point of some kind (not 100% sure what it is, though).
One that makes a "Whoooosh!" sound would be preferable, I think.
Of course, doing so would also piss off pretty much the entire planet, because it would likely knock out hundreds of satellites and disrupt world-wide communications for weeks or months afterwards, and space travel for (potentially) years. So anyone who wants to pull something like that off has to be willing to face the military wrath of more or less the entire planet afterwards.
Common law is precedent, which I specifically mentioned. More importantly, common law cannot supersede legislative law. Common law is also usually the practical implementation of legislative law (in this case, existing legislative patent law), and not all judges are even situated to create it (it is only binding in their jurisdiction). I don't know what this judge's placement is in the UK system, so I can't speak to that, obviously, but I would guess that he would be setting a limited precedent with this judgment. The subject is highly subjective, though, so how much force it actually has is questionable.
A judge's decision is not "law". It may serve as precedent, depending, but it is not law. Rather, it is an interpretation (a judgment, hence the term, "judge") of how the law applies or does not apply in this specific case. Since Apple was suing over a design similarity, it is perfectly logical to say the design isn't similar because it isn't as "cool." The judge can't really say "the patent system, which was enacted by the legislature and over which I have no power, is stupid, so I'm going to ignore the law and make up my own!" A judge's job is not to make law, it is to interpret it. They can comment on how stupid they think the law is, directly or indirectly (and in fact this judge may have been doing that subtly), and they can decide if a law breaks other, higher laws, but they cannot make law directly.
No. Get Windows 7 if you haven't already (and are bound to Windows for whatever reason). If you don't need Windows in particular, there are far better alternatives. Only people who haven't used Windows 8 think the Linux desktop is unfriendly.
The Linux desktop isn't unfriendly, per se. The problem is it is difficult to use just the desktop with Linux, because the OS was designed from the ground up to be used from the command line, and tacking on a GUI doesn't really change that. That's really the reason Linux never had its year on the desktop, and probably never will: Linux never was intended to be a desktop OS. Linux is unfriendly to its own desktop (and there isn't anything wrong with that, necessarily, it makes Linux a lot more powerful in many ways, just not for casual users). Windows always was a desktop OS, a fact MS seems to have forgotten. Also, just because Metro is worse wouldn't make the Linux desktop any more friendly.
Guilt about sex is one of the things religion uses to keep people in line. Reduce guilt about sex and you reduce religion's hold over the populace. We can't have that happening, now can we?
Depends: do you consider the future portrayed by Brave New World good or bad?
SI standards specify that a period (or a comma, for that matter, the proper indicator is a space), should not be used for digit grouping, which means the "American" interpretation is actually the internationally accepted scientific/engineering standard.
As far as the government is concerned marriage should be treated like any other contract. They should have no say in the contents. If there is a breech take it to court and let a jury decide. Then purge out of law any benefits or tax considerations based on material status and just people as individuals.
The government should very much be able to say what can and cannot be put into a contract. Otherwise, things like slavery would be legal if it was in a contract. The government can and should be able to decide what can and cannot be in a contract for the good of society.
And revoking marriage benefits is an even worse idea. The concept behind it is that it allows both parents to not have to work (in fact many do, either because they want more money to sustain their lifestyle or because they can't get good enough jobs not to, but the marriage benefits help tremendously). Parents in the US already don't pay enough attention to their kids (with pretty awful results), this would make that far far worse. Unless you want kids being raised by the government. I most certainly do not.
The bigger issue, it seems to be, is feedback. Sure, you can train the machine to "read" certain patterns with attempts to move the arm, and potentially create very advanced interfaces, but the interface is purely one-way: there is no way to tell the human he has "touched" something. Cameras work to some extent to provide visual feedback, but more advanced and more delicate control requires something beyond just that. We need to find a way to provide neural feedback to replicate the sense of touch, at the very least. Sight can be provided easily (without requiring a neural interface), as can hearing, and smell is largely unneeded, but for an arm, touch feedback is essential.
In theory, though, an SDR cell phone could transition from 3G to 4G-LTE to true 4G with nothing but a software update. That is an extremely cool idea. Tt'd also allow fancy things like using it as a true walkie-talkie or CB radio, and 100% world-wide compatibility. I agree it is unlikely to happen anytime soon, but TFA compares the current SDR systems to the Apple I: it's going to take a very long time before the technology sees it's full usage.
I believe OP's point was that the UN issuing a declaration is just about as effective a measure at helping insure free speech rights as trying to stop a bull by yelling at it. The UN is so toothless it can't even stop open genocide: why would you expect it to be able to do anything when mere freedom of speech is at stake?
If bandwidth is bad, the native application will have trouble accessing anything it needs remote data for, but the app itself will run just fine and remain perfectly responsive (assuming it is properly coded), just as your browser doesn't lag everytime it loads a page. The web app, OTOH, will become unresponsive as soon as it needs to load new code. You can witness this in GMail: if you go to the setting tab, for example, it lags according to the time it takes the new resources to load. It is possible, of course, to download the resources for a web app to the local machine, but most web apps I've seen don't (support for it is pretty poor so far).
And yeah, Apple intended the iPhone to be entirely web-app for all third-party programs. They didn't release an SDK until 9 months after the iPhone came out (when they realized that, at least at the time, it was a lousy idea).
It's a matter of scale. Nukes can prevent full-scale war between the countries that hold them. It cannot prevent smaller wars and genocides, just as it cannot prevent gang-wars or serial murderers. There is a minimum threshold before nuclear weapons would even be considered (i.e. an amount beyond which the use or threat to use a nuclear weapon is less than the damage that would be caused by not using one).
Extensibility -> Pretty sure the idea is to just make as much as possible the "original" webpages more usable on a mobile device, instead of requiring the user to install half-assed "apps". There's already API's for pretty much everything in JS.
That was originally what the iPhone was supposed to do. Didn't work too well for them in the long run. You simply can't get the performance and flexibility of a local app with a webpage, and you won't until you get high-bandwidth non-capped connections and better web standards (WebGL/HTML are close, but not quite there yet).
Thus restricted boot environments become a necessity for Microsoft to turn Windows into a DRM-friendly platform. DRM on PCs is not dead, it was just on vacation while the big players worked on a way to sneak in restricted boot environments. No more grabbing secret keys out of running processes, no more replacing WoW DLLs to cheat, no more patching software to evade license checks. That's why Microsoft requires this.
That is also why we need to fight back against this.
And why I am hoping Steam's Linux initiative is both more than a rumor, and successful. Even if they don't get AAA titles, indie games can still appear on Linux, and the big game studios seem to have forgotten one little thing: they were once small studios, making what are now considered indie games. And that was considered the golden age of gaming.
Oh, and even DRM from boot will never work, not completely. Just ask Sony or MS how well that turned out, and they controlled every aspect of the hardware and software.
This is a DARPA project. What that means is they are doing it to see if they can, and what problems will come about if they actually try it not because they actually plan on doing anything with it. Other DARPA projects include: flying tanks, thought-controlled robot arms, high energy lasers, hypersonic aircraft, passive radar, onion routing, and the precursor to the Internet. You'll note that only a few of those are actual, real, working, practical things (ironically, some of them are also the cause of the problem they are trying to solve now).
This project seems like it has a multitude of uses: ways to identify and track the false information, automatic generation tools, and a whole bunch of random security tools that can genuinely be useful in protecting secure networks from intrusion (some of which look extremely useful for private network security, which is most likely where this technology will end up, judging by past DARPA projects)..
now that its been discovered, all textbooks will have to be re-written and sold to students.
So, business as usual, then?
That depends. Are we talking about the inertial mass, or the gravitational mass? They may be numerically equal, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
Unfortunately, that feeling will pass as soon as he opens his eyes.
As I understand it, it means that MS effectively says they now have $6.2 billion less in assets. When they bought aQuantive, they spent $6.3 billion, but got an asset that they valued at the same level, meaning their assets stayed more or less the same. Now they recognize that it isn't worth that, so they "write it off" (most of it anyways) in recognition of that fact.
So forgive me if all of my experience points to this being yet another case of that. If it were some technical issue, why would Blizz stick to its guns and alienate customers?
I don't know, why would Blizzard stick to their guns and refuse to put LAN into SC2 or Diablo III? Because they don't care what a (in their eyes, anyways) relatively small number of their customers think if they think they can make money doing something else. They haven't for years: maybe Blizz did once, but not anymore. And, unlike WoW, they don't even really lose money off a banned customer: they've already paid for the game, and there isn't a monthly fee. They might figure they lose a few dollars of RMAH by having fewer players, but they also figure it is better to have an overly aggressive banning system rather than lose even more off of cheaters. It makes sense, from that point of view, it just ends up possibly screwing a few innocent people over.
First of all, you are assuming Blizzard is 100% trustworthy. I, and many others, are not so sure, not after Blizzard's behavior over the past few years. Secondly, Blizzard's setup, pretty much out of necessity, assumes everyone is using 100% default, unmodified software. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (million, literally) for Linux users to be using custom software, in every single component from Wine to their kernel, especially when running 3D Windows software in Wine. And finally, the comparison to WoW is poor: WoW is a pure client-server achitecture, which means the server doesn't have to trust the client for much more than user input. Most of the "cheating" in WoW was, in fact, just using bots to replicate false user-input. Diablo III, OTOH, obviously trusts the client far more than that, probably for Blizzard to lessen their load (and because Diablo, at heart, is a single player game, not an MMO).
Which is the final problem: if people want to cheat at Diablo III, why does Blizzard care? Because they are greedy bastards who want to force people to play online so they can use their RMAH, that is why. And that is the real reason people are pissed: because if even 1 person gets false banned because of that, Blizzard are the ones at fault, from the very beginning, because they were being greedy. And that is why I did not buy Diablo III or SC2, and will not be buying anything from Blizzard in the foreseeable future.