It's not the decimal places as such. It's the fact that, if we step through the entire stack: Everything is rounded off properly(that means, no floating points math rounding errors)
Anything involving money shouldn't be using floating point anyway. If the language doesn't have a built-in currency data type, the best way to store amounts of money is as an integer quantity of cents. (Of course, if you need mill-level precision, then store an integer quantity of mills instead.)
Juror 1: "If we say this patent is valid, they'll take our internet away!"
Jurors: "Hell no!"
Juror 1: "I guess we should shoot the breeze for a couple hours so they will think we thought hard about this
As an AC poster further down pointed out, this is really no different than what appellate courts do. The decisions made by the Supreme Court have a lot more to do with their personal policy preferences than with black-letter law. This is, in part, because all the obvious slam-dunk cases are resolved at the trial courts and turned down on lower levels of appeal, so the only cases that reach the Supreme Court are the ones where there is a plausible argument to be made on both sides. And this is where it basically comes down to what the judge wants to do.
The effect on a patent validity decision should not be a part of the process, and based on the article's description Tim had no business there giving any opinion. Only facts about what was in place at the time, as it pertains to prior art.
Also, the company only wanted money according to the article. It did not want to shut down the internet. So in this specific case, the same is true. It's irrelevant, and the 'what if' case should not be considered.
I disagree. The Constitution makes it clear that copyrights and patents are NOT a fundamental right, and exist only for consequential reasons: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Allowing Eolas to shut down the Internet, or even tax it, would not promote the progress of science and useful arts. Therefore, the courts should not allow the patent system to be used in this manner. This is true regardless of any other facts in the case. The Constitution not only permits, but demands, that we consider the 'what if' case when it comes to copyright and patent laws.
The computer (or phone, or tablet) you're using to type that comment is a direct result of the effort to put man into space. The space program gave us the integrated circuit.
Nonsense. Even NASA's own web page on spinoff benefits doesn't go as far as to make this claim; it seems to be restricted to the fringes of the space-nutter crowd. According to Wikipedia, the antecedents of the integrated circuit date to Germany in 1949, and the first example of what we would today think of as an IC was developed by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958. (Robert Noyce was doing parallel work at Fairchild Semiconductor and had a working example a few months later than Kilby.) NASA wasn't even founded until mid-1958 so it would be difficult to claim they had anything to do with these developments. They didn't invent microprocessors either; that was Intel, which created the 4004 CPU for use in a calculator, not the space program.
While there have been some decent tech spin-offs from the space program in general, there have been very few that can be directly attributed to manned spaceflight. From a cost-benefit perspective it is very difficult to justify shooting people into space rather than spending that same amount of money on R&D back here on Earth.
The difference is that earlier forms of exploration generally served some useful purpose, while sending humans into space is just a publicity stunt with no real scientific or economic value.
you realize that Apple relies on cheap Chinese slave labor to make iPads at $499/ea, right? And if Apple pulled out of China they'd have nowhere else to go. America isn't an option because of labor regulations and an expensive workforce. iPads would be up at $1499 and still losing money, iPhones would be $1000 subsidized and America's economy would take a larger nosedive than China's. Brazil? They've already tried that and it's as bad as America.
Bullshit. The differences in manufacturing costs amount to a few dollars per unit. From the New York Times:
the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove [California] was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85.
So we're talking about $22, not $1000. You're off by over an order of magnitude. Sure, moving the supply chains from China to the USA would be a big challenge, but that's a one-time expense.
China has the whip hand here. If push came to shove, China could just shut down the iPad factories and even nationalize it.
They could, but they won't, because doing so would make it difficult if not impossible for them to get more foreign corporate investment in the future. If Apple's operations in China are not safe, what other western corporation will think their Chinese operations would be?
My personal opinion is that wars involving world economic powers are going to become less and less likely over the next 50-100 years. There is too much at stake at home, and I don't just mean troops' lives. The global economy is a reality, and we're quite entangled with the economies of pretty much any other country of economic significance - by that I don't just mean the G8, but well beyond that. With the other large economies, we have a lot to lose on exports/imports of finished goods if we go to war, but with the middle 50%, we lose access to inputs - sometimes critical ones, like oil - if we go to war. Even beyond the idea that killing each other is so 20th century, there's too much to lose economically in a hot war in probably 75% of the cases.
Norman Angell made the same argument in 1912, in his book The Great Illusion. He noted that any kind of large-scale war among European powers would be economically destructive and futile, and that even the "winners" would lose more than they gained in blood and treasure. He was right, of course, but it didn't stop World War I from happening anyway only a few years later. I think you overestimate the rationality of humans and underestimate the power of tribal ideology.
this what people want to hear? I know many Americans don't really care that much about civil liberties in the abstract, but they do care about things that might affect their own lives. The TSA was popular for a year or two after 9/11, but most Americans hate it now. The average man (or woman) on the street cares a lot more about the bad economy than about vague threats of terrorism.
Exactly, thanks smash. I mean who gives a flying fuck about the drive? but if you are working on some important term paper or business proposal and the SSD decides NOW is the time its gonna crap itself? That's when you realize that hot speed isn't worth the crazy failure rates. I mean either you have every. single. change of any note backed up or you are literally rolling the dice. try contacting them and asking about your data, they'll tell you tough luck, it isn't covered.
That's why you store your actual data on magnetic drives - preferably on a NAS with ZFS software RAID. The SSD should only have the OS, installed software, and miscellaneous stuff like cache and swapfile. All this can easily be replaced from a drive image; at most you might need to reinstall a couple of software updates. If you keep a lot of important data on a SSD, you're doing it wrong. Putting the OS and software on SSD gives you all the speed advantage while minimizing downside risk.
Yeah seems to me that Intel is actually helping Sandforce fix the bugs in Sandforce's product. Not for free of course, but one wonders about the long term strategic reasons for this. They could have let Sandforce keep churning out SSDs with buggy firmware.
The Anandtech article indicates that the fixed firmware will be exclusive to Intel for a certain (unspecified) period of time, before being made available to other SandForce vendors. So what Intel gets for their time and effort is a period of exclusivity.
Actually, the EEOC has traditionally taken a very dim view of pencil-and-paper employment tests. While such tests are not openly discriminatory, they are often considered to have a disparate impact on minorities if they fail at a higher rate than white males.
Ah, but because they're PROFITING off the infringement, it escalates to THEFT, a criminal matter.
No, it doesn't. As I noted, copyright infringement can under some circumstances be considered a crime, but it is not considered theft – it's a completely separate and unrelated offense. And the criminal authorities aren't going to get involved in a case where it is not even clear whether the acts in question constituted infringement in the first place. You can repeat the word "theft" all you want, but it doesn't change the underlying facts: you can't copyright game rules.
That paper you cited is on a completely different issue (lockouts and interoperability). An important issue, but not one relevant to Zynga's alleged actions here.
For criminal sanctions for copyright infringement, it now doesn't matter if the infringement was for profit or not. However, the government DOES have to prove that the infringement took place, and that it was willful and deliberate. That's why Zynga cannot and will not be criminally prosecuted; it's not at all clear that what they did was even infringement at all, and even if a civil court ruled that it was, the fact that there were good-faith arguments on the other side indicates the infringing acts were not undertaken willfully and deliberately. Bottom line, no way is the FBI getting involved in this one: if asked, they're going to say it is a civil matter.
So the question is not whether they CAN pursue Zynga for jail time, it's a question of whether they CHOOSE to, or go for cash instead.
They can do both simultaneously. Or try to. But in this case, if they go to the FBI and file a claim of copyright or trademark infringement, they will be told that it's a civil matter. Criminal copyright infringement only applies to cases where it's absolutely clear that the copying is prohibited. Here, Zynga can plausibly argue based on existing precedent that game rules aren't subject to copyright at all, so they did nothing wrong. The FBI isn't going to waste their time on this kind of hair-splitting, and you can't force the police or FBI to pursue a criminal case if they don't want to.
Pincus infamously told employees: 'I don't want f*cking innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.'
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I think the open-source movement would be well served if more OSS developers took this advice. Of course, it doesn't always apply, but if you're trying to compete with a dominant commercial product, don't think you know better than Microsoft or Adobe or Apple; just copy the damn thing. The GIMP crew thinks they know better than Adobe how to design a UI, and look at how far that has got them – the butt of every joke in the OSS world. People don't want GIMP, they want an open-source copy of Photoshop, so give that to them. Likewise, people don't want all the "innovative" desktop environments Gnome and KDE are coming out with; they want an open-source copy of the Windows UI. Or better yet an open-source version of Windows; it's amazing to me that ReactOS hasn't gotten more love, when it represents the best potential long-term method for open source to take over the desktop. I know it's not as rewarding for the coders, but if you actually care about the market share of OSS software, this is the way forward. Change the graphics as much as needed for copyright reasons, but copy the look and feel. After all, both Microsoft and Apple got their footholds the same way.
And if the originators of the game ideas win the case, I strongly recommend that they demand jail time for Pincus seeing as he's clearly documented that this is a POLICY of the company under his leadership, so he can't pin the blame on some middle manager and fire him instead.
You don't seem to understand much about U.S. law. Torts are not crimes, and civil cases are not criminal cases. Individuals can't prosecute someone for a crime. You can only sue them civilly and get monetary damages, and/or an injunction to stop doing something. To send someone to jail, the state or federal government would have to criminally prosecute them. And there's next to no chance this will happen here, since it's not even clear that what Zynga did was a tort, let alone an actual crime. (Most trademark and patent infringements are not crimes, though some forms of copyright infringement are.)
If the competition isn't copyrighting and trademarking their games as companies used to in the era of "Pac-Man" and "Space Invaders", then they haven't got the tools needed to defend themselves against Zynga's predatory practices.
Do you have any idea how many Pac-Man and Space Invaders clones there were in the early 1980s? And few, if any, of the cloners were ever sued. This is because, as others have noted, you can't copyright game rules. You can trademark the title and copyright the code and graphics, but not stop someone else from independently re-implementing more or less the same game on their own.
There have been many precedent setting cases in the US and Canada where competitors who cloned and renamed games without altering the play were able to defend against their predators, and force the competition off the market.
Can you cite any of these cases?
f Apple can force HTC and Samsung into a corner because of "design similarities", then the game companies should be able to lynch Zynga the same way.
Apple's claims were based on patents, not copyrights or trademarks.
New versions of Unicode introduce new pages. If you're blocking a page for some reason, the next version of Unicode might introduce another page that extends the functionality of the old page, reintroducing the behavior that led you to block the old page.
So use a whitelist instead of a blacklist for pages.
This actually is a serious problem that has been discussed on the Wikipedia development and foundation mailing lists. Because Wikicode is not rigorously defined like real HTML/XML, the only definition of correct output is "whatever the current parser generates." This not only makes it nearly impossible to independently implement Wikicode in other products besides MediaWiki, but it also makes it far more difficult to create a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't break things. And doing the latter has been a goal of many people high up in Wikipedia for some time.
Oh, come on. Everyone who uses computers even casually knows that the floppy-disk icon means "Save." That it no longer reflects the underlying hardware is irrelevant.
So you're saying if you care about video quality you should spend more than $25?
No, I'm saying that there is no media streamer at any price which offers everything videophiles need, and it's disappointing that Raspberry Pi can't leverage open-source to fill the gap due to its lack of needed codecs. HTPCs mess with your colorspace; you can't get them to output a 100% untouched signal to your video scaler. Media streamers using Sigma chips can output the correct signal and decode all the needed formats, but their user interfaces suck ass, and none of them except the now-discontinued SageTV HD300 support source direct mode (so if you want untouched output you need to manually change the resolution whenever switching from DVDs to Blu-Rays and back). What is really needed is a full-featured video playback ARM SoC that is open-source friendly so we don't have to put up with the horrible stock firmware every company designs. The upcoming ARM Google TV will use a Marvell Armada 1500 chip with a very good built-in scaler, but it is not clear whether end-user applications will be able to talk to the chip and tell it what to do directly. To do it right, a bare-metal C/C++ API for the SoC is needed. Nothing at any price currently gives this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the decimal places as such. It's the fact that, if we step through the entire stack: Everything is rounded off properly(that means, no floating points math rounding errors)
Anything involving money shouldn't be using floating point anyway. If the language doesn't have a built-in currency data type, the best way to store amounts of money is as an integer quantity of cents. (Of course, if you need mill-level precision, then store an integer quantity of mills instead.)
Juror 1: "If we say this patent is valid, they'll take our internet away!"
Jurors: "Hell no!"
Juror 1: "I guess we should shoot the breeze for a couple hours so they will think we thought hard about this
As an AC poster further down pointed out, this is really no different than what appellate courts do. The decisions made by the Supreme Court have a lot more to do with their personal policy preferences than with black-letter law. This is, in part, because all the obvious slam-dunk cases are resolved at the trial courts and turned down on lower levels of appeal, so the only cases that reach the Supreme Court are the ones where there is a plausible argument to be made on both sides. And this is where it basically comes down to what the judge wants to do.
The effect on a patent validity decision should not be a part of the process, and based on the article's description Tim had no business there giving any opinion. Only facts about what was in place at the time, as it pertains to prior art. Also, the company only wanted money according to the article. It did not want to shut down the internet. So in this specific case, the same is true. It's irrelevant, and the 'what if' case should not be considered.
I disagree. The Constitution makes it clear that copyrights and patents are NOT a fundamental right, and exist only for consequential reasons: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Allowing Eolas to shut down the Internet, or even tax it, would not promote the progress of science and useful arts. Therefore, the courts should not allow the patent system to be used in this manner. This is true regardless of any other facts in the case. The Constitution not only permits, but demands, that we consider the 'what if' case when it comes to copyright and patent laws.
The computer (or phone, or tablet) you're using to type that comment is a direct result of the effort to put man into space. The space program gave us the integrated circuit.
Nonsense. Even NASA's own web page on spinoff benefits doesn't go as far as to make this claim; it seems to be restricted to the fringes of the space-nutter crowd. According to Wikipedia, the antecedents of the integrated circuit date to Germany in 1949, and the first example of what we would today think of as an IC was developed by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958. (Robert Noyce was doing parallel work at Fairchild Semiconductor and had a working example a few months later than Kilby.) NASA wasn't even founded until mid-1958 so it would be difficult to claim they had anything to do with these developments. They didn't invent microprocessors either; that was Intel, which created the 4004 CPU for use in a calculator, not the space program.
While there have been some decent tech spin-offs from the space program in general, there have been very few that can be directly attributed to manned spaceflight. From a cost-benefit perspective it is very difficult to justify shooting people into space rather than spending that same amount of money on R&D back here on Earth.
The difference is that earlier forms of exploration generally served some useful purpose, while sending humans into space is just a publicity stunt with no real scientific or economic value.
you realize that Apple relies on cheap Chinese slave labor to make iPads at $499/ea, right? And if Apple pulled out of China they'd have nowhere else to go. America isn't an option because of labor regulations and an expensive workforce. iPads would be up at $1499 and still losing money, iPhones would be $1000 subsidized and America's economy would take a larger nosedive than China's. Brazil? They've already tried that and it's as bad as America.
Bullshit. The differences in manufacturing costs amount to a few dollars per unit. From the New York Times:
So we're talking about $22, not $1000. You're off by over an order of magnitude. Sure, moving the supply chains from China to the USA would be a big challenge, but that's a one-time expense.
China has the whip hand here. If push came to shove, China could just shut down the iPad factories and even nationalize it.
They could, but they won't, because doing so would make it difficult if not impossible for them to get more foreign corporate investment in the future. If Apple's operations in China are not safe, what other western corporation will think their Chinese operations would be?
My personal opinion is that wars involving world economic powers are going to become less and less likely over the next 50-100 years. There is too much at stake at home, and I don't just mean troops' lives. The global economy is a reality, and we're quite entangled with the economies of pretty much any other country of economic significance - by that I don't just mean the G8, but well beyond that. With the other large economies, we have a lot to lose on exports/imports of finished goods if we go to war, but with the middle 50%, we lose access to inputs - sometimes critical ones, like oil - if we go to war. Even beyond the idea that killing each other is so 20th century, there's too much to lose economically in a hot war in probably 75% of the cases.
Norman Angell made the same argument in 1912, in his book The Great Illusion. He noted that any kind of large-scale war among European powers would be economically destructive and futile, and that even the "winners" would lose more than they gained in blood and treasure. He was right, of course, but it didn't stop World War I from happening anyway only a few years later. I think you overestimate the rationality of humans and underestimate the power of tribal ideology.
is
this what people want to hear? I know many Americans don't really care that much about civil liberties in the abstract, but they do care about things that might affect their own lives. The TSA was popular for a year or two after 9/11, but most Americans hate it now. The average man (or woman) on the street cares a lot more about the bad economy than about vague threats of terrorism.
Why are you not using NoScript?
Can't answer on his behalf, but I don't use NoScript because it breaks virtually every site on the Web by default.
Exactly, thanks smash. I mean who gives a flying fuck about the drive? but if you are working on some important term paper or business proposal and the SSD decides NOW is the time its gonna crap itself? That's when you realize that hot speed isn't worth the crazy failure rates. I mean either you have every. single. change of any note backed up or you are literally rolling the dice. try contacting them and asking about your data, they'll tell you tough luck, it isn't covered.
That's why you store your actual data on magnetic drives - preferably on a NAS with ZFS software RAID. The SSD should only have the OS, installed software, and miscellaneous stuff like cache and swapfile. All this can easily be replaced from a drive image; at most you might need to reinstall a couple of software updates. If you keep a lot of important data on a SSD, you're doing it wrong. Putting the OS and software on SSD gives you all the speed advantage while minimizing downside risk.
Yeah seems to me that Intel is actually helping Sandforce fix the bugs in Sandforce's product. Not for free of course, but one wonders about the long term strategic reasons for this. They could have let Sandforce keep churning out SSDs with buggy firmware.
The Anandtech article indicates that the fixed firmware will be exclusive to Intel for a certain (unspecified) period of time, before being made available to other SandForce vendors. So what Intel gets for their time and effort is a period of exclusivity.
Actually, the EEOC has traditionally taken a very dim view of pencil-and-paper employment tests. While such tests are not openly discriminatory, they are often considered to have a disparate impact on minorities if they fail at a higher rate than white males.
Ah, but because they're PROFITING off the infringement, it escalates to THEFT, a criminal matter.
No, it doesn't. As I noted, copyright infringement can under some circumstances be considered a crime, but it is not considered theft – it's a completely separate and unrelated offense. And the criminal authorities aren't going to get involved in a case where it is not even clear whether the acts in question constituted infringement in the first place. You can repeat the word "theft" all you want, but it doesn't change the underlying facts: you can't copyright game rules.
That paper you cited is on a completely different issue (lockouts and interoperability). An important issue, but not one relevant to Zynga's alleged actions here.
For criminal sanctions for copyright infringement, it now doesn't matter if the infringement was for profit or not. However, the government DOES have to prove that the infringement took place, and that it was willful and deliberate. That's why Zynga cannot and will not be criminally prosecuted; it's not at all clear that what they did was even infringement at all, and even if a civil court ruled that it was, the fact that there were good-faith arguments on the other side indicates the infringing acts were not undertaken willfully and deliberately. Bottom line, no way is the FBI getting involved in this one: if asked, they're going to say it is a civil matter.
As to citing cases, get off your lazy ass and search for yourself. I'm not your Google.
You made the argument. Back it up or STFU.
So the question is not whether they CAN pursue Zynga for jail time, it's a question of whether they CHOOSE to, or go for cash instead.
They can do both simultaneously. Or try to. But in this case, if they go to the FBI and file a claim of copyright or trademark infringement, they will be told that it's a civil matter. Criminal copyright infringement only applies to cases where it's absolutely clear that the copying is prohibited. Here, Zynga can plausibly argue based on existing precedent that game rules aren't subject to copyright at all, so they did nothing wrong. The FBI isn't going to waste their time on this kind of hair-splitting, and you can't force the police or FBI to pursue a criminal case if they don't want to.
Pincus infamously told employees: 'I don't want f*cking innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.'
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I think the open-source movement would be well served if more OSS developers took this advice. Of course, it doesn't always apply, but if you're trying to compete with a dominant commercial product, don't think you know better than Microsoft or Adobe or Apple; just copy the damn thing. The GIMP crew thinks they know better than Adobe how to design a UI, and look at how far that has got them – the butt of every joke in the OSS world. People don't want GIMP, they want an open-source copy of Photoshop, so give that to them. Likewise, people don't want all the "innovative" desktop environments Gnome and KDE are coming out with; they want an open-source copy of the Windows UI. Or better yet an open-source version of Windows; it's amazing to me that ReactOS hasn't gotten more love, when it represents the best potential long-term method for open source to take over the desktop. I know it's not as rewarding for the coders, but if you actually care about the market share of OSS software, this is the way forward. Change the graphics as much as needed for copyright reasons, but copy the look and feel. After all, both Microsoft and Apple got their footholds the same way.
And if the originators of the game ideas win the case, I strongly recommend that they demand jail time for Pincus seeing as he's clearly documented that this is a POLICY of the company under his leadership, so he can't pin the blame on some middle manager and fire him instead.
You don't seem to understand much about U.S. law. Torts are not crimes, and civil cases are not criminal cases. Individuals can't prosecute someone for a crime. You can only sue them civilly and get monetary damages, and/or an injunction to stop doing something. To send someone to jail, the state or federal government would have to criminally prosecute them. And there's next to no chance this will happen here, since it's not even clear that what Zynga did was a tort, let alone an actual crime. (Most trademark and patent infringements are not crimes, though some forms of copyright infringement are.)
If the competition isn't copyrighting and trademarking their games as companies used to in the era of "Pac-Man" and "Space Invaders", then they haven't got the tools needed to defend themselves against Zynga's predatory practices.
Do you have any idea how many Pac-Man and Space Invaders clones there were in the early 1980s? And few, if any, of the cloners were ever sued. This is because, as others have noted, you can't copyright game rules. You can trademark the title and copyright the code and graphics, but not stop someone else from independently re-implementing more or less the same game on their own.
There have been many precedent setting cases in the US and Canada where competitors who cloned and renamed games without altering the play were able to defend against their predators, and force the competition off the market.
Can you cite any of these cases?
f Apple can force HTC and Samsung into a corner because of "design similarities", then the game companies should be able to lynch Zynga the same way.
Apple's claims were based on patents, not copyrights or trademarks.
New versions of Unicode introduce new pages. If you're blocking a page for some reason, the next version of Unicode might introduce another page that extends the functionality of the old page, reintroducing the behavior that led you to block the old page.
So use a whitelist instead of a blacklist for pages.
This actually is a serious problem that has been discussed on the Wikipedia development and foundation mailing lists. Because Wikicode is not rigorously defined like real HTML/XML, the only definition of correct output is "whatever the current parser generates." This not only makes it nearly impossible to independently implement Wikicode in other products besides MediaWiki, but it also makes it far more difficult to create a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't break things. And doing the latter has been a goal of many people high up in Wikipedia for some time.
Oh, come on. Everyone who uses computers even casually knows that the floppy-disk icon means "Save." That it no longer reflects the underlying hardware is irrelevant.
So you're saying if you care about video quality you should spend more than $25?
No, I'm saying that there is no media streamer at any price which offers everything videophiles need, and it's disappointing that Raspberry Pi can't leverage open-source to fill the gap due to its lack of needed codecs. HTPCs mess with your colorspace; you can't get them to output a 100% untouched signal to your video scaler. Media streamers using Sigma chips can output the correct signal and decode all the needed formats, but their user interfaces suck ass, and none of them except the now-discontinued SageTV HD300 support source direct mode (so if you want untouched output you need to manually change the resolution whenever switching from DVDs to Blu-Rays and back). What is really needed is a full-featured video playback ARM SoC that is open-source friendly so we don't have to put up with the horrible stock firmware every company designs. The upcoming ARM Google TV will use a Marvell Armada 1500 chip with a very good built-in scaler, but it is not clear whether end-user applications will be able to talk to the chip and tell it what to do directly. To do it right, a bare-metal C/C++ API for the SoC is needed. Nothing at any price currently gives this.