I read it as: Whatever kind of license we need to run Android, we should get one. As somebody who was not, himself, actually involved in any kind of licensing negotiations, laws, etc., he didn't have the least flipping clue WHAT that might entail.
Imagine my boss seeing emacs for the first time and saying "Holy $hit! this emacs is awesome! SirWired, go buy whatever we need to run it." That isn't any kind of admission that running emacs requires paying somebody; just a statement that he wants it.
Google's position is that no license from Sun was in fact needed, and that Eric Lindstrom was not the person that had anything to do with that determination
To be fair, the amount of current required to fast-charge a car in 1/2 hr (with a 500 mile battery, no less) is enormous. A whole parking lot full of those cars charging at once? That'd require the power feed the size of what you'd use to power a medium-size factory.
I've been with the "range anxiety" crowd for a while now... the current capacity of electric vehicles has meant you pretty much MUST own a second car, or you'll be renting a "real" car pretty often.
If my car can go 500 miles on a charge? The last time I was riding in a car that went that long without an overnight stop (which could be used for charging) was college. Now that I have actual money? If I'm going 500 miles, I fly. (And even if I was driving, I'd get a hotel room for overnight... straight-through shift driving is something I just don't do any more.)
Assuming this can be productized in a relatively reasonable timeframe, this is a HUGE advance. And, if IBM is reporting it, it is more likely to actually be true. (As opposed to some random no-name startup with results that cannot be duplicated and just happens to be up for a round of funding soon...)
I have since learned that he is a comedian with a TV show, and I'm assuming many TV appearances. I don't watch TV.
I'm not saying this in an "I'm superior to you because I don't watch TV" way... just a simple statement of fact.
It would have been helpful if the submitter had said, maybe, "the hit comedian Louis CK". That would have been more than enough information. All it would have taken would have been three little words.
Would it have killed the submitter to include about three to five words informing us who the frack "Louis CK" is? Yes, it's just a Google away, but it would have been nice to mention it in the submission. (Or the editors could have added it.)
If your car is running at WOT (Wide Open Throttle) in neutral you aren't producing the vacuum necessary to power the brake system. Even if the rev limiter pulls you back from WOT, you still won't have that much vac pressure. If you slam on the brakes after popping into neutral (a perfectly normal reaction), the ABS will bleed off your reserve vacuum pretty much instantly and it's going to take you a LOOONNNGGG time to slow down the car. (Power brakes simply are NOT designed to be operated unboosted... even standing on the brakes isn't going to help much.)
Firstly, where did they find their sample of people who have never had bitewings taken? If you've EVER received a dental exam, the dentist almost certainly took a set of bitewings, and probably a panorex.
If you've actually never had bitewings takne, you probably aren't receiving dental care at all. And if you aren't receiving dental care, it's a safe bet that you are more likely (though not certain) to not be receiving quality medical either. Meaning you could have a menengioma and die without it ever being diagnosed.
And please, please, note that even the study stated these results were based on far older radiation levels. Today's x-rays don't need nearly as much.
Given that dental abscesses can be fatal if untreated, (in addition to poor dental health being linked to stuff far more common and deadly than brain tumors), don't refuse dental x-rays based on this report.
- Cavities between the teeth that cannot be found via the probe. If they are caught early, they can be easily treated. If you wait until they CAN be found by the probe, you risk a root canal, or worse. - The dentist is looking for bone recession indicating gum problems - Abscesses under the gumline.
As long as you can think of a complaint that you believe is worth more than twenty dollars, you, too, can sue anyone about anything. Please tell me what the Democrats have to do with that.
And of course, right-leaning god-fearing folk have never been known to engage in divisive identity politics.
WTF is up with the inflammatory headline: "Free Speech or Journalism"? Defamation, extortion, and libel is not now, and never has been, any kind of protected speech. It doesn't matter if you do it in your local newspaper, leaflets you hand out throughout the neighborhood, the corner soapbox, or a network of libelous websites.
If you lose your SS card, and need a new one RIGHT NOW in order to begin a job, the local SS office gives you a black-and-white document, not an actual blue card. The card comes later in the mail.
While you aren't forced to get issued an SSN at birth, part of filling out the paperwork offers the parents the chance to apply for one. (Kind of like getting your driver's license and registering to vote or become an organ donor.) Since the IRS has required the SSN of all dependents on your taxes for a couple of decades now, pretty much all parents go ahead and get the SSN.
(I know this is not true when I was born, and I did not get an SSN until it was time for me to get my first bank account.)
The only time somebody born in the last twenty years or so would be a citizen and not have an SSN would be if they were born in the US to foreign parents. (US parents living abroad would still need to file US taxes, and would want the SSN for the newborn.)
If you apply for an SSN now and you are over a year old, it's a lot harder to get one. You can't just shove a US birth certificate over the counter... the only thing they'll accept is a form authorizing the SSA to obtain a birth certificate directly from the appropriate issuing authority, along with extensive ID checks to make sure you are who you say you are. It's actually easier to get a US Passport than for somebody other than a newborn to get an SSN.
Sealand (and HavenCo)... just like BitCoins. Interesting in an academic sense, but not at all practical or viable in the real world, for reasons which should have been obvious to everyone involved before things even got started.
North is essential if you are lost in the woods and have no idea as to your location, but do know your direction.
But in a moving car, we turn steering wheels "left" or "right", not "North" or "South." Re-orienting the map to the current direction of travel makes perfect sense, especially if you are looking at the display quickly, and it's not immediately clear which way the car is pointed. (At least, not without looking at the symbol for your current location closely.)
With the map always being oriented to the direction of travel, I can see out of the corner of my eye how far it is to the next turn, and which direction the turn will be in. If the map stays oriented North, and I'm right on top of a turn from, say, East to South, I can't tell if I need to make a turn at all, or if I'm supposed to go straight; at least, not without examining the direction pointer closely.
To be blunt, how would you have the least freaking clue whether or not it has a "surprisingly minimal effect on driving."? All you know is that you haven't had to swerve or stomp on your brakes in a while.
I suspect the drivers around you might have a difference of opinion on the matter.
I have absolutely no problem with the idea of BitCoins (I have my doubts about its scalability though.) I think something like BitCoins could fill a useful niche... I don't see the lack of a trusted intermediary, no govt. backing, etc. as major issues.
But BitCoins themselves? The designers betrayed a complete and total lack of understanding of the most basic economic precepts when designing that beyond-awful BitCoin expansion curve. It guaranteed that the currency would go absolutely nowhere... it started off way too quickly (letting those in on the "ground floor" obtain too much of the supply), and then it will level off at some point until it stops growing entirely.
Why on earth would anybody EVER design a currency that would stop growing? If a currency does not expand with the size of the economy using it, it deflates. Massively. Leading to illiquidity, non-functioning credit markets, and wildly fluctuating value. (BTW, the ability to tweak the money supply in response to current economic conditions in order to maintain currency stability is why every single modern economy uses fiat currency. Some central banks are better at it than others, but this nonetheless is precisely why nobody uses the gold standard any more.)
A better curve would have been to start slow to give time for it to be picked up, ramp up as adoption was expected to increase, and then level off at a rate approx. that of annual world GDP growth.
What they did instead was to flood the market at the beginning, and then slow down as adoption increased, and designed it to eventually stop entirely. This was, to be blunt, stupid, and it doomed BitCoins to irrelevancy. (Economically irrelevant anyway... maybe the technical ideas will be picked up by some other team with better economic understanding.)
The hyper-niche and stagnant acceptance of the currency seems like failure to me. If it were successful, you'd think Amazon or some other major outfit would have picked them up by now, but that has not occurred, and will not occur, due to how illiquid BitCoins are.
BitCoin didn't fail because of the lack of government backing. It failed because it's expansion curve was stupidly chosen, leading to an impossible amount of deflation required (thousands of %) for it become anything larger than a geeky toy. The necessary deflation led to hoarding, which in turn led to illiquidity, which in turn led to downright insane swings in value.
Maybe BitCoin 2.0 will learn those lessons. But I have my doubts.
You can use nature all you want when putting developing a patent. What you can't do is patent nature itself.
Patentable: You can test for drug metabolite X by heating a blood sample to 100C, twirling it around your head, adding unicorn tears to it, and then looking for it to turn chartreuse. Unpatentable: If you find metabolite X in the concentration of 100ppm in the blood a 150lb unicorn, it's tears won't grant eternal life.
or, in the grand Slashdot tradition of car analogies:
Patentable: A new fuel formula consisting of Unicorn Tears as an octane booster. Unpatentable: The statement: "Anybody claiming they put unicorn tears in their gas tank to make the car go faster is an idiot."
Yes, discovering natural laws can take a lot of research and effort. But something does not magically become patentable just because it takes work to discover.
This decision most certainly does NOT invalidate chemical process patents. The patent at question was: "Metabolite X is a product of the working dose of drug Y; if you detect X at a certain amount, that's bad." That's it. It's not a patent on how to test for X. It has nothing to do with the creation of Y or X. It's a simple statement of cause and effect. Anyone that measures the metabolite while using the drug would be violating the patent.
A chemical process patent is a different animal altogether. In a chemical process patent you get instructions on how to do things: "You can produce Chemical Z by adding Chemical Y to Catalyst X and heating it to 200C..." This is eminently patentable, and still is after this decision. If you produce Chemical Z with this process, you'll need to license the patent.
The chemical process equivalent of this junk patent would be: "If, when you heat Chemical X to 200C, you detect Chemical Y at 10ppm, X can no longer be used as a catalyst for Z production." It's a useful statement to make, but it's not patentable if the process for producing Z is not itself patentable. All you've done is given hints on how to make a Z factory run better.
It will most certainly stop some commercial research into discovering such relationships. But on the other hand, the lack of such patents also allows research (commercial or otherwise) that simply could not feasibly take place if the patents were allowed to stand.
If Prometheus had developed a unique test for their metabolite, their patent would have been upheld. But giving instructions what as to an unpatentable chemical is good for? Not patentable.
I've read a lot of works I enjoy from Baen. I've gotten hooked on several series (which I have then purchased later installments) from the Free Library.
That said, Baen publishes more polemic than any other major SF publisher I'm aware of, and those books are about as subtle as an Ayn Rand novel. I don't mind books where it is apparent the author has a political viewpoint which differs from mine. But books where you get bludgeoned over the head with it, and it appears the plot exists solely as a background for political ranting... count me out.
Try the Wool series by Hugh Howey. It'll cost you a buck for each book in the currently five-book series. If you read the first installment (a short-form book you should be able to finish in a hurry) and don't like it, I'll personally mail you a dollar bill. Polished and tight, you'll never know it wasn't professionally edited.
He published one book under a publisher, which didn't sell, and hasn't signed on with a publisher since. The Wool series has sold well over 100,000 copies at this point (an SF blockbuster by any measure), and not a dime of that went to a publisher.
Every single one of those benefits is to people developing system-level applications. Every single one. They're all true, but they are also completely irrelevant to the discussion.
The population of people that need to do such things is so small, it's utterly insignificant. That's not what anybody (except you) is referring to when they say "desktops".
Slashdot Mirror
I read it as: Whatever kind of license we need to run Android, we should get one. As somebody who was not, himself, actually involved in any kind of licensing negotiations, laws, etc., he didn't have the least flipping clue WHAT that might entail.
Imagine my boss seeing emacs for the first time and saying "Holy $hit! this emacs is awesome! SirWired, go buy whatever we need to run it." That isn't any kind of admission that running emacs requires paying somebody; just a statement that he wants it.
Google's position is that no license from Sun was in fact needed, and that Eric Lindstrom was not the person that had anything to do with that determination
To be fair, the amount of current required to fast-charge a car in 1/2 hr (with a 500 mile battery, no less) is enormous. A whole parking lot full of those cars charging at once? That'd require the power feed the size of what you'd use to power a medium-size factory.
I've been with the "range anxiety" crowd for a while now... the current capacity of electric vehicles has meant you pretty much MUST own a second car, or you'll be renting a "real" car pretty often.
If my car can go 500 miles on a charge? The last time I was riding in a car that went that long without an overnight stop (which could be used for charging) was college. Now that I have actual money? If I'm going 500 miles, I fly. (And even if I was driving, I'd get a hotel room for overnight... straight-through shift driving is something I just don't do any more.)
Assuming this can be productized in a relatively reasonable timeframe, this is a HUGE advance. And, if IBM is reporting it, it is more likely to actually be true. (As opposed to some random no-name startup with results that cannot be duplicated and just happens to be up for a round of funding soon...)
I have since learned that he is a comedian with a TV show, and I'm assuming many TV appearances. I don't watch TV.
I'm not saying this in an "I'm superior to you because I don't watch TV" way... just a simple statement of fact.
It would have been helpful if the submitter had said, maybe, "the hit comedian Louis CK". That would have been more than enough information. All it would have taken would have been three little words.
Would it have killed the submitter to include about three to five words informing us who the frack "Louis CK" is? Yes, it's just a Google away, but it would have been nice to mention it in the submission. (Or the editors could have added it.)
If your car is running at WOT (Wide Open Throttle) in neutral you aren't producing the vacuum necessary to power the brake system. Even if the rev limiter pulls you back from WOT, you still won't have that much vac pressure. If you slam on the brakes after popping into neutral (a perfectly normal reaction), the ABS will bleed off your reserve vacuum pretty much instantly and it's going to take you a LOOONNNGGG time to slow down the car. (Power brakes simply are NOT designed to be operated unboosted... even standing on the brakes isn't going to help much.)
Firstly, where did they find their sample of people who have never had bitewings taken? If you've EVER received a dental exam, the dentist almost certainly took a set of bitewings, and probably a panorex.
If you've actually never had bitewings takne, you probably aren't receiving dental care at all. And if you aren't receiving dental care, it's a safe bet that you are more likely (though not certain) to not be receiving quality medical either. Meaning you could have a menengioma and die without it ever being diagnosed.
And please, please, note that even the study stated these results were based on far older radiation levels. Today's x-rays don't need nearly as much.
Given that dental abscesses can be fatal if untreated, (in addition to poor dental health being linked to stuff far more common and deadly than brain tumors), don't refuse dental x-rays based on this report.
- Cavities between the teeth that cannot be found via the probe. If they are caught early, they can be easily treated. If you wait until they CAN be found by the probe, you risk a root canal, or worse.
- The dentist is looking for bone recession indicating gum problems
- Abscesses under the gumline.
As long as you can think of a complaint that you believe is worth more than twenty dollars, you, too, can sue anyone about anything. Please tell me what the Democrats have to do with that.
And of course, right-leaning god-fearing folk have never been known to engage in divisive identity politics.
Right on.
WTF is up with the inflammatory headline: "Free Speech or Journalism"? Defamation, extortion, and libel is not now, and never has been, any kind of protected speech. It doesn't matter if you do it in your local newspaper, leaflets you hand out throughout the neighborhood, the corner soapbox, or a network of libelous websites.
If you lose your SS card, and need a new one RIGHT NOW in order to begin a job, the local SS office gives you a black-and-white document, not an actual blue card. The card comes later in the mail.
While you aren't forced to get issued an SSN at birth, part of filling out the paperwork offers the parents the chance to apply for one. (Kind of like getting your driver's license and registering to vote or become an organ donor.) Since the IRS has required the SSN of all dependents on your taxes for a couple of decades now, pretty much all parents go ahead and get the SSN.
(I know this is not true when I was born, and I did not get an SSN until it was time for me to get my first bank account.)
The only time somebody born in the last twenty years or so would be a citizen and not have an SSN would be if they were born in the US to foreign parents. (US parents living abroad would still need to file US taxes, and would want the SSN for the newborn.)
If you apply for an SSN now and you are over a year old, it's a lot harder to get one. You can't just shove a US birth certificate over the counter... the only thing they'll accept is a form authorizing the SSA to obtain a birth certificate directly from the appropriate issuing authority, along with extensive ID checks to make sure you are who you say you are. It's actually easier to get a US Passport than for somebody other than a newborn to get an SSN.
Sealand (and HavenCo)... just like BitCoins. Interesting in an academic sense, but not at all practical or viable in the real world, for reasons which should have been obvious to everyone involved before things even got started.
North is essential if you are lost in the woods and have no idea as to your location, but do know your direction.
But in a moving car, we turn steering wheels "left" or "right", not "North" or "South." Re-orienting the map to the current direction of travel makes perfect sense, especially if you are looking at the display quickly, and it's not immediately clear which way the car is pointed. (At least, not without looking at the symbol for your current location closely.)
With the map always being oriented to the direction of travel, I can see out of the corner of my eye how far it is to the next turn, and which direction the turn will be in. If the map stays oriented North, and I'm right on top of a turn from, say, East to South, I can't tell if I need to make a turn at all, or if I'm supposed to go straight; at least, not without examining the direction pointer closely.
To be blunt, how would you have the least freaking clue whether or not it has a "surprisingly minimal effect on driving."? All you know is that you haven't had to swerve or stomp on your brakes in a while.
I suspect the drivers around you might have a difference of opinion on the matter.
I have absolutely no problem with the idea of BitCoins (I have my doubts about its scalability though.) I think something like BitCoins could fill a useful niche... I don't see the lack of a trusted intermediary, no govt. backing, etc. as major issues.
But BitCoins themselves? The designers betrayed a complete and total lack of understanding of the most basic economic precepts when designing that beyond-awful BitCoin expansion curve. It guaranteed that the currency would go absolutely nowhere... it started off way too quickly (letting those in on the "ground floor" obtain too much of the supply), and then it will level off at some point until it stops growing entirely.
Why on earth would anybody EVER design a currency that would stop growing? If a currency does not expand with the size of the economy using it, it deflates. Massively. Leading to illiquidity, non-functioning credit markets, and wildly fluctuating value. (BTW, the ability to tweak the money supply in response to current economic conditions in order to maintain currency stability is why every single modern economy uses fiat currency. Some central banks are better at it than others, but this nonetheless is precisely why nobody uses the gold standard any more.)
A better curve would have been to start slow to give time for it to be picked up, ramp up as adoption was expected to increase, and then level off at a rate approx. that of annual world GDP growth.
What they did instead was to flood the market at the beginning, and then slow down as adoption increased, and designed it to eventually stop entirely. This was, to be blunt, stupid, and it doomed BitCoins to irrelevancy. (Economically irrelevant anyway... maybe the technical ideas will be picked up by some other team with better economic understanding.)
The hyper-niche and stagnant acceptance of the currency seems like failure to me. If it were successful, you'd think Amazon or some other major outfit would have picked them up by now, but that has not occurred, and will not occur, due to how illiquid BitCoins are.
Personally, I took the EFF, of all places, returning all BitCoin donations as a bad sign.
And the current pathetic theoretical net value of the entire BitCoin currency ($30M) isn't exactly encouraging either.
BitCoin didn't fail because of the lack of government backing. It failed because it's expansion curve was stupidly chosen, leading to an impossible amount of deflation required (thousands of %) for it become anything larger than a geeky toy. The necessary deflation led to hoarding, which in turn led to illiquidity, which in turn led to downright insane swings in value.
Maybe BitCoin 2.0 will learn those lessons. But I have my doubts.
You can use nature all you want when putting developing a patent. What you can't do is patent nature itself.
Patentable: You can test for drug metabolite X by heating a blood sample to 100C, twirling it around your head, adding unicorn tears to it, and then looking for it to turn chartreuse.
Unpatentable: If you find metabolite X in the concentration of 100ppm in the blood a 150lb unicorn, it's tears won't grant eternal life.
or, in the grand Slashdot tradition of car analogies:
Patentable: A new fuel formula consisting of Unicorn Tears as an octane booster.
Unpatentable: The statement: "Anybody claiming they put unicorn tears in their gas tank to make the car go faster is an idiot."
Yes, discovering natural laws can take a lot of research and effort. But something does not magically become patentable just because it takes work to discover.
This decision most certainly does NOT invalidate chemical process patents. The patent at question was: "Metabolite X is a product of the working dose of drug Y; if you detect X at a certain amount, that's bad." That's it. It's not a patent on how to test for X. It has nothing to do with the creation of Y or X. It's a simple statement of cause and effect. Anyone that measures the metabolite while using the drug would be violating the patent.
A chemical process patent is a different animal altogether. In a chemical process patent you get instructions on how to do things: "You can produce Chemical Z by adding Chemical Y to Catalyst X and heating it to 200C..." This is eminently patentable, and still is after this decision. If you produce Chemical Z with this process, you'll need to license the patent.
The chemical process equivalent of this junk patent would be: "If, when you heat Chemical X to 200C, you detect Chemical Y at 10ppm, X can no longer be used as a catalyst for Z production." It's a useful statement to make, but it's not patentable if the process for producing Z is not itself patentable. All you've done is given hints on how to make a Z factory run better.
It will most certainly stop some commercial research into discovering such relationships. But on the other hand, the lack of such patents also allows research (commercial or otherwise) that simply could not feasibly take place if the patents were allowed to stand.
If Prometheus had developed a unique test for their metabolite, their patent would have been upheld. But giving instructions what as to an unpatentable chemical is good for? Not patentable.
I've read a lot of works I enjoy from Baen. I've gotten hooked on several series (which I have then purchased later installments) from the Free Library.
That said, Baen publishes more polemic than any other major SF publisher I'm aware of, and those books are about as subtle as an Ayn Rand novel. I don't mind books where it is apparent the author has a political viewpoint which differs from mine. But books where you get bludgeoned over the head with it, and it appears the plot exists solely as a background for political ranting... count me out.
Try the Wool series by Hugh Howey. It'll cost you a buck for each book in the currently five-book series. If you read the first installment (a short-form book you should be able to finish in a hurry) and don't like it, I'll personally mail you a dollar bill. Polished and tight, you'll never know it wasn't professionally edited.
He published one book under a publisher, which didn't sell, and hasn't signed on with a publisher since. The Wool series has sold well over 100,000 copies at this point (an SF blockbuster by any measure), and not a dime of that went to a publisher.
(And no, I'm not Hugh Howey.)
Every single one of those benefits is to people developing system-level applications. Every single one. They're all true, but they are also completely irrelevant to the discussion.
The population of people that need to do such things is so small, it's utterly insignificant. That's not what anybody (except you) is referring to when they say "desktops".