Android 4.5, brought to you by Pepsi can't be far from here.
Screw you and your cross marketing opportunities.
It should get interesting towards the end though. Can anybody think of a well know sugary snack whose name begins with 'x'? I suppose Xylitol qualifies even though it is an artificial sweetener but it is also a laxative so... umm... not the best choice.
The anomalous behavior that sent up red flags could include staffers downloading multiple documents or accessing classified databases they do not normally use for their work, said two people familiar with the software used to monitor employee activity.
Downloading multiple files? Gee... it sounds like the NSA watchdogs are watching NSA staff so closely the typical NSA staffer has little time to do any actual work between attending regularly scheduled interrogations related the multitude of internal affairs investigations he set in motion while trying to get a bit of work done.
It matters who started what. Firebombing Dresden may very well have been a 'war crime', but on the other hand - it may be justified as a revenge well deserved for the civilians concerned. Hitler did not start the war on his own. He came to power through elections, promising a bigger Germany. Expansion was only possible through war. And so the people who elected him were guilty in said war. So bombing them just to mass murder them can be justified on that ground. (As opposed to people who live and suffer under a dictator they never had any control over.)
Electing a warlord is not ok - when genocide and war is part of his plans. "Mein kampf" and similiar litterature were available before Hitler got elected. Expanding Germany (and somehow getting rid of the jews) were among his campaign promises. Dresden was a war crime, but in this case, the civilians was not innocent.
The USA was responsible for the murder of thousands of people in the Middle East by supporting homicidal dictators in the region during the period after WWII. US agents trained death-squads and torturers, consulted on their activities and financed their operations all over the world. Does that mean that the Twin Towers were, and I quote your self: "revenge well deserved for the [American] civilians concerned"? IMHO the answer is *NO*. Just because somebody is an American and his government (that he may or may not have voted for) sponsors the murder of people in the Middle East it does not mean that this civilian is responsible for the atrocity committed by his government and deserves to die. If that applies to Americans it also applies to everybody else including Germans.
If it is illegal to teach people to avoid a polygraph, what about teaching other skills that can evade police detection. Is teaching encryption illegal? Is discussing mobile phone tracking illegal? Costuming and disguise?
I think that it only makes sense to criminalize aiding a SPECIFIC crime, not providing tools that could be used to commit a crime
According to TFA he didn't get arrested for teaching people how to beat a polygraph, he got done for telling people to conceal the fact that they had received such training when applying for government jobs:
According to prosecutors, Dixon taught seven federal law enforcement applicants and two government contractors, including one who had a security clearance with an unnamed intelligence agency.
Personally I think that polygraph testing is junk-sicence and that if even state-of-the-art polygraphs can be beaten they are essentially paperweights and should not be used by the government at all. That is the best way of putting people like Dixon out of business. No amount of legislating and hauling people into court is going to change the fact that polygraphs are junk, the US govt. might as well try to ban rain on weekends. On top of that we haven't even begun to discuss the fact that polygraphs are less than 100% accurate.
The article says, "we will be introducing a new wearable concept device..." So is this going to be marketed, or just a concept vehicle (perhaps to let some air out of a possible Apple iWatch announcement?)
I the whole iWatch rumour mill has me completely confused. One thing I do know, if Apple managed to sucker everybody into building 'smart-watches' just by leaking the product name 'iWatch' and the damn thing turns out to be their long rumoured TV thingamabob (as in: iWatch TV) I'm going to laugh my head off.
A bit of digging finds that they are reacting Olivine (Magnesium silicate) with CO2 giving Magnesium Carbonate.
This reaction has been studied for years as a sequestration reaction for CO2 but traditionally it needs high pressure and moderate temperature to get reasonable conversion of the Olivine. The team at Newcastle Uni have come up with a method to produce Magnesium Carbonate (Dolomite) at much more modest reaction conditions.
So how much CO2 is being produced with this process per ton of CO2 sequestered? There is hardly any point in an exercise like this if the ratio isn't smaller than one.
There seems to be a lot of looking at Bill Gates with rose coloured glasses. As far as I've been able to tell, Microsoft is still trying to do the same thing as it's always done since it's inception. Wait for others to define a market, then try to buy or muscle your way into it with a "good enough" product.
Then perhaps they should poach somebody from Samsung?
The US is a terrible polluter and has lots of fraked natural gas that have driven down prices, so isn't a very useful comparison.
Unless electricity costs matter to you more than those other concerns (the "terrible polluter" is about as polluting as the EU and fracking just doesn't seem that bad compared to normal oil drilling) at the minor levels they occur at.
We're talking about electricity production here and the most problematic pollutant in electricity production with fossil fuels is CO2. The US produces c.a. 17 tons of the stuff per capita. The only EU country that tops that is Luxembourg with 20 tons, the runner up is the Faroe Islands with 14.3 followed by Estonia with 11.9. So on average the EU countries produce between 50-60% as much CO2 per capita as the US (cit.). Thus in terms of CO2 pollution the USA does indeed rank as a great polluter although the good news is that the current trend is downward, but the US still has a whole lot of progress to make before it reaches EU per capita levels.
If OS X is Unix, what do you call iOS. And if we take Linux as a kind of Unix, how about Android?
Or maybe the title should be written as "the steady decline of Unix Server License sale"
OS X has a Unix certification, iOS as far as I know does not. Of course this entire discussion would become moot if somebody were to foot the bill and get Linux Unix certified.
A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least. Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.
What? That Google is moving from innovation towards stagnation? If people are not being paid to innovate most of them are sure as hell not going to do it for free on their own time when they can spend that same time with their families. Google will become a stagnant empire that lives off it's established products just like Microsoft did until the world changes on them and somebody more innovative creeps up on them and steals their thunder.
Also, there has been this push to push UI metaphors from iOS on to the desktop. THIS IS TERRIBLE. On my 17" Macbook, in Lion, my scroll bars became the width of a quarter.
Who actually uses the mouse to click a scrollbar when you can simply put to fingers on the trackpad and slide, or use a mouse scroller?
I don't know about you, but I actually use my File: Open menu to open docs
I use spotlight to open docs and apps.
... and when I can't tab to an app because it quit behind my back without my permission, I hate this.
iOS 7. OMG. Where to start? Simply by looking at the publicly released images, the design inspires "weak and feeble", with overly saturated (painful) colors against too much white. The functional gears Settings icon of the past has been replaced with a weak looking non functional design that can't work. It doesn't do anything. It's not connected to anything. It's thin and weak.
On this front, the initial releases looked terrible and were panned by many. Even the creator of the font that they used (Helvetica Neue) stated so. One terrible thing is that many elements that were buttons or tappable, used to have a button treatment that made the UI instantly more understandable since a button LOOKED like a button. Now, text is simply blue. Unless it's in another application and then it might be purple, or yellow. This is bad. This is a step back. This forces the user to guess more as to what is a clickable/tappable element and makes the elements harder to see. This isn't helping make an easier to use UI.
Can't help you there, I don't really care much about how things look, I am generally more concerned with how they work...
Gluing the contents to the case? So you can't even update your own machine? Even with the 2011 models, it's not rosy. Simply to replace the keyboard on my 17" MacBook will cost me 500 dollars. 500 damn dollars on a two year old Machine. Sweet mother of suck.
If you want super compact laptops you will have to put up with compromises. If you want super upgradable laptops buy one of those clunky plastic Dell laptops they use in corporate machine pools. Just don't expect compactness and stylish design (you seem to care more about looks than functionality). You are correct in pointing out that MacBooks are hard to disassemble but you get that to various degrees with most other laptops too and the more compact something is the less user upgradable it tends to be. Not that the MacBooks are a complete loss, they are upgradable up to a point. You can for example upgrade the SSD, I have done that myself. That brings me to another point. What are you doing posting on a forum for nerds if you are scared to crack open your laptop swap out the keyboard yourself?
iTunes 11 shipped with a really easy to find data loss bug that cost me 6000 archived podcasts.
iTunes is crap, always has been. Try this:
1) Buy a Samsung phone. 2) Try using Samsung Kies for a couple of months. 3) Realise that there is actually something that sucks way worse than iTunes.
There may be some great engineering going on under the hood, but all I've seen coming out of Apple since Snow Leopard have been substandard OS releases that are slower than Snow Leopard, with questionable features that do not make the Mac easier to use. Even the look of the new software is not what it once was. Look at iTunes 11 (fugly) vs. iTunes 10 (crisp).
And no more 17" MBP? Look. We're all getting older and cramming more pixels into a smaller space isn't going to make the screen easier to read.
Airdrop? Who cares! Give me a FAST UI that doesn't burn my eyeballs off.
I'm really upset with the direction Apple's taking. Snow Leopard was the last release that
I'm from the Netherlands and I did not know it aired on a public channel on the same day as in the US. I can't find any information about it either. All I know it airs on a premium channel 5 days after the US release, which is still not bad!
I live in Germany and I wasn't aware of it. If something like this isn't heavily publisized then the old habits prevail. They should have taken out ads on Pirate Bay and gone to the popular media if they had wanted a proper test case.
It's not just that people don't know about the global release. If you want to subscribe to the channel airing your show you can only get it if you buy som dumbass package with another 24 assorted sports, celebrity, lifestyle channels,... etc... most of whom you never watch but that you get to pay a big fat markup for anyway. What I want is zero day global releases through a service where I can download it rapidly, in consistent quality, malware free and on demand and I'm prepared to pay for it.
They both blatantly copied each other constantly, misused patents, misused lawsuits and injunctions, etc. All these individual little patent disputes are really annoying. They should each be barred from suing each other for anything that happened prior to a certain date so we can be done with this. Then, if they want, they can just duke it out in a paintball game or Mario Party 9 or something.
This is not just about the past. They are both selling phones in the present that each of them claims is infringing on their patents.
The courts should examine the patent, determine how fundamental it is, assign an economic value to each of the patents as a price per phone sold; and then force the two to allow the other's use of the patent: require them to pay each other a royalty of their sales based on the court's valuation of each of their patents, and prohibit any further litigation between the two based on those patents, so long as they pay as required.
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Douchebaggy? Let me try:
1) Big corporations and banks have tons of money to hire legal weasels to weasel them out of paying more than one or two percent taxes and they also use that money to bribe politicians into changing tax laws to lower their tax burden. 2) Joe Sixpack cannot afford to hire self same legal weasels to minimise his taxes nor can he afford to rent corrupt congress critters and make them change tax laws so he pays a way higher portion of his income in taxes than one or two percent by those corporations and banks. 3) There is a financial crisis. 4) Aforementioned corporations and banks get into trouble due to financial crisis and have to be bailed out. Since they themselves hardly paid any taxes most of the money comes out of the tax money paid by Joe Sixpack and a legion of smaller businesses.
That's douchebaggery... If you then consider take into consideration various other things such as... oh... that the moneyed classes in the US and Europe have been manipulating interest rates and raw material prices and I can think of way words words to call these bastards that "douchebags"
You know this how? There's no way to tell if Apple does this or not since their OS is closed source..
C'mon don't be so hard on poor Samsung, they copied Apple's devices, they copied the look of Apple's mobile OS and now they are seeking to copy Apple's weaselyness.
It's all in our heads. We choose to eat some animals (like cows) and not others (like cats) because of cultural reasons. Same with insects.
That is true, however, the average human still accidentally ingests an estimated 0,5-1 kilogram of insect parts every year. A 100gr serving of peanut butter contains around 30 insect parts. Yummy....
IANAA (I am not an Anthropologist) but I'm going to take a stab in the dark and hypothesise that it is because human offspring require a much bigger commitment of time, energy and resources before they can fend for themselves, than the offspring of pretty much any other species on the planet. Mind you monogamy is not exactly some sort of genetic trait we have evolved. Here in the west it is largely a cultural phenomenon that the christian church has popularised. There are plenty of cultures around the world where even fairly low status males can have more than one wife and there are also cultures where wives can have multiple husbands. So it is probably more accurate to say that humans evolved to be highly social and to engage in highly structured very long term bonding to form monogamous or polygamous families, partly to minimise infanticide and to maximise the odds of their very time and resource expensive offspring reaching adulthood.
And in the future years it will also include sites critical of the government, large corporations, etc.
The UK introduced the European Convention and it's freedom of expression guarantees into it's Human Rights Act. Then they added a whole legion of exceptions to freedom of expression such as:
- Threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior.
- Causing alarm or distress or causing a breach of the peace.
- Sending somebody an object deemed indecent or offensive with the intention to cause distress.
- Inciting racial or religious hatred.
- Inciting and encouraging terrorism.
- Possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.
- Imagining the death of the monarc.
- Advocating the abolition of the monarchy.
- Sedition.
- Obscenity and Indecency.
So with all these exceptions the conservatives do not seem to be stepping outside of any legal framework here. Many other European countries have at least some of these exceptions on the books as well as ones on trade secrets, copyrighted material etc. but It is pretty rare to see a government in a democratic western country actually implement across the board opt-out censorship of most or all of the things listed above. They usually content themselves with a subset. Regulation of many cases of things like indecency and obscenity usually happens on a case for case basis through the courts when somebody feels the line has been crossed. Other things on that list seem unenforceable, such as 'imagining the death of the monarch' (seriously?) and 'advocating the abolition of the monarchy'. I know a whole bunch of Britons who'd love to abolish the monarchy and are not afraid to advocate it. Basically the conservatives are testing the limits of the exceptions in the Human Rights act and are using porn as an excuse to get censorship in place. It will be interesting to see what happens if this gets dragged into the UK supreme court. It's also interesting to see the conservatives, who usually can't shut up about how they represent liberty and the free market and how the political left represents the nanny state, turn around and do something like this. I can't imagine many things that you can do that stink more strongly of the nanny-state than this which makes the tories guilty of a massive hypocrisy. Even more interesting is that TFA points out that the HomeSafe system singled out by Cameron is actually operated by Huawei, I take it that I don't have to explain to people here why this is also a massive hypocrisy. The only thing that remains is what to call this thing? Cameron's firewall? Limes Ignis Britannicus?
"Under the plea agreement, which requires court approval, Houston-based Halliburton will also face three years' probation, pay the maximum fine of $200,000..."
yeah good thing they didn't perform wire fraud(or weren't prosecuted for that)..
just regular good 'ol boys fraud affecting billions of dollars..
Foul up an entire ecosystem, wreck the lives of thousands, destroy the evidence, pay $200.000. Download 30 songs off a torrent pay $675.000.
I can't imagine I'm the only one who thinks that is a broke way of valuing things. How about handing in one of those White House petitions about this issue and asking them what they are going to do about it. The answer should be interesting. Even if it turns out to be a gust of hot air at least we'd get to see them squirm for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Old, played out, desperate to remain relevant.
Yeah, they should dissolve Apple and give the money back to the shareholders...
If it makes you feel any better, the Israeli government pinky-promised that they wouldn't use it for anything bad. And that's a PINKY promise, mister!
Right; I mean, it's not like Mossad has a reputation for being disreputable or anything...
And, one should keep in mind that Israel is basically the 51st state so It's not as if the NSA is sharing this data with foreigners.
Android 4.5, brought to you by Pepsi can't be far from here.
Screw you and your cross marketing opportunities.
It should get interesting towards the end though. Can anybody think of a well know sugary snack whose name begins with 'x'? I suppose Xylitol qualifies even though it is an artificial sweetener but it is also a laxative so... umm... not the best choice.
The anomalous behavior that sent up red flags could include staffers downloading multiple documents or accessing classified databases they do not normally use for their work, said two people familiar with the software used to monitor employee activity.
Downloading multiple files? Gee... it sounds like the NSA watchdogs are watching NSA staff so closely the typical NSA staffer has little time to do any actual work between attending regularly scheduled interrogations related the multitude of internal affairs investigations he set in motion while trying to get a bit of work done.
It matters who started what. Firebombing Dresden may very well have been a 'war crime', but on the other hand - it may be justified as a revenge well deserved for the civilians concerned. Hitler did not start the war on his own. He came to power through elections, promising a bigger Germany. Expansion was only possible through war. And so the people who elected him were guilty in said war. So bombing them just to mass murder them can be justified on that ground. (As opposed to people who live and suffer under a dictator they never had any control over.)
Electing a warlord is not ok - when genocide and war is part of his plans. "Mein kampf" and similiar litterature were available before Hitler got elected. Expanding Germany (and somehow getting rid of the jews) were among his campaign promises. Dresden was a war crime, but in this case, the civilians was not innocent.
The USA was responsible for the murder of thousands of people in the Middle East by supporting homicidal dictators in the region during the period after WWII. US agents trained death-squads and torturers, consulted on their activities and financed their operations all over the world. Does that mean that the Twin Towers were, and I quote your self: "revenge well deserved for the [American] civilians concerned"? IMHO the answer is *NO*. Just because somebody is an American and his government (that he may or may not have voted for) sponsors the murder of people in the Middle East it does not mean that this civilian is responsible for the atrocity committed by his government and deserves to die. If that applies to Americans it also applies to everybody else including Germans.
It's a common trope in USA that most poor people are poor because they're lazy or just inherently bad with money.
FTFY.
Otherwise, I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.
True, but they are too big to fail ...
If it is illegal to teach people to avoid a polygraph, what about teaching other skills that can evade police detection. Is teaching encryption illegal? Is discussing mobile phone tracking illegal? Costuming and disguise?
I think that it only makes sense to criminalize aiding a SPECIFIC crime, not providing tools that could be used to commit a crime
According to TFA he didn't get arrested for teaching people how to beat a polygraph, he got done for telling people to conceal the fact that they had received such training when applying for government jobs:
According to prosecutors, Dixon taught seven federal law enforcement applicants and two government contractors, including one who had a security clearance with an unnamed intelligence agency.
Personally I think that polygraph testing is junk-sicence and that if even state-of-the-art polygraphs can be beaten they are essentially paperweights and should not be used by the government at all. That is the best way of putting people like Dixon out of business. No amount of legislating and hauling people into court is going to change the fact that polygraphs are junk, the US govt. might as well try to ban rain on weekends. On top of that we haven't even begun to discuss the fact that polygraphs are less than 100% accurate.
The article says, "we will be introducing a new wearable concept device..." So is this going to be marketed, or just a concept vehicle (perhaps to let some air out of a possible Apple iWatch announcement?)
I the whole iWatch rumour mill has me completely confused. One thing I do know, if Apple managed to sucker everybody into building 'smart-watches' just by leaking the product name 'iWatch' and the damn thing turns out to be their long rumoured TV thingamabob (as in: iWatch TV) I'm going to laugh my head off.
A bit of digging finds that they are reacting Olivine (Magnesium silicate) with CO2 giving Magnesium Carbonate.
This reaction has been studied for years as a sequestration reaction for CO2 but traditionally it needs high pressure and moderate temperature to get reasonable
conversion of the Olivine. The team at Newcastle Uni have come up with a method to produce Magnesium Carbonate (Dolomite) at much more modest reaction conditions.
So how much CO2 is being produced with this process per ton of CO2 sequestered? There is hardly any point in an exercise like this if the ratio isn't smaller than one.
There seems to be a lot of looking at Bill Gates with rose coloured glasses.
As far as I've been able to tell, Microsoft is still trying to do the same thing as it's always done since it's inception. Wait for others to define a market, then try to buy or muscle your way into it with a "good enough" product.
Then perhaps they should poach somebody from Samsung?
3) Stop screwing IT businesses all over.
Right, that's gonna happen...
The US is a terrible polluter and has lots of fraked natural gas that have driven down prices, so isn't a very useful comparison.
Unless electricity costs matter to you more than those other concerns (the "terrible polluter" is about as polluting as the EU and fracking just doesn't seem that bad compared to normal oil drilling) at the minor levels they occur at.
We're talking about electricity production here and the most problematic pollutant in electricity production with fossil fuels is CO2. The US produces c.a. 17 tons of the stuff per capita. The only EU country that tops that is Luxembourg with 20 tons, the runner up is the Faroe Islands with 14.3 followed by Estonia with 11.9. So on average the EU countries produce between 50-60% as much CO2 per capita as the US (cit.). Thus in terms of CO2 pollution the USA does indeed rank as a great polluter although the good news is that the current trend is downward, but the US still has a whole lot of progress to make before it reaches EU per capita levels.
If OS X is Unix, what do you call iOS. And if we take Linux as a kind of Unix, how about Android?
Or maybe the title should be written as "the steady decline of Unix Server License sale"
OS X has a Unix certification, iOS as far as I know does not. Of course this entire discussion would become moot if somebody were to foot the bill and get Linux Unix certified.
A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least. Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.
What? That Google is moving from innovation towards stagnation? If people are not being paid to innovate most of them are sure as hell not going to do it for free on their own time when they can spend that same time with their families. Google will become a stagnant empire that lives off it's established products just like Microsoft did until the world changes on them and somebody more innovative creeps up on them and steals their thunder.
Obligatory: http://www.xkcd.com/504/
Also, there has been this push to push UI metaphors from iOS on to the desktop. THIS IS TERRIBLE. On my 17" Macbook, in Lion, my scroll bars became the width of a quarter.
Who actually uses the mouse to click a scrollbar when you can simply put to fingers on the trackpad and slide, or use a mouse scroller?
I don't know about you, but I actually use my File: Open menu to open docs
I use spotlight to open docs and apps.
... and when I can't tab to an app because it quit behind my back without my permission, I hate this.
defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes
iOS 7. OMG. Where to start? Simply by looking at the publicly released images, the design inspires "weak and feeble", with overly saturated (painful) colors against too much white. The functional gears Settings icon of the past has been replaced with a weak looking non functional design that can't work. It doesn't do anything. It's not connected to anything. It's thin and weak.
On this front, the initial releases looked terrible and were panned by many. Even the creator of the font that they used (Helvetica Neue) stated so. One terrible thing is that many elements that were buttons or tappable, used to have a button treatment that made the UI instantly more understandable since a button LOOKED like a button. Now, text is simply blue. Unless it's in another application and then it might be purple, or yellow. This is bad. This is a step back. This forces the user to guess more as to what is a clickable/tappable element and makes the elements harder to see. This isn't helping make an easier to use UI.
Can't help you there, I don't really care much about how things look, I am generally more concerned with how they work...
Gluing the contents to the case? So you can't even update your own machine? Even with the 2011 models, it's not rosy. Simply to replace the keyboard on my 17" MacBook will cost me 500 dollars. 500 damn dollars on a two year old Machine. Sweet mother of suck.
If you want super compact laptops you will have to put up with compromises. If you want super upgradable laptops buy one of those clunky plastic Dell laptops they use in corporate machine pools. Just don't expect compactness and stylish design (you seem to care more about looks than functionality). You are correct in pointing out that MacBooks are hard to disassemble but you get that to various degrees with most other laptops too and the more compact something is the less user upgradable it tends to be. Not that the MacBooks are a complete loss, they are upgradable up to a point. You can for example upgrade the SSD, I have done that myself. That brings me to another point. What are you doing posting on a forum for nerds if you are scared to crack open your laptop swap out the keyboard yourself?
iTunes 11 shipped with a really easy to find data loss bug that cost me 6000 archived podcasts.
iTunes is crap, always has been. Try this:
1) Buy a Samsung phone.
2) Try using Samsung Kies for a couple of months.
3) Realise that there is actually something that sucks way worse than iTunes.
There may be some great engineering going on under the hood, but all I've seen coming out of Apple since Snow Leopard have been substandard OS releases that are slower than Snow Leopard, with questionable features that do not make the Mac easier to use. Even the look of the new software is not what it once was. Look at iTunes 11 (fugly) vs. iTunes 10 (crisp).
And no more 17" MBP? Look. We're all getting older and cramming more pixels into a smaller space isn't going to make the screen easier to read.
Airdrop? Who cares! Give me a FAST UI that doesn't burn my eyeballs off.
I'm really upset with the direction Apple's taking. Snow Leopard was the last release that
I'm from the Netherlands and I did not know it aired on a public channel on the same day as in the US. I can't find any information about it either. All I know it airs on a premium channel 5 days after the US release, which is still not bad!
I live in Germany and I wasn't aware of it. If something like this isn't heavily publisized then the old habits prevail.
They should have taken out ads on Pirate Bay and gone to the popular media if they had wanted a proper test case.
It's not just that people don't know about the global release. If you want to subscribe to the channel airing your show you can only get it if you buy som dumbass package with another 24 assorted sports, celebrity, lifestyle channels,... etc ... most of whom you never watch but that you get to pay a big fat markup for anyway. What I want is zero day global releases through a service where I can download it rapidly, in consistent quality, malware free and on demand and I'm prepared to pay for it.
They both blatantly copied each other constantly, misused patents, misused lawsuits and injunctions, etc. All these individual little patent disputes are really annoying. They should each be barred from suing each other for anything that happened prior to a certain date so we can be done with this. Then, if they want, they can just duke it out in a paintball game or Mario Party 9 or something.
This is not just about the past. They are both selling phones in the present that each of them claims is infringing on their patents.
The courts should examine the patent, determine how fundamental it is, assign an economic value to each of the patents as a price per phone sold; and then force the two to allow the other's use of the patent: require them to pay each other a royalty of their sales based on the court's valuation of each of their patents, and prohibit any further litigation between the two based on those patents, so long as they pay as required.
I am a bit confused here. I distinctly remember reading that UPSTO had invalidated the Steve Jobs patent (No. 7,479,949). Now alluvasudden Samsung is in trouble for infringing on this same patent.
How is that douchebaggy?
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Douchebaggy? Let me try:
1) Big corporations and banks have tons of money to hire legal weasels to weasel them out of paying more than one or two percent taxes and they also use that money to bribe politicians into changing tax laws to lower their tax burden.
2) Joe Sixpack cannot afford to hire self same legal weasels to minimise his taxes nor can he afford to rent corrupt congress critters and make them change tax laws so he pays a way higher portion of his income in taxes than one or two percent by those corporations and banks.
3) There is a financial crisis.
4) Aforementioned corporations and banks get into trouble due to financial crisis and have to be bailed out. Since they themselves hardly paid any taxes most of the money comes out of the tax money paid by Joe Sixpack and a legion of smaller businesses.
That's douchebaggery... If you then consider take into consideration various other things such as... oh... that the moneyed classes in the US and Europe have been manipulating interest rates and raw material prices and I can think of way words words to call these bastards that "douchebags"
You know this how? There's no way to tell if Apple does this or not since their OS is closed source..
C'mon don't be so hard on poor Samsung, they copied Apple's devices, they copied the look of Apple's mobile OS and now they are seeking to copy Apple's weaselyness.
It's all in our heads. We choose to eat some animals (like cows) and not others (like cats) because of cultural reasons. Same with insects.
That is true, however, the average human still accidentally ingests an estimated 0,5-1 kilogram of insect parts every year. A 100gr serving of peanut butter contains around 30 insect parts. Yummy....
why it hasn't evolved in lots of other species.
IANAA (I am not an Anthropologist) but I'm going to take a stab in the dark and hypothesise that it is because human offspring require a much bigger commitment of time, energy and resources before they can fend for themselves, than the offspring of pretty much any other species on the planet. Mind you monogamy is not exactly some sort of genetic trait we have evolved. Here in the west it is largely a cultural phenomenon that the christian church has popularised. There are plenty of cultures around the world where even fairly low status males can have more than one wife and there are also cultures where wives can have multiple husbands. So it is probably more accurate to say that humans evolved to be highly social and to engage in highly structured very long term bonding to form monogamous or polygamous families, partly to minimise infanticide and to maximise the odds of their very time and resource expensive offspring reaching adulthood.
Get it? They said OR, so that's not a lie.
Let's see how much I remember from logic class... they said they will !Kill v Torture Snowden:
!K|K|T|!TvK
------------
0|1|1| 1 <--
0|1|0| 0
1|0|1| 1
1|0|0| 1
Heh, he's right ... torturing AND killing Snowden is an option.
And in the future years it will also include sites critical of the government, large corporations, etc.
The UK introduced the European Convention and it's freedom of expression guarantees into it's Human Rights Act. Then they added a whole legion of exceptions to freedom of expression such as:
So with all these exceptions the conservatives do not seem to be stepping outside of any legal framework here. Many other European countries have at least some of these exceptions on the books as well as ones on trade secrets, copyrighted material etc. but It is pretty rare to see a government in a democratic western country actually implement across the board opt-out censorship of most or all of the things listed above. They usually content themselves with a subset. Regulation of many cases of things like indecency and obscenity usually happens on a case for case basis through the courts when somebody feels the line has been crossed. Other things on that list seem unenforceable, such as 'imagining the death of the monarch' (seriously?) and 'advocating the abolition of the monarchy'. I know a whole bunch of Britons who'd love to abolish the monarchy and are not afraid to advocate it. Basically the conservatives are testing the limits of the exceptions in the Human Rights act and are using porn as an excuse to get censorship in place. It will be interesting to see what happens if this gets dragged into the UK supreme court. It's also interesting to see the conservatives, who usually can't shut up about how they represent liberty and the free market and how the political left represents the nanny state, turn around and do something like this. I can't imagine many things that you can do that stink more strongly of the nanny-state than this which makes the tories guilty of a massive hypocrisy. Even more interesting is that TFA points out that the HomeSafe system singled out by Cameron is actually operated by Huawei, I take it that I don't have to explain to people here why this is also a massive hypocrisy. The only thing that remains is what to call this thing? Cameron's firewall? Limes Ignis Britannicus?
"Under the plea agreement, which requires court approval, Houston-based Halliburton will also face three years' probation, pay the maximum fine of $200,000..."
yeah good thing they didn't perform wire fraud(or weren't prosecuted for that)..
just regular good 'ol boys fraud affecting billions of dollars..
Foul up an entire ecosystem, wreck the lives of thousands, destroy the evidence, pay $200.000.
Download 30 songs off a torrent pay $675.000.
I can't imagine I'm the only one who thinks that is a broke way of valuing things. How about handing in one of those White House petitions about this issue and asking them what they are going to do about it. The answer should be interesting. Even if it turns out to be a gust of hot air at least we'd get to see them squirm for a while.