But sir, do we surrender before or after we file the missiles?
That is a tired such a tired joke.
Of 125 major European wars since 1495, the French have fought in 50, more than Austria (47) and England (43). Out of a total 168 battles since 387BC, they won 109, lost 49 and drawn 10.
-- Stephen Fry, QI season 6 episode 5.
Not bad for a bunch of surrender monkeys. Disclaimer: I'm a German and we were, after all, responsible for that oft mentioned surrender but we also admire courage and tenacity even in our (thankfully former) enemies. If you occupants of the Anglo Saxon cultural bubble want to call anybody a bunch of 'Surrender Mokeys' it's us Germans. We did after all surrender twice in the last century, the French only once.
The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
So 30,000 years doesn't seem to be beyond recoverable, as long as you get enough material from a body kept under roughly ideal conditions.
So you are saying that the DNA is fragmented but it can still be 'stitched' together even If the DNA degrades. How do you re-assemble the DNA of an archaic hominid accurately when it had DNA that was different from ours? I suppose you could use the DNA of modern humans as a clue but if that is the case (and I'm not saying it is), what about animals that are extinct and have no close genetic relative today like, say, a terror-bird. What I mean is that with Neanderthal DNA being sequencable we could theoretically some day clone a Neanderthal does that mean that 'Pleistocene park' is theoretically doable, that we could some day theoretically possibly clone any animal from the Pleistocene period as long as we have the genetic data?
If the half-life of DNA is 521 years how are scientists able to sequence 30.000 year old Neanderthal DNA? Presumably this applies to regular DNA, did Svante Pääbo and his team sequence mtDNA?
While I agree with you, the last time Apple tried to change post-Jobs, it went horribly wrong.
You mean when Jobs was running the company into the ground and the board finally had to force him out so that they could run it into the ground themselves?
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the cat experiment, in that the author is assuming that by opening the box the cat gets killed. When in fact the cat can be considered both alive AND dead while the box is unopened, and if you open it it might very well be alive and not dead. Thus it would be equally accurate (or inaccurate, rather) to say "the equivalent of taking a peek at Schrodinger's metaphorical cat without making it LIVE.
I'm not a quantum physicist but If I understand Schrödinger's experiment correctly (feel free to reeducate me), the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box and 'fix' it's state. Until you observe the cat all you can say is that the closer you get to an hour (the radioctive matierial decays one atom per hour) the more likely it is that the cat is dead. So have these scientists managed to observe Schrödinger's cat in it's dual live/dead 'flux' state?
I hope they nail his ass to the wall for juror misconduct and that Samsung gets an actual fair and impartial trial out of it.
After the Billion-Dollar ruling against Samsung last time, good luck finding a jury of 12 people who haven't heard about the case and had a chance to form an opinion about it. Even my grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, asked me about it last time I saw her.
I'm pretty sure 98% of the general public doesn't give a rats ass which soulless megacorp wins this fight and thus they have not been following it with even a fraction of the attention they lavish on their favourite reality shows. The only people who care about this lawsuit are geeks, lawyers and possibly a few "business analysts".
Funny that Apple sell so many retina MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs when they're the most expensive machines you can buy in those form factors. Could it be that a race to the bottom, cutting corners to reduce costs, ISN'T what people want? What happened with Netbooks again?
If PC manufacturers are struggling to knock $4-500 off the price of an UltraBook to bring it into the $6-700 price range, I am having a hard time seeing how the MacBook Air is massively overpriced at $1,199.00. I'll only believe that PC manufacturers can produce something that rivals the MacBook Air, and that has a retail price-tag of $600, when I see it. I know it is fashionable these days to hate Apple but the MacBook Air is actually a quality machine and a feat of engineering. All of the UltraBooks I have seen that were anything like as nice as the MacBook Air, like the ZenBook, were priced very similarly to the MacBook Air.
That's because the Japanese AREN'T ASSHOLES! It's a major part of their culture, being packed on a tiny island. They developed a concept that roughly equates to "don't annoy other people."
This must be a recent development, according to some US veterans I ran into a few years ago the Japanese were very annoying back in the mid 1940s.
Maybe it is, but writing, say, a FOSS library and then not writing any documentation is the best way of ensuring hardly anybody ever uses your code. Not writing at least half way usable documentation is a bit like spending tons of money developing a product and then doing no marketing because marketing is 'boring', you won't sell very much product. I always gravitate toward APIs that are well documented even if they have fewer features. Basically if I can't get a simple non-trivial example working in about 2-3 hours due to lousy documentation I'll start looking for alternatives. I'm not going to rifle through sources to figure out how to use an API unless I am forced to.
Honest Question: after perusing your site, the findings indicate that the underlying mapping data is seriously flawed. Apple gets its mapping data from third parties, primarily Tom Tom. I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist--they still need to take responsibility for the performance of the final product, data used and all--but wouldn't this suggest that Tom Tom's dataset is largely to blame? Or am I missing something deeper here?
Wouldn't the same apply if Apple had chosen to stop using Samsung to supply Flash RAM for the iPhone, so they found a different (but inferior) source, which sometimes has memory corruption problems. Apple doesn't make the Flash themselves, all they do is choose the manufacturer and integrate it into their phone. The did some testing, found a few faults but figured that it was "good enough" so they shipped it...or maybe Apple didn't even test it, they just assumed it would work. Would it be Apple's fault that the Flash sucks or is it the Flash manufacturer's?
I think they just bit off more than they could chew. Apple has done it before, for example the 10.2 and 10.3 OS X releases were prone to kernel panics. At some point Apple then decided to dedicate a OS release (the 10.5 release IIRC) to stability improvements and the problem went away. If you want to provide a viable alternative to a product like Google Maps you need a large team of qualified experts in cartography and a whole lot of pretty high quality coders, especially if yo are planning to merge mapping data from many different sources. You can't just throw a team of developers at a problem like this and expect a result in record time.
What I find amusing is that Apple have a hundred billion dollars that they have no idea what to do with. Looks like they're now going to have to try and hire thousands of Nokia and Google map experts (and no, we're not just talking about software developers, they are ten a penny in comparison).
Good! Then the established players get some more competition.
While it's fun to think that China's got a stranglehold on the US, the truth is the economies are so intertwined and dependent upon each other neither side would do anything other that a futile bit of posturing now and again for press points. The Federal Reserve holds most of the US government's debt, not China. So the "doomsday" scenario about China "cashing in" on US debt is unfounded as well, but hey, it sells newspapers I guess. (China has about 8% iirc.).
I'm not so sure about that. US companies built up massive business interests in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s but the US Govt. still elected to side with Britain and go to war with Germany which was doubtless the correct decision but it caused a lot of US companies to loose major investments. Some US corporations managed to regain some of their possessions after WWII and a few even exercised some influence over their German subsidiaries through the shell companies in Switzerland but the losses in dollars were still massive. The lesson is that you should not count on economic interests trumping a cocktail of mass-emotions, ideology (and/or religion) and demagoguery every time.
No, given Steve's legendary temper tantrums, posing him with an angry face and getting ready to stomp on a Galaxy S3 would be more in character. I am a minimalist myself and I admire the guy's eye for design and his nose for market opportunities but he definitely had anger management issues and he seems to have been a champion grudge holder. A thousand years ago these qualities would have made him a fine Viking beserker warlord, today they make you a top CEO...
What I meant is that if that is really the case Apple should have taken the necessary time or invested the necessary amount of resources to have a good alternative solution. I highly doubt that Google's terms were anywhere as bad as you describe, though. Google has a long history of allowing other to license the use of its technologies, unlike Apple.
I think that Apple has long adhered to the Agile Software Development concept of committing 'just enough' development resources to a product to implement 'just enough' features to make that product a viable choice for people to buy. You can see this in earlier releases of the iPhone OS where they left out a long list of features like 'copy/paste', 'mark mail as read' and a whole lot of other small and small-ish features who then crept into later releases. People voted with their wallets and bought their iPhones anyway because the feature set was still complete enough to make the devices interesting. This time Apple simply underestimated what 'just enough' is when it comes to mapping applications. Apple also seriously underestimated just how much people use maps on their smart-phones. I think Apple's mad scramble to hire people with cartographic experience makes this obvious. Unfortunately for them Apple will not be able to catch up with Google Maps unless they shell out a significant proportion of their vast cash reserve, which I hope they do since I applaud any serous competition Google gets.
Where, exactly, do you propose that an iOS6 user download this alleged Google Maps app from?
The way I see it there are three options:
1) If Apple Maps really sucks so badly and Google does release it's maps app for iOS 6 (porting the existing one to iOS 6 should be really easy) one would think that most regular Google Maps users would simply download the Google mapping app from the Appstore. Nothing much changes until Apple Maps starts to not suck and it seems it will take a while before that happens
2) Google crawls into a corner to sulk and decides to 'punish' Apple by refusing to release a native Google Maps app for iOS 6. However, since the only reason Google Maps exists in the first place is to enable Google to harvest certain location data from mobile users (according to them anonymously) it would be very bad business for Google to suddenly retire it's most powerful harvesting tool and miss out on location data from the hoard of (what is it now, tens of millions?) of iOS users simply out of spite and loose out on all that location data. Apple users are stuck with a crappy mapping app unless and until some third party creates a Google Maps front end for iOS.
3) Apple rejects the Google Maps and any other competing Mapping app because it 'replicates functionality already present in iOS'. In that case we will probably see some very interesting lawsuits unfold.
Even under the most retarded configurations the control panel in windows is at most 2 clicks away.
And then? After you hit the control panel the click-pahts can be pretty daunting, or they could be prior to Windows 7, I haven't taken a long hard look at Win 7. A friend of mine worked on a tech support line for a telecom as a student. Her assessment was that with Windows XP/Vista when talking a user through some sort of network/hardware configuration procedure, the click paths were sometimes so long and confusing you lost track of what the customer was doing and had to tell him/her to shut all open windows and start again. With the Mac this was much less of an issue. Linux users, as usual, were up a creek without a paddle unless the random tech guy they happened to allocated by the switchboard happened to be a Linux geek or a CS student.
What a terrible first response. I mean fucking, stupidly, terrible. You don't unionize over a few bad practices, probably put in place by a stupid manager. You unionize when labor laws are obviously being violated.
There is a distinct issue here of medical privacy that is most likely being violated. Tracking bathroom visits could be a way for someone to infer you have a medical condition.
What you should do is seek an attorney who will look at this pro bono. They will probably tell you to start with your HR department with a complaint. It's all about the paper trail.
I will never understand how the political and moneyed classes in the USA managed to convince the working man in that country that unions are the spawn of Satan. While I can see the problem when unions becoming lazy and corrupt I don't really see what is wrong with the vast majority of them who are properly run. I have been a union member all of my professional life. I prefer to have a union behind me to foot the bill if I have to take my employer to court as opposed to the situation in the US where you are frequently up shit creek without a paddle if your employer decides to crap all over you. Another service I get from my a union is legal advice regarding employment contracts. One of the many things the engineers union I am a member of offers to for it's members is to have a legal professional read over your employment contract and point out to you legal land mines your employer sometimes builds into those things like draconian clauses about IP ownership, anti competition stuff and requirements that you relinquish the right to take them to court in favour of private arbitration (no prizes for guessing who gets to choose the arbitrator). It's easy to abuse a single person, it's a whole lot harder for employers to abuse 100.000 of you standing together.
Hardware patents perhaps, but personally I don't think software patents have helped in any way to further innovation. They are only a weapon.
So what you are saying is that a guy who pours significant amounts of time into developing an algorithm, making it space and time efficient, modelling it to resolve concurrency issues, etc... should not get patent protection and that you are 'entitled' to use his algorithm without compensating him for all his hard work? Creating algorithms is one example of a software development activity that is by far not always a trivial. I can see why granting a once-click-shopping patent or a slide-to-unlock patent is just plain dumb, I can also see why people are frustrated by big corporations patenting obvious stuff by the shipload and then using the expense of patent lawsuits as a tool to drive small competitors out of business. All of these are things that are wrong with the current system. However, I also fail to see why a guy developing hardware deserves patent protection but a guy developing software doesn't because that's one thing the patent system currently does right, which is giving inventors some protection against being ripped off by predators.
Friendly Reminder: Apple, Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is permitted to like.
No, Apple's off the list because they're so ridiculously evil nowadays. Their sole goal is to lock you into their own ecosystem and prevent you from doing what you want with your purchased devices, and they're actively trying to destroy anyone they compete with.
Sooo.... Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is officially not permitted to criticise? Has Samsung then replaced Apple on that list?
Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Party is actually clear that they want to retain the creator's right to attribution. It's only the economic rights they want to abolish.
The problem being that the creators sustain them selves by the same economic rights the pirates want to abolish.
But sir, do we surrender before or after we file the missiles?
That is a tired such a tired joke.
Of 125 major European wars since 1495, the French have fought in 50, more than Austria (47) and England (43).
Out of a total 168 battles since 387BC, they won 109, lost 49 and drawn 10.
-- Stephen Fry, QI season 6 episode 5.
Not bad for a bunch of surrender monkeys. Disclaimer: I'm a German and we were, after all, responsible for that oft mentioned surrender but we also admire courage and tenacity even in our (thankfully former) enemies. If you occupants of the Anglo Saxon cultural bubble want to call anybody a bunch of 'Surrender Mokeys' it's us Germans. We did after all surrender twice in the last century, the French only once.
From TFA:
So 30,000 years doesn't seem to be beyond recoverable, as long as you get enough material from a body kept under roughly ideal conditions.
So you are saying that the DNA is fragmented but it can still be 'stitched' together even If the DNA degrades. How do you re-assemble the DNA of an archaic hominid accurately when it had DNA that was different from ours? I suppose you could use the DNA of modern humans as a clue but if that is the case (and I'm not saying it is), what about animals that are extinct and have no close genetic relative today like, say, a terror-bird. What I mean is that with Neanderthal DNA being sequencable we could theoretically some day clone a Neanderthal does that mean that 'Pleistocene park' is theoretically doable, that we could some day theoretically possibly clone any animal from the Pleistocene period as long as we have the genetic data?
If the half-life of DNA is 521 years how are scientists able to sequence 30.000 year old Neanderthal DNA? Presumably this applies to regular DNA, did Svante Pääbo and his team sequence mtDNA?
I haven't seen a non-phone, non-tablet media player in years either.
Do you go to the gym regularly? Half the Aerobics nuts in my gym have an iPod Nano or Shuffle lashed to their upper arm.
The effect of him winning would pretty much destroy Monsanto's GMO business model though.
Hope springs eternal.
While I agree with you, the last time Apple tried to change post-Jobs, it went horribly wrong.
You mean when Jobs was running the company into the ground and the board finally had to force him out so that they could run it into the ground themselves?
There.... I fixed it for you.
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the cat experiment, in that the author is assuming that by opening the box the cat gets killed. When in fact the cat can be considered both alive AND dead while the box is unopened, and if you open it it might very well be alive and not dead. Thus it would be equally accurate (or inaccurate, rather) to say "the equivalent of taking a peek at Schrodinger's metaphorical cat without making it LIVE.
I'm not a quantum physicist but If I understand Schrödinger's experiment correctly (feel free to reeducate me), the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box and 'fix' it's state. Until you observe the cat all you can say is that the closer you get to an hour (the radioctive matierial decays one atom per hour) the more likely it is that the cat is dead. So have these scientists managed to observe Schrödinger's cat in it's dual live/dead 'flux' state?
I hope they nail his ass to the wall for juror misconduct and that Samsung gets an actual fair and impartial trial out of it.
After the Billion-Dollar ruling against Samsung last time, good luck finding a jury of 12 people who haven't heard about the case and had a chance to form an opinion about it. Even my grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, asked me about it last time I saw her.
I'm pretty sure 98% of the general public doesn't give a rats ass which soulless megacorp wins this fight and thus they have not been following it with even a fraction of the attention they lavish on their favourite reality shows. The only people who care about this lawsuit are geeks, lawyers and possibly a few "business analysts".
Funny that Apple sell so many retina MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs when they're the most expensive machines you can buy in those form factors. Could it be that a race to the bottom, cutting corners to reduce costs, ISN'T what people want? What happened with Netbooks again?
If PC manufacturers are struggling to knock $4-500 off the price of an UltraBook to bring it into the $6-700 price range, I am having a hard time seeing how the MacBook Air is massively overpriced at $1,199.00. I'll only believe that PC manufacturers can produce something that rivals the MacBook Air, and that has a retail price-tag of $600, when I see it. I know it is fashionable these days to hate Apple but the MacBook Air is actually a quality machine and a feat of engineering. All of the UltraBooks I have seen that were anything like as nice as the MacBook Air, like the ZenBook, were priced very similarly to the MacBook Air.
That's because the Japanese AREN'T ASSHOLES! It's a major part of their culture, being packed on a tiny island. They developed a concept that roughly equates to "don't annoy other people."
This must be a recent development, according to some US veterans I ran into a few years ago the Japanese were very annoying back in the mid 1940s.
'Nuff said.
Writing documentation is boring and tedious.
'Nuff said.
Maybe it is, but writing, say, a FOSS library and then not writing any documentation is the best way of ensuring hardly anybody ever uses your code. Not writing at least half way usable documentation is a bit like spending tons of money developing a product and then doing no marketing because marketing is 'boring', you won't sell very much product. I always gravitate toward APIs that are well documented even if they have fewer features. Basically if I can't get a simple non-trivial example working in about 2-3 hours due to lousy documentation I'll start looking for alternatives. I'm not going to rifle through sources to figure out how to use an API unless I am forced to.
Honest Question: after perusing your site, the findings indicate that the underlying mapping data is seriously flawed. Apple gets its mapping data from third parties, primarily Tom Tom. I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist--they still need to take responsibility for the performance of the final product, data used and all--but wouldn't this suggest that Tom Tom's dataset is largely to blame? Or am I missing something deeper here?
Wouldn't the same apply if Apple had chosen to stop using Samsung to supply Flash RAM for the iPhone, so they found a different (but inferior) source, which sometimes has memory corruption problems. Apple doesn't make the Flash themselves, all they do is choose the manufacturer and integrate it into their phone. The did some testing, found a few faults but figured that it was "good enough" so they shipped it...or maybe Apple didn't even test it, they just assumed it would work. Would it be Apple's fault that the Flash sucks or is it the Flash manufacturer's?
I think they just bit off more than they could chew. Apple has done it before, for example the 10.2 and 10.3 OS X releases were prone to kernel panics. At some point Apple then decided to dedicate a OS release (the 10.5 release IIRC) to stability improvements and the problem went away. If you want to provide a viable alternative to a product like Google Maps you need a large team of qualified experts in cartography and a whole lot of pretty high quality coders, especially if yo are planning to merge mapping data from many different sources. You can't just throw a team of developers at a problem like this and expect a result in record time.
What I find amusing is that Apple have a hundred billion dollars that they have no idea what to do with. Looks like they're now going to have to try and hire thousands of Nokia and Google map experts (and no, we're not just talking about software developers, they are ten a penny in comparison).
Good! Then the established players get some more competition.
[APPLAUSE]
While it's fun to think that China's got a stranglehold on the US, the truth is the economies are so intertwined and dependent upon each other neither side would do anything other that a futile bit of posturing now and again for press points. The Federal Reserve holds most of the US government's debt, not China. So the "doomsday" scenario about China "cashing in" on US debt is unfounded as well, but hey, it sells newspapers I guess. (China has about 8% iirc.).
I'm not so sure about that. US companies built up massive business interests in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s but the US Govt. still elected to side with Britain and go to war with Germany which was doubtless the correct decision but it caused a lot of US companies to loose major investments. Some US corporations managed to regain some of their possessions after WWII and a few even exercised some influence over their German subsidiaries through the shell companies in Switzerland but the losses in dollars were still massive. The lesson is that you should not count on economic interests trumping a cocktail of mass-emotions, ideology (and/or religion) and demagoguery every time.
Pose him with a Galaxy S3 in hand.
No, given Steve's legendary temper tantrums, posing him with an angry face and getting ready to stomp on a Galaxy S3 would be more in character. I am a minimalist myself and I admire the guy's eye for design and his nose for market opportunities but he definitely had anger management issues and he seems to have been a champion grudge holder. A thousand years ago these qualities would have made him a fine Viking beserker warlord, today they make you a top CEO...
Is anyone else sick of hearing about Apple vs. Samsung?
Count me in.
What I meant is that if that is really the case Apple should have taken the necessary time or invested the necessary amount of resources to have a good alternative solution. I highly doubt that Google's terms were anywhere as bad as you describe, though. Google has a long history of allowing other to license the use of its technologies, unlike Apple.
I think that Apple has long adhered to the Agile Software Development concept of committing 'just enough' development resources to a product to implement 'just enough' features to make that product a viable choice for people to buy. You can see this in earlier releases of the iPhone OS where they left out a long list of features like 'copy/paste', 'mark mail as read' and a whole lot of other small and small-ish features who then crept into later releases. People voted with their wallets and bought their iPhones anyway because the feature set was still complete enough to make the devices interesting. This time Apple simply underestimated what 'just enough' is when it comes to mapping applications. Apple also seriously underestimated just how much people use maps on their smart-phones. I think Apple's mad scramble to hire people with cartographic experience makes this obvious. Unfortunately for them Apple will not be able to catch up with Google Maps unless they shell out a significant proportion of their vast cash reserve, which I hope they do since I applaud any serous competition Google gets.
Where, exactly, do you propose that an iOS6 user download this alleged Google Maps app from?
The way I see it there are three options:
1) If Apple Maps really sucks so badly and Google does release it's maps app for iOS 6 (porting the existing one to iOS 6 should be really easy) one would think that most regular Google Maps users would simply download the Google mapping app from the Appstore. Nothing much changes until Apple Maps starts to not suck and it seems it will take a while before that happens
2) Google crawls into a corner to sulk and decides to 'punish' Apple by refusing to release a native Google Maps app for iOS 6. However, since the only reason Google Maps exists in the first place is to enable Google to harvest certain location data from mobile users (according to them anonymously) it would be very bad business for Google to suddenly retire it's most powerful harvesting tool and miss out on location data from the hoard of (what is it now, tens of millions?) of iOS users simply out of spite and loose out on all that location data. Apple users are stuck with a crappy mapping app unless and until some third party creates a Google Maps front end for iOS.
3) Apple rejects the Google Maps and any other competing Mapping app because it 'replicates functionality already present in iOS'. In that case we will probably see some very interesting lawsuits unfold.
Which do you think is most likely?
Even under the most retarded configurations the control panel in windows is at most 2 clicks away.
And then? After you hit the control panel the click-pahts can be pretty daunting, or they could be prior to Windows 7, I haven't taken a long hard look at Win 7. A friend of mine worked on a tech support line for a telecom as a student. Her assessment was that with Windows XP/Vista when talking a user through some sort of network/hardware configuration procedure, the click paths were sometimes so long and confusing you lost track of what the customer was doing and had to tell him/her to shut all open windows and start again. With the Mac this was much less of an issue. Linux users, as usual, were up a creek without a paddle unless the random tech guy they happened to allocated by the switchboard happened to be a Linux geek or a CS student.
Kind of makes all the rest of us feel like worthless garbage, doesn't it.
You must be on OxyContin.
Not to point out the obvious but you do realise they won't sell 2 million every 24 hours henceforth?
Probably not but it would still seem that predictions that the iPhone 5 is destined to be a flop have been greatly exaggerated.
What a terrible first response. I mean fucking, stupidly, terrible. You don't unionize over a few bad practices, probably put in place by a stupid manager. You unionize when labor laws are obviously being violated.
There is a distinct issue here of medical privacy that is most likely being violated. Tracking bathroom visits could be a way for someone to infer you have a medical condition.
What you should do is seek an attorney who will look at this pro bono. They will probably tell you to start with your HR department with a complaint. It's all about the paper trail.
I will never understand how the political and moneyed classes in the USA managed to convince the working man in that country that unions are the spawn of Satan. While I can see the problem when unions becoming lazy and corrupt I don't really see what is wrong with the vast majority of them who are properly run. I have been a union member all of my professional life. I prefer to have a union behind me to foot the bill if I have to take my employer to court as opposed to the situation in the US where you are frequently up shit creek without a paddle if your employer decides to crap all over you. Another service I get from my a union is legal advice regarding employment contracts. One of the many things the engineers union I am a member of offers to for it's members is to have a legal professional read over your employment contract and point out to you legal land mines your employer sometimes builds into those things like draconian clauses about IP ownership, anti competition stuff and requirements that you relinquish the right to take them to court in favour of private arbitration (no prizes for guessing who gets to choose the arbitrator). It's easy to abuse a single person, it's a whole lot harder for employers to abuse 100.000 of you standing together.
Hardware patents perhaps, but personally I don't think software patents have helped in any way to further innovation. They are only a weapon.
So what you are saying is that a guy who pours significant amounts of time into developing an algorithm, making it space and time efficient, modelling it to resolve concurrency issues, etc... should not get patent protection and that you are 'entitled' to use his algorithm without compensating him for all his hard work? Creating algorithms is one example of a software development activity that is by far not always a trivial. I can see why granting a once-click-shopping patent or a slide-to-unlock patent is just plain dumb, I can also see why people are frustrated by big corporations patenting obvious stuff by the shipload and then using the expense of patent lawsuits as a tool to drive small competitors out of business. All of these are things that are wrong with the current system. However, I also fail to see why a guy developing hardware deserves patent protection but a guy developing software doesn't because that's one thing the patent system currently does right, which is giving inventors some protection against being ripped off by predators.
Friendly Reminder: Apple, Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is permitted to like.
No, Apple's off the list because they're so ridiculously evil nowadays. Their sole goal is to lock you into their own ecosystem and prevent you from doing what you want with your purchased devices, and they're actively trying to destroy anyone they compete with.
Sooo.... Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is officially not permitted to criticise? Has Samsung then replaced Apple on that list?