Google may have determined that any patents WebM infringes are too weak to stand up to a determined attack in court and so will not be enforced against them. Owners of weak patents often license them at just below the cost of destroying them in court. Since Google is not going buy a license at any price...
I'm not a State of Calif employee, but I would _LOVE_ it for my megacorp employer to take my issued cell phone away.
I suspect that those State of California employees who would love to have their phones taken away are precisely the ones that will be "allowed" to keep them.
Not that I'm arguing we live in a sane universe, but the one we live in generally requires long term contracts with early termination fees for cell phones in the US.
If you insist on the latest smartphone for "free" with a complex "data plan", yes. If you are a state government requesting bids on supplying 100,000 phones, you get whatever the hell you want. The state of California did not sign up for 100,000 take-it-or-leave-it 2 year retail contracts.
Pretty much every IT job, every management job. every lawyer, every doctor need a phone.
Then tell them that carrying a phone (their own) is a condition of employment (you know they've got one anyway). Give them a small allowance to cover the added expense if necessary.
1000 captchas solved by humans for $2? WTF? Who do they have working on these things?
People who have solved millions of CAPTCHAs and are really fast. They probably also do the easy ones in software, thus upping the effective throughput. One approach would be to have the software present its best guess to a human for verification.
I don't understand how scientific articles manage to continually abuse terms like "smaller than," "slower than," "closer than" and other "lesser than" variants, when they fail to specify a reference point.
I have always felt that people put too narrow a view on what life is or could be.
If we assume that life can be anything anywhere how do we decide where to look and how will we know it if we find it? We have one example of a habitable planet. We are narrowing the search by looking for similar places. We have limited resources. Why look for silicon-based life instead of carbon-based life when we don't even know if the former is possible but are an example of the latter?
How will we discover planets that are orbiting stars, but that do not cross in front of our field of view?
With difficulty. We can try to detect the slight wobble induced in the star by the planet or attempt to image the planet directly. AFAIK both are beyond current technology for Earth-sized planets.
Slashdot Mirror
Google may have determined that any patents WebM infringes are too weak to stand up to a determined attack in court and so will not be enforced against them. Owners of weak patents often license them at just below the cost of destroying them in court. Since Google is not going buy a license at any price...
> it's very likely that WebM infringes on patents, so saying it's unencumbered is wrong.
Where are the lawsuits?
> MPEG-LA isn't meant primarily to generate a profit...
Horseshit. It's purpose is to maximize the profits of the members.
That must have been expensive.
Not news.
The minutes you burn for personal use are taxable income in the USA (though I've not yet heard of the IRS nailing anyone on that).
> Any of it he ruins, yes.
So if your employer ruins your phone you get to bill him for a replacement.
I suspect that those State of California employees who would love to have their phones taken away are precisely the ones that will be "allowed" to keep them.
If you insist on the latest smartphone for "free" with a complex "data plan", yes. If you are a state government requesting bids on supplying 100,000 phones, you get whatever the hell you want. The state of California did not sign up for 100,000 take-it-or-leave-it 2 year retail contracts.
> If my employer wants to use my things he had better pay for them.
Does your employer pay for your clothing? In any case, note that I specified "executives".
Then tell them that carrying a phone (their own) is a condition of employment (you know they've got one anyway). Give them a small allowance to cover the added expense if necessary.
> Well thats never stopped them from doing what they want in the past, has it?
Yes. Many times. For a recent example see the "Children's on Line Protection Act".
Mod parent up.
And why not require "executives" to provide themselves with phones at their own expense? They'll have them anyway.
> ...am I overlooking the tool that allows that sort of filtering?
Good question. My newsreader has a killfile. Would be nice to have one here.
Surely they can simply declare child porn a "crime against humanity" and therefor subject to "universal jursidiction".
That depends on what you mean by "now".
"Lately"?
People who have solved millions of CAPTCHAs and are really fast. They probably also do the easy ones in software, thus upping the effective throughput. One approach would be to have the software present its best guess to a human for verification.
It isn't AI. AI is whatever it is that machines can't do yet.
Scientific articles don't. News articles do.
If we assume that life can be anything anywhere how do we decide where to look and how will we know it if we find it? We have one example of a habitable planet. We are narrowing the search by looking for similar places. We have limited resources. Why look for silicon-based life instead of carbon-based life when we don't even know if the former is possible but are an example of the latter?
> This is the part I don't get - does it mean 1/20th?
I think that's what newsies usually mean when they say something like "20 times closer".
With difficulty. We can try to detect the slight wobble induced in the star by the planet or attempt to image the planet directly. AFAIK both are beyond current technology for Earth-sized planets.
> ...20 miles from the surface of a star...
Not 20 miles. "20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun". That would put it somewhere around 1.5 million miles out.