I get the concept you're shooting for, but it's a bit too simplistic.
As the titular leading force of his political party, a sitting president is supposed to have the influence and political will to rally congressional members of the same political party (and perhaps other parties) into performing tasks that benefit his promised goals. Examples? For better or worse, we have the "Bush Tax Cuts", "Obamacare", "Reaganomics", et al. Each of those were initiatives started by their respective presidents, allied congresscritters got the ball rolling, and the results were signed into law by respective presidents.
So yeah, when a president promises something, most of the time it is at least somewhat within his power to fulfill it.
One tiny problem with that, though: Ceres is a bit further out from the sun than Mars... as in way the hell out there.
It does have potential for fueling an orbital colony or, well, any colony that isn't at the bottom of a big gravity well. OTOH, if Mars is a screamer of a target to hit, I can only imagine what it would take to hit a relatively microscopic-sized target that's way further out, and somewhat surrounded by asteroids.
It is possible that the meteorite came from the asteroid, which in turn came from a proto-planet that had a volcano or two on it - which in turn is the likely source of the Pyroxene.
Many, many asteroids are remnants of planets, so this isn't exactly a massive leap of logic.
I just want to know who makes $240m a year from chopping foreskins. I mean, seriously - is the stuff a direct replacement for nuclear fuel or something?
Looking at the example you posted, that's not even close. Seriously; the screen on the MIO only takes up only 50% of the face (the iPhone and Samsung models swallow about 80% of it.)
As for what is owed to Samsung? That's a whole different story. Yes, Samsung makes parts and does a decent job of doing it... that doesn't give them an excuse to ape someone else's product, and their own internal emails condemned them on that point.
Dude, seriously - a design patent works exactly that way.
Before the iPhone came out, you simply didn't have a device with not only the outside shape (which is where you stopped describing it), but a screen that dominated one face save for a single button at the bottom. Seriously, like GP said - that design simply did not exist outside of a few devices (e.g. the LG Prada). Those few devices were as thick as a brick, often had slide-out keypads, and (again, as GP said) didn't have a touch-only UI running on it.
It's not just "rectangular shape with rounded corners", it's the overall design that got ripped off.
I distinctly remember the industry before and immediately after the iPhone came out - beforehand, it was all dominated by Blackberry-style mini QWERTY pads or Sidekick-style slide-out keypads. Immediately afterwards, everyone suddenly got bigger screens, and wedged in touchscreen action into their UI whenever and wherever they could. Most skirted the Apple design patent. Samsung was one of the few who said 'fuck it' and aped the whole thing - their own internal emails admit as much.
==
As for TFA? I'm fairly certain that Android on its own can be distanced from the design patent, but I do find it more than just a little suspicious that Schmidt (or was it Page?) sat on Apple's board right up until the iPhone was launched, then suddenly Google decided they wanted to get into the phone UI business. Coincidence? Hell, no. I will say that Google did at least keep off of aping the thing.
(disclosures? I have a crappy old Blackberry provided by my employer, and I recently purchased an Android tablet for my wife's birthday. Why? Because I happen to like ICS/4.0, the price was very attractive, and believe she will take to it well. Oh, and I'm typing this on a Samsung RC-512 laptop that has served me very well for over a year now.)
George and I had one thing in common - too pre-occupied at the time. My mother insists that she pointed my face to the TV in the hospital dayroom, but my priorities as a newborn were a bit different, so I don't remember a thing about it. OTOH, it literally soaked my childhood from the earliest cogent thoughts onward.
And if you get it pre-installed there is a checkbox in Action center that kills it, which if you are so clueless that you can't even uncheck a checkbox in a GUI? Really having a hard time feeling sorry for you.
Normally I would agree with you, but having done a whole lot of Windows support over the years? There are way too many people out there (I daresay a majority among the consumers) who doesn't even know what an Action Center is, or what the smartscreen feature really does, let alone know to go there and uncheck the box. To top it off, odds are good (disclosure, I haven't looked) that disabling the feature will come with a pop-up window warning dire consequences if the user goes through with opting-out. (similar to the way HP warns that the printer will probably no longer work if you remove their stupid HP Shopping application.)
That alone will scare off most folks, keeping them compliant.
I was literally less than 24 hours old when Apollo 11 launched. I spent my childhood years dreaming of an upcoming adult life where being an astronaut would be as common as being a plumber, or an accountant. I eagerly read The High Frontier, eagerly anticipating orbital space stations and living in one.
I watched the Challenger explosion as a teenager, and soon after watched Congress, then subsequent administrations, all of them - they went and fucked up the whole space idea beyond all recognition. I eventually gave up those dreams with heavy resignation as a young adult.
Throughout it all? Armstrong, Aldrin, and many others among them kept the dream alive. Because of them, we now have Zubrin, Musk, Bigelow, and a whole cadre of people working like hell to make the original dream into reality. I'll likely be dead of old age before that original childhood dream becomes reality, but with a little hope and a lot of work, it may yet get there.
Armstrong was one of the pioneers. Certainly, you could say he lucked out, yadda yadda... but I disagree. His coolness under pressure made Apollo 11's mission possible (and successful) when nearly any other astronaut would have aborted too early or gotten everyone killed.
Hell, even if we just get close, time dilation will make it possible to go a hell of a long ways, and will stretch out lifetimes enough to make it worthwhile. If we can squeeze out 0.95c, that shit comes out to a bit over 2x the average human lifespan back here on Earth. A 60 ly trip takes only 26 years to the clocks and travelers on the ship, which is easily doable for a 2-3 generation crew.
BTW, with a little effort atop current technology? Using the Sun as a big-assed gravity slingshot with a solar sail boost on the way out has the potential to get us up to 10%. An ion engine with a moderate amount of fuel has the potential to boost that even higher. Reaching 95% isn't impossible - just incredibly hard to do with what we know and have right now.
Even better - write a small app that generates random app names/specs from a huge DB of legitimate applications, and randomly sends notification of installs and uninstalls whenever the user's machine goes idle. Bonus points if it generates random GUIDs and computer profiles.
Courtesy of US Military intelligence, lasting over eight years or more. Unless you can point to an image of Obama holding an M-16 in one hand and Bin Laden's severed head in the other, he (nor you) can't claim that one.
General Motors and Chrysler, and the industrial heartland of the country, were saved from a catastrophe that would make the dust bowl look like nothing.
They were 'saved' by a loan that was given them when TARP was passed... in 2008. Signed into law by that guy you likely loathe to the core of your soul.
An end has come to the era of people being condemned to death by for-profit insurance companies using the excuse of "pre-existing conditions" to deny people their basic human right to health care coverage.
So Medicare and Medicaid didn't exist before 2009 then?
Colonel Gadaffi was ousted from power without a single American soldier being deployed on the ground, and without adding countless billions to the deficit.
...thanks to the "Arab Spring", certainly. Same with Egypt, Tunisia, and hopefully Syria. Contrary to popular belief, the rest of the world is perfectly capable of fixing itself on occasion without a US president or military helping out.
That god-awful war in Iraq, the biggest foreign policy blunder since Napoleon invaded Russia, has ended.
...on schedule, no less. A schedule that was set years before Obama took office.
Since Obama took office, oil imports have dropped by an average of 1.1 million barrels per day and in 2010 domestic crude oil production reached its highest level since 2003.
...recent massive spikes in fuel costs had a lot more to do with it than any US governmental policy. Unless of course you can point us to one. You can do that, right?
How you got an "insightful" mod I do not know.
...because he actually used a bit of logic in his post, instead of blindly praising some politician for things that he obviously had little-to-no (mostly "no") hand in shaping.
Can't let the lies go unanswered, sorry pal. The Democrats did have a majority in the Senate, but they did not have a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate.
...so where were all the filibusters? How many of them were there? For what bills?
Wait, you mean they didn't even filibuster that massive healthcare thingy that Pelosi said everyone had to vote for before they could know what was in it?
Seriously - the DNC had free run in Congress this whole time, judging by the lack of actual filibusters. Hell, they even had a four-month filibuster-proof run that they could have passed whatever the hell they wanted to in.
The result wasn't counted in dollars, but was counted in untold hours of solid fun gameplay for thousands of people. Almost everyone involved did it for fun, and even looking at it from well over a decade, it was still worth it.
Y'all can keep your hypothetical $10m that 99.9% (or so) of all aspiring game designers will never see. I'll keep the awesome memories gathered over years of kick-ass gameplay and a ton of sweat.
I'm just curious about one thing though... TFA mentions shareholders. Who the fuck would be crazy/stupid/naive enough to still be clinging to shares of SCOX? It's not like it's worth anything (it currently trades at $0.02, FFS)
Better idea: Have the prettiest female representative of each corporation duke it out in a mud/jello/you-pick-wrestling bikini match. Best 51 out of 101 falls is the winner.
Is taht sexist? Yes. Do I care? Nope, because the odds of it happening are about the same as that of my winning the lottery jackpot two weeks in a row.
If it is available or you have a copy, go over the original terms and conditions docs you got when you purchased it. Unless there's weasel-wording in there (there likely is), you can possibly take them to small-claims court for at least the money you initially paid.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the concept you're shooting for, but it's a bit too simplistic.
As the titular leading force of his political party, a sitting president is supposed to have the influence and political will to rally congressional members of the same political party (and perhaps other parties) into performing tasks that benefit his promised goals. Examples? For better or worse, we have the "Bush Tax Cuts", "Obamacare", "Reaganomics", et al. Each of those were initiatives started by their respective presidents, allied congresscritters got the ball rolling, and the results were signed into law by respective presidents.
So yeah, when a president promises something, most of the time it is at least somewhat within his power to fulfill it.
One tiny problem with that, though: Ceres is a bit further out from the sun than Mars... as in way the hell out there.
It does have potential for fueling an orbital colony or, well, any colony that isn't at the bottom of a big gravity well. OTOH, if Mars is a screamer of a target to hit, I can only imagine what it would take to hit a relatively microscopic-sized target that's way further out, and somewhat surrounded by asteroids.
Sounds like fun, though.
It is possible that the meteorite came from the asteroid, which in turn came from a proto-planet that had a volcano or two on it - which in turn is the likely source of the Pyroxene.
Many, many asteroids are remnants of planets, so this isn't exactly a massive leap of logic.
I just want to know who makes $240m a year from chopping foreskins. I mean, seriously - is the stuff a direct replacement for nuclear fuel or something?
Not even the Universe will live forever.
Why would I want to continue hanging around in this universe for all that time?
So if there was prior art on Apple's specific iPhone design patent, then one big, fat question sticks out here:
Why didn't Samsung point to any credible examples?
Looking at the example you posted, that's not even close. Seriously; the screen on the MIO only takes up only 50% of the face (the iPhone and Samsung models swallow about 80% of it.)
As for what is owed to Samsung? That's a whole different story. Yes, Samsung makes parts and does a decent job of doing it... that doesn't give them an excuse to ape someone else's product, and their own internal emails condemned them on that point.
Dude, seriously - a design patent works exactly that way.
Before the iPhone came out, you simply didn't have a device with not only the outside shape (which is where you stopped describing it), but a screen that dominated one face save for a single button at the bottom. Seriously, like GP said - that design simply did not exist outside of a few devices (e.g. the LG Prada). Those few devices were as thick as a brick, often had slide-out keypads, and (again, as GP said) didn't have a touch-only UI running on it.
It's not just "rectangular shape with rounded corners", it's the overall design that got ripped off.
I distinctly remember the industry before and immediately after the iPhone came out - beforehand, it was all dominated by Blackberry-style mini QWERTY pads or Sidekick-style slide-out keypads. Immediately afterwards, everyone suddenly got bigger screens, and wedged in touchscreen action into their UI whenever and wherever they could. Most skirted the Apple design patent. Samsung was one of the few who said 'fuck it' and aped the whole thing - their own internal emails admit as much.
==
As for TFA? I'm fairly certain that Android on its own can be distanced from the design patent, but I do find it more than just a little suspicious that Schmidt (or was it Page?) sat on Apple's board right up until the iPhone was launched, then suddenly Google decided they wanted to get into the phone UI business. Coincidence? Hell, no. I will say that Google did at least keep off of aping the thing.
(disclosures? I have a crappy old Blackberry provided by my employer, and I recently purchased an Android tablet for my wife's birthday. Why? Because I happen to like ICS/4.0, the price was very attractive, and believe she will take to it well. Oh, and I'm typing this on a Samsung RC-512 laptop that has served me very well for over a year now.)
George and I had one thing in common - too pre-occupied at the time. My mother insists that she pointed my face to the TV in the hospital dayroom, but my priorities as a newborn were a bit different, so I don't remember a thing about it. OTOH, it literally soaked my childhood from the earliest cogent thoughts onward.
And if you get it pre-installed there is a checkbox in Action center that kills it, which if you are so clueless that you can't even uncheck a checkbox in a GUI? Really having a hard time feeling sorry for you.
Normally I would agree with you, but having done a whole lot of Windows support over the years? There are way too many people out there (I daresay a majority among the consumers) who doesn't even know what an Action Center is, or what the smartscreen feature really does, let alone know to go there and uncheck the box. To top it off, odds are good (disclosure, I haven't looked) that disabling the feature will come with a pop-up window warning dire consequences if the user goes through with opting-out. (similar to the way HP warns that the printer will probably no longer work if you remove their stupid HP Shopping application.)
That alone will scare off most folks, keeping them compliant.
I was literally less than 24 hours old when Apollo 11 launched. I spent my childhood years dreaming of an upcoming adult life where being an astronaut would be as common as being a plumber, or an accountant. I eagerly read The High Frontier, eagerly anticipating orbital space stations and living in one.
I watched the Challenger explosion as a teenager, and soon after watched Congress, then subsequent administrations, all of them - they went and fucked up the whole space idea beyond all recognition. I eventually gave up those dreams with heavy resignation as a young adult.
Throughout it all? Armstrong, Aldrin, and many others among them kept the dream alive. Because of them, we now have Zubrin, Musk, Bigelow, and a whole cadre of people working like hell to make the original dream into reality. I'll likely be dead of old age before that original childhood dream becomes reality, but with a little hope and a lot of work, it may yet get there.
Armstrong was one of the pioneers. Certainly, you could say he lucked out, yadda yadda... but I disagree. His coolness under pressure made Apollo 11's mission possible (and successful) when nearly any other astronaut would have aborted too early or gotten everyone killed.
Godspeed, Mr. Armstrong.
Who says we have to do the full FTL Monty?
Hell, even if we just get close, time dilation will make it possible to go a hell of a long ways, and will stretch out lifetimes enough to make it worthwhile. If we can squeeze out 0.95c, that shit comes out to a bit over 2x the average human lifespan back here on Earth. A 60 ly trip takes only 26 years to the clocks and travelers on the ship, which is easily doable for a 2-3 generation crew.
BTW, with a little effort atop current technology? Using the Sun as a big-assed gravity slingshot with a solar sail boost on the way out has the potential to get us up to 10%. An ion engine with a moderate amount of fuel has the potential to boost that even higher. Reaching 95% isn't impossible - just incredibly hard to do with what we know and have right now.
Even better - write a small app that generates random app names/specs from a huge DB of legitimate applications, and randomly sends notification of installs and uninstalls whenever the user's machine goes idle. Bonus points if it generates random GUIDs and computer profiles.
Your link says: "Apologies, but we were unable to find what you were looking for. Perhaps the search box will help."
But sure - feel free to sling around insults and show your intolerance towards anything that challenges your worldview.
Osama Bin Laden was killed.
Courtesy of US Military intelligence, lasting over eight years or more. Unless you can point to an image of Obama holding an M-16 in one hand and Bin Laden's severed head in the other, he (nor you) can't claim that one.
The recession is over.
Even the New York Times isn't letting that bit of propaganda slip by unchallenged: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/us/recession-officially-over-us-incomes-kept-falling.html
General Motors and Chrysler, and the industrial heartland of the country, were saved from a catastrophe that would make the dust bowl look like nothing.
They were 'saved' by a loan that was given them when TARP was passed... in 2008. Signed into law by that guy you likely loathe to the core of your soul.
An end has come to the era of people being condemned to death by for-profit insurance companies using the excuse of "pre-existing conditions" to deny people their basic human right to health care coverage.
So Medicare and Medicaid didn't exist before 2009 then?
Colonel Gadaffi was ousted from power without a single American soldier being deployed on the ground, and without adding countless billions to the deficit.
...thanks to the "Arab Spring", certainly. Same with Egypt, Tunisia, and hopefully Syria. Contrary to popular belief, the rest of the world is perfectly capable of fixing itself on occasion without a US president or military helping out.
That god-awful war in Iraq, the biggest foreign policy blunder since Napoleon invaded Russia, has ended.
...on schedule, no less. A schedule that was set years before Obama took office.
Since Obama took office, oil imports have dropped by an average of 1.1 million barrels per day and in 2010 domestic crude oil production reached its highest level since 2003.
...recent massive spikes in fuel costs had a lot more to do with it than any US governmental policy. Unless of course you can point us to one. You can do that, right?
How you got an "insightful" mod I do not know.
...because he actually used a bit of logic in his post, instead of blindly praising some politician for things that he obviously had little-to-no (mostly "no") hand in shaping.
Can't let the lies go unanswered, sorry pal. The Democrats did have a majority in the Senate, but they did not have a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate.
...so where were all the filibusters? How many of them were there? For what bills?
Wait, you mean they didn't even filibuster that massive healthcare thingy that Pelosi said everyone had to vote for before they could know what was in it?
Seriously - the DNC had free run in Congress this whole time, judging by the lack of actual filibusters. Hell, they even had a four-month filibuster-proof run that they could have passed whatever the hell they wanted to in.
So, err, what happened there?
Here are some bits that are a lot more solid than figments:
http://michellemalkin.com/category/unhinged/assassination-chic/
http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=621
*ahem*:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/gary-k-owen-eileen-qutub-washington-state-emails_n_1773555.html
--and the point where it goes from HuffPo's "alleged" to the actual news where "Man admits [sending] death threat"--
http://www.kgw.com/news/Man-arrested-for-death-threat-against-WA-candidate-165745706.html
Yeah, dude's nuts. OTOH, the target of his death threat has an "(R)" after her name whenever it appears on the newscasts.
Now c'mon... that is a completely reasonable and perfectly logical post.
You know better than that, and besides, it doesn't make good airplay on MSNBC or CNN, yanno?
Unless a story can be drawn as an 'Us versus Them' dogfight, it'll never make the newscasts.
It's actually Snark. The left doesn't genuinely believe these things.
Judging by the pollution on my Facebook page, not only do they believe it, but many actively hope for worse.
You don't get it, do you? You'll never see that $10m, nor will the vast majority of other developers.
So unless your name is, say, John Carmack? Keep dreaming.
He's not an outlier. I've done the same thing nearly 14 years ago, just for the hell of it.
A bunch of guys took Quake 2 (then Quake3, then Unreal Tournament), and all together, we made one hell of a mod out of it.
The result wasn't counted in dollars, but was counted in untold hours of solid fun gameplay for thousands of people. Almost everyone involved did it for fun, and even looking at it from well over a decade, it was still worth it.
Y'all can keep your hypothetical $10m that 99.9% (or so) of all aspiring game designers will never see. I'll keep the awesome memories gathered over years of kick-ass gameplay and a ton of sweat.
Most folks have.
I'm just curious about one thing though... TFA mentions shareholders. Who the fuck would be crazy/stupid/naive enough to still be clinging to shares of SCOX? It's not like it's worth anything (it currently trades at $0.02, FFS)
Better idea: Have the prettiest female representative of each corporation duke it out in a mud/jello/you-pick-wrestling bikini match. Best 51 out of 101 falls is the winner.
Is taht sexist? Yes. Do I care? Nope, because the odds of it happening are about the same as that of my winning the lottery jackpot two weeks in a row.
This, right here.
If it is available or you have a copy, go over the original terms and conditions docs you got when you purchased it. Unless there's weasel-wording in there (there likely is), you can possibly take them to small-claims court for at least the money you initially paid.