US Patent No. 8,086,604 - this patent claims priority back to 2000 (issued Dec. 2011) and covers searching multiple sources of information (on device and elsewhere) through a single search interface, such as Siri. Apple specifically touts Siri in its injunction request, but also argues that a unified text search is covered by the patent as well.
They never heard of Dogpile? Well, I guess the court and the patent office didn't.
US Patent No. 8,074,172 - this patent was filed in 2007 (issued Dec. 2011) and covers providing word suggestions while the user types on a touchscreen keyboard, where the suggestions can be accepted or rejected by the user.
Because of course a touchscreen keyboard is SO much different than any other keyboard.
When you buy something from a shop, you make an offer to treat by going to the till and offering the shop money for the item. The contract is agreed when they take your money.
The invitation to treat is made by the shop when they put the item on display. When you go to the till and offer money, that's an offer. When they take your money, that's acceptance; at that point the contract is made.
I'm not sure, but I think the US libertarians here are confused because they think that all legal issues boil down to contract law.
While there are certainly libertarians overly enamored with contract law, I'm not one of them. And I find that it's more authoritarians who want to provide the power to make contracts of adhesion simply by displaying a sign or something similar.
I am SO TIRED of hearing about this, especially when it's from people who have NO IDEA what really happened.
And I'm tired of hearing refutations from people who swallowed the line from the American Trial Lawyers Association.
For your edification - the coffee was excessively hot, and McDonalds had been repeatedly warned about it, a warning they chose to ignore.
Or perhaps simply a value judgement they disagreed with.
The coffee was so hot, it melted the cup in her hands, and therefore onto her lap, and she ended up with some serious burns in a spot where I'm thinking most folks would not want to have burns.
The first part is utter bullshit. The cup did not melt. She put the cup between her legs and removed the top, spilling the whole cup on herself in the process.
And who are these H1B workers on absurdly low wages? It costs Microsoft 30% more to hire foreigners on H1Bs because there aren't enough Americans graduating with master's and PhDs in STEM fields.
And why, exactly, do they need people with masters degrees in computer science? What do you get with a masters degree in computer science that you don't get with a bachelor's degree in same?
In case you haven't figured it out, they don't. The reason for the masters degree requirement is to create a false shortage. H-1B workers are often preferred because they can't freely change companies.
IANAL, but I suspect that the terms apply to the "offer to treat" or whatever it is called - that's when the contract is made. Payment is simply settling. Hopefully a legal eagle will be able to correct me on this.
At some point, the ADA runs into the First Amendment, which prohibits "forced speech". (Broadcast TV is a special case, because it involves publicly owned RF spectrum.) Book publishers aren't required to produce audio or Braille editions, or translations to another language.
I'm not sure "forced speech" is the issue so much as ordinary free speech. If the ADA is said to apply and require Netflix (and other streaming services) to provide captioning for content which is not currently captioned, and to produce that captioning would be fairly expensive (much more than the cost of provided the movie in the first place), that content has essentially been censored.
Unfortunately, usually when fundamental rights run into "but think of the disabled, you heartless bastard", fundamental rights lose. But at least there's an issue.
It also doesn't have to be captioned well. Captioning can be very cheap.
The requirement cuts off the "long tail", though; if this goes through, Netflix can no longer show the many films which haven't been captioned and only get a very few viewers.
well we could take it to the next logical step, What about blind people? we need to make sure blind people can access the internet and "watch" their videos as well!
The tough nut for this problem isn't the payor, it's the payee. You can put NFC in everyone's pocket but the killer app will be getting it at every POS -- it'd also be nice if they came up with a system that didn't require a credit card (like Google)
Google Wallet doesn't require a credit card. You can use a prepaid card and fill it from a debit card.
And of course the very definition of O(1) is that it be constant time in the worst case scenario, no matter how unlikely the worst case is.
That's not even true formally. You can do big-O analysis for worst case, average case, or even best case if you want. Anyway, HashSet contains() is O(1) for any but pathological cases built to defeat the hash function.
If an H-1B worker carries a California drivers license and is pulled over on a traffic stop in Arizona, the presumption of legal status with an Arizona driver's license goes away, said Jorge Lopez, co-chair of the Immigration & Global Migration Practice at Littler Mendelson.
"Papers? What the fuck, man, I was born in East LA!"
Since when does sensible regulation = totalitarianism?
"Sensible regulation" is like "peaceful coexistance. Which is to say it's proposed by those who propose to act any way BUT sensibly, and the promise of it staying "sensible" is believed only by fools.
If someone says they want to "sensible regulations" on something, it's a ban they're looking for, 9999 times out of 10000
At no point in history of C or C++, it was worth to try to "optimize" anything that a modern compiler would optimize better. Even before such optimizarion was implemented. The problem is, you and "modern programmers" have absolutely no idea what optimization is and what it is not, so you believe that someone had to specifically trick compiler into making something "faster". In reality, the problem with most software never was "insufficient optimization" or " excessive attempts of optimization" but idiotic choice of an algorithm.
Wrong. Constant factors often matter. Sometimes even additive constants matter. And some optimizations, such as strength reduction, can even change the asymptotic behavior of an algorithm.
Microsoft wants to be able to tell, say GE or Sony, that it's ok to publish files or media which work with Windows Media Player, because Windows Media Player will always know for sure, whether it's outputting decoded video to a real video card with a real HDCP connection to a real monitor
Oh, HDCP. ROTFL. Let's suppose they manage to lock everything down utterly. HDMI recording has been available for years now, and HDCP has been broken for some time. OK, not everyone has a rig with that capability, but how many do you need to distribute the unencrypted video worldwide? One.
You're blaming a politician's flunky knowing where her bread is buttered -- an act which would have been familiar in the days of the Roman Republic -- on capitalism?
Go to Seattle, Texas or Virginia. In particular, look for engineering firms (specially Defense contractors). They'll have no problem hiring a person with your experience.
Wrong. They only want to hire people who already hold a clearance, or at least have a current background investigation. The only way you can get that is to either have just left the military in a position requiring such, or to already be working for a defense contractor. Nobody wants to spend the time and money (and take the risk) getting someone cleared when that person can then be poached by a competitor. Then they all whine about how they can't find anyone, when they're unwilling to expand the pool.
The government actually *could* do something about it. Via policy, they could absorb the private debt into public debt.
Speaking as someone who has managed his own finances well, I'm going to yell "moral hazard" here. That is, if my reward for not getting in over my head is to have my future tax money used to pay off the debt owed by those who did, then clearly I'm playing the game by the wrong rules -- I should simply get in as deep as I can and hope for a bailout.
Holy shit. How much software can NOT be used for illegal activity?
Not just software. Did you know that all x86 and x86-64 processors contain an instruction called MOV? Despite the innocuous name, this instruction does not in fact MOVE data from one place from another. Rather, it COPIES the data, leaving it in both places -- and that's not the only instruction which does so, just the most common. The ARM processors and even the POWER processors all have similar instructions. The whole industry is involved in a massive conspiracy to violate the copyrights of the xxAAs.
Dark chocolate and coffee, dark chocolate and pretzels, dark chocolate and pinot noir, dark chocolate and mint... hmm, gotta find a non-chocolate example. Tequila and lime?
It is a misnomer to say that an assumptions is "true" or "false". In this case, you can only say that your assumptions are coherent with the assumptions made by the people who wrote the test. That doesn't mean that your assumptions are true. It means that your assumptions agree with someone else's assumptions.
My assumptions agree with the way they programmed the test. That's good enough for me to call them "true".
And if I was writing one to give back to the test-designers, there'd be a Ballmer peak just to throw them off. 1 - Fair 2 - Good 3 - Fair 4 - poor 5 - poor 6 - poor 7 - GREAT 8 - poor 9 - poor
Us stingy non-compassionate curmudgeonly types not swayed by cries that everyone must be educated or accusations of elitism have been saying this for a very long time.
Case in point: scientists mentioned above believe that not being able to test 9 discrete choices with only the capacity to test 6 discrete choices is somehow a failure. Sure, you could test a few choices and extrapolate what the results of the missing choices might be, but you can't conclusively determine something you haven't tested.
It's not obvious from the interface they give, but you can do it given a few (true) assumptions. The key thing is to note that you can do multiple experiments as long as the total is only 6 trays. The assumptions are that 1) There is only one optimum fertilizer value, and it's one of the testable values 2) If you're off by one, plants will grow better than if you're off by more than one.
Given this, you just test 2,4,6, and 8. If one seems best, test the values on either side of it and pick the best of the three. If two seem equally good, you know the answer is between the two (but test it anyway).
I'll be the FIRST to agree with you that the 'no tolerance' rules are idiotic, and mainly crafted NOT for the welfare of the kids, but to protect administrations from having to make (and defend) judgement calls from schools of litigation-hungry lawyers. But that's not the SCHOOL's fault. Schools are empowered *exactly* to the degree that parents (through their school board) chose, over time.
Passing the buck doesn't make an arbitrary decision (and zero tolerance rules are perfect examples) less arbitrary. Nor is it particularly relevant to the student whether or not the arbitrary decision was made by the principal or the school board; either way, no amount of reason will make a dent in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they could get Larry, Sergey, and Eric to sell; between the three they control the lion's share of the stock.
They never heard of Dogpile? Well, I guess the court and the patent office didn't.
Because of course a touchscreen keyboard is SO much different than any other keyboard.
The invitation to treat is made by the shop when they put the item on display. When you go to the till and offer money, that's an offer. When they take your money, that's acceptance; at that point the contract is made.
While there are certainly libertarians overly enamored with contract law, I'm not one of them. And I find that it's more authoritarians who want to provide the power to make contracts of adhesion simply by displaying a sign or something similar.
And I'm tired of hearing refutations from people who swallowed the line from the American Trial Lawyers Association.
Or perhaps simply a value judgement they disagreed with.
The first part is utter bullshit. The cup did not melt. She put the cup between her legs and removed the top, spilling the whole cup on herself in the process.
Not a lawyer, but: "We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram"
(Technically, that's "fuck off", but the sentiment is the same)
And why, exactly, do they need people with masters degrees in computer science? What do you get with a masters degree in computer science that you don't get with a bachelor's degree in same?
In case you haven't figured it out, they don't. The reason for the masters degree requirement is to create a false shortage. H-1B workers are often preferred because they can't freely change companies.
An invitation to treat isn't a contract.
I'm not sure "forced speech" is the issue so much as ordinary free speech. If the ADA is said to apply and require Netflix (and other streaming services) to provide captioning for content which is not currently captioned, and to produce that captioning would be fairly expensive (much more than the cost of provided the movie in the first place), that content has essentially been censored.
Unfortunately, usually when fundamental rights run into "but think of the disabled, you heartless bastard", fundamental rights lose. But at least there's an issue.
The requirement cuts off the "long tail", though; if this goes through, Netflix can no longer show the many films which haven't been captioned and only get a very few viewers.
They've already proposed that as well.
Google Wallet doesn't require a credit card. You can use a prepaid card and fill it from a debit card.
That's not even true formally. You can do big-O analysis for worst case, average case, or even best case if you want. Anyway, HashSet contains() is O(1) for any but pathological cases built to defeat the hash function.
"Papers? What the fuck, man, I was born in East LA!"
"Sensible regulation" is like "peaceful coexistance. Which is to say it's proposed by those who propose to act any way BUT sensibly, and the promise of it staying "sensible" is believed only by fools.
If someone says they want to "sensible regulations" on something, it's a ban they're looking for, 9999 times out of 10000
Wrong. Constant factors often matter. Sometimes even additive constants matter. And some optimizations, such as strength reduction, can even change the asymptotic behavior of an algorithm.
Oh, HDCP. ROTFL. Let's suppose they manage to lock everything down utterly. HDMI recording has been available for years now, and HDCP has been broken for some time. OK, not everyone has a rig with that capability, but how many do you need to distribute the unencrypted video worldwide? One.
You're blaming a politician's flunky knowing where her bread is buttered -- an act which would have been familiar in the days of the Roman Republic -- on capitalism?
Wrong. They only want to hire people who already hold a clearance, or at least have a current background investigation. The only way you can get that is to either have just left the military in a position requiring such, or to already be working for a defense contractor. Nobody wants to spend the time and money (and take the risk) getting someone cleared when that person can then be poached by a competitor. Then they all whine about how they can't find anyone, when they're unwilling to expand the pool.
Speaking as someone who has managed his own finances well, I'm going to yell "moral hazard" here. That is, if my reward for not getting in over my head is to have my future tax money used to pay off the debt owed by those who did, then clearly I'm playing the game by the wrong rules -- I should simply get in as deep as I can and hope for a bailout.
Not just software. Did you know that all x86 and x86-64 processors contain an instruction called MOV? Despite the innocuous name, this instruction does not in fact MOVE data from one place from another. Rather, it COPIES the data, leaving it in both places -- and that's not the only instruction which does so, just the most common. The ARM processors and even the POWER processors all have similar instructions. The whole industry is involved in a massive conspiracy to violate the copyrights of the xxAAs.
Dark chocolate and coffee, dark chocolate and pretzels, dark chocolate and pinot noir, dark chocolate and mint... hmm, gotta find a non-chocolate example. Tequila and lime?
My assumptions agree with the way they programmed the test. That's good enough for me to call them "true".
And if I was writing one to give back to the test-designers, there'd be a Ballmer peak just to throw them off.
1 - Fair
2 - Good
3 - Fair
4 - poor
5 - poor
6 - poor
7 - GREAT
8 - poor
9 - poor
Us stingy non-compassionate curmudgeonly types not swayed by cries that everyone must be educated or accusations of elitism have been saying this for a very long time.
It's not obvious from the interface they give, but you can do it given a few (true) assumptions. The key thing is to note that you can do multiple experiments as long as the total is only 6 trays. The assumptions are that
1) There is only one optimum fertilizer value, and it's one of the testable values
2) If you're off by one, plants will grow better than if you're off by more than one.
Given this, you just test 2,4,6, and 8. If one seems best, test the values on either side of it and pick the best of the three. If two seem equally good, you know the answer is between the two (but test it anyway).
Passing the buck doesn't make an arbitrary decision (and zero tolerance rules are perfect examples) less arbitrary. Nor is it particularly relevant to the student whether or not the arbitrary decision was made by the principal or the school board; either way, no amount of reason will make a dent in it.