You've been woefully miss-informed. I currently stream video that's essentially indistinguishable from SDTV over a mere 2.5 megabit connection to my Wii. I'd say most people would consider that a relatively low end connection these days.
It may not be HDTV, but even that only takes a few megabits more. If you think you need multi tens of megabyte internet connection just to watch TV, you couldn't be more wrong.
Occasionally I catch glimpses of the local TV news on the rare occasions I watch a local TV station. More often than not, it's some inflammatory piece of garbage poisoning everyones minds. The rest of the time it's trite garbage pretending to be "news". A couple weeks ago the big teaser headline was their "investigative report" on food sold at local supermarkets that was past its best by date. Shocking!
This isn't just my area. I've seen local TV news shows across the US before, and by and large they're all exactly the same. This form of news I will not miss, and welcome its death with open arms. Frankly if I knew how, I'd try to hasten its death.
I might not be the best idea to stiff someone who's highly skilled at finding security vulnerabilities in software. Especially if you ARE a software company.
What I don't understand is how that is turned around and transformed into these series of death threats (and actions, and laws) that in effect make the depiction of the man more important than the depiction of the beliefs he was supposed to represent.
There's something about the human brain that makes it prone to crazy fanaticism. It doesn't matter if it's Islam, Christianity, or PETA. I really think it's more about the group dynamics and such that bring it about rather than the actual thing people are being fanatical about. Rational thought doesn't really enter into it. It's about defending and maintaining your group, not the actual offense.
I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate. You'll often see different polls differ by much more than that (far more often than 5% of the time or whatever the confidence level is).
Election polling is just especially difficult, since what counts is if you actually vote and who you vote for, neither of which have been determined at the time of the poll and could change. Election polling isn't simply an opinion poll, but is obviously supposed to reflect the population of people who will actually vote on election day. The polls have differing models of selecting "likely voters", and will thus have numbers that differ more than the margin of error for any single poll. In other words, taking the margin of error for a single poll and comparing it among multiple polls is invalid, since the differing polls used different means of sample selection.
Certainly actual elections tend to fall well outside the +/- 3% accuracy claimed by many of the election-day pollsters.
I guess I haven't found that to be true if you mean "tend to" is more than 50% of the time. Sure, you're going to find some that are outside of the 3% error bars, but you'd also expect that to happen, statistically speaking.
Millions of gallons of oil leach into the Gulf every year through natural processes.
Really? Does that happen all in one spot, just off the coast of Louisiana over a short period of time, or is it spread out over the entire Gulf of Mexico over an entire year?
but it also seldom gets mentioned by the 'any amount of oil is bad bad bad' crowd who seek to capitalize on the crisis.
Maybe it doesn't get mentioned because it's a really terrible comparison to what's actually happening? I'm really getting tired of this continuing trend among some people to merely assume everyone is as bad as everyone else, as if everyone in the world has some seedy angle. Child labor laws? That's just a product of people who want to "capitalize" on a less available labor such as Unions and the like. Public libraries? Pushed through by "big learning" and educational institutions so they can get people hooked on learning, and then will need higher education.
Not everything is a special interest. I object on a very basic level to your attempt to imagine some group of people and try to paint them as into a tiny, somehow relevant opinion. Who is this "any amount of oil is bad" crowd, and when did that one point become the over-riding opinion they hold? If they do indeed exist, do they really have any more relevance than the crazy guy down the street who worries about the government mind control rays?
There's been quite a lot of speculation that the numbers estimated by BP are low. BPs response has essentially been "that won't help us stop the leak, so stuff it". Well, that's not really true, since to know how effective something is you need to be able to measure before and after. There's also the obvious problem of the aftermath, and understanding how large it will be.
Frankly, I think BP releasing how much oil is leaking represents a HUGE conflict of interest for them. I believe they know the flow rate is substantially higher than the original estimates. But why would they want to release that information? Attempting to keep the numbers low limits their potential damage payout. It also would be a huge PR nightmare if the numbers are even bigger. In the long term there's going to be a TON of lawsuits. Many of them are going to be dependent on the scientific data to support them. The amount of oil leaked is obviously going to be a BIG factor. The larger the amount of oil leaked, the larger the damage right? So BP is essentially trying to play dumb, and hope that the original estimates will stick, thus limiting their liability.
To get a handle on this it's very clear we need real numbers on how much oil is leaking. The position that stopping the leak is the only thing that matters is ridiculous. The problem doesn't go away after they stop the leak. Solving the large term damage left by this is obviously partially dependent on knowing how much oil has leaked into the Gulf. Being potentially off by an order of magnitude is in no way acceptable.
These "giant plumes" are total hyperbole. A few miles is NOTHING in the context of a body of water the size of the Gulf of Mexico.
That's assuming all parts of the Gulf are equal. Are you sure they are? Might it just be possible that some parts of the Ocean are more important to us than others?
I've been reading a little about oil dispersants. I understand that basically they help to break down oil so that microorganisms can do their thing and use the oil as food. Maybe an oversimplification, but that is what I got out of it.
Not really. Dispersant merely help the oil mix with the water, they don't break it down in any real way. Your laundry detergent is an example of a product that does this. Normally oil and water don't mix very well because water is a polar solvent, and oil is a non-polar solvent. This leads to the oil floating to the surface, and eventually washing up on land. By allowing the two to mix, the oil gets dispersed over the full volume of the ocean rather than separating at the surface. So now if you use oil dispersants, do you end up exacerbating the oxygen problem? If the microorganisms go nuts on the food supply, does this kill off even more of the ecosystem?
Republicans criticizing the commercialization of low-orbit space flights? Demanding the return of a gigantic, overbudget, behind schedule rocket to nowhere? Obama for the privatization of space and Conservatives for the continuation of a government monopoly on space?
You must be new to this "politics thing". See, Republicans are critical of "big government" they don't like, or don't have any special interest in, but love spending in their own state or for projects they approve of. So spending on big military projects in your home state == good. Spending in someone else's state (especially a blue one) on transit or west nile virus research == bad.
The Democrats aren't really much better, but they aren't the ones people seem to think are the ones against "government waste".
In reality, it's the individuals rather than the parties that might actually be for actually reducing wasteful projects. Most of the time that all gets lost in all the noise and nonsense that gets thrown around to try to divide everyone into neat little categories.
Because the material in question is Ricin, one of the most toxic chemicals known. It really has no other use than as a poison (unless you happen to be a cancer researcher with the ability to attach the molecule to some something that only targets cancer cells). I don't think this guy qualifies for that.
Have you ever used a knife? A car? A computer? Thought so.
All those materials have numerous other legitimate and everyday uses. Except for the theoretical use above, ricin really has no legitimate use outside of murder.
The only caveat about that particular solution is the lack of redundant power, poor serviceability in the rack (may not apply like you said), and slow speed.
All of which for a home solution are likely acceptable. "Slow" means 3 gigabits/second over the interface, which even if you take into account the overhead is going to easily saturate even a gigabit network connection. This is video we're talking about. Even fully uncompressed video at 720x480 24fps is 720*480*24*24 is only about 200 Megabits/second.
We started at 5,000 barrels a day, then 20, 50 and 100,000 barrels a day. Yesterday I saw a figure quoted at 200,000, today I saw 210,000
But 1 million barrels a day? That's almost three full days ahead of schedule for the media. Didn't Slashdot get the memo?
The reason you're getting wild ass guesses all over the board is because BP isn't saying how much oil is leaking. So people estimate and speculate. You can blame the media all you like, but in this case there's nothing much to report from anyone authoritative since the people who might (and likely do) actually know aren't saying anything.
If you think BP doesn't have a decent estimate, do you really think they'd be trying to build containment vessels if they didn't have a pretty decent idea as to the flow rate of the thing they're trying to contain?
The other interesting thing I heard was that the big apparatus they put over the leak earlier this week to try to stop the leak was essentially a very good estimator of how much oil was coming out of the leak. Simply time how long it took to fill up, and divide.
The [WAAS] satellites also broadcast the same type of range information as normal GPS satellites, effectively increasing the number of satellites available for a position fix.
The WAAS satellites aren't merely another GPS satellites, it's entirely different. GPS signals have errors based on a variety of different variables (clock errors, ionosphere propagation variability, etc). The WAAS satellites broadcast a series of correction signals that account for these errors. The end effect is increased accuracy.
yeah great idea to have a prepayment penalty and forced to pay $200,000 in additional interest.
Where the hell did you get your loan, and how much was it that you're seriously paying 200,000 in interest payment penalties? If these are serious numbers, you REALLY should have paid more attention to the amount, interest rate, and terms of your student loans.
The honest truth is NOTHING is efficient. And NOTHING is really interested in anything other than collecting as much power as possible/maintaining the status quo.
Hmm.. I guess I just don't agree. Government is really one of the few things that can create solutions in everyones interest. Do you honestly think child labor, anti-discrimination policies, the interstate highway system, free public education (as opposed to private only), etc aren't all successes of government? None of those examples are either "maintaining the status quo". I guess you could argue some of them are "collecting power", but that's not always a bad thing either. Dismissing government as a solution to problems because you only look at its failures is dishonest.
This particular case I don't know about, but you sound like you're merely dismissing it out of hand, based on ideological grounds. I think that's wrong, and you don't have to look to far to see why.
He was the lawyer, I was just a consultant. Guess who was taken notice of?
Officially of course the lawyer. That's more about posturing and group dynamics than anything else though. Privately I bet a lot of people thought the lawyers reply was unprofessional, and that of an ass. He was after all "only the lawyer", and not a leader setting the tone.
The difference between "trolling" and "bad article" is: is it purposefully stupid in order to get outraged replies? Or merely ignorantly stupid.
Interesting. I might define "trolling" as using language such as "purposefully stupid" or "ignorantly stupid" to describe something.
Actually I really detest the whole "trolling" meme. It's so incredibly subjective as to have little meaning. It becomes a bludgeon to apply to any idea that might personally enrage you. In other words "I don't have to think about that idea, because the whole thing is a troll!".
The article at issue here uses very loaded language from the beginning - e.g. the "government-created mess". This is designed to incite a flamefest, in my opinion.
I think you're being a bit overly sensitive. It's an opinion piece designed to show a point of view. It's not really any different from your average letter to the editor in a local newspaper. Actually probably a bit better than the average one, since the average one tends to be even more poorly worded and thought out. If you really think this article is a troll, then a large percentage of the world is essentially trolls.
There is a deeper issue, though: What exactly *is* an industry standard for the purpose of this? Who defines it?
I thought of that, but both of those are just problems of scope and definition. They're problems to be sure, but they don't strike me as ones that might be fundamentally unsolvable.
Oh sure, lets get the government involved in this! Because they're: Efficient Looking out for the people Focused Not interested in pork Uninfluenced by patent holders
And who should be involved in this that meets those criteria, business? If you think business is "efficient", then you haven't looked terribly deeply into business. The other ones I don't even think anyone has any serious beliefs business is any good at. People only accuse government of all the things you describe because we have a big public window into it's operations.
Instead of invalidating patents, why not just simply say all standards must not be patent encumbered?
That turns "we're taking your great idea" into "we'll take any great ideas that you don't try to own, lock, stock, and barrel". Everyone knows the real money is always in delivering the solution and maintaining it, not trying to control the idea and own it. Large companies hate this of course, because they know that if they had to compete in a fair marketplace the small shops would eat their lunch since they can out-innovate most of the time (especially with software).
Sounds like the lawyer felt threatened by the idea. He probably thought that if such a law were to take effect, there'd be less need for legal council. Thus his dickish reply.
Is completely clueless trolling in the summary the new standard on/. now?
It's not a summary, and it's not "trolling". The paragraph IS the article, and the links are merely poor background information. Though I do agree that there's no apparent connection between trademarks and patents.
You might not agree with the article, and it's largely poorly written and poorly supported. But "trolling" isn't the same thing as a bad article. Honestly, when did "trolling" become just a poorly written article? If anything, I'd say directly attacking someones intellect is trolling.
Given all that, I think the idea of legislating patents applied to industry standards is an interesting idea. It's likely problematic in many ways though. How do you stop people from trying to invalidate any patent by merely making it part of an "industry standard"? Can federal legislation even DO that kind of thing? (There are limits to what the federal government can do). Would it even matter, since standards such as HTML5 are international ones, not US only? Would such legislation have impacts on already existing trade agreements?
The waters seem muddy enough that even if such an approach got traction, I have doubts it would be workable.
You're right, they should have tested it. But I'd take serious issue with your contention that it's "one of the most important ones". MSE 1.0 was released on the 29th of September, 2009. So it's essentially a 7 month old product. I'd also note that it doesn't come as part of the OS, and it looks like you need to download and install the software yourself.
So given that, why do you think it's one of the most important ones?
So in your opinion the question "Is a computer faster than an abacus?" has no answer then?
On many levels, yes. Since the problem you're trying to solve is open ended, there's as many answers to it as their are ends to the question. it's just to tell that it can do some things much faster and that is why you should care. That's the first thing you should get across in any communication, there's tons of things that are technically correct but uninteresting or useless. If you can't get that across within the first 30 seconds, I got better things to do.
Why does it have to be made interesting to everyone? Most people don't really care anyway that someone might be able to solve some mathematical problem faster than they could before. So why bother trying to jazz it up? If you seriously have to dumb something down so much that you lose the essential principles, then the person is never going to be interested in it anyway. Better just tell the truth and let those not interested in it stay uninterested in it. At least nobody has a false sense of knowing something about the thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?
You've been woefully miss-informed. I currently stream video that's essentially indistinguishable from SDTV over a mere 2.5 megabit connection to my Wii. I'd say most people would consider that a relatively low end connection these days.
It may not be HDTV, but even that only takes a few megabits more. If you think you need multi tens of megabyte internet connection just to watch TV, you couldn't be more wrong.
Occasionally I catch glimpses of the local TV news on the rare occasions I watch a local TV station. More often than not, it's some inflammatory piece of garbage poisoning everyones minds. The rest of the time it's trite garbage pretending to be "news". A couple weeks ago the big teaser headline was their "investigative report" on food sold at local supermarkets that was past its best by date. Shocking!
This isn't just my area. I've seen local TV news shows across the US before, and by and large they're all exactly the same. This form of news I will not miss, and welcome its death with open arms. Frankly if I knew how, I'd try to hasten its death.
I might not be the best idea to stiff someone who's highly skilled at finding security vulnerabilities in software. Especially if you ARE a software company.
What I don't understand is how that is turned around and transformed into these series of death threats (and actions, and laws) that in effect make the depiction of the man more important than the depiction of the beliefs he was supposed to represent.
There's something about the human brain that makes it prone to crazy fanaticism. It doesn't matter if it's Islam, Christianity, or PETA. I really think it's more about the group dynamics and such that bring it about rather than the actual thing people are being fanatical about. Rational thought doesn't really enter into it. It's about defending and maintaining your group, not the actual offense.
I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate. You'll often see different polls differ by much more than that (far more often than 5% of the time or whatever the confidence level is).
Election polling is just especially difficult, since what counts is if you actually vote and who you vote for, neither of which have been determined at the time of the poll and could change. Election polling isn't simply an opinion poll, but is obviously supposed to reflect the population of people who will actually vote on election day. The polls have differing models of selecting "likely voters", and will thus have numbers that differ more than the margin of error for any single poll. In other words, taking the margin of error for a single poll and comparing it among multiple polls is invalid, since the differing polls used different means of sample selection.
Certainly actual elections tend to fall well outside the +/- 3% accuracy claimed by many of the election-day pollsters.
I guess I haven't found that to be true if you mean "tend to" is more than 50% of the time. Sure, you're going to find some that are outside of the 3% error bars, but you'd also expect that to happen, statistically speaking.
Millions of gallons of oil leach into the Gulf every year through natural processes.
Really? Does that happen all in one spot, just off the coast of Louisiana over a short period of time, or is it spread out over the entire Gulf of Mexico over an entire year?
but it also seldom gets mentioned by the 'any amount of oil is bad bad bad' crowd who seek to capitalize on the crisis.
Maybe it doesn't get mentioned because it's a really terrible comparison to what's actually happening? I'm really getting tired of this continuing trend among some people to merely assume everyone is as bad as everyone else, as if everyone in the world has some seedy angle. Child labor laws? That's just a product of people who want to "capitalize" on a less available labor such as Unions and the like. Public libraries? Pushed through by "big learning" and educational institutions so they can get people hooked on learning, and then will need higher education.
Not everything is a special interest. I object on a very basic level to your attempt to imagine some group of people and try to paint them as into a tiny, somehow relevant opinion. Who is this "any amount of oil is bad" crowd, and when did that one point become the over-riding opinion they hold? If they do indeed exist, do they really have any more relevance than the crazy guy down the street who worries about the government mind control rays?
There's been quite a lot of speculation that the numbers estimated by BP are low. BPs response has essentially been "that won't help us stop the leak, so stuff it". Well, that's not really true, since to know how effective something is you need to be able to measure before and after. There's also the obvious problem of the aftermath, and understanding how large it will be.
Frankly, I think BP releasing how much oil is leaking represents a HUGE conflict of interest for them. I believe they know the flow rate is substantially higher than the original estimates. But why would they want to release that information? Attempting to keep the numbers low limits their potential damage payout. It also would be a huge PR nightmare if the numbers are even bigger. In the long term there's going to be a TON of lawsuits. Many of them are going to be dependent on the scientific data to support them. The amount of oil leaked is obviously going to be a BIG factor. The larger the amount of oil leaked, the larger the damage right? So BP is essentially trying to play dumb, and hope that the original estimates will stick, thus limiting their liability.
To get a handle on this it's very clear we need real numbers on how much oil is leaking. The position that stopping the leak is the only thing that matters is ridiculous. The problem doesn't go away after they stop the leak. Solving the large term damage left by this is obviously partially dependent on knowing how much oil has leaked into the Gulf. Being potentially off by an order of magnitude is in no way acceptable.
These "giant plumes" are total hyperbole. A few miles is NOTHING in the context of a body of water the size of the Gulf of Mexico.
That's assuming all parts of the Gulf are equal. Are you sure they are? Might it just be possible that some parts of the Ocean are more important to us than others?
I've been reading a little about oil dispersants. I understand that basically they help to break down oil so that microorganisms can do their thing and use the oil as food. Maybe an oversimplification, but that is what I got out of it.
Not really. Dispersant merely help the oil mix with the water, they don't break it down in any real way. Your laundry detergent is an example of a product that does this. Normally oil and water don't mix very well because water is a polar solvent, and oil is a non-polar solvent. This leads to the oil floating to the surface, and eventually washing up on land. By allowing the two to mix, the oil gets dispersed over the full volume of the ocean rather than separating at the surface.
So now if you use oil dispersants, do you end up exacerbating the oxygen problem? If the microorganisms go nuts on the food supply, does this kill off even more of the ecosystem?
Good question. I guess we're going to find out.
Republicans criticizing the commercialization of low-orbit space flights? Demanding the return of a gigantic, overbudget, behind schedule rocket to nowhere? Obama for the privatization of space and Conservatives for the continuation of a government monopoly on space?
You must be new to this "politics thing". See, Republicans are critical of "big government" they don't like, or don't have any special interest in, but love spending in their own state or for projects they approve of. So spending on big military projects in your home state == good. Spending in someone else's state (especially a blue one) on transit or west nile virus research == bad.
The Democrats aren't really much better, but they aren't the ones people seem to think are the ones against "government waste".
In reality, it's the individuals rather than the parties that might actually be for actually reducing wasteful projects. Most of the time that all gets lost in all the noise and nonsense that gets thrown around to try to divide everyone into neat little categories.
Can sombody explain why this is illegal?
Because the material in question is Ricin, one of the most toxic chemicals known. It really has no other use than as a poison (unless you happen to be a cancer researcher with the ability to attach the molecule to some something that only targets cancer cells). I don't think this guy qualifies for that.
Have you ever used a knife? A car? A computer? Thought so.
All those materials have numerous other legitimate and everyday uses. Except for the theoretical use above, ricin really has no legitimate use outside of murder.
The only caveat about that particular solution is the lack of redundant power, poor serviceability in the rack (may not apply like you said), and slow speed.
All of which for a home solution are likely acceptable. "Slow" means 3 gigabits/second over the interface, which even if you take into account the overhead is going to easily saturate even a gigabit network connection. This is video we're talking about. Even fully uncompressed video at 720x480 24fps is 720*480*24*24 is only about 200 Megabits/second.
We started at 5,000 barrels a day, then 20, 50 and 100,000 barrels a day. Yesterday I saw a figure quoted at 200,000, today I saw 210,000
But 1 million barrels a day? That's almost three full days ahead of schedule for the media. Didn't Slashdot get the memo?
The reason you're getting wild ass guesses all over the board is because BP isn't saying how much oil is leaking. So people estimate and speculate. You can blame the media all you like, but in this case there's nothing much to report from anyone authoritative since the people who might (and likely do) actually know aren't saying anything.
If you think BP doesn't have a decent estimate, do you really think they'd be trying to build containment vessels if they didn't have a pretty decent idea as to the flow rate of the thing they're trying to contain?
The other interesting thing I heard was that the big apparatus they put over the leak earlier this week to try to stop the leak was essentially a very good estimator of how much oil was coming out of the leak. Simply time how long it took to fill up, and divide.
The [WAAS] satellites also broadcast the same type of range information as normal GPS satellites, effectively increasing the number of satellites available for a position fix.
The WAAS satellites aren't merely another GPS satellites, it's entirely different. GPS signals have errors based on a variety of different variables (clock errors, ionosphere propagation variability, etc). The WAAS satellites broadcast a series of correction signals that account for these errors. The end effect is increased accuracy.
yeah great idea to have a prepayment penalty and forced to pay $200,000 in additional interest.
Where the hell did you get your loan, and how much was it that you're seriously paying 200,000 in interest payment penalties? If these are serious numbers, you REALLY should have paid more attention to the amount, interest rate, and terms of your student loans.
The honest truth is NOTHING is efficient. And NOTHING is really interested in anything other than collecting as much power as possible/maintaining the status quo.
Hmm.. I guess I just don't agree. Government is really one of the few things that can create solutions in everyones interest. Do you honestly think child labor, anti-discrimination policies, the interstate highway system, free public education (as opposed to private only), etc aren't all successes of government? None of those examples are either "maintaining the status quo". I guess you could argue some of them are "collecting power", but that's not always a bad thing either. Dismissing government as a solution to problems because you only look at its failures is dishonest.
This particular case I don't know about, but you sound like you're merely dismissing it out of hand, based on ideological grounds. I think that's wrong, and you don't have to look to far to see why.
He was the lawyer, I was just a consultant. Guess who was taken notice of?
Officially of course the lawyer. That's more about posturing and group dynamics than anything else though. Privately I bet a lot of people thought the lawyers reply was unprofessional, and that of an ass. He was after all "only the lawyer", and not a leader setting the tone.
The difference between "trolling" and "bad article" is: is it purposefully stupid in order to get outraged replies? Or merely ignorantly stupid.
Interesting. I might define "trolling" as using language such as "purposefully stupid" or "ignorantly stupid" to describe something.
Actually I really detest the whole "trolling" meme. It's so incredibly subjective as to have little meaning. It becomes a bludgeon to apply to any idea that might personally enrage you. In other words "I don't have to think about that idea, because the whole thing is a troll!".
The article at issue here uses very loaded language from the beginning - e.g. the "government-created mess". This is designed to incite a flamefest, in my opinion.
I think you're being a bit overly sensitive. It's an opinion piece designed to show a point of view. It's not really any different from your average letter to the editor in a local newspaper. Actually probably a bit better than the average one, since the average one tends to be even more poorly worded and thought out. If you really think this article is a troll, then a large percentage of the world is essentially trolls.
There is a deeper issue, though: What exactly *is* an industry standard for the purpose of this? Who defines it?
I thought of that, but both of those are just problems of scope and definition. They're problems to be sure, but they don't strike me as ones that might be fundamentally unsolvable.
Oh sure, lets get the government involved in this! Because they're:
Efficient
Looking out for the people
Focused
Not interested in pork
Uninfluenced by patent holders
And who should be involved in this that meets those criteria, business? If you think business is "efficient", then you haven't looked terribly deeply into business. The other ones I don't even think anyone has any serious beliefs business is any good at. People only accuse government of all the things you describe because we have a big public window into it's operations.
Instead of invalidating patents, why not just simply say all standards must not be patent encumbered?
That turns "we're taking your great idea" into "we'll take any great ideas that you don't try to own, lock, stock, and barrel". Everyone knows the real money is always in delivering the solution and maintaining it, not trying to control the idea and own it. Large companies hate this of course, because they know that if they had to compete in a fair marketplace the small shops would eat their lunch since they can out-innovate most of the time (especially with software).
Heh.
Sounds like the lawyer felt threatened by the idea. He probably thought that if such a law were to take effect, there'd be less need for legal council. Thus his dickish reply.
Is completely clueless trolling in the summary the new standard on
It's not a summary, and it's not "trolling". The paragraph IS the article, and the links are merely poor background information. Though I do agree that there's no apparent connection between trademarks and patents.
You might not agree with the article, and it's largely poorly written and poorly supported. But "trolling" isn't the same thing as a bad article. Honestly, when did "trolling" become just a poorly written article? If anything, I'd say directly attacking someones intellect is trolling.
Given all that, I think the idea of legislating patents applied to industry standards is an interesting idea. It's likely problematic in many ways though. How do you stop people from trying to invalidate any patent by merely making it part of an "industry standard"? Can federal legislation even DO that kind of thing? (There are limits to what the federal government can do). Would it even matter, since standards such as HTML5 are international ones, not US only? Would such legislation have impacts on already existing trade agreements?
The waters seem muddy enough that even if such an approach got traction, I have doubts it would be workable.
You're right, they should have tested it. But I'd take serious issue with your contention that it's "one of the most important ones". MSE 1.0 was released on the 29th of September, 2009. So it's essentially a 7 month old product. I'd also note that it doesn't come as part of the OS, and it looks like you need to download and install the software yourself.
So given that, why do you think it's one of the most important ones?
So in your opinion the question "Is a computer faster than an abacus?" has no answer then?
On many levels, yes. Since the problem you're trying to solve is open ended, there's as many answers to it as their are ends to the question.
it's just to tell that it can do some things much faster and that is why you should care. That's the first thing you should get across in any communication, there's tons of things that are technically correct but uninteresting or useless. If you can't get that across within the first 30 seconds, I got better things to do.
Why does it have to be made interesting to everyone? Most people don't really care anyway that someone might be able to solve some mathematical problem faster than they could before. So why bother trying to jazz it up? If you seriously have to dumb something down so much that you lose the essential principles, then the person is never going to be interested in it anyway. Better just tell the truth and let those not interested in it stay uninterested in it. At least nobody has a false sense of knowing something about the thing.