You selfish "saving" on fuel leads to you occupying extra road time-space. You are basically hogging it, take it from other drivers, which leads to heavier traffic, in fact, very often it will lead to creation of extra traffic jams.
That's going to vary by circumstances. On my way home from work, I have to turn left onto a stretch of expressway with a 50MPH speed limit. Once on that stretch, I have a red light to look forward to shortly after accelerating to 50MPH. No matter how fast I go, I can not get through that light at the speed limit; the light turns red before the prior left turn light turns green. The faster traffic moves down that stretch, the longer cars have to idle at the red light.
However, accelerating to only 35MPH after the left turn gets me to the light at more or less the exact time the last stopped car has started moving through the intersection (assuming I'm the lead car at the left turn, which is frequently the case). I, and all the drivers behind me, then make it through the light without having to stop. Then we can all accelerate to 50MPH until we get to the next red light much farther down the road.
This works because the intersection is controlled by a timer, and not a proximity sensor. The latter would make this technique unreliable.
Roads are not for "saving" on fuel or brakes. Roads are for getting from A to B
The two are not mutually exclusive. Accelerating faster to an unavoidable red light both wastes gas unnecessarily, and does nothing to get you to your destination faster.
Of course the habit of many drivers to sit back a good car length from the stop lines....
Where I live, we have a different problem. It seems that many drivers don't understand what the big, thick white line at the intersection means; nor do they understand what the set of thin, spaced lines well beyond that point means. Far too many drivers here invert the meaning of those two symbols, and end up stopping just beyond the thin line closest to the intersection.
This is particularly common for drivers in the left turn lane, which is particularly problematic for drivers trying to make a right turn, and for perpendicular traffic trying to avoid clipping the moron in the left turn lane.
Why even bother with history, when you must admit it contains errors?
Because history books are written by people who understand that the content represents one of several points of view. For example, American history books paint our founding fathers as heroes, whereas British history books paint them as traitors. Both are correct, depending on your point of view.
Whereas Christianity (among other religions) promotes the nonsensical position that it is the ultimate authority on everything. Therefore, if one significant flaw is found in its dogma, then the rest is rendered suspect, and therefore useless. This is because a dogma which claims to be right about everything must be right about everything. If it isn't, then it can't be trusted to be right about anything.
Most religions can only exist if they are believed to be right about everything. That is why fanatics/the religious will go to any lengths to crush or hand-wave away any evidence which is contradictory to those beliefs. To do otherwise will require them to face the obvious: their religious view of the universe has been, is, and always will be wrong. Since they tend to define themselves in terms of their absurd belief system, such a revelation is embarrassing to the point of challenging their will to live.
There is no "you lose your rights forever" clause in the GPLv2 license.
Section 4 of the GPLv2:
"4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance."
Violation of the license terminates your rights immediately and permanently. In theory, you can ask each copyright holder to reinstate your license, but it can be damn near impossible to do so for a project with many contributors. In essence, you lose your license forever if the project has a diverse developer base.
There is no easy answer to this problem, because the weak link in any proposed solution is the skill of the school administrator to carry it out. Give the administration too much power, and they abuse it. That's why schools ended up losing so much authority to begin with. Give them too little power, and they are powerless to stop the legitimately disruptive students. The result is that they throw up their hands and call in the cops. But then the cops feel the need to justify their position, so they end up abusing children.
For every potential solution I can conceive, I can also think of at least two ways in which it can (and therefore most likely will) be abused by school administrators.
The best solution I have available to me is home schooling. I used to think it was just religious idiocy that promoted home schooling (so they could teach fantasy as if it were fact). But after doing my research, home schooling is looking really, really good as a means to not only educate my children, but to protect them as well. And stories like this are making the decision a whole lot easier.
Everyone else will see it as a reason to dump SMS altogether and use an IP-based rather than cell-based messaging service.
I'd be all for that if not for one little problem: if you don't use the cell towers, and you're not near an open WiFi hotspot, how are you supposed to send your Internet based text messages? The software for sending text messages via IP is a trivial issue. The problem is Internet connectivity without cell service.
"Unless it's too complicated for a human to do the math"? Good grief.
Yep, we're back to square one. All that will happen now is that patent applications will include bloated calculations to pass the "too complicated for a human" math test. They won't actually be necessary for anything except printing more money...err...getting the math patent approved.
It's good to see that our judiciary is stuffed with people who utterly fail at basic literacy.
In my little world, Microsoft is of no consequence, and that's a good thing. I will not touch Microsoft products (including NOKIA), as a matter of principal.
It's even better than that for me. Not only won't I touch Microsoft/Nokia products out of principle, I won't touch them because I have absolutely no need for them. Linux and Android fill 100% of my personal and professional needs. I won't use Microsoft/Nokia products because I have far better products already.
I recently watched a PBS special about broadband, which indicated the UK's system is setup so that most households have a choice of multiple broadband providers, where high speed starts in at least 2-digit megabits per second, and the monthly cost is almost trivially low (I forgot the actual costs that were mentioned).
Although the lines are owned primarily by an oligopoly of companies (AT&T, Verizon, and British Telecom were the three mentioned), they are required by law to lease the lines to competitors. Not only that, but Verizon, AT&T, and BT all wholeheartedly endorse the the concept of being required to lease their lines to competitors. Spokespeople for those companies all said that the required competition kept them working to improve their respective services.
The special also said that the companies are investing in massive new outlays of fiber optics across the country so that even very remote and sparsely populated outlying areas get fast Internet.
Now shift to the U.S., where Verizon and AT&T are fighting tooth and nail against regulations that would provide the same level of service and network expansion going on in the UK, and where 3mb DSL is considered high speed (by AT&T).
It just drove home how royally screwed we are in the U.S.
P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.
X will survive as a plugin to Wayland, or as a separate server that runs on top of Wayland just like it runs on top of Windows. It just won't be an integral part of the graphics pipeline as it currently is.
So there's no need to worry about running X applications remotely.
I'm either very, very lucky, or the people complaining about how hard it is to run your own mail server are very, very unlucky. I've been running my own mail server off my DSL for five years now with almost no problems. The biggest problem I have is that a few sites reject my mail due to their policy settings (Craigslist is the biggest offender). Yahoo blanket-rejected me in the beginning until I followed the link its mail server put in my Postfix logs to get me unblocked. It took exactly two email exchanges with Yahoo to explain that I was running my own mail server, then I was unblocked.
My issues fell into two major categories: It's either that my IP address is linked to my DSL (one site), or that my ISP's reverse DNS didn't resolve back to my domain name (two sites). All of these problems are fixable if I were to configure my DSL modem to allow use of my other four static IP addresses so I could run my own DNS servers, but it hasn't been enough of an issue to motivate me to go through the effort.
Other than those little glitches, it's been very smooth sailing for me.
If Google thinks this is bogus. They need to fight and get the patents invalidated.
That is a losing strategy, as the USPTO issues bad patents like Proctor & Gamble issues toilet paper (both of which serve the same purpose). Imagine if you had to spend millions of dollars for each piece of toilet paper Proctor & Gamble produces. Does that seems like a good use of resources?
The better use of resources is to get math patents abolished altogether.
Congress shall make no law...abridging...the right of the people peaceably to assemble....
Note the emphasized word. This says nothing about states.
However, from the Missouri Constitution:
"Section 9. Rights of peaceable assembly and petition. --That the people have the right peaceably to assemble for their common good, and to apply to those invested with the powers of government for redress of grievances by petition or remonstrance."
So while not a violation of the U.S. Constitution, it most certainly is a violation of the Missouri Constitution. This is, of course, assuming that state courts actually read and follow their respective Constitutions; something that seems to be increasingly rare in this country.
The answer to your Slashdot question is trivially simple: take everything you know to a copyright lawyer, and get a consultation to see if you have a case. Then you and your lawyer decide how to proceed from there.
Do not, Not, NOt, NOT get your legal advice from Slashdot.
The above notwithstanding, do NOT threaten your former employer. If any threats are to be made, or actions are to be taken, leave it to your lawyer. Otherwise, you are just likely to dig yourself a very, very deep legal hole.
This is the Axis of Evil we're talking about. Of course they're going to say, "We would never dream of using these patents offensively -wink, wink-. We would only use them defensively -chuckle, chuckle-.
...we've been sticking our fingers in our ears and pretending that our telecommunications oligopoly-with-local-monopoly-characteristics is a vibrant free market...
Who's "we"? Most Americans will eagerly point out how little choice we have in phone and Internet service, and how we're being vastly overcharged and vastly underserviced. The only people who seems to not be listening are regulators and politicians. No one else is pretending that America's current telecom situation is anything other than unmitigated crap.
So, this is not a new development and unlikely to change anything.
The Assclown vs. Google legal proceedings haven't progressed far enough for summary judgements, which is when I expect this to be used. This is something that would cause any sane legal system to stop in its tracks and dismiss the case with prejudice.
This trial doesn't matter either way, as it's going to be appealed by whomever loses. This judge is giving both sides ample ammunition for appeal. Frankly, this trial is a total waste of time, money, and effort. The appeals court is going to grant the loser a new trial, anyway.
Some of the decisions this judge made are just jaw-droppingly bad.
and on another note, this situation basically drew my attention to the fact that relying on google is not a good thing.
This is one of the big reasons that relying on cloud services to host your important data is dumb with a capital STUPID. The hosting company can turn on you at any instant, rendering your data inaccessible. This is fine if all you're storing there is your grocery list. But if you're storing your business data in the cloud, you're just asking for a virtual ass raping someday.
There are many other reasons that using someone else's servers to store your important data is monumentally brain dead, but I'm just sticking to the immediate topic.
They're just games, so don't buy them. There are far, far better ways to spend your time. Odds are that you've already played every game on the market, anyway, just under a different name or brand.
It might very well be that Honeycomb is this beautiful, hard-working, honey-making bee of the mobile OS world
Honeycomb reportedly has several severe issues which make it unpalatable for users, and developers know this. Knowing this, developers are not going to target it. Developers will continue to target other Android versions, though.
Slashdot Mirror
You selfish "saving" on fuel leads to you occupying extra road time-space. You are basically hogging it, take it from other drivers, which leads to heavier traffic, in fact, very often it will lead to creation of extra traffic jams.
That's going to vary by circumstances. On my way home from work, I have to turn left onto a stretch of expressway with a 50MPH speed limit. Once on that stretch, I have a red light to look forward to shortly after accelerating to 50MPH. No matter how fast I go, I can not get through that light at the speed limit; the light turns red before the prior left turn light turns green. The faster traffic moves down that stretch, the longer cars have to idle at the red light.
However, accelerating to only 35MPH after the left turn gets me to the light at more or less the exact time the last stopped car has started moving through the intersection (assuming I'm the lead car at the left turn, which is frequently the case). I, and all the drivers behind me, then make it through the light without having to stop. Then we can all accelerate to 50MPH until we get to the next red light much farther down the road.
This works because the intersection is controlled by a timer, and not a proximity sensor. The latter would make this technique unreliable.
Roads are not for "saving" on fuel or brakes. Roads are for getting from A to B
The two are not mutually exclusive. Accelerating faster to an unavoidable red light both wastes gas unnecessarily, and does nothing to get you to your destination faster.
Of course the habit of many drivers to sit back a good car length from the stop lines....
Where I live, we have a different problem. It seems that many drivers don't understand what the big, thick white line at the intersection means; nor do they understand what the set of thin, spaced lines well beyond that point means. Far too many drivers here invert the meaning of those two symbols, and end up stopping just beyond the thin line closest to the intersection.
This is particularly common for drivers in the left turn lane, which is particularly problematic for drivers trying to make a right turn, and for perpendicular traffic trying to avoid clipping the moron in the left turn lane.
He had three, but dropped the one with the eleventh commandment that said, "Haha! Made you look!" But by that time, the damage had been done.
Why even bother with history, when you must admit it contains errors?
Because history books are written by people who understand that the content represents one of several points of view. For example, American history books paint our founding fathers as heroes, whereas British history books paint them as traitors. Both are correct, depending on your point of view.
Whereas Christianity (among other religions) promotes the nonsensical position that it is the ultimate authority on everything. Therefore, if one significant flaw is found in its dogma, then the rest is rendered suspect, and therefore useless. This is because a dogma which claims to be right about everything must be right about everything. If it isn't, then it can't be trusted to be right about anything.
Most religions can only exist if they are believed to be right about everything. That is why fanatics/the religious will go to any lengths to crush or hand-wave away any evidence which is contradictory to those beliefs. To do otherwise will require them to face the obvious: their religious view of the universe has been, is, and always will be wrong. Since they tend to define themselves in terms of their absurd belief system, such a revelation is embarrassing to the point of challenging their will to live.
There is no "you lose your rights forever" clause in the GPLv2 license.
Section 4 of the GPLv2:
"4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance."
Violation of the license terminates your rights immediately and permanently. In theory, you can ask each copyright holder to reinstate your license, but it can be damn near impossible to do so for a project with many contributors. In essence, you lose your license forever if the project has a diverse developer base.
There is no easy answer to this problem, because the weak link in any proposed solution is the skill of the school administrator to carry it out. Give the administration too much power, and they abuse it. That's why schools ended up losing so much authority to begin with. Give them too little power, and they are powerless to stop the legitimately disruptive students. The result is that they throw up their hands and call in the cops. But then the cops feel the need to justify their position, so they end up abusing children.
For every potential solution I can conceive, I can also think of at least two ways in which it can (and therefore most likely will) be abused by school administrators.
The best solution I have available to me is home schooling. I used to think it was just religious idiocy that promoted home schooling (so they could teach fantasy as if it were fact). But after doing my research, home schooling is looking really, really good as a means to not only educate my children, but to protect them as well. And stories like this are making the decision a whole lot easier.
Everyone else will see it as a reason to dump SMS altogether and use an IP-based rather than cell-based messaging service.
I'd be all for that if not for one little problem: if you don't use the cell towers, and you're not near an open WiFi hotspot, how are you supposed to send your Internet based text messages? The software for sending text messages via IP is a trivial issue. The problem is Internet connectivity without cell service.
"Unless it's too complicated for a human to do the math"? Good grief.
Yep, we're back to square one. All that will happen now is that patent applications will include bloated calculations to pass the "too complicated for a human" math test. They won't actually be necessary for anything except printing more money...err...getting the math patent approved.
It's good to see that our judiciary is stuffed with people who utterly fail at basic literacy.
In my little world, Microsoft is of no consequence, and that's a good thing. I will not touch Microsoft products (including NOKIA), as a matter of principal.
It's even better than that for me. Not only won't I touch Microsoft/Nokia products out of principle, I won't touch them because I have absolutely no need for them. Linux and Android fill 100% of my personal and professional needs. I won't use Microsoft/Nokia products because I have far better products already.
This isn't true. I work in the UK ISP industry, and the reality of the UK world is you have basically got two access options
Thanks for the explanation. I actually feel better knowing that UK customers are just as screwed as US customers.
I recently watched a PBS special about broadband, which indicated the UK's system is setup so that most households have a choice of multiple broadband providers, where high speed starts in at least 2-digit megabits per second, and the monthly cost is almost trivially low (I forgot the actual costs that were mentioned).
Although the lines are owned primarily by an oligopoly of companies (AT&T, Verizon, and British Telecom were the three mentioned), they are required by law to lease the lines to competitors. Not only that, but Verizon, AT&T, and BT all wholeheartedly endorse the the concept of being required to lease their lines to competitors. Spokespeople for those companies all said that the required competition kept them working to improve their respective services.
The special also said that the companies are investing in massive new outlays of fiber optics across the country so that even very remote and sparsely populated outlying areas get fast Internet.
Now shift to the U.S., where Verizon and AT&T are fighting tooth and nail against regulations that would provide the same level of service and network expansion going on in the UK, and where 3mb DSL is considered high speed (by AT&T).
It just drove home how royally screwed we are in the U.S.
P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.
X will survive as a plugin to Wayland, or as a separate server that runs on top of Wayland just like it runs on top of Windows. It just won't be an integral part of the graphics pipeline as it currently is.
So there's no need to worry about running X applications remotely.
I'm either very, very lucky, or the people complaining about how hard it is to run your own mail server are very, very unlucky. I've been running my own mail server off my DSL for five years now with almost no problems. The biggest problem I have is that a few sites reject my mail due to their policy settings (Craigslist is the biggest offender). Yahoo blanket-rejected me in the beginning until I followed the link its mail server put in my Postfix logs to get me unblocked. It took exactly two email exchanges with Yahoo to explain that I was running my own mail server, then I was unblocked.
My issues fell into two major categories: It's either that my IP address is linked to my DSL (one site), or that my ISP's reverse DNS didn't resolve back to my domain name (two sites). All of these problems are fixable if I were to configure my DSL modem to allow use of my other four static IP addresses so I could run my own DNS servers, but it hasn't been enough of an issue to motivate me to go through the effort.
Other than those little glitches, it's been very smooth sailing for me.
When did it become bogus?
The moment math was allowed to be patented.
If Google thinks this is bogus. They need to fight and get the patents invalidated.
That is a losing strategy, as the USPTO issues bad patents like Proctor & Gamble issues toilet paper (both of which serve the same purpose). Imagine if you had to spend millions of dollars for each piece of toilet paper Proctor & Gamble produces. Does that seems like a good use of resources?
The better use of resources is to get math patents abolished altogether.
Congress shall make no law...abridging...the right of the people peaceably to assemble....
Note the emphasized word. This says nothing about states.
However, from the Missouri Constitution:
"Section 9. Rights of peaceable assembly and petition. --That the people have the
right peaceably to assemble for their common good, and to apply to those invested with
the powers of government for redress of grievances by petition or remonstrance."
So while not a violation of the U.S. Constitution, it most certainly is a violation of the Missouri Constitution. This is, of course, assuming that state courts actually read and follow their respective Constitutions; something that seems to be increasingly rare in this country.
The computer only had a bit part in the movie, based on the nybble we got on YouTube. But I heard it took a huge byte of the awards later.
(let the groaning begin)
The answer to your Slashdot question is trivially simple: take everything you know to a copyright lawyer, and get a consultation to see if you have a case. Then you and your lawyer decide how to proceed from there.
Do not, Not, NOt, NOT get your legal advice from Slashdot.
The above notwithstanding, do NOT threaten your former employer. If any threats are to be made, or actions are to be taken, leave it to your lawyer. Otherwise, you are just likely to dig yourself a very, very deep legal hole.
This is the Axis of Evil we're talking about. Of course they're going to say, "We would never dream of using these patents offensively -wink, wink-. We would only use them defensively -chuckle, chuckle-.
...we've been sticking our fingers in our ears and pretending that our telecommunications oligopoly-with-local-monopoly-characteristics is a vibrant free market...
Who's "we"? Most Americans will eagerly point out how little choice we have in phone and Internet service, and how we're being vastly overcharged and vastly underserviced. The only people who seems to not be listening are regulators and politicians. No one else is pretending that America's current telecom situation is anything other than unmitigated crap.
So, this is not a new development and unlikely to change anything.
The Assclown vs. Google legal proceedings haven't progressed far enough for summary judgements, which is when I expect this to be used. This is something that would cause any sane legal system to stop in its tracks and dismiss the case with prejudice.
This trial doesn't matter either way, as it's going to be appealed by whomever loses. This judge is giving both sides ample ammunition for appeal. Frankly, this trial is a total waste of time, money, and effort. The appeals court is going to grant the loser a new trial, anyway.
Some of the decisions this judge made are just jaw-droppingly bad.
and on another note, this situation basically drew my attention to the fact that relying on google is not a good thing.
This is one of the big reasons that relying on cloud services to host your important data is dumb with a capital STUPID. The hosting company can turn on you at any instant, rendering your data inaccessible. This is fine if all you're storing there is your grocery list. But if you're storing your business data in the cloud, you're just asking for a virtual ass raping someday.
There are many other reasons that using someone else's servers to store your important data is monumentally brain dead, but I'm just sticking to the immediate topic.
They're just games, so don't buy them. There are far, far better ways to spend your time. Odds are that you've already played every game on the market, anyway, just under a different name or brand.
So, Google's now going to be providing English search results for China?
It might very well be that Honeycomb is this beautiful, hard-working, honey-making bee of the mobile OS world
Honeycomb reportedly has several severe issues which make it unpalatable for users, and developers know this. Knowing this, developers are not going to target it. Developers will continue to target other Android versions, though.