I think that'd stand up in court for all of about four seconds. Telling your engineers not to do patent searches in case they come across something similar to what they are working on that they didn't already know about is one thing; setting your engineers to deliberately copy someone else's work is rather another. At any rate, ignorance is no defence to patent infringement, it just helps you avoid the triple damages for wilful infringement.
The whole story is a horrendous beat-up, though. Android is open-source and MS are free to copy it any time they like. There are no proprietary parts of Android that Microsoft would have to replace. The Google Play store *is* proprietary and some Google apps are only (officially/legally) available through it. So Microsoft would have to supply their own implementations of maps (hint: they already have one) their own app store (hint: they already have one, albeit not for Android) and, erm, any other Google apps they thought they couldn't survive without. Since most of the money in Android comes from the Play store and ads in the search and maps apps, I don't think Microsoft are going to be too upset about this revenue going to them and not to Google.
From my skim reading of the interwebs, studies vary enormously. While the one cited by the ISNA gives a total of 1 in 100, the other studies I found all gave numbers between 1 in 4,200 and 1 in 5,000. Of course the result is going to depend heavily on just how you interpret the phrase "differ from standard male or female", but one can't help the suspicion that just maybe ISNA has a bit of an agenda to push and has chosen its referenced study accordingly.
I don't know anything about it, but the "this aspect of the native culture survived the ruthless cultural destruction by Christian missionaries" narrative seems a bit unlikely, since the Tongan word for it is derived from the English word 'lady' (at least according to the Wiki page you cite).
Indeed this seems to be almost the last taboo of Western society. We've come around to divorce, adultery, homosexuality, bisexuality, 'free love', transexuality, BDSM, gay marriage...
But promise two women you'll never leave them and it's prison for you, mister.
Lots of other Western countries already have similar systems. Where I studied in Australia, I 'paid' about $5,000 per year to attend University. The government loaned me this money. Once I graduated, any income over a certain threshold was taxed at 1.5% and any income over a further threshold at 3% until the loan was repaid. The loan amount increases with inflation (CPI).
There are two main problems with it: 1 - it penalises disciplines that are productive in the economy. The BA student who either never works or flips burgers at McDonalds gets his education for free, while the engineers or doctors have to pay. 2 - it encourages brain drain. Since the repayment is through the tax system, the easiest way to avoid it while still earning good money is to move to another country where they won't care about it.
If you think Ny has any control over the situation you are very naive. I think Assange's tactic is to outwait the current US administration and hope the next one doesn't give a shit about leaks that embarrassed Hillary (eg. the "get something on the diplomats so we can blackmail them" cable).
Yes, a sane, balanced view of the situation. Almost as sane and balanced as Julian's.
As for whether or not Assange believes himself when he claims he fears extradition to the US - He only faced two years in a cushy Swedish prison. He has now lived trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for four.
What deeper implications of travelling into Sweden, exactly? You mean escaping the UK's we'll-give-you-anyone-you-ask-for extradition treaty with the USA? I can see how that would be a problem for him, yes.
Yes, but the reason he's there is that the UK seemed to be about to extradite him to Sweden. He was quite happy living in the UK so long as it didn't mean going to Sweden.
It's the fatal flaw in dear old Julian's argument: He's worried about the Americans getting hold of him, so he'd rather stay in the UK where extradition to the US is easy, rather than go to Sweden where extradition to the US is much harder. Or maybe there's another reason....
What that other reason is is hard to tell, exactly. It might be that he is genuinely guilty-as-not-yet-charged in Sweden. Or it could just as easily be that he has an enormous ego, a superiority complex and a highly-developed paranoia that makes him see persecution in everything, whether it looks plausible to a sane person or not.
I sort of doubt Android phones have any useful sort of dead reckoning. My experience of playing around with accelerometers on phones is that they can tell you roughly which way is up and can detect sharp shakes or jolts and that is all. Attempting to integrate the results over any period of more than about a second results in drift so bad it is useless.
I've seen pretty convincing analysis today showing that, when you take the tax benefits of the deal and Motorola's cash position into account, Google is about $1bn to the good out of the deal, and it's retaining the patents. So it has bought a loss-making company for $12bn, broken it up into bits it can sell for around $5bn, got $3bn cash out of it, and about $6bn off its tax bill over the next six years, while gaining a large and important patent portfolio. Doesn't look look like a loss to me.
This is supposed to be News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, and the number of people who didn't get the "TwoBillion-OneHundredFortySevenMillion-FourHundredEightyThreeThousand-SixHundredFortyEightDrive" joke is rather depressing.
A lot of people don't understand that the less they give as customers, the less they'll receive as employees.
Which is, of course, why we're all much worse off now than when the industrial revolution started. Back then it was the machines making goods cheaper than the people could. Of course people would buy the cheaper goods made by machine, not realising they were sowing the seeds of their own economic destruction. The less they gave as customers, the less they received as employees!
Honestly, can we drop this tosh now? Another way of saying the same thing is, "The more expensive everything is, the more you'll be able to buy!" It is obvious nonsense.
I make no comment on idiots posting ignorant tosh when they bloody well should know better if they've ever eg. seen a fish and wondered how it breathes.
But how the fucking hell did this get modded insightful?
I mean, I could understand interesting. After all, morons can be interesting if their stupidity reaches the right sort of rarefied heights. They become a curiosity and we can peer at them through the bars of the cage and be reassured that, no matter what we've done to the world and each other, nature can still have its way and throw up the sort of laughable dunce who really ought to have entered the Darwin award nominations long ago. We can meditate on the extreme tail of any probability distribution that keeps such a person alive for this long and reflect that life is like a box of chocolates.
But insightful? I can only suppose that we are meant to learn that no moderation system is perfect and the award of mod points does not automatically bestow wisdom.
I mean, it's not like they're saying, "Help us or we'll lock you up for not helping us." They're saying, "You committed a crime and the punishment for that crime is 124 years in prison. But help us and we'll see if we can shorten that a bit."
Slashdot Mirror
I think that'd stand up in court for all of about four seconds. Telling your engineers not to do patent searches in case they come across something similar to what they are working on that they didn't already know about is one thing; setting your engineers to deliberately copy someone else's work is rather another. At any rate, ignorance is no defence to patent infringement, it just helps you avoid the triple damages for wilful infringement.
The whole story is a horrendous beat-up, though. Android is open-source and MS are free to copy it any time they like. There are no proprietary parts of Android that Microsoft would have to replace. The Google Play store *is* proprietary and some Google apps are only (officially/legally) available through it. So Microsoft would have to supply their own implementations of maps (hint: they already have one) their own app store (hint: they already have one, albeit not for Android) and, erm, any other Google apps they thought they couldn't survive without. Since most of the money in Android comes from the Play store and ads in the search and maps apps, I don't think Microsoft are going to be too upset about this revenue going to them and not to Google.
From my skim reading of the interwebs, studies vary enormously. While the one cited by the ISNA gives a total of 1 in 100, the other studies I found all gave numbers between 1 in 4,200 and 1 in 5,000. Of course the result is going to depend heavily on just how you interpret the phrase "differ from standard male or female", but one can't help the suspicion that just maybe ISNA has a bit of an agenda to push and has chosen its referenced study accordingly.
I don't know anything about it, but the "this aspect of the native culture survived the ruthless cultural destruction by Christian missionaries" narrative seems a bit unlikely, since the Tongan word for it is derived from the English word 'lady' (at least according to the Wiki page you cite).
There's, like, this series of books? Something about low-resolution monochrome?
Some cultures have several
Really?
I'm pretty sure I don't want to know the answer to this, but what exactly is "ambiguous genitalia" and how many people actually have it?
Indeed this seems to be almost the last taboo of Western society. We've come around to divorce, adultery, homosexuality, bisexuality, 'free love', transexuality, BDSM, gay marriage...
But promise two women you'll never leave them and it's prison for you, mister.
Lots of other Western countries already have similar systems. Where I studied in Australia, I 'paid' about $5,000 per year to attend University. The government loaned me this money. Once I graduated, any income over a certain threshold was taxed at 1.5% and any income over a further threshold at 3% until the loan was repaid. The loan amount increases with inflation (CPI).
There are two main problems with it: 1 - it penalises disciplines that are productive in the economy. The BA student who either never works or flips burgers at McDonalds gets his education for free, while the engineers or doctors have to pay. 2 - it encourages brain drain. Since the repayment is through the tax system, the easiest way to avoid it while still earning good money is to move to another country where they won't care about it.
If you think Ny has any control over the situation you are very naive.
I think Assange's tactic is to outwait the current US administration and hope the next one doesn't give a shit about leaks that embarrassed Hillary (eg. the "get something on the diplomats so we can blackmail them" cable).
Yes, a sane, balanced view of the situation. Almost as sane and balanced as Julian's.
As for whether or not Assange believes himself when he claims he fears extradition to the US - He only faced two years in a cushy Swedish prison. He has now lived trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for four.
Try 18 months, not four years.
What deeper implications of travelling into Sweden, exactly? You mean escaping the UK's we'll-give-you-anyone-you-ask-for extradition treaty with the USA? I can see how that would be a problem for him, yes.
Yes, but the reason he's there is that the UK seemed to be about to extradite him to Sweden. He was quite happy living in the UK so long as it didn't mean going to Sweden.
It's the fatal flaw in dear old Julian's argument: He's worried about the Americans getting hold of him, so he'd rather stay in the UK where extradition to the US is easy, rather than go to Sweden where extradition to the US is much harder. Or maybe there's another reason....
What that other reason is is hard to tell, exactly. It might be that he is genuinely guilty-as-not-yet-charged in Sweden. Or it could just as easily be that he has an enormous ego, a superiority complex and a highly-developed paranoia that makes him see persecution in everything, whether it looks plausible to a sane person or not.
I sort of doubt Android phones have any useful sort of dead reckoning. My experience of playing around with accelerometers on phones is that they can tell you roughly which way is up and can detect sharp shakes or jolts and that is all. Attempting to integrate the results over any period of more than about a second results in drift so bad it is useless.
They're training customers to sue them.
FTFY
And yes, I know the numbers don't add up. It's an approximation. Get over it.
I've seen pretty convincing analysis today showing that, when you take the tax benefits of the deal and Motorola's cash position into account, Google is about $1bn to the good out of the deal, and it's retaining the patents. So it has bought a loss-making company for $12bn, broken it up into bits it can sell for around $5bn, got $3bn cash out of it, and about $6bn off its tax bill over the next six years, while gaining a large and important patent portfolio. Doesn't look look like a loss to me.
This is supposed to be News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, and the number of people who didn't get the "TwoBillion-OneHundredFortySevenMillion-FourHundredEightyThreeThousand-SixHundredFortyEightDrive" joke is rather depressing.
Which is, of course, why we're all much worse off now than when the industrial revolution started. Back then it was the machines making goods cheaper than the people could. Of course people would buy the cheaper goods made by machine, not realising they were sowing the seeds of their own economic destruction. The less they gave as customers, the less they received as employees!
Honestly, can we drop this tosh now? Another way of saying the same thing is, "The more expensive everything is, the more you'll be able to buy!" It is obvious nonsense.
I wasn't commenting on the OP, but on the moderation of the OP. It still has a net moderation score of +3, FFS.
Um, er, wait, you what? The former two catholic popes did similar stuff to murdering health workers?
I... um... wow. Just wow.
I suppose it just goes to show that there really ought to be a "-1 Fucking Retard" moderation option.
I make no comment on idiots posting ignorant tosh when they bloody well should know better if they've ever eg. seen a fish and wondered how it breathes.
But how the fucking hell did this get modded insightful?
I mean, I could understand interesting. After all, morons can be interesting if their stupidity reaches the right sort of rarefied heights. They become a curiosity and we can peer at them through the bars of the cage and be reassured that, no matter what we've done to the world and each other, nature can still have its way and throw up the sort of laughable dunce who really ought to have entered the Darwin award nominations long ago. We can meditate on the extreme tail of any probability distribution that keeps such a person alive for this long and reflect that life is like a box of chocolates.
But insightful? I can only suppose that we are meant to learn that no moderation system is perfect and the award of mod points does not automatically bestow wisdom.
Sorry, do we have a problem with the third person plural pronoun now?
I mean, it's not like they're saying, "Help us or we'll lock you up for not helping us." They're saying, "You committed a crime and the punishment for that crime is 124 years in prison. But help us and we'll see if we can shorten that a bit."