This, of course, is entirely conjectural, and would need some solid evidence to back it up. Without that evidence, I would be inclined to chalk it up to folk superstition, encouraged in part by the anti alternative energy noise machine, [...]
In the mean time, it's not hard to mandate a reasonable minimum distance from existing residences just to be on the safe side.
I'm also in that position. My daughter is 10, and I let her play Portal, which is rated M. She asked after playing Portal 2, which is rated PG.
Clearly I'm not as smart as a 10 year old, because I couldn't tell the difference, and she worked it out: In the original being shot by turrets results in a small amount of blood splatter. Apparently being shot at by live bullets isn't bad enough by itself.
If gas prices were hidden and the government (or insurance company) paid for them, people would drive all over the place without care.
If a US health insurance company paid for fuel, they'd audit every trip you took, making sure that it was a life-or-death situation before you went.
If a non-US public insurer (say, Australian Medicare) paid for fuel, they'd set the price they paid for fuel, reviewed yearly. Petrol stations ("gas" means LPG since this is Australia) would charge what they want. Some petrol stations would provide a completely no-frills service so that they could charge exactly the government price, so you'd never be out of pocket. Most would only charge the government price for people who are disabled and so couldn't walk or bike around. But petrol stations would actually be allowed to charge whatever they want, and many would pay it if they provided, say, full driveway service.
Now CSIRO may be a research organization. But this business model of turning government funding into lawsuits around the world is patent trolling. Sorry if you don't like it, but that's the way it is.
OK, so let's turn the question around. You're in charge of the CSIRO, an Australian government-funded research and development arm. What would you have done differently?
The central problem here is that the term "patent troll" doesn't have a universally agreed-upon definition.
Wikipedia lists these qualities that a patent troll generally has:
Purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent; Enforces patents against purported infringers without itself intending to manufacture the patented product or supply the patented service; Enforces patents but has no manufacturing or research base; Focuses its efforts solely on enforcing patent rights; or Asserts patent infringement claims against non-copiers or against a large industry that is composed of non-copiers.
Of these, the CSIRO can be legitimately accused of at most one, and even that one isn't clear.
Doing original research isn't sufficient to escape being considered a patent troll.
Not every non-practicing entity who sues over patent infringement is automatically a patent troll, either.
That's because memcpy() is literally from the dawn of the C Standard Library, when the Bell Labs hackers were trying to squeeze as much functionality as they could into machines which look pathetically small by today's standards.
No, they don't look pathetically small by today's standards. And no, we can't move on. Yesterday's minicomputer is today's microcontroller or smartcard. These 40-year-old "small" platforms aren't dead, they've just been pushed down the food chain.
That may not mean anything for the platforms that glibc (or Flash, for that matter) targets, but it's very important for the C standard.
To be fair if I genuinely believed in the rapture and that it was coming very soon, I would probably also question what the point of protecting the world from future events that can never happen because Jesus is coming (or some other supernatural being).
If you believed that, then you'd presumably take the prediction of the likely fate of those who took that attitude seriously:
"The nations raged, but your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth." (Rev 11:18, NRSV; emphasis added)
But hey, only the ignorant accuse fundamentalists of consistency.
I sure wish we could get liberals to think that way about government spending.
I'm sure that US liberals wish they could get US conservatives to realise that the military eats up over 20% of government spending, and that the US government spends twice as much per person on health care than nations with public health care systems.
They can also drive safely millimetres (like inches but smaller) apart from each other, massively increasing the capacity of the existing road network.
You don't know that for certain. AFAIK they have never put two Google cars together on the same road.
Which makes sense, when you think about how laser range finding works. If you put a second car with an identical setup next to it, you would surely get crosstalk between the two rigs.
An employer should be able to fire any employee for any reason, even if he doesn't like the way they sneeze. It may not be ethical or moral, but it surely shouldn't be illegal.
If you like working under those conditions, there are plenty of opportunities in the Chinese manufacturing industry.
Nit fairly picked, though allow me to nitpick your nitpick. I happen to know about a dozen Iranian-born people (I don't know why, but there seem to be a lot around this workplace). Most of them speak English and Arabic, even the ones who aren't Muslim. If I had to guess why, it's probably to do with the alphabet; the primary barrier to learning Persian or Arabic for most European-language-speakers is the alphabet, which is not a problem that Iranians have.
I already have what I demand. I have a smartphone which is pretty powerful, compact, repairable and based on relatively open platforms. Suffice it to say, it's not made by Apple.
I'm curious. Does that mean if you have your car worked on by an accredited mechanic, the warranty has to be honored no matter how much an accredited mechanic (theoretically) screws it up? If not, the dealer could say, "Oh, that accredited mechanic really botched your transmission, so if you want it fixed take it back to him," while the accredited mechanic says, "The dealer is lying, the transmission failed, they have to replace it."
Oh, you're really missing out on the whole new car buying experience. Believe me, they try everything to make you think a brand-specific mechanic is the only way to go, especially with all the new-fangled electronics and such in new cars these days. Oh, you took it to someone else, they really messed up the whatchamacallit - so sorry about your warranty.
Oh, they try it here in Australia. I've heard some horror stories. But they can't legally insist on using a branded mechanic for general services. That's why we have accreditation for auto mechanics.
In the real world, we're not stuck with either extreme.
My refrigerator manufacturer doesn't license repairers. If it's still under warranty, of course I'll go through the manufacturer/supplier first, because assuming it is covered by the warranty, they'll fix it for free. But all other things being equal, I'll personally go with the repairman I've used for years with many different household appliances, who is appropriately qualified, highly experienced and offers a pretty good guarantee on his own work.
I've never bought a new car, but where I live, auto mechanics are licensed by the peak automobile industry body. If you want to get your car repaired under the warranty, you go back to the dealer who will do it for free. But for a general service, even under the warranty period, you can use any qualified mechanic. "Qualifications" are endorsed by the peak automotive industry body.
Even if you can't fix your fridge, there are plenty of people who can, none of whom require permission from the manufacturer. This prevents the manufacturer and the repairer forming a cartel.
Whistleblowers and muckrakers shouldn't be a part of the government.
Dude, politicians are some of the worst muckrakers of them all. He'll fit right in there. As for whistleblowers, at least he'll have one person to keep him company.
No, because he isn't part of a diplomatic mission. What you're thinking of is that which is known as parliamentary privilege, parliamentary immunity or legislative immunity. In Commonwealth countries such as Australia, parliamentary privilege generally only extends to protection from slander or libel for statements made in the legislature. Legislators are not immune from criminal actions for the simple reason that all are equal under the law. This is pretty much the same as in the US.
Succeed != Adopt. (Or =\= if you prefer Prolog,/= if you prefer Haskell... forget it, we could be here all day.)
Not all serious languages are developed with the goal wide adopted. Many are testbeds for new language features and paradigms, or new compiler techniques. The technology can live on long after the language, and if that happens, the language succeeded.
You probably have done or used most, if not all, of the following:
Written a "Hello world" program.
Single-line comments denoted by "//".
Compund statements delimited by punctuation instead of identifiers (i.e. curly braces instead of BEGIN/END, DO/OD etc).
Byte-oriented memory addressing exposed by the language.
Personal computer operating system written in a high-level language.
Compilers that are retargetable by compiling through a low-level platform-independent representation.
Multiplayer role-playing games.
You can thank BCPL for all of this. It didn't "succeed" in the sense of long-term wide adoption, but its legacy is unsurpassed by any other language.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, crap. You just called the demoscene "history". That means I'm old.
This, of course, is entirely conjectural, and would need some solid evidence to back it up. Without that evidence, I would be inclined to chalk it up to folk superstition, encouraged in part by the anti alternative energy noise machine, [...]
In the mean time, it's not hard to mandate a reasonable minimum distance from existing residences just to be on the safe side.
I'm also in that position. My daughter is 10, and I let her play Portal, which is rated M. She asked after playing Portal 2, which is rated PG.
Clearly I'm not as smart as a 10 year old, because I couldn't tell the difference, and she worked it out: In the original being shot by turrets results in a small amount of blood splatter. Apparently being shot at by live bullets isn't bad enough by itself.
If gas prices were hidden and the government (or insurance company) paid for them, people would drive all over the place without care.
If a US health insurance company paid for fuel, they'd audit every trip you took, making sure that it was a life-or-death situation before you went.
If a non-US public insurer (say, Australian Medicare) paid for fuel, they'd set the price they paid for fuel, reviewed yearly. Petrol stations ("gas" means LPG since this is Australia) would charge what they want. Some petrol stations would provide a completely no-frills service so that they could charge exactly the government price, so you'd never be out of pocket. Most would only charge the government price for people who are disabled and so couldn't walk or bike around. But petrol stations would actually be allowed to charge whatever they want, and many would pay it if they provided, say, full driveway service.
Also to use Windows 3.x effectively.
Now CSIRO may be a research organization. But this business model of turning government funding into lawsuits around the world is patent trolling. Sorry if you don't like it, but that's the way it is.
OK, so let's turn the question around. You're in charge of the CSIRO, an Australian government-funded research and development arm. What would you have done differently?
The central problem here is that the term "patent troll" doesn't have a universally agreed-upon definition.
Wikipedia lists these qualities that a patent troll generally has:
Purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent;
Enforces patents against purported infringers without itself intending to manufacture the patented product or supply the patented service;
Enforces patents but has no manufacturing or research base;
Focuses its efforts solely on enforcing patent rights; or
Asserts patent infringement claims against non-copiers or against a large industry that is composed of non-copiers.
Of these, the CSIRO can be legitimately accused of at most one, and even that one isn't clear.
Doing original research isn't sufficient to escape being considered a patent troll.
Not every non-practicing entity who sues over patent infringement is automatically a patent troll, either.
That's because memcpy() is literally from the dawn of the C Standard Library, when the Bell Labs hackers were trying to squeeze as much functionality as they could into machines which look pathetically small by today's standards.
No, they don't look pathetically small by today's standards. And no, we can't move on. Yesterday's minicomputer is today's microcontroller or smartcard. These 40-year-old "small" platforms aren't dead, they've just been pushed down the food chain.
That may not mean anything for the platforms that glibc (or Flash, for that matter) targets, but it's very important for the C standard.
Not in the country where I live, you insensitive clod.
To be fair if I genuinely believed in the rapture and that it was coming very soon, I would probably also question what the point of protecting the world from future events that can never happen because Jesus is coming (or some other supernatural being).
If you believed that, then you'd presumably take the prediction of the likely fate of those who took that attitude seriously:
"The nations raged, but your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth." (Rev 11:18, NRSV; emphasis added)
But hey, only the ignorant accuse fundamentalists of consistency.
I sure wish we could get liberals to think that way about government spending.
I'm sure that US liberals wish they could get US conservatives to realise that the military eats up over 20% of government spending, and that the US government spends twice as much per person on health care than nations with public health care systems.
Moreover, Fget in Romania is too small to support its own parliament.
On a related note, I always thought traffic congestion must waste an enormous amount of fuel.
Which makes sense when you consider that around 80% of automobile passenger capacity is unused.
They can also drive safely millimetres (like inches but smaller) apart from each other, massively increasing the capacity of the existing road network.
You don't know that for certain. AFAIK they have never put two Google cars together on the same road.
Which makes sense, when you think about how laser range finding works. If you put a second car with an identical setup next to it, you would surely get crosstalk between the two rigs.
An employer should be able to fire any employee for any reason, even if he doesn't like the way they sneeze. It may not be ethical or moral, but it surely shouldn't be illegal.
If you like working under those conditions, there are plenty of opportunities in the Chinese manufacturing industry.
Mostly true, but not quite.
Nit fairly picked, though allow me to nitpick your nitpick. I happen to know about a dozen Iranian-born people (I don't know why, but there seem to be a lot around this workplace). Most of them speak English and Arabic, even the ones who aren't Muslim. If I had to guess why, it's probably to do with the alphabet; the primary barrier to learning Persian or Arabic for most European-language-speakers is the alphabet, which is not a problem that Iranians have.
I already have what I demand. I have a smartphone which is pretty powerful, compact, repairable and based on relatively open platforms. Suffice it to say, it's not made by Apple.
I'm curious. Does that mean if you have your car worked on by an accredited mechanic, the warranty has to be honored no matter how much an accredited mechanic (theoretically) screws it up? If not, the dealer could say, "Oh, that accredited mechanic really botched your transmission, so if you want it fixed take it back to him," while the accredited mechanic says, "The dealer is lying, the transmission failed, they have to replace it."
I don't know precisely how it works, sorry.
Oh, you're really missing out on the whole new car buying experience. Believe me, they try everything to make you think a brand-specific mechanic is the only way to go, especially with all the new-fangled electronics and such in new cars these days. Oh, you took it to someone else, they really messed up the whatchamacallit - so sorry about your warranty.
Oh, they try it here in Australia. I've heard some horror stories. But they can't legally insist on using a branded mechanic for general services. That's why we have accreditation for auto mechanics.
In the real world, we're not stuck with either extreme.
My refrigerator manufacturer doesn't license repairers. If it's still under warranty, of course I'll go through the manufacturer/supplier first, because assuming it is covered by the warranty, they'll fix it for free. But all other things being equal, I'll personally go with the repairman I've used for years with many different household appliances, who is appropriately qualified, highly experienced and offers a pretty good guarantee on his own work.
I've never bought a new car, but where I live, auto mechanics are licensed by the peak automobile industry body. If you want to get your car repaired under the warranty, you go back to the dealer who will do it for free. But for a general service, even under the warranty period, you can use any qualified mechanic. "Qualifications" are endorsed by the peak automotive industry body.
Even if you can't fix your fridge, there are plenty of people who can, none of whom require permission from the manufacturer. This prevents the manufacturer and the repairer forming a cartel.
He has no chance of winning [...]
They said that of Andrew Wilkie.
Whistleblowers and muckrakers shouldn't be a part of the government.
Dude, politicians are some of the worst muckrakers of them all. He'll fit right in there. As for whistleblowers, at least he'll have one person to keep him company.
No, because he isn't part of a diplomatic mission. What you're thinking of is that which is known as parliamentary privilege, parliamentary immunity or legislative immunity. In Commonwealth countries such as Australia, parliamentary privilege generally only extends to protection from slander or libel for statements made in the legislature. Legislators are not immune from criminal actions for the simple reason that all are equal under the law. This is pretty much the same as in the US.
To be fair, a significant proportion TSA employees are people who hate what they do, but are relieved to have a job at all in the current economy.
Succeed != Adopt. (Or =\= if you prefer Prolog, /= if you prefer Haskell... forget it, we could be here all day.)
Not all serious languages are developed with the goal wide adopted. Many are testbeds for new language features and paradigms, or new compiler techniques. The technology can live on long after the language, and if that happens, the language succeeded.
You probably have done or used most, if not all, of the following:
You can thank BCPL for all of this. It didn't "succeed" in the sense of long-term wide adoption, but its legacy is unsurpassed by any other language.