First, this is not a question of science but of useful arts. Second, I agree that design patents are a bad idea: the place for protecting design IP is, if anywhere, under trademark. Third, I am so tired of the "rounded corners" canard; it is corners rounded equally PLUS a whole bunch of other things (like a metallic rim and certain proportionalities) ALL TAKEN TOGETHER that are at issue. Fourth, icons are covered under point one, since this is a design issue. But fifth, bounce-back scrolling and inertial scrolling really were actually innovative and useful — so useful as to seem obvious in retrospect. (Just like the "pull down the list to refresh" patent that Twitter acquired along with Tweetie.) Even if one doesn't agree with software patents (and frankly, I have a hard time with them), one should at least be able to agree that IF software is to be patentable, then this is the kind of thing that should be patentable.
Yes. In fact, most years when I've been independent, my rates have only gone up when I've changed the kind or amount of coverage I have. My total health care insurance today is roughly the same cost (indexed for the general rate of inflation) that it was in 2001, or within $100 a month of that. I do pay for more out of pocket now than I did then, at least nominally, but the costs of having children and early child care are gone, and our current insurance coverage doesn't include them, so I'm not paying for a service I wouldn't use. (I paid for it then because we were using it then.) You have to be willing to shop around every couple of years, and you have to be willing in doing that to tailor your coverage to your expected needs, but as long as you do that and absorb a large chunk of the first-dollar costs (that is, have a high-deductible plan), there's no reason why insurance rates need to rise dramatically.
It seems to me that there are three primary drivers to the startling increases in health care costs: mandates that all plans have a wide range of potentially costly and not-necessarily-common conditions covered; end of life care given the advances in technology that we have made for extending life; and the tendency of our "insurance" to cover expected expenses. Consider car insurance if every car had to be insured for headlight wiper blade replacement (even if they didn't have headlight wipers), if we routinely repaired cars no matter what damage or fault they had or how old they were, and if car insurance paid for oil changes and repairs. That's the equivalent of the situation we have in health insurance.
Except that's crap. I've been a contractor for more than a decade and am in my forties. Love the independence, and buy my own insurance. When Obamacare kicks all the way in, it's going to raise my insurance costs a lot, possibly to the point that I will have to go to work as an employee to afford it. So actually, for the situation the poster describes, which is mine, repealing Obamacare, which requires voting Obama out, is actually the better option.
There is not a single computer market; there are four or five. Apple has little, and lessening, interest in servers or the enterprise, because they believe the cloud obviates them. Apple has no interest in hobbyists, and has not since the Apple//. Apple is interested in consumers of data and apps, mobile or otherwise. They are interested in creators of consumable content and apps. They seem uninterested in embedded systems. Their hardware and software reflect these interests. The enterprise and hobbyist types are over represented here, and meaningless to Apple.
Or you could just go with subsidiarity, and let people in California teach that infanticide is a public service and people in Tennessee that they should at all costs avoid looking at the world around them. Yes, that was tendentiously stated in both cases, but only to showcase a point: the original Constitutional scheme of pushing these decisions down to the lowest level worked because people in one state or city didn't have to worry about what people in another state or city were doing. Now, everyone is supposed to care about everyone else, but that means that where we fundamentally disagree, we can't move away to a place where our opinion holds, and thus we have to fight over everything. You want to know why our politics is so screwed? These mantras of the personal is political and everything needs to be decided at the national level explain pretty much the whole thing.
When did Ted Kennedy become a Bible thumping moron? Moron, sure, but I don't think he ever thumped a Bible unless he fell on it in a drunken stupor. Oh, you meant Bush, who signed on to NCLB in order to get Kennedy's vote and influence on other stuff? I think maybe your idea of the history of the issue needs a little rework.
The Right believes in biology but not evolution. The Left believes in evolution but not biology. By all means, shame both sides whenever they get stupid, but it's hard to get excited at "someone is doing something dumb" on the issue.
They are requiring authentication at all endpoints, at least in part to prevent mass public reading of data. But this can be done through the web interface without authentication, and a programmatic web interface is not difficult to write. All that's needed is a burner user (or set of them, if Twitter is going to be diligent about shutting them down). Since it's all automatic, the real-time services are impacted, but the spamming, data mining and other potentially nefarious uses which do not require real-time data would be unimpeded, beyond a few days to put together a client to get this information differently and the effort of automating account creation. In other words, major inconvenience for legit app developers, but minor inconvenience for those who are looking to abuse the system.
Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.
We will not be shutting down client applications that use those endpoints and are currently over those token limits. If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.
In other words, if you build something like TweetBot (or Tweetie, which is now Twitter's official mobile client!), you can't get bigger than 100,000 users. So no point in spending time building a better Twitter client: if it's good enough to get used, it can't get used. This seems... counterintuitive... if your goal is to have a successful platform.
We hope that all of this information gives you more clarity around where we are headed with API v1.1.
It does give clarity. It clarifies that Twitter is angering the very developers who are both motivated and capable of building a system to replace it. Also, this means that client innovation (the same innovation that brought hash tags, @ references and tweet discovery) will slow dramatically, which in turn opens up niches for competing services to capitalize on.
All in all, this smells like a huge error on their part.
When did "troll" become a synonym for "disagree"? This post does not merely assert Ecuador's human rights issues; it provides examples. When the post makes the statement about storming the embassey, the author provides a link backing up the assertion. So the only possible conclusion is that the opinion in the last paragraph, that people who think Assange getting asylum in Ecuador is a good thing have a "disregard and lack of respect for freedom... but a celebration of anything that attacks the US and the West", is the source of the troll ratings. Yet that opinion is a defensible one, and should hardly be risible. Nor is it stated in a way that is deliberately provocative of outrage. What a travesty of poor moderation. The post should be read, because it contains and states well a point of view that should be under discussion.
There have been schematics purporting to be the device, and rear-view shots of the supposed device in a case, so there is some evidence that at least Apple is prototyping this. Gruber's speculation builds on that, so not exactly content free. Also, his speculation is better than random, because he has a long-established track record of being right more often than wrong.
I think Apple would be happy with 10% unit share and 75% profit share in the mobile market, not that unit share matters a bit to Apple if history is any guide. They are always focused on the profit. Always.
I don't think you and I are disagreeing. I was only pointing out that if you want to create a dividing line beyond which government investment is pointless, and it should all be left to the market, public goods is a good place to start. I was not arguing that the market cannot provide at least some public goods.
Clearly wrong, as there are not an infinite number of programs, period. For that matter, there are not an infinite number of names for programs, because there are a limited set of characters for those names and there are limitations on the maximum length of those names. The set may be quite large, certainly is theoretically quite large, but it is neither practically nor theoretically infinite.
How large is the universe of Windows programs not named in Latin characters? I have to think it's in the low millions at most, and probably less than that. Maybe the way to do this is to try the paths and filenames of those programs, and see if you get a match. As a first try at reducing the things you have to check, you could eliminate anything widely used, since this is likely targeted at a rare configuration. I'd start by looking at SCADA control programs, personally, because there's a good chance that this is targeted at industrial control systems, based on the last few weaponized software bits that have been found (stuxnet, et al).
Isn't it interesting, though, that the Democrats blame the Republicans in the House for there being no budget? I mean, if it's a false issue, wouldn't the Democrats not need to try to blame the House Republicans? For that matter, I suspect that if the roles were reversed, and it were a Republican Senate refusing to pass a budget, you'd be screaming bloody murder.
But there is an easy dividing line for a first pass approximation: public goods. Have the government do what is non-rivalrous and non-excludeable, such as pure research, while the private sector is left to do everything else. So in the case of space exploration, it's likely true that early rocketry (until we go the ability to reliably loft satellites), early manned space, the Apollo program, the development of the Space Shuttle and the various planetary science missions could not or would not have been done by private industry. It's equally true that developing the engineering and science that we have developed through the space program, and releasing them into the public domain, would be public goods, in the same way that all basic science and engineering research are. (Knowledge is a public good.)
That said, there's no reason for the government now to be funding commercial satellite launches, development of commercial launchers (except to the extent that it meets their own needs to get into orbit), anything in LEO, etc. NASA should be pushing towards long-duration, high-risk deep space manned missions, continued planetary science missions, and engineering and technology development. We're kind of stuck with the space station now that we have put so much into it, and that means that we need to fund a way to get there without relying on the Russians, but that's a short-term problem.
Unfortunately, though, I don't think NASA still has the entreprenurial culture to do the high-risk deep space manned stuff, which means that what's left (once the space station is done) should basically be planetary exploration and technology development. The time for commercial exploitation of the Earth-Moon system is come, and the reality is that the rest of the solar system will likely be exploited commercially starting in a few decades, simply because government will not assume the inherent risks in doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you been paying ANY attention the last 4 years? The last 40? Of course the executive can subvert the law with impunity.
You seem to be asking government to protect you from government.
That's odd, because I have a couple of them installed on my iPhone.
First, this is not a question of science but of useful arts. Second, I agree that design patents are a bad idea: the place for protecting design IP is, if anywhere, under trademark. Third, I am so tired of the "rounded corners" canard; it is corners rounded equally PLUS a whole bunch of other things (like a metallic rim and certain proportionalities) ALL TAKEN TOGETHER that are at issue. Fourth, icons are covered under point one, since this is a design issue. But fifth, bounce-back scrolling and inertial scrolling really were actually innovative and useful — so useful as to seem obvious in retrospect. (Just like the "pull down the list to refresh" patent that Twitter acquired along with Tweetie.) Even if one doesn't agree with software patents (and frankly, I have a hard time with them), one should at least be able to agree that IF software is to be patentable, then this is the kind of thing that should be patentable.
It seems to me that there are three primary drivers to the startling increases in health care costs: mandates that all plans have a wide range of potentially costly and not-necessarily-common conditions covered; end of life care given the advances in technology that we have made for extending life; and the tendency of our "insurance" to cover expected expenses. Consider car insurance if every car had to be insured for headlight wiper blade replacement (even if they didn't have headlight wipers), if we routinely repaired cars no matter what damage or fault they had or how old they were, and if car insurance paid for oil changes and repairs. That's the equivalent of the situation we have in health insurance.
Except that's crap. I've been a contractor for more than a decade and am in my forties. Love the independence, and buy my own insurance. When Obamacare kicks all the way in, it's going to raise my insurance costs a lot, possibly to the point that I will have to go to work as an employee to afford it. So actually, for the situation the poster describes, which is mine, repealing Obamacare, which requires voting Obama out, is actually the better option.
There is not a single computer market; there are four or five. Apple has little, and lessening, interest in servers or the enterprise, because they believe the cloud obviates them. Apple has no interest in hobbyists, and has not since the Apple //. Apple is interested in consumers of data and apps, mobile or otherwise. They are interested in creators of consumable content and apps. They seem uninterested in embedded systems. Their hardware and software reflect these interests. The enterprise and hobbyist types are over represented here, and meaningless to Apple.
Well demonstrated.
I don't think that you have the first clue of what a theocracy is or is like.
Or you could just go with subsidiarity, and let people in California teach that infanticide is a public service and people in Tennessee that they should at all costs avoid looking at the world around them. Yes, that was tendentiously stated in both cases, but only to showcase a point: the original Constitutional scheme of pushing these decisions down to the lowest level worked because people in one state or city didn't have to worry about what people in another state or city were doing. Now, everyone is supposed to care about everyone else, but that means that where we fundamentally disagree, we can't move away to a place where our opinion holds, and thus we have to fight over everything. You want to know why our politics is so screwed? These mantras of the personal is political and everything needs to be decided at the national level explain pretty much the whole thing.
When did Ted Kennedy become a Bible thumping moron? Moron, sure, but I don't think he ever thumped a Bible unless he fell on it in a drunken stupor. Oh, you meant Bush, who signed on to NCLB in order to get Kennedy's vote and influence on other stuff? I think maybe your idea of the history of the issue needs a little rework.
The Right believes in biology but not evolution. The Left believes in evolution but not biology. By all means, shame both sides whenever they get stupid, but it's hard to get excited at "someone is doing something dumb" on the issue.
Depends on how fast you want to go, really.
In other words, if you build something like TweetBot (or Tweetie, which is now Twitter's official mobile client!), you can't get bigger than 100,000 users. So no point in spending time building a better Twitter client: if it's good enough to get used, it can't get used. This seems ... counterintuitive ... if your goal is to have a successful platform.
It does give clarity. It clarifies that Twitter is angering the very developers who are both motivated and capable of building a system to replace it. Also, this means that client innovation (the same innovation that brought hash tags, @ references and tweet discovery) will slow dramatically, which in turn opens up niches for competing services to capitalize on.
All in all, this smells like a huge error on their part.
So you agree, that Troll means "I disagree with the point of view"?
When did "troll" become a synonym for "disagree"? This post does not merely assert Ecuador's human rights issues; it provides examples. When the post makes the statement about storming the embassey, the author provides a link backing up the assertion. So the only possible conclusion is that the opinion in the last paragraph, that people who think Assange getting asylum in Ecuador is a good thing have a "disregard and lack of respect for freedom ... but a celebration of anything that attacks the US and the West", is the source of the troll ratings. Yet that opinion is a defensible one, and should hardly be risible. Nor is it stated in a way that is deliberately provocative of outrage. What a travesty of poor moderation. The post should be read, because it contains and states well a point of view that should be under discussion.
But they have to build his death ray
I think Apple would be happy with 10% unit share and 75% profit share in the mobile market, not that unit share matters a bit to Apple if history is any guide. They are always focused on the profit. Always.
I don't think you and I are disagreeing. I was only pointing out that if you want to create a dividing line beyond which government investment is pointless, and it should all be left to the market, public goods is a good place to start. I was not arguing that the market cannot provide at least some public goods.
Clearly wrong, as there are not an infinite number of programs, period. For that matter, there are not an infinite number of names for programs, because there are a limited set of characters for those names and there are limitations on the maximum length of those names. The set may be quite large, certainly is theoretically quite large, but it is neither practically nor theoretically infinite.
How large is the universe of Windows programs not named in Latin characters? I have to think it's in the low millions at most, and probably less than that. Maybe the way to do this is to try the paths and filenames of those programs, and see if you get a match. As a first try at reducing the things you have to check, you could eliminate anything widely used, since this is likely targeted at a rare configuration. I'd start by looking at SCADA control programs, personally, because there's a good chance that this is targeted at industrial control systems, based on the last few weaponized software bits that have been found (stuxnet, et al).
Isn't it interesting, though, that the Democrats blame the Republicans in the House for there being no budget? I mean, if it's a false issue, wouldn't the Democrats not need to try to blame the House Republicans? For that matter, I suspect that if the roles were reversed, and it were a Republican Senate refusing to pass a budget, you'd be screaming bloody murder.
But there is an easy dividing line for a first pass approximation: public goods. Have the government do what is non-rivalrous and non-excludeable, such as pure research, while the private sector is left to do everything else. So in the case of space exploration, it's likely true that early rocketry (until we go the ability to reliably loft satellites), early manned space, the Apollo program, the development of the Space Shuttle and the various planetary science missions could not or would not have been done by private industry. It's equally true that developing the engineering and science that we have developed through the space program, and releasing them into the public domain, would be public goods, in the same way that all basic science and engineering research are. (Knowledge is a public good.)
That said, there's no reason for the government now to be funding commercial satellite launches, development of commercial launchers (except to the extent that it meets their own needs to get into orbit), anything in LEO, etc. NASA should be pushing towards long-duration, high-risk deep space manned missions, continued planetary science missions, and engineering and technology development. We're kind of stuck with the space station now that we have put so much into it, and that means that we need to fund a way to get there without relying on the Russians, but that's a short-term problem.
Unfortunately, though, I don't think NASA still has the entreprenurial culture to do the high-risk deep space manned stuff, which means that what's left (once the space station is done) should basically be planetary exploration and technology development. The time for commercial exploitation of the Earth-Moon system is come, and the reality is that the rest of the solar system will likely be exploited commercially starting in a few decades, simply because government will not assume the inherent risks in doing so.
So, more like Fannie Mae?
So you want NASA to be a company? Interesting.