Either a guilty person gets less punishment than they deserve or an innocent person gets punished when they deserve no punishment. It's a lose-lose situation.
It removes some of the uncertainty of the process and it's a good deal cheaper for the defendant (who cares if it saves the state money -- the state obviously does, but the defendant should not). So it's not entirely a lose-lose situation for the defendant... or the state, for that matter.
It probably makes sense in many cases for the defendant when the plea bargain is for a specific fine rather than possible jail time, but if even the plea bargain involves significant jail time I'd suggest that most people should force the state to try them (and provide a defense lawyer for them) -- which will lead to either a better plea bargain or a chance of getting found not guilty.
Unfortunately, our entire adversarial legal system is extremely broken for anybody who isn't fairly wealthy. If you're wealthy, you can afford to put up an adequate defense. But if you're not, the best you can get is a plea bargain, a crappy public defender or getting years of debt owed to a lawyer who may or may not be just as crappy as the public defender.
Of course a bigger problem with the law is that ignorance of the law is no excuse but it's impossible for me to know every law and precedent that applies to me.
Well, that's why you get a lawyer -- they should know that stuff. Of course, a public defendant probably doesn't have time or resources to properly research it...
Had a friend who unfortunately decided to grow his own marijuana a few years ago. The cops found him by helicopter with the use of thermal imaging cameras. It was the best evidence they had when they raided him (he was growing like 5 plants) and arrested him.
Why would the lamps for a mere five plants generate enough heat to be so obvious to a thermal imaging camera? Something doesn't add up -- for all the cops could tell, maybe he had a few computers in that room.
Also, as others have said, such searches were already ruled illegal without warrants eleven years ago. Perhaps they already knew he was growing, got a warrant, pulled out the IR camera and found a spot that was somewhat hotter than normal and decided to call that evidence and he had a crappy lawyer? Or perhaps he had five plants now, but way more previously?
In the UK, refusing/failing to provide a specimen of blood or breath carries the same punishment as providing a positive sample. This gets around people like you trying to avoid responsibility for their actions.
In the US, our Constitution explicitly says that you do not have to incriminate yourself, and providing a breathalyzer or blood sample does so.
(Some states have gotten around this to some degree by giving you an "administrative" sanction by taking your license if you don't, which is still way better than DWI -- but they can't give you criminal charges for it.)
You can see it as "avoiding responsibility for their actions" but others see it as exercising their legal rights. Both views are likely correct.
If either country, if the police think you are guilty of a crime -- and you actually are or it could be easily believed that you are, and you want to minimize the penalties that could befall you, I'd suggest cooperating to the barest possible minimum that the relevant law requires unless otherwise advised by your legal counsel.
(Now, if you don't care what happens to you, if you want to "take responsibility for your actions", then by all means -- sing like a canary. But don't be surprised if the legal system screws you over royally.)
Technically a blood test can reveal alcohol consumption up to 14 days later
Assuming that this is true (and I don't know that it is)... if you're measuring the amount of alcohol in the blood, that will tell you how drunk they guy was when it was taken. If it's 0.08 or higher, the guy was legally drunk. (And he could be legally drunk if it was lower, but then it becomes a judgement call.)
Perhaps the blood test can measure the compounds that show up in the blood for 14 days after the liver has metabolized the alcohol, or it can measure the trace amounts of alcohol that could remain, but it should be completely clear just how intoxicated the guy was when the blood was taken (the BAC will be obvious -- the effect on the guy won't be quite so clear, but educated guesses can be made.) If the test gives a BAC of 0.01 -- he's probably not drunk.
When they do a urine drug test, they're looking for trace amounts of various compounds -- not just seeing if the guy is high *right now* (well, when the urine was taken.) If you're looking for their current state -- blood is probably better than urine or hair anyways. But if you're looking for any use at all in the recent past, then urine or hair will give you better data.
no serious person above the age of 5 really believes that means that you're drunk for 14 days...
And similarly, no serious person thinks that if a normal sized adult drinks 1 ounce of beer that they'll be drunk at all.
How about maintain two FB profiles, one for friends and one 'work safe' one with work colleagues on it.
Better solution - Maintain a fake 2nd page covered in information about how much you support various federally protected classes to which you may (or may not) actually belong.
Even better solution -- assume that anything you put on Facebook will be visible to somebody if they want to see it badly enough, so don't put anything on there that you wouldn't let people see.
If I were hiring people to be peace officers, and asked them to show me their Facebook profile during an interview, I would not hire anybody who accepted and let me look at the profile. If they don't understand that it's wrong to search without probable cause to suspect wrongdoing, then I don't want them in that job.
Cops certainly do have to know the rules regarding searches, but they also know how to trick people into consenting to searches when needed.
And to be fair, asking to look at your Facebook profile during a job interview is very different situation from from having a cop stop you and trying to get you to let him search your car.
Then again, the fact that I think like that would probably disqualify me from being in a position where I'm making that kind of hiring decision....
By default, these facilities should have cell phone jamming technology enabled with a clear sign stating as such.
OK, but current law does not allow this. INTENTIONALLY JAMMING SIGNALS IS ILLEGAL IN THE VAST MAJORITY OF CASES (and for good reason.)
(The actual law is a whole lot more complicated than that, but be aware that if you buy a cell phone jammer and use it, you're breaking the law. Even the government itself doesn't get to do this in the vast majority of cases.)
The government will *not* be changing these laws to allow you to jam cell phones. Period, end of story. (The only thing that they might change is to allow the government or it's agents to do it in more situations -- for example, to allow it to happen at a prison or a secure base, to allow the police to jam cell phones during a crime, etc. They certainly will never let you do it.)
Now, what the places could do legally is block the signal rather than jam it. It's hard to do for a building, but if you can make sure that every gap larger than about a quarter of the wavelength of the signal you're trying to stop is covered by metal or a metal mesh (with holes smaller than 1/4 wavelength), you can prevent these signals from getting through. But as I said -- it's hard, and even then, blocking cell phones entirely isn't a good plan either.
- Appreciating data-types, their limitations and the perils of using casting them incorrectly helped me a lot in understanding about things I need to be careful about - Are they going skip the concept of Pointers ? It's not wise to use them unless necessary but to be aware of the concept was very rewarding for me - How will they teach multi-threaded programming? We're not quite there yet in JS.
Your first language doesn't have to support every programming feature. BASIC certainly didn't support any of these (except data-types to a very, very minor degree) and many of us did fine with it. While data types are important at the beginning to do anything in many languages, we don't really teach pointers or threads (if a language even supports them) until later, so I don't see this as a big problem here.
I'd say for the purposes of Khan Academy, they need something easy that will keep people's attention (as it's mostly aimed at youth who have no real obligation to keep on paying attention unless it's interesting)... and so, given it's graphical nature, this sounds like a good choice. Their second language can be more fully featured.
By practically everywhere, you mean it's available at about half of restaurants and such, in your house of course, and possibly at work -- and nowhere else. Right? Because that's where WiFi is available around here. Maybe you have citywide WiFi or something, but not everywhere.
This does work to a degree, but you become difficult to reach. Even if a place does have WiFi, you have to tell your iPod to connect to it, and possibly have to fire up a browser to agree to their AUP before it'll work. Every time you go to this place.
The phone I mentioned can do all the stuff an iPod can do, costs less than an iPod (you need a 4g iPod if you want a built-in microphone) and you can have real phone service for $10/year if you use it very little. (And it can still run Skype or whatever other VoIP app you pick.)
As a side note, my phone supports phone calls over WiFi already. Though T-Mobile offers no incentive to actually use it, as it uses up minutes just like normal calls.
Need an ultra high discharge or charge rate? NiCd cells can have extremely low internal resistance, which is required for fast charge/discharge.
That is indeed a good feature of them, but LiPo cells have recently beaten even NiCd cells in this regard.
It's not uncommon at all to find LiPo packs intended for R/C use that are rated at a sustained 60C discharge rate -- for example, this pack which they say can put out a sustained 390 amps (and considering that this is at a 65C rate -- that means the pack can do that for a whole 55 seconds.)
I don't know of any NiCd cells that can support this sort of power/weight ratio.
This pack can probably also handle a 15C charge rate -- so full charge in four minutes.
That said, NiCd still has it's niche -- they're resistant to abuse (running this LiPo pack at 65C will wear it out fast), tend to survive a large number of cycles, don't deteriorate much over time, can handle fairly high discharge rates and are cheap. But they've been largely replaced by other chemistries.
Ever heard of the Sony Eneloop? It's a NiMH cell that holds 75% charge for three years and is completely unharmed by doing so.
Yes, and I even explicitly mentioned it (though Eneloop isn't the only game in town any more, so I didn't mention it by name.)
"The modern low self discharge NiMH cells are much better and can last a year or so, but if this is 20 years old, it's not one of those."
Eneloops will not hold 75% of their charge for three years. (Yes, I know Sanyo claims they will, but that's probably under perfect conditions. Probably inside a fridge for starters.) They'll hold it for six months, however -- which is still amazing compared to the old NiMH cells which were 90% dead after two months.
But if you're trying to claim that your nearly 20 year old phone has it's original pack made with Eneloop batteries, well, good luck with that:)
I put aside a notebook with a LiIon ion battery for several years and recently turned it on and it booted and worked fine on battery. And it still accepts a full charge. That's on the original 2003 battery.
Nine years old and it works as well as it did when it was new? Better alert the media, because you've got the most amazing Li-ion battery pack *ever*.
On the other hand I wouldn't take a NiCad for ANY purpose if you PAID me. They are complete garbage.
Weren't you the one talking about dogma? NiCd have certainly been mostly replaced by NiMH and now Li-ion, and LiPo cells, but they're far from garbage. For most applications, they're not the best any more (they used to be the only game in town) but there's a few things they excel at.
For starters, they handle abuse (over charging, reverse charging, physical damage, etc.) better than any other rechargeable battery out there. They're also cheap. There's a reason they're found in solar powered lights and (lower end) power tools.
I got one of the T-Mobile LG Optimus T android phones for about $100 (it was on sale, probably $150 now) and use pay as you go with them.
If I buy my minutes $100 at a time, I pay $0.10/minute, $0.10/text message and $0.25/picture message.
I don't use my phone that much, so I average around $10/month with this setup, and I have a capable phone that can use WiFi and run apps and such with it.
Ever found an old cell phone in your night stand drawer or wherever? I recently found one from the early 90's (almost 20 years old) and the thing still had a 1/2 charge left and worked.
A 20 year old cell phone probably had a NiMH or NiCd battery.
NiMH and NiCd batteries can indeed last decades -- but they won't hold a charge (especially NiMH) for more than a few months. (The modern low self discharge NiMH cells are much better and can last a year or so, but if this is 20 years old, it's not one of those.
Li-ion and Lipo batteries will hold their charge for a year or so too -- but they wear out even if not used, and so they're usually dead (as in throw it away -- it won't accept a charge anymore) after a few years.
If your phone has a NiCd or NiMH battery, I believe it'll still accept a charge after 20 years. I do not believe it's still half charged now, however (unless you have charged it recently.) And if it did happen to be one of the first phones with Liion batteries -- it would have died (no charge, unable to accept a charge) before hitting ten years.
Genetically modified organisms have anti-hippy ways? (I'll assume you meant "their" rather than "there" -- if not, I'm even more confused.)
They shouldn't be allowed to defend themselves against naturalists who do no scientific studies and magically blame problems on anything corporate....for a fee!
Genetically modified organisms should not be able to defend themselves? Or was the "they" there about hippies, hippies that shouldn't be able to defend themselves against naturalists?
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here.
Wait, NOW context matters? Where were you when your fellow "skeptics"
Context always matters.
If somebody tells you that context doesn't matter, then you should consider that that person probably is lying to you or at least isn't giving you the full truth. Whatever side they're on.
It's also not fair to beat somebody up over what somebody else who may or may not have similar beliefs said. If one person who supports cause X says something, and somebody else who supports cause X says something else -- that's not evidence of hypocrisy. It's evidence of disagreement, and if you really do think that everybody who supports cause X agrees on everything, the problem is with you, not them.
And yes, this is just one sentence. It could be exactly what they meant, or it could just be a miswording of things -- it certainly wouldn't be the first. One will have to look at context to figure out what they really meant.
I really think he had a responsibility to argue this case about a decade ago at least.
Morally, sure.
Legally, no. Legally he can choose to "defend" his patents whenever he feels like it, or not at all if that's his choice.
Now, in theory, a patent is only good for 17 or 20 years, so there's not that much time to abuse this (so suits about the wheel probably aren't likely, unless it's a new fangled wheel... on a computer) but submarine patents came about from people abusing the process to keep their patents alive for much longer. Fortunately, the system has since been changed so new patents can't be abused like that, but some old patents still can.
I mean... if you file your claim decades after everyone was violating your patient isn't that your fault at a certain point?
I know big companies are basically forced to defend their trademark and copyrights or else risk that other people can do it with impunity. There's some requirement that you protest when this sort of thing happens.
Trademarks do indeed have this requirement that you refer to, that they must be protected or they will become void.
Copyrights and patents have no such requirement, and quite often people do hold off on taking things to court for years to give the infringement (if it really is) a chance to become more pervasive -- to make it more difficult to use something that doesn't infringe and so to increase the damages they can claim.
The press never "loans" their confidential sources to the police.
What does that even mean?
Are you saying that the press never shares information with the police? I find that to be incredibly unlikely. Are you saying that they have "confidential" information they don't share with the police? Possibly, but don't you have confidential information you don't share with the police? (Such as the ounce of weed you keep hidden behind the plates? Or the details of the red light you ran through the other day?)
I'm sort of surprised that the police are so willing to be accommodating here too -- "They bought the radios, why not use them" makes perfect sense here. But the idea that the press doesn't share, why should the police? seems very strange -- as I'm pretty sure the press does share.
Why do that? Why not just write to, say, the Single user Unix spec. This describes all the commands and is, in essence, where the other user space implementations (Linux and otherwise) are generally based on. (Ignoring the odd GNU tweak here and there)
Sure, that works too. The reality is that the documentation they would need to produce would be minimal -- as I said, a list of commands and which options to support for each. It could probably fit on one page of paper. But the important part is that the people who come up with this documentation, however they do it, are ideally the only ones who have anything to do with Busybox itself.
If they wanted to make this clone a drop-in replacement for Busybox, they probably would want to see exactly what it supported rather than simply going with the Single user Unix spec -- just in case there were some differences.
I don't think that the people wanting to make a clone have to go to this much trouble -- it's not as tricky a situation as the BIOS cloning was -- but they could if they wanted and it really wouldn't be that much trouble.
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A plea bargain ensures that justice is not done.
Either a guilty person gets less punishment than they deserve or an innocent person gets punished when they deserve no punishment. It's a lose-lose situation.
It removes some of the uncertainty of the process and it's a good deal cheaper for the defendant (who cares if it saves the state money -- the state obviously does, but the defendant should not). So it's not entirely a lose-lose situation for the defendant ... or the state, for that matter.
It probably makes sense in many cases for the defendant when the plea bargain is for a specific fine rather than possible jail time, but if even the plea bargain involves significant jail time I'd suggest that most people should force the state to try them (and provide a defense lawyer for them) -- which will lead to either a better plea bargain or a chance of getting found not guilty.
Unfortunately, our entire adversarial legal system is extremely broken for anybody who isn't fairly wealthy. If you're wealthy, you can afford to put up an adequate defense. But if you're not, the best you can get is a plea bargain, a crappy public defender or getting years of debt owed to a lawyer who may or may not be just as crappy as the public defender.
Of course a bigger problem with the law is that ignorance of the law is no excuse but it's impossible for me to know every law and precedent that applies to me.
Well, that's why you get a lawyer -- they should know that stuff. Of course, a public defendant probably doesn't have time or resources to properly research it ...
The cashier at McDonald's is paid a wage. This is just slavery.
Slaves don't have a choice. I'm pretty sure these guys do.
Unless you're saying those volunteers at the soup kitchen passing out food are slaves too ...
Had a friend who unfortunately decided to grow his own marijuana a few years ago. The cops found him by helicopter with the use of thermal imaging cameras. It was the best evidence they had when they raided him (he was growing like 5 plants) and arrested him.
Why would the lamps for a mere five plants generate enough heat to be so obvious to a thermal imaging camera? Something doesn't add up -- for all the cops could tell, maybe he had a few computers in that room.
Also, as others have said, such searches were already ruled illegal without warrants eleven years ago. Perhaps they already knew he was growing, got a warrant, pulled out the IR camera and found a spot that was somewhat hotter than normal and decided to call that evidence and he had a crappy lawyer? Or perhaps he had five plants now, but way more previously?
In the UK, refusing/failing to provide a specimen of blood or breath carries the same punishment as providing a positive sample. This gets around people like you trying to avoid responsibility for their actions.
In the US, our Constitution explicitly says that you do not have to incriminate yourself, and providing a breathalyzer or blood sample does so.
(Some states have gotten around this to some degree by giving you an "administrative" sanction by taking your license if you don't, which is still way better than DWI -- but they can't give you criminal charges for it.)
You can see it as "avoiding responsibility for their actions" but others see it as exercising their legal rights. Both views are likely correct.
If either country, if the police think you are guilty of a crime -- and you actually are or it could be easily believed that you are, and you want to minimize the penalties that could befall you, I'd suggest cooperating to the barest possible minimum that the relevant law requires unless otherwise advised by your legal counsel.
(Now, if you don't care what happens to you, if you want to "take responsibility for your actions", then by all means -- sing like a canary. But don't be surprised if the legal system screws you over royally.)
Technically a blood test can reveal alcohol consumption up to 14 days later
Assuming that this is true (and I don't know that it is) ... if you're measuring the amount of alcohol in the blood, that will tell you how drunk they guy was when it was taken. If it's 0.08 or higher, the guy was legally drunk. (And he could be legally drunk if it was lower, but then it becomes a judgement call.)
Perhaps the blood test can measure the compounds that show up in the blood for 14 days after the liver has metabolized the alcohol, or it can measure the trace amounts of alcohol that could remain, but it should be completely clear just how intoxicated the guy was when the blood was taken (the BAC will be obvious -- the effect on the guy won't be quite so clear, but educated guesses can be made.) If the test gives a BAC of 0.01 -- he's probably not drunk.
When they do a urine drug test, they're looking for trace amounts of various compounds -- not just seeing if the guy is high *right now* (well, when the urine was taken.) If you're looking for their current state -- blood is probably better than urine or hair anyways. But if you're looking for any use at all in the recent past, then urine or hair will give you better data.
no serious person above the age of 5 really believes that means that you're drunk for 14 days...
And similarly, no serious person thinks that if a normal sized adult drinks 1 ounce of beer that they'll be drunk at all.
How about maintain two FB profiles, one for friends and one 'work safe' one with work colleagues on it.
Better solution - Maintain a fake 2nd page covered in information about how much you support various federally protected classes to which you may (or may not) actually belong.
Even better solution -- assume that anything you put on Facebook will be visible to somebody if they want to see it badly enough, so don't put anything on there that you wouldn't let people see.
Kind of hard to prove a negative, eh?
Yes, but it's sometimes easy to disprove a positive.
If you tell the truth, that's fine. (Unless they don't believe you, then all they have to do is not hire you -- they don't have to prove anything.)
But if you lie, and they find it later ... you might get fired.
If I were hiring people to be peace officers, and asked them to show me their Facebook profile during an interview, I would not hire anybody who accepted and let me look at the profile. If they don't understand that it's wrong to search without probable cause to suspect wrongdoing, then I don't want them in that job.
Cops certainly do have to know the rules regarding searches, but they also know how to trick people into consenting to searches when needed.
And to be fair, asking to look at your Facebook profile during a job interview is very different situation from from having a cop stop you and trying to get you to let him search your car.
Then again, the fact that I think like that would probably disqualify me from being in a position where I'm making that kind of hiring decision....
Probably.
By default, these facilities should have cell phone jamming technology enabled with a clear sign stating as such.
OK, but current law does not allow this. INTENTIONALLY JAMMING SIGNALS IS ILLEGAL IN THE VAST MAJORITY OF CASES (and for good reason.)
(The actual law is a whole lot more complicated than that, but be aware that if you buy a cell phone jammer and use it, you're breaking the law. Even the government itself doesn't get to do this in the vast majority of cases.)
The government will *not* be changing these laws to allow you to jam cell phones. Period, end of story. (The only thing that they might change is to allow the government or it's agents to do it in more situations -- for example, to allow it to happen at a prison or a secure base, to allow the police to jam cell phones during a crime, etc. They certainly will never let you do it.)
Now, what the places could do legally is block the signal rather than jam it. It's hard to do for a building, but if you can make sure that every gap larger than about a quarter of the wavelength of the signal you're trying to stop is covered by metal or a metal mesh (with holes smaller than 1/4 wavelength), you can prevent these signals from getting through. But as I said -- it's hard, and even then, blocking cell phones entirely isn't a good plan either.
- Appreciating data-types, their limitations and the perils of using casting them incorrectly helped me a lot in understanding about things I need to be careful about
- Are they going skip the concept of Pointers ? It's not wise to use them unless necessary but to be aware of the concept was very rewarding for me
- How will they teach multi-threaded programming? We're not quite there yet in JS.
Your first language doesn't have to support every programming feature. BASIC certainly didn't support any of these (except data-types to a very, very minor degree) and many of us did fine with it. While data types are important at the beginning to do anything in many languages, we don't really teach pointers or threads (if a language even supports them) until later, so I don't see this as a big problem here.
I'd say for the purposes of Khan Academy, they need something easy that will keep people's attention (as it's mostly aimed at youth who have no real obligation to keep on paying attention unless it's interesting) ... and so, given it's graphical nature, this sounds like a good choice. Their second language can be more fully featured.
Around '94, my Motorola bag phone had a sealed lead-acid battery. I didn't see a newer technology until about 96-97.
NiCd was old technology at that point. I'm not sure about NiMH. But yeah, I don't think there were Li-ion batteries in cell phones until later.
I'll bet that bag phone wouldn't fit in his nightstand drawer though :)
Either way, that sealed lead-acid battery wouldn't last 15 years either.
And free wi-fi is practically everywhere.
By practically everywhere, you mean it's available at about half of restaurants and such, in your house of course, and possibly at work -- and nowhere else. Right? Because that's where WiFi is available around here. Maybe you have citywide WiFi or something, but not everywhere.
This does work to a degree, but you become difficult to reach. Even if a place does have WiFi, you have to tell your iPod to connect to it, and possibly have to fire up a browser to agree to their AUP before it'll work. Every time you go to this place.
The phone I mentioned can do all the stuff an iPod can do, costs less than an iPod (you need a 4g iPod if you want a built-in microphone) and you can have real phone service for $10/year if you use it very little. (And it can still run Skype or whatever other VoIP app you pick.)
As a side note, my phone supports phone calls over WiFi already. Though T-Mobile offers no incentive to actually use it, as it uses up minutes just like normal calls.
Need an ultra high discharge or charge rate? NiCd cells can have extremely low internal resistance, which is required for fast charge/discharge.
That is indeed a good feature of them, but LiPo cells have recently beaten even NiCd cells in this regard.
It's not uncommon at all to find LiPo packs intended for R/C use that are rated at a sustained 60C discharge rate -- for example, this pack which they say can put out a sustained 390 amps (and considering that this is at a 65C rate -- that means the pack can do that for a whole 55 seconds.)
I don't know of any NiCd cells that can support this sort of power/weight ratio.
This pack can probably also handle a 15C charge rate -- so full charge in four minutes.
That said, NiCd still has it's niche -- they're resistant to abuse (running this LiPo pack at 65C will wear it out fast), tend to survive a large number of cycles, don't deteriorate much over time, can handle fairly high discharge rates and are cheap. But they've been largely replaced by other chemistries.
Ever heard of the Sony Eneloop? It's a NiMH cell that holds 75% charge for three years and is completely unharmed by doing so.
Yes, and I even explicitly mentioned it (though Eneloop isn't the only game in town any more, so I didn't mention it by name.)
"The modern low self discharge NiMH cells are much better and can last a year or so, but if this is 20 years old, it's not one of those."
Eneloops will not hold 75% of their charge for three years. (Yes, I know Sanyo claims they will, but that's probably under perfect conditions. Probably inside a fridge for starters.) They'll hold it for six months, however -- which is still amazing compared to the old NiMH cells which were 90% dead after two months.
But if you're trying to claim that your nearly 20 year old phone has it's original pack made with Eneloop batteries, well, good luck with that :)
I put aside a notebook with a LiIon ion battery for several years and recently turned it on and it booted and worked fine on battery. And it still accepts a full charge. That's on the original 2003 battery.
Nine years old and it works as well as it did when it was new? Better alert the media, because you've got the most amazing Li-ion battery pack *ever*.
On the other hand I wouldn't take a NiCad for ANY purpose if you PAID me. They are complete garbage.
Weren't you the one talking about dogma? NiCd have certainly been mostly replaced by NiMH and now Li-ion, and LiPo cells, but they're far from garbage. For most applications, they're not the best any more (they used to be the only game in town) but there's a few things they excel at.
For starters, they handle abuse (over charging, reverse charging, physical damage, etc.) better than any other rechargeable battery out there. They're also cheap. There's a reason they're found in solar powered lights and (lower end) power tools.
I got one of the T-Mobile LG Optimus T android phones for about $100 (it was on sale, probably $150 now) and use pay as you go with them.
If I buy my minutes $100 at a time, I pay $0.10/minute, $0.10/text message and $0.25/picture message.
I don't use my phone that much, so I average around $10/month with this setup, and I have a capable phone that can use WiFi and run apps and such with it.
Ever found an old cell phone in your night stand drawer or wherever? I recently found one from the early 90's (almost 20 years old) and the thing still had a 1/2 charge left and worked.
A 20 year old cell phone probably had a NiMH or NiCd battery.
NiMH and NiCd batteries can indeed last decades -- but they won't hold a charge (especially NiMH) for more than a few months. (The modern low self discharge NiMH cells are much better and can last a year or so, but if this is 20 years old, it's not one of those.
Li-ion and Lipo batteries will hold their charge for a year or so too -- but they wear out even if not used, and so they're usually dead (as in throw it away -- it won't accept a charge anymore) after a few years.
If your phone has a NiCd or NiMH battery, I believe it'll still accept a charge after 20 years. I do not believe it's still half charged now, however (unless you have charged it recently.) And if it did happen to be one of the first phones with Liion batteries -- it would have died (no charge, unable to accept a charge) before hitting ten years.
I'm tired of GMO's and there anti-hippy ways.
Genetically modified organisms have anti-hippy ways? (I'll assume you meant "their" rather than "there" -- if not, I'm even more confused.)
They shouldn't be allowed to defend themselves against naturalists who do no scientific studies and magically blame problems on anything corporate....for a fee!
Genetically modified organisms should not be able to defend themselves? Or was the "they" there about hippies, hippies that shouldn't be able to defend themselves against naturalists?
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here.
Eat HFCS much? Add smoking and cocaine. You'll be fine, Whitney.
OK, to answer my own question ...
Yes, exaggerate much.
And meanwhile, these seeds are about as healthy as dioxin.
Exaggerate much?
Wait, NOW context matters? Where were you when your fellow "skeptics"
Context always matters.
If somebody tells you that context doesn't matter, then you should consider that that person probably is lying to you or at least isn't giving you the full truth. Whatever side they're on.
It's also not fair to beat somebody up over what somebody else who may or may not have similar beliefs said. If one person who supports cause X says something, and somebody else who supports cause X says something else -- that's not evidence of hypocrisy. It's evidence of disagreement, and if you really do think that everybody who supports cause X agrees on everything, the problem is with you, not them.
And yes, this is just one sentence. It could be exactly what they meant, or it could just be a miswording of things -- it certainly wouldn't be the first. One will have to look at context to figure out what they really meant.
I really think he had a responsibility to argue this case about a decade ago at least.
Morally, sure.
Legally, no. Legally he can choose to "defend" his patents whenever he feels like it, or not at all if that's his choice.
Now, in theory, a patent is only good for 17 or 20 years, so there's not that much time to abuse this (so suits about the wheel probably aren't likely, unless it's a new fangled wheel ... on a computer) but submarine patents came about from people abusing the process to keep their patents alive for much longer. Fortunately, the system has since been changed so new patents can't be abused like that, but some old patents still can.
I mean... if you file your claim decades after everyone was violating your patient isn't that your fault at a certain point?
I know big companies are basically forced to defend their trademark and copyrights or else risk that other people can do it with impunity. There's some requirement that you protest when this sort of thing happens.
Trademarks do indeed have this requirement that you refer to, that they must be protected or they will become void.
Copyrights and patents have no such requirement, and quite often people do hold off on taking things to court for years to give the infringement (if it really is) a chance to become more pervasive -- to make it more difficult to use something that doesn't infringe and so to increase the damages they can claim.
These sorts of confidential sources have not necessarily done anything criminal themselves, they just do not want the publicity or to face the sack.
And thanks to the Constitution, they are under no legal obligation to "get the publicity" or "face the sack" in the majority of cases.
The press shares all sorts of stuff with the police. Not everything, but lots.
The press never "loans" their confidential sources to the police.
What does that even mean?
Are you saying that the press never shares information with the police? I find that to be incredibly unlikely. Are you saying that they have "confidential" information they don't share with the police? Possibly, but don't you have confidential information you don't share with the police? (Such as the ounce of weed you keep hidden behind the plates? Or the details of the red light you ran through the other day?)
I'm sort of surprised that the police are so willing to be accommodating here too -- "They bought the radios, why not use them" makes perfect sense here. But the idea that the press doesn't share, why should the police? seems very strange -- as I'm pretty sure the press does share.
Why do that? Why not just write to, say, the Single user Unix spec. This describes all the commands and is, in essence, where the other user space implementations (Linux and otherwise) are generally based on. (Ignoring the odd GNU tweak here and there)
Sure, that works too. The reality is that the documentation they would need to produce would be minimal -- as I said, a list of commands and which options to support for each. It could probably fit on one page of paper. But the important part is that the people who come up with this documentation, however they do it, are ideally the only ones who have anything to do with Busybox itself.
If they wanted to make this clone a drop-in replacement for Busybox, they probably would want to see exactly what it supported rather than simply going with the Single user Unix spec -- just in case there were some differences.
I don't think that the people wanting to make a clone have to go to this much trouble -- it's not as tricky a situation as the BIOS cloning was -- but they could if they wanted and it really wouldn't be that much trouble.