I seriously don't know how you can say "overall direction looks really good". It looks to me a lot more like a bunch of dithering and continuing the status quo (a.k.a. NASA Jobs Program) until the next election and the next Presidential commission changes direction again and reboots it all again. At some point someone needs to do a Kennedy, pick a target worth doing, set a schedule, throw down a guantlet, DO IT, and stop changing course every few years to avoid ever doing ANYTHING except wasting billions of dollars.
Flying astronauts to LaGrange points strikes me as bizarre. I could see you sending satellites to them but they are empty points in space. You spend billions of dollars to fly people to empty points in space, everyone on Earth will say WTF are you doing? Spending even more billions to fly people to Mars, not land and return is just as bad, and will get just as bad a reception. You either have a plan to go to Mars and land, and ideally stay there, or don't even bother.
I could maybe see flying to an asteroid or comet but I'm inclined to think a very capable robotic rover like Spirit or Opportunity would be a LOT more bang for the buck until you figure out a mission you REALLY need people on one for.
I seriously wish the U.S. was a rational country with a rational government but I don't think it has been for at least 40 years. You kind of have two options, decide you want to do manned space exploration and fund it properly or pull the plug on it and move on. Wasting money on it and never doing anything has to stop. The amount of money this report is quibbling over here is less than the U.S. blows in Iraq and Afghanistan in a month so you kind of figure the truth is everyone in Washington wants manned space exploration dead, but they don't have the balls to actually kill it. Assorted powerful Congressmen just want the jobs program in their state/district and don't care if it actually accomplishes anything.
I was taken aback when I saw earlier this week that NASA has already spent $450 million on the upcoming Aries 1-X launch. This is basically to launch one pretty much off the shelf Shuttle SRB with a bunch of mockups stacked on top presumably made out of paper meche. And we wonder why they are having budget and schedule problems?
P.S.
Putting an ex Lockheed CEO in charge of this commission pretty much eliminated any chance of any original thinking before this commission even started. Lockheed IS the status quo and the jobs program.
"Another advantage is that if your rocket does encounter some calamity, you don't lose your entire (much more expensive than the rocket itself) payload, but rather just a piece of it."
If you lose one payload chances are whatever your mission was is shot anyway until you replace it, unless you are going to build a spare for every module and have spare launchers ready to go, which would seem to be a problem if they are "expensive". Maybe if its bulk stuff like fuel, water or oxygen it wouldn't be so much of a problem to lose one but for those the launch is the expensive thing.
I'm pretty sure the Apollo people thought all this out and they came up with a pretty good solution that is known to work. I wager they figured it was best to launch everything at once where possible. As prone as launches are to being aborted for technical problems and weather in Florida if you had to do many launches it could take a long and unpredictable amount of time to get everything you need in to orbit. Just hope you don't need to hit a window, to go to Mars for example.
I think it remains to be seen how much actual economy of scale you can get in launchers. So far they are more custom built by craftsmen than an assembly line where economy of scale would really pay off. Would be interesting if you could make a reliable assembly line that could turn them out like Model T's. Would also be interesting to know what launch rate and how much it would cost annually to make a real rocket assembly line with economy of scale.
This patent suit has NOTHING to do with phone/carrier bundling as nearly as I can tell. GSM is patented by Nokia and CDMA is patented by Qualcomm and those are the deployed cell phone RF standards. If you are building a cell phone deploying on either network you have to license them, Apple certainly knew that going in.
You could make a case for developing a new, open cell phone RF standard, and then deploy it all over the world. High frequency RF communication and analog circuits aren't exactly trivial to develop though. You would need billions in R&D funding from someplace, it would be challenging to develop without stepping on existing patents and it would take years to develop and then years more and billions more to deploy.
Like it or not GSM and CDMA are the standards that are here now, everyone knows it, Apple knew it when they started thinking about iPhone, and they should have dealt with the licenses back then, instead of now when it will be a train wreck.
I should add I seriously would have thought Apple would have and licensed these patents when iPhone was just a glitter in Jobs eye, unless even back then Nokia saw the threat (thinking the iPod which was already big then) and wanted a lot even before it shipped. Pretty sure anyone doing a cell phone would know they have to license GSM from Nokia and or CDMA from Qualcomm before they even start.
Now iPhone is a huge success, making billions of dollars, Apple has $30+ billion in the bank, and is giving Nokia serious competition and grief so you can be pretty sure their terms are probably 10X worse now than they would have been a few years ago.
Since nearly every other cell phone maker has licensed these patents and Apple was negotiating to license them chances are pretty good Nokia's claim is valid. Don't think it has much to do with Slashdot bias.
Presumably Nokia's licensing terms were unreasonable to Apple, this is just escalation of the "negotiating" process by one side or the other, Nokia thinks they will win and get more cash than Apple was offering in the negotiation, or maybe even Apple thought they will do better in court or with a counter suit over other patents so they provoked Nokia in to this.
Symbian is such a primitive operating system I doubt its possible for it to infringe any patent that didn't expire 10 years ago.
Qt on the other hand, that one is almost certain to be violating some patents, I wonder if it infringes on any Apple font patents.
You can guess where this is probably heading it will grind through courts and backroom negotiations for years, they will either settle out of court and cross license patents, or maybe Apple will have to throw Nokia some cash. They have more than $30 billion in cash reserves if memory serves, almost as much as Microsoft so I doubt it will put much of a dent in their bank account.
"Wonder why women are so uncomfortable in the Information Technology field?"
My theory is that women shun the tech world because they tend to have more common sense than men. Other than maybe during the tech bubble it is generally a pretty shitty career path. There are a few rock star geeks who get rich but its mostly the sales, marketing and MBA types that make it to the top of most companies and make most of the money. Most techies get a wonderful life of deadlines, death marches to meet schedules and bug databases. Lately they get the wonderful opportunity to compete for jobs against people in China, India and Eastern Europe making a couple dollars an hour.
I tend to think women should be gleeful they were driven out of tech for the most part so they could focus on careers that don't suck like business, marketing, sales, law, medicine, etc.
It shouldn't. They are playing leap frog. One side of the Atlantic implements an oppressive law, tax, or spy on your own citizens regime, and then the other side of the Atlantic says, see they did it and it was good so we shall do it too and we can do it even better. Repeat over and over and.... BAMMMM..... you are living in Fascist world.
Both sides of the Atlantic are also passing these same obscene laws because the same multinationals are lobbying, bribing and pressuring politicians the world over to legislate their profitability.
At this point I mostly debate if I lived in a world dominated by Fascist governments or governments which are for all intents and purposes organized crime syndicates, I think a little of both. They are taking vast sums from ordinary people and transferring it to their rich friends and themselves. It boggles the mind that working people in the U.S. are taxed at least 25% income tax and 12.5% payroll taxes(counting the employer half) for 37.5% at a minimum. Billionaire hedge fund operators are taxed at 15%. These same hedge funds manager tax their own clients more than that, over 20% (2% management fees and 20% of profits).
I was watching Frontline on PBS last night on Brookseley Born. A great story. During the Clinton administration she tried to use the authority she had at the obscure Commodities Futures Trading Commission to regulate derivatives. If she had succeeded she might well have prevented at least the AIG part of the recent financial crisis. Instead she was crushed by Alan Greenspan, Phil Graham, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers. Long Term Capital Management collapsed during this period trading derivatives, nearly sparking a major panic, proving Born right and they continued to crush her.
Alan Greenspan supposedly told Born that she was NOT suppose to pursue fraud in derivatives or commodities though it was explicitly in her agencies charter to do just that.
Bob Rubin went on to help lead Citigroup in to complete ruin and billions of tax payer bailouts.
Phil Graham's wife was on the board at Enron, he went to UBS where his Swiss bank ran tax shelters for thousands of wealthy Americans, and was a leading player in the collapse during which he called us all a bunch of whiners.
Larry Summers is now Obama's senior economic adviser.
All four of these people should be run out of every government position, boardroom or any other position of authority because they are a delightful mix of stupid and criminal. Its especially obscene for Larry Summers to be calling the shots on financial matters in the Obama administration. Paul Volcker might actually fix the bankster problem but he has been completely shut out by Summers and Geitner.
Exactly right. Chances are Ellison is loving this since he can blame the carnage on the EU, he gets SUN to take all the charges for the layoffs, and he gets rid of people he would have fired the day after the merger closed anyway. Only interesting question is if Schwartz and SUN decided who got canned or if Ellison and Oracle are deciding. Chance are SUN at least consulted with Oracle on who got the ax.
People use MySQL because its free, simple and easy. If they wanted an expensive Oracle DB they would be using..... Oracle.
There is a near certainty Oracle is looking to mess with MySQL one way another or they would have spun it out of this deal already and it kinds of looks like the EU knows it. Oracle can't exactly kill MySQL since its open source but they sure can mess with it in to the future and force a migration to a fork and a new brand name which is usually messy. I doubt Ellison has any love loss for MySQL considering A) he is ruthless and B) MySQL and other open source DB's have cost him billions over the years.
Because in case your haven't noticed the U.S. government has turned in to a gigantic corporation, an extremely corrupt and incompetent corporation at that. There isn't anything resembling a government "of the people" in Washington any more and both parties are equally to blame. By any definition the U.S. has moved in to the realm of "state capitalism", and again both Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible, its been happening for a while but the last couple years it became a fait accompli as breakneck speed. "State Capitalism" is also known as "Fascism".
It a unique corporation in that it can garner revenue by:
A - Extracting it by force from it customer base in the form of taxes. For a new first if the current health reform bill passes they will force you to spend 10K a year on insurance from a private corporation or face punitive taxes and still have no insurance.
B - Issuing debt in the form of T Bills which has been a bottomless reservoir of cash as long as the dollar is the global reserve currency and China and Japan keep buying them. This will soon come to an end. When the dollar is phased out as the reserve current by the rest of the world because they are fed up with American mismanagement the U.S. will have to live within its means and it will be a cataclysm. The ONLY thing keeping the U.S. out of bankruptcy is the dollar being the reserve currency and China pegging to the dollar by buying U.S. debt. The U.S. current accounts deficit (the combination of trade deficits and Federal deficits which must be up around $2 trillion this year) would be completely unsustainable otherwise. If the dollar wasn't the reserve currency the U.S. would be in the hands of the IMF now, getting "austerity measures" and IMF loans.
C - The Fed can just print money which they've been doing at a ferocious pace lately which is why the dollar is tanking and gold is soaring. If you have any money sitting in a bank account a large percentage of it has disappeared in the last year without most people realizing it. As proof America is now on the same plane as Zimbabwe the Fed has been printing dollars and immediately turning around and buying U.S. debt (i.e. T-Bills). When you are printing money to buy your own debt you know your economy is doomed and your country is pretty much a criminal enterprise on par with Robert Mugabe.
You also know your country is a criminal enterprise when a former Goldman Sachs CEO, while at Goldman Sachs got the law changed to allow 30-1 leverage, and then as Treasury Secretary infused Goldman Sachs with something like $70 billion in free money at tax payers expense with no strings attached and NO debate when 30-1 leverage nearly destroyed them. It would, no doubt, have devastated our economy if Goldman Sachs had failed which it would have if AIG had failed. But, it would have been worth it to A) get rid of the cancer that is Goldman Sachs on our economy and to B) maintain the crucial concept of "moral hazard" without which free market Capitalism doesn't work.
In the system we have now Goldman Sachs is now both an FDIC insured bank and a high flying, gambling investment bank. It is getting billions in Federal guarantees and billions of dollars at 0% from the Fed, FREE MONEY, which they are gambling on stocks and bonds, making a killing and driving the current market bubble. They now KNOW if their risky investments crash again they are too big to fail and the taxpayers will just bail them out again. It is head they win, tails we all lose. When you no longer have moral hazard you no longer have capitalism, you have "state capitalism".
It isn't "literally "the database"", is "the base", "the basis" or "the foundation". Maybe some CIA guy with a sense of humor morphed it in to "the database" but this looks like just a pretty flawed translation or fabrication.
From Wikipedia.... "The name comes from the Arabic noun q'idah, which means foundation or basis and can also refer to a military base. The initial al- is the Arabic definite article the, hence the base."
Mining peoples social networks is almost certainly extremely useful if you can find a person of interest. You can immediately identify their close associates.
I'm kind of doubting many serious terrorist or criminals actually use Twitter but I wager all the Iranians who used facebook and twitter to protest a rigged election immediately had their social networks scoured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. If you are trying to unroll an underground network if you find people that put their social network online must be priceless.
To put it another way I doubt mining social networks is very useful to combat crime or terrorism but it is probably an exceptional tool for political oppression and to stifle dissent.
High interest rates used to be a crime called "usery" and it dates back a few thousand years. It used to be a crime to charge interest at all. The U.S. used to have state statutes on the maximum interest you could charge before it became usery. A common punishment for usery is the loan was forgiven or the lender couldn't sue to collect. In 1980 when the U.S. was in a nasty inflationary spiral all usery laws were overturned with the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act. It was actually passed by Dems just before Reagan was elected though it was a perfect fit for the Republicans. Much of our financial cataclysm of late is actually thanks to this act which allowed userous loans. We've had payday loans, 20% credit card rates and every manner of acute usery since. You could argue its buyer beware but people are often desperate or foolish and take out loans they can never repay and it just makes their problems worse. I personally never borrow money... EVER. I wish it was a lot harder to get loans but banks make a lot of money on teaser rates, balloons, etc and they pretty much own Congress so we have turned in to a nation of debtors and its a key reason our economy is imploding, while the Chinese, who are chronic savers are doing well. You ever wonder why there are payday loans stores on every street corner now, its because usery is legal and very profitable in the U.S.
The worst thing about student loans has been the last eight years when the Republicans decided it was a good idea to put private corporations in charge of them. They provide none of the capital, they assume none of the risk, tax payers provide the money and take the risk, they just take a hefty cut and all they do is marketing and hand out cash. It was pretty much a criminal enterprise like most things in the U.S. and all it did was take money from students and taxpayers to line the pockets of politically connected corporations. I think the Dems have been trying to return to a sane system where the government just does the loans and gets rid of the middle man, though it will end a no risk gravy train for a lot of powerful people.
I think labeling these people as pschopathic is misguided at best. I'm pretty sure insider trading is an epidemic now and I wager a LOT of people are doing the same thing, in fact its behavior that is probably the new normal in the morally bankrupt world we live in. These guys were just doing it on a wholesale level and were unlucky that someone ratted them out. I wonder how many people are cringing right now because they know they've done the same thing and worry a little they might get caught too. I wager a week from now all the insider cheats will be back at it because the money is too good and too easy.
It pretty tough to care about a few million made on illegal stock tips when places like Goldman Sachs are looting billions out of the pockets of all of us and getting away with it year after year. They ran a racket that nearly destroyed the global economy, pushed millions in to unemployment, foreclosure and homelessness and we punished them by giving them a bank charter, FDIC insurance, nearly unlimited money at zero percent. They are making a billion a month, and are going to pay record bonuses to the same execs who steamrolled our economy. When your whole economy has turned in to a crime scene how do you single out these people to jail.
"...and those people will get other people killed..."
On the other hand we live on a planet with 6+ billion people which is heading to 9 and some where along the way we will run out of resource like food, water and energy and we will have a major crash that will make a flu pandemic look benign by comparison.
I'm not sure I subscribe to the idea that its really such a great idea to work so hard to short circuit all the natural biological mechanisms for population control. Those mechanisms were developed over billions of years of evolution because they were extremely necessary to prevent biological organisms from overpopulating and exhausting their environment. Keeping everyone alive at all costs no doubt gives everyone the warm fuzzies but something that seems like a near term win-win could in the long run be cataclysmic.
I'm all for wiping out disease, preventing aging and have everyone live past 120 which seems to be where we are heading. at least in the places that can afford it. but.... if you are going to do that you also need to either:
A. Institute draconian birth control and allow no more births than their are deaths to achieve a stable or probably even better, gently declining population
B. You need some major technological breakthroughs to stretch a biosphere that is already showing signs of cracking, or you need to terraform a nearby planet and create more biosphere (which is a long shot solution at best).
I'm starting to have a serious problem with a society that is hell bent on wiping out all disease and keeping people alive at all costs using expensive medical technology to the point it bankrupts economies and robs young people of their future because they have to support politically powerful seniors who paid in next to nothing when they were young and are now milking their grandchildren of their future. We also seem hell bent on wiping out famine and every other natural mechanism for population control but we are also completely unwilling to institute equally effective, mandatory if necessary, birth control regimes.
I seriously don't want to live on a planet that looks like Soylent Green and that is where we are heading. Either you vote for living to 120 and you forgo having children, or if you wanna breed like rabbits then you should be willing to die like one at a relatively early age.
Dont think I fall in the category but maybe I'm the last to know... but....
I do subscribe to the idea it actually probably a good idea to build a strong immune system the natural way by exposure to and overcoming infections. There are probably diseases where a vaccine is a best course where the lethality of the disease is high, but then too I could easily see governments and health care providers overcompensating by trying to vaccinate for EVERYTHING and pushing out vaccines that either don't work or are potentially harmful. As in most thing there is probably a middle ground which is the best ground. You do want to promote proven effective vaccines. You want to discourage poorly tested or ineffective vaccines so the more studies the better.
I often wonder if their is a correlation between the increasingly sterile existence western's live with sterilized water, antibacterial soaps, vaccines and the large numbers of kids with allergies and basically wimpish dispositions.
There is an old saying if it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger.
Don't have practical first hand experience with Chinese medicine but if the system is as you described doctors would also have an incentive to not treat very sick people, let them die and focus on the healthy people. I did read one report that when it comes to the rural population China does pretty much punt on giving them health care and you either stay healthy or die. Not sure its accurate but I wager when you have a billion plus people it follows they can't afford to give them a fraction of the care they would get in the west or it would break their economy, and they have a pretty ruthless system, so I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing their best to kill off the sick with bad or no care unless the person is valuable to them in some way.
The effectiveness of flu vaccines fluctuate wildly depending on how well the people who designed the vaccine guessed which strains would be present during the flu season, among other things. Not sure about these studies but if you ran a study during a year where they nailed it the effectiveness might be great. You do a study in a year they missed it, chances are the vaccine would be completely ineffective.
Blanket statements that flu vaccines are always good are just as flawed as the ones that say they are completely ineffective. the truth lies in the middle. In the case of H1N1 it kind of looks to me like the vaccine is arriving late, its poorly tested and its not really the horrific strain of flu all the press and government would have you think it is.
"That people aren't comfortable with Linux isn't Linux's fault."
Actually yes it is and you kind of spelled out one reason why in your next sentence.
A lot of people aren't comfortable with an OS which makes you choose between two competing desktops and application sets before you even start, and its a decision someone new to Linux wouldn't want to make, or even know how to make. Kubuntu is pretty much the red headed stepchild in Ubuntu land anyway.
It pisses everyone off here every time I say it but as long as the Linux desktop is fractured between Gnome and KDE Linux is pretty much doomed on the desktop and at this point there is no way to fix that problem. Maybe you could just fork a couple dozen more times and see if that fixes it.
I've never liked Gnome because its kind of ugly and built on top of GTK which has to be the poorest GUI toolkit in use in a desktop OS today. The clusterfuck that was KDE 4.0 pretty much turned me against KDE, that and Trolltech seems to have an exceptional talent for constantly breaking code built on top of Qt.
And then of course there is the fact that ALSA and audio on Linux completely sucks and people do actually want good audio these days. Its one thing Apple completely nails and Linux doesn't. BeOS completely nailed audio ten years ago leaving me to wonder why Linux continues to be an epic FAIL. Interface Builder is another thing Apple nailed which leads directly to a lot of well designed, consistent, easy to use apps, while Linux apps, with a few exceptions, tend to be an inconsistent, painful to use, grab bag.
"Come on people, there are very very few "easy ways to get rich"
Well.... Apple and their shareholders seems to have found one.... let everyone else write their apps for them and make them sell them for next to nothing on their app store. Apple takes a cut on them all with almost no risk. They don't care which apps succeed since they take a cut off all of them that aren't free. With the free apps they get free apps to sell their phones for them.
Pretty similar situation with iTunes. Everyone else takes the risk producing a hit song and Apple takes a cut off all of them so they can't lose.
Not to belittle their genius in creating iPod, iPhone and their app store but at this point they have achieved something resembling the Microsoft tax on PC's. They take a cut out of everything in these two markets and they have almost no risk since they've acquired a near monopoly with iTunes, iPod and iPhone.
Toyota has a slew of patents on hybrid technology which I think was a key reason Ford chose to license them instead of trying to compete in the space.
In a lot of ways Toyota is just getting a dose of its own medicine. I don't have much sympathy for one patent wielding company being sued by another patent wielding company.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously don't know how you can say "overall direction looks really good". It looks to me a lot more like a bunch of dithering and continuing the status quo (a.k.a. NASA Jobs Program) until the next election and the next Presidential commission changes direction again and reboots it all again. At some point someone needs to do a Kennedy, pick a target worth doing, set a schedule, throw down a guantlet, DO IT, and stop changing course every few years to avoid ever doing ANYTHING except wasting billions of dollars.
Flying astronauts to LaGrange points strikes me as bizarre. I could see you sending satellites to them but they are empty points in space. You spend billions of dollars to fly people to empty points in space, everyone on Earth will say WTF are you doing? Spending even more billions to fly people to Mars, not land and return is just as bad, and will get just as bad a reception. You either have a plan to go to Mars and land, and ideally stay there, or don't even bother.
I could maybe see flying to an asteroid or comet but I'm inclined to think a very capable robotic rover like Spirit or Opportunity would be a LOT more bang for the buck until you figure out a mission you REALLY need people on one for.
I seriously wish the U.S. was a rational country with a rational government but I don't think it has been for at least 40 years. You kind of have two options, decide you want to do manned space exploration and fund it properly or pull the plug on it and move on. Wasting money on it and never doing anything has to stop. The amount of money this report is quibbling over here is less than the U.S. blows in Iraq and Afghanistan in a month so you kind of figure the truth is everyone in Washington wants manned space exploration dead, but they don't have the balls to actually kill it. Assorted powerful Congressmen just want the jobs program in their state/district and don't care if it actually accomplishes anything.
I was taken aback when I saw earlier this week that NASA has already spent $450 million on the upcoming Aries 1-X launch. This is basically to launch one pretty much off the shelf Shuttle SRB with a bunch of mockups stacked on top presumably made out of paper meche. And we wonder why they are having budget and schedule problems?
P.S.
Putting an ex Lockheed CEO in charge of this commission pretty much eliminated any chance of any original thinking before this commission even started. Lockheed IS the status quo and the jobs program.
"Another advantage is that if your rocket does encounter some calamity, you don't lose your entire (much more expensive than the rocket itself) payload, but rather just a piece of it."
If you lose one payload chances are whatever your mission was is shot anyway until you replace it, unless you are going to build a spare for every module and have spare launchers ready to go, which would seem to be a problem if they are "expensive". Maybe if its bulk stuff like fuel, water or oxygen it wouldn't be so much of a problem to lose one but for those the launch is the expensive thing.
I'm pretty sure the Apollo people thought all this out and they came up with a pretty good solution that is known to work. I wager they figured it was best to launch everything at once where possible. As prone as launches are to being aborted for technical problems and weather in Florida if you had to do many launches it could take a long and unpredictable amount of time to get everything you need in to orbit. Just hope you don't need to hit a window, to go to Mars for example.
I think it remains to be seen how much actual economy of scale you can get in launchers. So far they are more custom built by craftsmen than an assembly line where economy of scale would really pay off. Would be interesting if you could make a reliable assembly line that could turn them out like Model T's. Would also be interesting to know what launch rate and how much it would cost annually to make a real rocket assembly line with economy of scale.
This patent suit has NOTHING to do with phone/carrier bundling as nearly as I can tell. GSM is patented by Nokia and CDMA is patented by Qualcomm and those are the deployed cell phone RF standards. If you are building a cell phone deploying on either network you have to license them, Apple certainly knew that going in.
You could make a case for developing a new, open cell phone RF standard, and then deploy it all over the world. High frequency RF communication and analog circuits aren't exactly trivial to develop though. You would need billions in R&D funding from someplace, it would be challenging to develop without stepping on existing patents and it would take years to develop and then years more and billions more to deploy.
Like it or not GSM and CDMA are the standards that are here now, everyone knows it, Apple knew it when they started thinking about iPhone, and they should have dealt with the licenses back then, instead of now when it will be a train wreck.
I should add I seriously would have thought Apple would have and licensed these patents when iPhone was just a glitter in Jobs eye, unless even back then Nokia saw the threat (thinking the iPod which was already big then) and wanted a lot even before it shipped. Pretty sure anyone doing a cell phone would know they have to license GSM from Nokia and or CDMA from Qualcomm before they even start.
Now iPhone is a huge success, making billions of dollars, Apple has $30+ billion in the bank, and is giving Nokia serious competition and grief so you can be pretty sure their terms are probably 10X worse now than they would have been a few years ago.
OK, the kernel is awesome, its just developing apps for that is primitive, and about 10 years behind the times at this point ;)
Since nearly every other cell phone maker has licensed these patents and Apple was negotiating to license them chances are pretty good Nokia's claim is valid. Don't think it has much to do with Slashdot bias.
Presumably Nokia's licensing terms were unreasonable to Apple, this is just escalation of the "negotiating" process by one side or the other, Nokia thinks they will win and get more cash than Apple was offering in the negotiation, or maybe even Apple thought they will do better in court or with a counter suit over other patents so they provoked Nokia in to this.
Symbian is such a primitive operating system I doubt its possible for it to infringe any patent that didn't expire 10 years ago.
Qt on the other hand, that one is almost certain to be violating some patents, I wonder if it infringes on any Apple font patents.
You can guess where this is probably heading it will grind through courts and backroom negotiations for years, they will either settle out of court and cross license patents, or maybe Apple will have to throw Nokia some cash. They have more than $30 billion in cash reserves if memory serves, almost as much as Microsoft so I doubt it will put much of a dent in their bank account.
"Wonder why women are so uncomfortable in the Information Technology field?"
My theory is that women shun the tech world because they tend to have more common sense than men. Other than maybe during the tech bubble it is generally a pretty shitty career path. There are a few rock star geeks who get rich but its mostly the sales, marketing and MBA types that make it to the top of most companies and make most of the money. Most techies get a wonderful life of deadlines, death marches to meet schedules and bug databases. Lately they get the wonderful opportunity to compete for jobs against people in China, India and Eastern Europe making a couple dollars an hour.
I tend to think women should be gleeful they were driven out of tech for the most part so they could focus on careers that don't suck like business, marketing, sales, law, medicine, etc.
It shouldn't. They are playing leap frog. One side of the Atlantic implements an oppressive law, tax, or spy on your own citizens regime, and then the other side of the Atlantic says, see they did it and it was good so we shall do it too and we can do it even better. Repeat over and over and .... BAMMMM ..... you are living in Fascist world.
Both sides of the Atlantic are also passing these same obscene laws because the same multinationals are lobbying, bribing and pressuring politicians the world over to legislate their profitability.
At this point I mostly debate if I lived in a world dominated by Fascist governments or governments which are for all intents and purposes organized crime syndicates, I think a little of both. They are taking vast sums from ordinary people and transferring it to their rich friends and themselves. It boggles the mind that working people in the U.S. are taxed at least 25% income tax and 12.5% payroll taxes(counting the employer half) for 37.5% at a minimum. Billionaire hedge fund operators are taxed at 15%. These same hedge funds manager tax their own clients more than that, over 20% (2% management fees and 20% of profits).
I was watching Frontline on PBS last night on Brookseley Born. A great story. During the Clinton administration she tried to use the authority she had at the obscure Commodities Futures Trading Commission to regulate derivatives. If she had succeeded she might well have prevented at least the AIG part of the recent financial crisis. Instead she was crushed by Alan Greenspan, Phil Graham, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers. Long Term Capital Management collapsed during this period trading derivatives, nearly sparking a major panic, proving Born right and they continued to crush her.
Alan Greenspan supposedly told Born that she was NOT suppose to pursue fraud in derivatives or commodities though it was explicitly in her agencies charter to do just that.
Bob Rubin went on to help lead Citigroup in to complete ruin and billions of tax payer bailouts.
Phil Graham's wife was on the board at Enron, he went to UBS where his Swiss bank ran tax shelters for thousands of wealthy Americans, and was a leading player in the collapse during which he called us all a bunch of whiners.
Larry Summers is now Obama's senior economic adviser.
All four of these people should be run out of every government position, boardroom or any other position of authority because they are a delightful mix of stupid and criminal. Its especially obscene for Larry Summers to be calling the shots on financial matters in the Obama administration. Paul Volcker might actually fix the bankster problem but he has been completely shut out by Summers and Geitner.
Exactly right. Chances are Ellison is loving this since he can blame the carnage on the EU, he gets SUN to take all the charges for the layoffs, and he gets rid of people he would have fired the day after the merger closed anyway. Only interesting question is if Schwartz and SUN decided who got canned or if Ellison and Oracle are deciding. Chance are SUN at least consulted with Oracle on who got the ax.
People use MySQL because its free, simple and easy. If they wanted an expensive Oracle DB they would be using..... Oracle.
There is a near certainty Oracle is looking to mess with MySQL one way another or they would have spun it out of this deal already and it kinds of looks like the EU knows it. Oracle can't exactly kill MySQL since its open source but they sure can mess with it in to the future and force a migration to a fork and a new brand name which is usually messy. I doubt Ellison has any love loss for MySQL considering A) he is ruthless and B) MySQL and other open source DB's have cost him billions over the years.
Because in case your haven't noticed the U.S. government has turned in to a gigantic corporation, an extremely corrupt and incompetent corporation at that. There isn't anything resembling a government "of the people" in Washington any more and both parties are equally to blame. By any definition the U.S. has moved in to the realm of "state capitalism", and again both Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible, its been happening for a while but the last couple years it became a fait accompli as breakneck speed. "State Capitalism" is also known as "Fascism".
It a unique corporation in that it can garner revenue by:
A - Extracting it by force from it customer base in the form of taxes. For a new first if the current health reform bill passes they will force you to spend 10K a year on insurance from a private corporation or face punitive taxes and still have no insurance.
B - Issuing debt in the form of T Bills which has been a bottomless reservoir of cash as long as the dollar is the global reserve currency and China and Japan keep buying them. This will soon come to an end. When the dollar is phased out as the reserve current by the rest of the world because they are fed up with American mismanagement the U.S. will have to live within its means and it will be a cataclysm. The ONLY thing keeping the U.S. out of bankruptcy is the dollar being the reserve currency and China pegging to the dollar by buying U.S. debt. The U.S. current accounts deficit (the combination of trade deficits and Federal deficits which must be up around $2 trillion this year) would be completely unsustainable otherwise. If the dollar wasn't the reserve currency the U.S. would be in the hands of the IMF now, getting "austerity measures" and IMF loans.
C - The Fed can just print money which they've been doing at a ferocious pace lately which is why the dollar is tanking and gold is soaring. If you have any money sitting in a bank account a large percentage of it has disappeared in the last year without most people realizing it. As proof America is now on the same plane as Zimbabwe the Fed has been printing dollars and immediately turning around and buying U.S. debt (i.e. T-Bills). When you are printing money to buy your own debt you know your economy is doomed and your country is pretty much a criminal enterprise on par with Robert Mugabe.
You also know your country is a criminal enterprise when a former Goldman Sachs CEO, while at Goldman Sachs got the law changed to allow 30-1 leverage, and then as Treasury Secretary infused Goldman Sachs with something like $70 billion in free money at tax payers expense with no strings attached and NO debate when 30-1 leverage nearly destroyed them. It would, no doubt, have devastated our economy if Goldman Sachs had failed which it would have if AIG had failed. But, it would have been worth it to A) get rid of the cancer that is Goldman Sachs on our economy and to B) maintain the crucial concept of "moral hazard" without which free market Capitalism doesn't work.
In the system we have now Goldman Sachs is now both an FDIC insured bank and a high flying, gambling investment bank. It is getting billions in Federal guarantees and billions of dollars at 0% from the Fed, FREE MONEY, which they are gambling on stocks and bonds, making a killing and driving the current market bubble. They now KNOW if their risky investments crash again they are too big to fail and the taxpayers will just bail them out again. It is head they win, tails we all lose. When you no longer have moral hazard you no longer have capitalism, you have "state capitalism".
It isn't "literally "the database"", is "the base", "the basis" or "the foundation". Maybe some CIA guy with a sense of humor morphed it in to "the database" but this looks like just a pretty flawed translation or fabrication.
From Wikipedia.... "The name comes from the Arabic noun q'idah, which means foundation or basis and can also refer to a military base. The initial al- is the Arabic definite article the, hence the base."
Mining peoples social networks is almost certainly extremely useful if you can find a person of interest. You can immediately identify their close associates.
I'm kind of doubting many serious terrorist or criminals actually use Twitter but I wager all the Iranians who used facebook and twitter to protest a rigged election immediately had their social networks scoured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. If you are trying to unroll an underground network if you find people that put their social network online must be priceless.
To put it another way I doubt mining social networks is very useful to combat crime or terrorism but it is probably an exceptional tool for political oppression and to stifle dissent.
High interest rates used to be a crime called "usery" and it dates back a few thousand years. It used to be a crime to charge interest at all. The U.S. used to have state statutes on the maximum interest you could charge before it became usery. A common punishment for usery is the loan was forgiven or the lender couldn't sue to collect. In 1980 when the U.S. was in a nasty inflationary spiral all usery laws were overturned with the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act. It was actually passed by Dems just before Reagan was elected though it was a perfect fit for the Republicans. Much of our financial cataclysm of late is actually thanks to this act which allowed userous loans. We've had payday loans, 20% credit card rates and every manner of acute usery since. You could argue its buyer beware but people are often desperate or foolish and take out loans they can never repay and it just makes their problems worse. I personally never borrow money... EVER. I wish it was a lot harder to get loans but banks make a lot of money on teaser rates, balloons, etc and they pretty much own Congress so we have turned in to a nation of debtors and its a key reason our economy is imploding, while the Chinese, who are chronic savers are doing well. You ever wonder why there are payday loans stores on every street corner now, its because usery is legal and very profitable in the U.S.
The worst thing about student loans has been the last eight years when the Republicans decided it was a good idea to put private corporations in charge of them. They provide none of the capital, they assume none of the risk, tax payers provide the money and take the risk, they just take a hefty cut and all they do is marketing and hand out cash. It was pretty much a criminal enterprise like most things in the U.S. and all it did was take money from students and taxpayers to line the pockets of politically connected corporations. I think the Dems have been trying to return to a sane system where the government just does the loans and gets rid of the middle man, though it will end a no risk gravy train for a lot of powerful people.
I think labeling these people as pschopathic is misguided at best. I'm pretty sure insider trading is an epidemic now and I wager a LOT of people are doing the same thing, in fact its behavior that is probably the new normal in the morally bankrupt world we live in. These guys were just doing it on a wholesale level and were unlucky that someone ratted them out. I wonder how many people are cringing right now because they know they've done the same thing and worry a little they might get caught too. I wager a week from now all the insider cheats will be back at it because the money is too good and too easy.
It pretty tough to care about a few million made on illegal stock tips when places like Goldman Sachs are looting billions out of the pockets of all of us and getting away with it year after year. They ran a racket that nearly destroyed the global economy, pushed millions in to unemployment, foreclosure and homelessness and we punished them by giving them a bank charter, FDIC insurance, nearly unlimited money at zero percent. They are making a billion a month, and are going to pay record bonuses to the same execs who steamrolled our economy. When your whole economy has turned in to a crime scene how do you single out these people to jail.
"...and those people will get other people killed..."
On the other hand we live on a planet with 6+ billion people which is heading to 9 and some where along the way we will run out of resource like food, water and energy and we will have a major crash that will make a flu pandemic look benign by comparison.
I'm not sure I subscribe to the idea that its really such a great idea to work so hard to short circuit all the natural biological mechanisms for population control. Those mechanisms were developed over billions of years of evolution because they were extremely necessary to prevent biological organisms from overpopulating and exhausting their environment. Keeping everyone alive at all costs no doubt gives everyone the warm fuzzies but something that seems like a near term win-win could in the long run be cataclysmic.
I'm all for wiping out disease, preventing aging and have everyone live past 120 which seems to be where we are heading. at least in the places that can afford it. but.... if you are going to do that you also need to either:
A. Institute draconian birth control and allow no more births than their are deaths to achieve a stable or probably even better, gently declining population
B. You need some major technological breakthroughs to stretch a biosphere that is already showing signs of cracking, or you need to terraform a nearby planet and create more biosphere (which is a long shot solution at best).
I'm starting to have a serious problem with a society that is hell bent on wiping out all disease and keeping people alive at all costs using expensive medical technology to the point it bankrupts economies and robs young people of their future because they have to support politically powerful seniors who paid in next to nothing when they were young and are now milking their grandchildren of their future. We also seem hell bent on wiping out famine and every other natural mechanism for population control but we are also completely unwilling to institute equally effective, mandatory if necessary, birth control regimes.
I seriously don't want to live on a planet that looks like Soylent Green and that is where we are heading. Either you vote for living to 120 and you forgo having children, or if you wanna breed like rabbits then you should be willing to die like one at a relatively early age.
"the fringe extremist nutters"
Dont think I fall in the category but maybe I'm the last to know... but....
I do subscribe to the idea it actually probably a good idea to build a strong immune system the natural way by exposure to and overcoming infections. There are probably diseases where a vaccine is a best course where the lethality of the disease is high, but then too I could easily see governments and health care providers overcompensating by trying to vaccinate for EVERYTHING and pushing out vaccines that either don't work or are potentially harmful. As in most thing there is probably a middle ground which is the best ground. You do want to promote proven effective vaccines. You want to discourage poorly tested or ineffective vaccines so the more studies the better.
I often wonder if their is a correlation between the increasingly sterile existence western's live with sterilized water, antibacterial soaps, vaccines and the large numbers of kids with allergies and basically wimpish dispositions.
There is an old saying if it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger.
Don't have practical first hand experience with Chinese medicine but if the system is as you described doctors would also have an incentive to not treat very sick people, let them die and focus on the healthy people. I did read one report that when it comes to the rural population China does pretty much punt on giving them health care and you either stay healthy or die. Not sure its accurate but I wager when you have a billion plus people it follows they can't afford to give them a fraction of the care they would get in the west or it would break their economy, and they have a pretty ruthless system, so I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing their best to kill off the sick with bad or no care unless the person is valuable to them in some way.
The effectiveness of flu vaccines fluctuate wildly depending on how well the people who designed the vaccine guessed which strains would be present during the flu season, among other things. Not sure about these studies but if you ran a study during a year where they nailed it the effectiveness might be great. You do a study in a year they missed it, chances are the vaccine would be completely ineffective.
Blanket statements that flu vaccines are always good are just as flawed as the ones that say they are completely ineffective. the truth lies in the middle. In the case of H1N1 it kind of looks to me like the vaccine is arriving late, its poorly tested and its not really the horrific strain of flu all the press and government would have you think it is.
"That people aren't comfortable with Linux isn't Linux's fault."
Actually yes it is and you kind of spelled out one reason why in your next sentence.
A lot of people aren't comfortable with an OS which makes you choose between two competing desktops and application sets before you even start, and its a decision someone new to Linux wouldn't want to make, or even know how to make. Kubuntu is pretty much the red headed stepchild in Ubuntu land anyway.
It pisses everyone off here every time I say it but as long as the Linux desktop is fractured between Gnome and KDE Linux is pretty much doomed on the desktop and at this point there is no way to fix that problem. Maybe you could just fork a couple dozen more times and see if that fixes it.
I've never liked Gnome because its kind of ugly and built on top of GTK which has to be the poorest GUI toolkit in use in a desktop OS today. The clusterfuck that was KDE 4.0 pretty much turned me against KDE, that and Trolltech seems to have an exceptional talent for constantly breaking code built on top of Qt.
And then of course there is the fact that ALSA and audio on Linux completely sucks and people do actually want good audio these days. Its one thing Apple completely nails and Linux doesn't. BeOS completely nailed audio ten years ago leaving me to wonder why Linux continues to be an epic FAIL. Interface Builder is another thing Apple nailed which leads directly to a lot of well designed, consistent, easy to use apps, while Linux apps, with a few exceptions, tend to be an inconsistent, painful to use, grab bag.
"Come on people, there are very very few "easy ways to get rich"
Well.... Apple and their shareholders seems to have found one.... let everyone else write their apps for them and make them sell them for next to nothing on their app store. Apple takes a cut on them all with almost no risk. They don't care which apps succeed since they take a cut off all of them that aren't free. With the free apps they get free apps to sell their phones for them.
Pretty similar situation with iTunes. Everyone else takes the risk producing a hit song and Apple takes a cut off all of them so they can't lose.
Not to belittle their genius in creating iPod, iPhone and their app store but at this point they have achieved something resembling the Microsoft tax on PC's. They take a cut out of everything in these two markets and they have almost no risk since they've acquired a near monopoly with iTunes, iPod and iPhone.
> Maneuvering fuel, food....
It would be awesome for pancakes.... in fact it could make pancakes out of just about ANYTHING.
Toyota has a slew of patents on hybrid technology which I think was a key reason Ford chose to license them instead of trying to compete in the space.
In a lot of ways Toyota is just getting a dose of its own medicine. I don't have much sympathy for one patent wielding company being sued by another patent wielding company.
Taking one step forward and then one step back isn't a way to get any place either.