It's not about spreading it -- it's about profiting from it. If Fox are going to profit from his words, why shouldn't his family? Remember that the first law suit over the speech was when someone tried to sell discs of the speech for profit. Many news companies had reproduced the speech but weren't sued -- it was news. When the speech became a "product", then sure -- MLK was the creator, his family should be the first beneficiaries.
Why would they care? All their stuff is obsolete long before it would be out of copyright, and they have no duty to disclose the source.
^^ What he said.
Technology has got to the stage where a (relatively) small amount of software can manipulate a large amount of data.
In commercial software you have "code" and "assets", and "assets" are increasingly taking up more dev time than code. Assets include sound effects, images, 3D models, level design etc etc etc. The more assets any coding house can get for free, the more they can focus on code.
I remember seeing a demonstration years ago of an extremely accurate 3D model of the facade of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris made by processing millions of tourist snaps from slightly different angles.
There's a lot of data in video recordings that could be extracted and processed -- sampling sound effects and dialogue, recreating long-demolished buildings from archive video, extracting texture maps from locations for use in 3D games.
NB: I'm not suggesting that they have a right to demand this, simply pointing out that there is a motivation for the technology companies to request it.
Nope. They're offering a free plugin for their own commercial software. Basically, they're just trying to shift more units of Visual Studio. Not nice, not evil, just normal commercial behaviour.
Unless of course the Python code produced will only run on Windows. Can anyone confirm...?
I'm sure when young Dick wants to submit an article about cavemen such as homo erectus, or about the time he saw a horny toad while riding on a donkey (ass) he'll be delighted to be told what a rude little boy he is....
Not necessarily. With foreign call centers becoming common, telephone calls between India and Indiana need some sort of common time reference.
Yes, but it's an assymetrical relationship. The call centres have to adjust to the customer. I don't have to think what time it is in India before calling my phone provider, because they've given me a contract that specifies contact hours in my time. If you think the offshore call centre industry is unpopular now, imagine what people would say if it ran on Indian office hours....
What you want to do is get rid of this wacky 24*60*60 system and use the natural and obvious scale -- degrees. Midnight is zero, midday is 180. We wouldn't need really accurate clocks any more because the iPhone has GPS and we could write an app that operates as a sextant and so you can recalibrate the clock to the sun every day.
I'd have no problem with DST going away, I think people should just adjust their schedule (e.g. schools can change start times depending on the season, if that's important), and not having everyone go to work from 8AM to 5PM would be a good thing overall.
The problem is, I would expect that the bosses will end up making the decisions for their employees. Without officially recognised DST, most large companies would most likely switch to a single year-round schedule, meaning that at certain times of the year, you'd need more before-school childcare... which would end up being provided by the school, and in a few years the school system would fall into line.
I also expect multinationals would use it as an excuse to shift the working times in some of their smaller geographies to match head office.
Our current typical working day is defined by convention and expectation, and switching the system would confuse us just enough that the HR department would be able to sneak a few things in under the radar.
If Bob, in the eastern US, sends Alice, in Hong Kong, a meeting request for "6pm", the system can just look at Bob's timezone localization, send the UTC equivalent of "6pm in bob world" to Alice's computer, which can then display the time that is locally meaningful to Alice according to her localization.
Isn't that exactly what any decent calendaring solution does already?
You're missing the point -- Apple wants to sell the thing that always works. Keeping things pinned down minimises crashes. Minimising crashes means higher user satisfaction, which builds the brand.
User freedom is also known as "enough rope to hang yourself".
Apple have been very clever and relied on the "appstore goldrush" to ensure that millions of different app developers can produce enough to satisfy the hundreds of significant use-cases of the phone. The ecosystem is saturated, so the loss of a few is no problem at all.
Not true: a lot of good science was historically done by religious scholars. The heavens were mapped by astrologers, the arabs protected European academic knowledge in Spain during the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church did more than anyone to advance structural engineering in the Middle Ages, and founded the universities with the express goal of working out the mechanics of God's creation.
Some people are hostile to advancement. It just so happens that sometimes matters of culture and self-identity are imposed onto religion. (See also the veil -- accepted by most Muslim scholars as "not a religious thing", but proclaimed as an important part of the religion by people who just happen to be from areas where it is traditionally worn.)
ID is more specific than the simply the notion of a guiding intelligence, just as Christianity is more specific than just a belief in the Christ Jesus. Can you quote me a book on ID that doesn't assume the age of life on Earth to be recent enough to account for the chronologies and genealogies included in the Genesis and Exodus?
Because the fossil record very very very strongly suggests that those timescales are impossible. Australopithicus Afarensis living for between 5 and 20 times the existence of humans, and there was a gap of between 15 and 60 times the existence of homo sapiens between homo sapiens and australopithicus afarensis. That's many many more times what the ID books generally accept to be the age of life on Earth...
He gets bonus points from me for including the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster.
How so? The FSM really is no way to open a debate, because it's designed to ridicule and debase your opponent. Upsetting someone doesn't make them more rational. At least not in my experience.
Does that post seem rational and measured to you? Now, would you give me as much attention if I'd said this instead...?
My god, you moron, don't you realise that the FSM was dreamed up by some self-fellating arsehole in order to stir massive quantities of shit on the internet?
Do you get my point? Ridicule doesn't open up debate.
There are private schools where that is the case many of which will teach all sorts of crazy things like virgin births
Look up "parthenogenesis" -- the mostly highly evolved creature it has been observed in is a shark, but it's not well understood and there's no reason to rule out the possibility that it could occur in humans. If it did, it would certainly look like a miracle to most people.
Of course, the only problem is that parthenogenesis produces a clone of the mother, so a male Jesus is hellishly unlikely. Klinefelter syndrome has only ever been seen to produce male phenotype, so it doesn't even look like Mary could have been XXY.
Erm.. no it doesn't. There are bottlenecks in the mitochondrial record, but there are multiple bottlenecks. There were several "mitochondrial Eves" at various places and at various times.
But this doesn't even prove that there was only one woman at each of these bottlenecks. In a patriarchal society, many Y-chromosomes die out as a single alpha male bloodline dominates the tribe. You can see this in the Lemba people of South Africa. Over 50% of the males have Semitic Y-chromosomes (they were a Jewish tribe who fled Israel), but they are as dark-skinned as any other tribe that you'll find in that part of Africa. They were obviously pretty indiscriminate historically in who they took as wives, but social factors squeezed the ethnic African males out over history to the point where the Lemba are genetically pretty much identical to neighbouring tribes apart from the single identifier of the male bloodline.
If early humans had developed a matriarchal society, the apparent bottleneck could have been the result of the continued dominance of the daughters of a particular matriarch, and those that came after her.
Or maybe that mitochondria belonged to the first blonde...;-)
The problem is, belief in Jesus exists because there was a person or several people round about that time that matches/match at least part of the description of Jesus. The FSM exists purely to suggest the idea of Jesus is absurd. This is reductio ad absurdum.
We know for sure that there were radicals in Judea who wanted the Romans out. We know that Joshua (the Hebraic root of the modern Jesus) was a particularly popular name in Judea at the time. So it's fairly likely that there was at least one radical Jew called Joshua who preached against the Romans. Jesus's teachings as written in the Bible are quite Gandhi-like at times in their use of passive resistance. This, for example, is contested by some, but most historical scholars accept it as the main meaning.
So there probably was a Jesus, and you could argue that the "messiah" thing was tacked on by himself or by his disciples in order to build up support and foment uprising. But the FSM is just ridiculous fiction. A better comparator would be an "almost god" like King Arthur. The Arthurian legends were strong enough that there was a growing cult in the idea that Arthur would return in Britain's greatest hour of need. If Christianity hadn't usurped Celtic religion, it's entirely possible that Arthur would have been elevated to demi-god status among the Britons, just as many great warlords in Ireland gained mythical status after their deaths.
The in-breeding problem only occurs in the presence of certain recessive genetic diseases. This problem arises in any population of animals that has had an adequately long time with a broad breeding stock, because the genetic imperative to remove the faulty gene is low. But if you go to any small tribe on an island or in a forest, you'll see that there is a very low occurrence of these dangerous recessive traits, because frequent inbreeding results in the traits being eliminated (no-one marries someone from a family with a history of defective births). The only isolated communities where inbreeding leads to endemic problems are those that artificially isolate themselves, such as European royalty. They were part of a large, mobile European community that had several endemic recessive traits that statistically weren't problematic, but those that were introduced into the royal houses were recycled to the point there was almost a 50-50 chance of children being affected. The biggest problem royalty had wasn't inbreeding per se anyway -- it was a type of anaemia carried in the Y chromosome, so all sons got it from their fathers, regardless of their mothers' bloodline. It was the cultural practice of a son inheriting titles from his father that caused this to be a problem for the "bluebloods", not inbreeding.
Atheism does get an unfair leg up on religion since it's by definition a non-establishment. In spite of the efforts to reclassify it as an equivalent belief system by the religious it depends on no beliefs of its own. Atheism ultimately is the argument that "I haven't heard a sound argument for a God from anyone so I maintain the default position of nothing on the subject." In fact Atheists are the least atheistic of all belief systems. As an atheist I will say "None of the 8 billion theories on God seem to hold any water or have sufficient proof." As a Christian I will say "There is one true God and *all other possible views* of God are therefore untrue"
The atheist rejects a finite number of belief systems as having insufficient evidence. Most theists reject an infinite number of belief systems other than the one.
Almost, but not quite. Atheism is a belief system: the core tenet of atheism is "there is only what I can see". Good scientists recognise that actually, no, there is more than I can see.
The only logically sound standpoint is agnosticism -- without-knowledge-ism. Whether I believe there is [a god|gods] or not, I do not know this. Both theists and atheists can accept this from a dispassionate point of view.
The intellectual theist says "I accept that there's more than science can see, and my forebearers have claimed that my culture's god(s) are part of that, so I believe on their testimony", and accepts that they believe rather than know. The intellectual atheist says "I accept that there's more than science can see, but the idea of any sort of supernatural deities is not supported by any solid evidence, so I do not believe it".
Those two standpoints can quite happily coexist, because a scientist from either camp starts with what there is evidence for, which both camps can (generally) agree on. It is when extremists claim that they "know" that it breaks down. Religion is called "faith" because we can never know. Science works on assumptions, and anyone who can't see that doesn't understand science.
I "lost my faith" (as they say) fairly recently, but all the anthropological arguments for why people believe can be applied to why I stopped: looking for something that explains X, peer pressure, etc etc.
The fact that every less argument for God gets you one step closer to Atheism does not logically follow that discrediting bad arguments for God is advancing Atheism. My dad is a Christian PhD Theologian and I am an atheist. We more often agree in debates than with most lay people. Why? Because most of the arguments that the religious advance have been rejected by theologians and philosophers for centuries as "nonsense".
Most people's faith and religion today is largely based on horribly outdated and overly simplistic arguments that are logical and philosophical sink holes of nonsense. Whether it's an atheist or a theologian who is dismissing such nonsense it's good for religion and Atheism that the old (in this court case's instance more than 1500 year old) logical fallacies are removed from public discourse.
Agreed entirely. The modern evangelical movements require a complete abandonment of logic that mainstream religions rejected a long time ago. It's a particular shame that the colonial legacy in the Arab states has been to make progress a naughty word -- without the Arab scholars in Spain, there wouldn't have been a Renaissance, yet many modern Arab states are built on the sort of principles that the US Bible Belt aspires to....
You've missed the point. In your car, the airbag deploys after the impact of the car with the tree/other car/other obstacle, but before you impact with the steering wheel or the side of the car. If the smartphone airbag deployed on impact, it would be too late -- the damage is done. The smartphone therefore has to predict the impact, which it can only do by detecting the fall. Unfortunately, the accelerometers in the phone don't know the difference between falling and other forms of acceleration....
The patent application says "A method for protecting a portable device that includes... detecting that the portable device will impact a surface". He also talks about a "surface type detector" that knows the difference between a pillow and concrete. Sadly, at no point does he tell us how this magical sensors actually work.
Is this how low patents have sunk in the US? Here's hoping it gets laughed out....
No, you missed the point of the article. The developers agreed to the amendment. They are not complaining about this. They are simply warning other devs that the promised 20% on Free App of the Day is a myth, because Amazon will always "renegotiate" for 0%. As the FAotD offer is as much about attracting developers to the Amazon app store as about attracting customers, they're walking a dangerous line, and the first dev to sue them is going to get full data on how much they've honoured the original agreement as part of "discovery", and it'll be pretty grim reading for Amazon....
It is a bait-and-switch. The "bait" is the developers' agreement, which says 20% of list price on free app of the day. The "switch" is the email that offers FAotD listing only once the developer has released an app. "Bait and switch" involves changing the terms of a contract or sale just before signing on the dotted line. Changing the deal afterwards isn't bait-and-switch, it's fraud, and even Amazon isn't big enough to get away with that.
It's not a bait-and-switch aimed at getting devs onto FAotD, it's a bait-and-switch aimed at getting devs to list their apps in the Amazon app store, and it has been very effective. First up, app stores need to be able to quote a high number of apps to draw in the customers, and offering the 20% really does attract devs, because they understandably expect to get more out of 20% FAotD than out of normal sales. Amazon win. Amazon don't really care if someone turns down FAotD because they'll just move on to the next guy. Amazon win.
The really sad thing is they probably could sell this app for a long time, they'd continuously get small amounts of money from it and maybe the app would grow over time (good supported app is worth the money). But now they have nothing, because everyone interested already has the app, so they probably won't get even the small amount of money from it.
If you buy something in the Amazon app store and later delete it from your phone, I assume the app store remembers this and lets you reinstall it at no extra charge later. And possibly even if you upgrade your phone, too.
If so, it's in the phone owner's interest to download every single free app, because it's free (use the home broadband, though) and it'll stay that way if it ever turns out you're going to need it.
This makes the FAotD offer a particularly poor marketing technique, as the only people who'll find out about it are people who will never have to buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
HAL.
Why would they care? All their stuff is obsolete long before it would be out of copyright, and they have no duty to disclose the source.
^^ What he said.
Technology has got to the stage where a (relatively) small amount of software can manipulate a large amount of data.
In commercial software you have "code" and "assets", and "assets" are increasingly taking up more dev time than code. Assets include sound effects, images, 3D models, level design etc etc etc. The more assets any coding house can get for free, the more they can focus on code.
I remember seeing a demonstration years ago of an extremely accurate 3D model of the facade of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris made by processing millions of tourist snaps from slightly different angles.
There's a lot of data in video recordings that could be extracted and processed -- sampling sound effects and dialogue, recreating long-demolished buildings from archive video, extracting texture maps from locations for use in 3D games.
NB: I'm not suggesting that they have a right to demand this, simply pointing out that there is a motivation for the technology companies to request it.
"Justice" comes from the Latin "fairness". All fairness is relative -- all justice is social.
Nope. They're offering a free plugin for their own commercial software. Basically, they're just trying to shift more units of Visual Studio. Not nice, not evil, just normal commercial behaviour.
Unless of course the Python code produced will only run on Windows. Can anyone confirm...?
I've sometimes heard "ejaculated" used for being thrown out of a club or somesuch. I'd Google the definition of the word, but....
Essentially, all these words are just rude.
I'm sure when young Dick wants to submit an article about cavemen such as homo erectus, or about the time he saw a horny toad while riding on a donkey (ass) he'll be delighted to be told what a rude little boy he is....
and have no need for such silliness.
Not necessarily. With foreign call centers becoming common, telephone calls between India and Indiana need some sort of common time reference.
Yes, but it's an assymetrical relationship. The call centres have to adjust to the customer. I don't have to think what time it is in India before calling my phone provider, because they've given me a contract that specifies contact hours in my time. If you think the offshore call centre industry is unpopular now, imagine what people would say if it ran on Indian office hours....
HAL
Go to your room and think about what you've done! ;-p
Nononono.
What you want to do is get rid of this wacky 24*60*60 system and use the natural and obvious scale -- degrees. Midnight is zero, midday is 180. We wouldn't need really accurate clocks any more because the iPhone has GPS and we could write an app that operates as a sextant and so you can recalibrate the clock to the sun every day.
I'd have no problem with DST going away, I think people should just adjust their schedule (e.g. schools can change start times depending on the season, if that's important), and not having everyone go to work from 8AM to 5PM would be a good thing overall.
The problem is, I would expect that the bosses will end up making the decisions for their employees. Without officially recognised DST, most large companies would most likely switch to a single year-round schedule, meaning that at certain times of the year, you'd need more before-school childcare... which would end up being provided by the school, and in a few years the school system would fall into line.
I also expect multinationals would use it as an excuse to shift the working times in some of their smaller geographies to match head office.
Our current typical working day is defined by convention and expectation, and switching the system would confuse us just enough that the HR department would be able to sneak a few things in under the radar.
HAL.
If Bob, in the eastern US, sends Alice, in Hong Kong, a meeting request for "6pm", the system can just look at Bob's timezone localization, send the UTC equivalent of "6pm in bob world" to Alice's computer, which can then display the time that is locally meaningful to Alice according to her localization.
Isn't that exactly what any decent calendaring solution does already?
Yes. Which is exactly his point.
You're missing the point -- Apple wants to sell the thing that always works. Keeping things pinned down minimises crashes. Minimising crashes means higher user satisfaction, which builds the brand.
User freedom is also known as "enough rope to hang yourself".
Apple have been very clever and relied on the "appstore goldrush" to ensure that millions of different app developers can produce enough to satisfy the hundreds of significant use-cases of the phone. The ecosystem is saturated, so the loss of a few is no problem at all.
Not true: a lot of good science was historically done by religious scholars. The heavens were mapped by astrologers, the arabs protected European academic knowledge in Spain during the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church did more than anyone to advance structural engineering in the Middle Ages, and founded the universities with the express goal of working out the mechanics of God's creation.
Some people are hostile to advancement. It just so happens that sometimes matters of culture and self-identity are imposed onto religion. (See also the veil -- accepted by most Muslim scholars as "not a religious thing", but proclaimed as an important part of the religion by people who just happen to be from areas where it is traditionally worn.)
ID is more specific than the simply the notion of a guiding intelligence, just as Christianity is more specific than just a belief in the Christ Jesus. Can you quote me a book on ID that doesn't assume the age of life on Earth to be recent enough to account for the chronologies and genealogies included in the Genesis and Exodus?
Because the fossil record very very very strongly suggests that those timescales are impossible. Australopithicus Afarensis living for between 5 and 20 times the existence of humans, and there was a gap of between 15 and 60 times the existence of homo sapiens between homo sapiens and australopithicus afarensis. That's many many more times what the ID books generally accept to be the age of life on Earth...
He gets bonus points from me for including the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster.
How so? The FSM really is no way to open a debate, because it's designed to ridicule and debase your opponent. Upsetting someone doesn't make them more rational. At least not in my experience.
Does that post seem rational and measured to you? Now, would you give me as much attention if I'd said this instead...?
My god, you moron, don't you realise that the FSM was dreamed up by some self-fellating arsehole in order to stir massive quantities of shit on the internet?
Do you get my point? Ridicule doesn't open up debate.
There are private schools where that is the case many of which will teach all sorts of crazy things like virgin births
Look up "parthenogenesis" -- the mostly highly evolved creature it has been observed in is a shark, but it's not well understood and there's no reason to rule out the possibility that it could occur in humans. If it did, it would certainly look like a miracle to most people.
Of course, the only problem is that parthenogenesis produces a clone of the mother, so a male Jesus is hellishly unlikely. Klinefelter syndrome has only ever been seen to produce male phenotype, so it doesn't even look like Mary could have been XXY.
HAL.
Erm.. no it doesn't. There are bottlenecks in the mitochondrial record, but there are multiple bottlenecks. There were several "mitochondrial Eves" at various places and at various times.
But this doesn't even prove that there was only one woman at each of these bottlenecks. In a patriarchal society, many Y-chromosomes die out as a single alpha male bloodline dominates the tribe. You can see this in the Lemba people of South Africa. Over 50% of the males have Semitic Y-chromosomes (they were a Jewish tribe who fled Israel), but they are as dark-skinned as any other tribe that you'll find in that part of Africa. They were obviously pretty indiscriminate historically in who they took as wives, but social factors squeezed the ethnic African males out over history to the point where the Lemba are genetically pretty much identical to neighbouring tribes apart from the single identifier of the male bloodline.
If early humans had developed a matriarchal society, the apparent bottleneck could have been the result of the continued dominance of the daughters of a particular matriarch, and those that came after her.
Or maybe that mitochondria belonged to the first blonde... ;-)
The problem is, belief in Jesus exists because there was a person or several people round about that time that matches/match at least part of the description of Jesus. The FSM exists purely to suggest the idea of Jesus is absurd. This is reductio ad absurdum.
We know for sure that there were radicals in Judea who wanted the Romans out. We know that Joshua (the Hebraic root of the modern Jesus) was a particularly popular name in Judea at the time. So it's fairly likely that there was at least one radical Jew called Joshua who preached against the Romans. Jesus's teachings as written in the Bible are quite Gandhi-like at times in their use of passive resistance. This, for example, is contested by some, but most historical scholars accept it as the main meaning.
So there probably was a Jesus, and you could argue that the "messiah" thing was tacked on by himself or by his disciples in order to build up support and foment uprising. But the FSM is just ridiculous fiction. A better comparator would be an "almost god" like King Arthur. The Arthurian legends were strong enough that there was a growing cult in the idea that Arthur would return in Britain's greatest hour of need. If Christianity hadn't usurped Celtic religion, it's entirely possible that Arthur would have been elevated to demi-god status among the Britons, just as many great warlords in Ireland gained mythical status after their deaths.
HAL.
The in-breeding problem only occurs in the presence of certain recessive genetic diseases. This problem arises in any population of animals that has had an adequately long time with a broad breeding stock, because the genetic imperative to remove the faulty gene is low. But if you go to any small tribe on an island or in a forest, you'll see that there is a very low occurrence of these dangerous recessive traits, because frequent inbreeding results in the traits being eliminated (no-one marries someone from a family with a history of defective births). The only isolated communities where inbreeding leads to endemic problems are those that artificially isolate themselves, such as European royalty. They were part of a large, mobile European community that had several endemic recessive traits that statistically weren't problematic, but those that were introduced into the royal houses were recycled to the point there was almost a 50-50 chance of children being affected. The biggest problem royalty had wasn't inbreeding per se anyway -- it was a type of anaemia carried in the Y chromosome, so all sons got it from their fathers, regardless of their mothers' bloodline. It was the cultural practice of a son inheriting titles from his father that caused this to be a problem for the "bluebloods", not inbreeding.
Atheism does get an unfair leg up on religion since it's by definition a non-establishment. In spite of the efforts to reclassify it as an equivalent belief system by the religious it depends on no beliefs of its own. Atheism ultimately is the argument that "I haven't heard a sound argument for a God from anyone so I maintain the default position of nothing on the subject." In fact Atheists are the least atheistic of all belief systems. As an atheist I will say "None of the 8 billion theories on God seem to hold any water or have sufficient proof." As a Christian I will say "There is one true God and *all other possible views* of God are therefore untrue"
The atheist rejects a finite number of belief systems as having insufficient evidence. Most theists reject an infinite number of belief systems other than the one.
Almost, but not quite. Atheism is a belief system: the core tenet of atheism is "there is only what I can see". Good scientists recognise that actually, no, there is more than I can see.
The only logically sound standpoint is agnosticism -- without-knowledge-ism. Whether I believe there is [a god|gods] or not, I do not know this. Both theists and atheists can accept this from a dispassionate point of view.
The intellectual theist says "I accept that there's more than science can see, and my forebearers have claimed that my culture's god(s) are part of that, so I believe on their testimony", and accepts that they believe rather than know. The intellectual atheist says "I accept that there's more than science can see, but the idea of any sort of supernatural deities is not supported by any solid evidence, so I do not believe it".
Those two standpoints can quite happily coexist, because a scientist from either camp starts with what there is evidence for, which both camps can (generally) agree on. It is when extremists claim that they "know" that it breaks down. Religion is called "faith" because we can never know. Science works on assumptions, and anyone who can't see that doesn't understand science.
I "lost my faith" (as they say) fairly recently, but all the anthropological arguments for why people believe can be applied to why I stopped: looking for something that explains X, peer pressure, etc etc.
The fact that every less argument for God gets you one step closer to Atheism does not logically follow that discrediting bad arguments for God is advancing Atheism. My dad is a Christian PhD Theologian and I am an atheist. We more often agree in debates than with most lay people. Why? Because most of the arguments that the religious advance have been rejected by theologians and philosophers for centuries as "nonsense".
Most people's faith and religion today is largely based on horribly outdated and overly simplistic arguments that are logical and philosophical sink holes of nonsense. Whether it's an atheist or a theologian who is dismissing such nonsense it's good for religion and Atheism that the old (in this court case's instance more than 1500 year old) logical fallacies are removed from public discourse.
Agreed entirely. The modern evangelical movements require a complete abandonment of logic that mainstream religions rejected a long time ago. It's a particular shame that the colonial legacy in the Arab states has been to make progress a naughty word -- without the Arab scholars in Spain, there wouldn't have been a Renaissance, yet many modern Arab states are built on the sort of principles that the US Bible Belt aspires to....
You've missed the point. In your car, the airbag deploys after the impact of the car with the tree/other car/other obstacle, but before you impact with the steering wheel or the side of the car. If the smartphone airbag deployed on impact, it would be too late -- the damage is done. The smartphone therefore has to predict the impact, which it can only do by detecting the fall. Unfortunately, the accelerometers in the phone don't know the difference between falling and other forms of acceleration....
The patent application says "A method for protecting a portable device that includes ... detecting that the portable device will impact a surface". He also talks about a "surface type detector" that knows the difference between a pillow and concrete. Sadly, at no point does he tell us how this magical sensors actually work.
Is this how low patents have sunk in the US? Here's hoping it gets laughed out....
HAL.
I'm thinking aeroplane + turbulence = bullet_from_air_marshall....
No, you missed the point of the article. The developers agreed to the amendment. They are not complaining about this. They are simply warning other devs that the promised 20% on Free App of the Day is a myth, because Amazon will always "renegotiate" for 0%. As the FAotD offer is as much about attracting developers to the Amazon app store as about attracting customers, they're walking a dangerous line, and the first dev to sue them is going to get full data on how much they've honoured the original agreement as part of "discovery", and it'll be pretty grim reading for Amazon....
It is a bait-and-switch. The "bait" is the developers' agreement, which says 20% of list price on free app of the day. The "switch" is the email that offers FAotD listing only once the developer has released an app. "Bait and switch" involves changing the terms of a contract or sale just before signing on the dotted line. Changing the deal afterwards isn't bait-and-switch, it's fraud, and even Amazon isn't big enough to get away with that.
It's not a bait-and-switch aimed at getting devs onto FAotD, it's a bait-and-switch aimed at getting devs to list their apps in the Amazon app store, and it has been very effective. First up, app stores need to be able to quote a high number of apps to draw in the customers, and offering the 20% really does attract devs, because they understandably expect to get more out of 20% FAotD than out of normal sales. Amazon win. Amazon don't really care if someone turns down FAotD because they'll just move on to the next guy. Amazon win.
HAL
The really sad thing is they probably could sell this app for a long time, they'd continuously get small amounts of money from it and maybe the app would grow over time (good supported app is worth the money). But now they have nothing, because everyone interested already has the app, so they probably won't get even the small amount of money from it.
If you buy something in the Amazon app store and later delete it from your phone, I assume the app store remembers this and lets you reinstall it at no extra charge later. And possibly even if you upgrade your phone, too.
If so, it's in the phone owner's interest to download every single free app, because it's free (use the home broadband, though) and it'll stay that way if it ever turns out you're going to need it.
This makes the FAotD offer a particularly poor marketing technique, as the only people who'll find out about it are people who will never have to buy it.
HAL.