What the hell happens to your hardware when you replace it with the newest latest "iShiny(tm)(r)(c)" 12-24 months down the line, because the church^H because the WWDC showed a slightly new iteration ?
Usually you hand it out to friends or sell it 2nd hand on ebay/craiglist, etc.
5 years down the line, after several owner changes, the hardware might find its path to some 3rd world country.
To you, a 5-7 years old computer is an old piece of junk that's worthless. To a developing country : it's still pretty much valuable, and you can get pretty much cheap as nobody else is considering (or for free through some charity, donated old hardware, etc.) And as long as you keep repairing and servicing it to make it operational, you could still use it a couple of years more.
In addition to shoddy build quality, this software lock is yet another nail on the coffin. Yet another thing that will make it less likely to find a 2nd hand use.
----
That and there might be rich westerner people traveling to developed world. But given their budget, they'll probably just settle for something more sturdy and easy to repair than Crapple
You mean their underpowered, PLASTIC screen portable that was obsolete before it was released?
You know most people play game for the fun those procure, not for number of MHz that a peculiar CPU in the device has.
Since somewhere in the 90s when technical limitation stopped being to extreme for 2D and somewhere since the 00s when 3D quality was enough to not limit expression, the raw perf of hardware don't matter that much.
What matter is the quality of the games.
And Nintendo is a big enough brand to manage to attract a good number of developers. Thus ensuring to have a decent ecosystem of quality games that most people will want to play.
No matter what the specs of the actual hardware are.
There might be better tablet with more powerful hardware, but these might not have the games people want to play.
But why do they think that *this peculiar time* it's finally going to work after a gazillion of failed attempts by nearly everyone else ? (e.g.: Citrix)
The history is littered with the corpses of failed such attempts. Why do they think that suddently its going to work better now ?
Indeed, you're right this mentality is problematic. Cue in tons of citations from Margarett Tatcher about "running out of somebody's else monney". Despite the fact that :
- there are several European countries here around which managed to have successful public healthcare, without being an enconomic shit-hole.
- the health domain is typically the situation where it will end up costing tons of money to these "somebody else"s in the long term if you don't spend a bit now in advance. (usually, prevention costs a lot less to the society than the actual handling of a disease. And that's at the society level. At the personal level it's even worse).
For something that will barely change over a decade (like your VCR that you bought in the 80s), yes manuals would make sense, and some nerds (like us/.) were actually RTFM.
For a modern pieces of equipment, like s smartphone : well, over the time the manual is written, translated, printed, and packaged into the box (should take the last couple of months of a product development cycle before shipping), the OS would have been going through several revisions, most of them changing its aspect (including changing drastically the menu structure). And anyway, when you take the device out of the box, you would need to install ASAP some extra security patches, which might yet again change how the software looks like.
In other word, the device will look completely differently between back when the manual was first written and how it looks now.
In fact if you pay close attention, this *already* did start in the late 80s and during the 90s for products that did change a lot. e.g.: motherboard BIOS. Ever noticed that back then, each mobo manual fell compelled to also give a detailled explanation of all the BIOS Setup menus ? And how these never actually matched the one you see when you turned on the mobo ? and further upgrade flashes (to support more CPU and RAM variants, etc. fix last minute bugs in some controller, etc.) introduce yet more different options ?
10 years down the line, the mobo's manual is still relevant regarding hardware elements, like position of jumpers and connectors on the mobo. at the moment of unboxing, the mobo's manual is already out of date regarding the BIOS.
Modern manufacturer have simply come to this realisation regarding devices that are mostly software driven.
That, and yes, most people don't indeed RTFM to begin with, so nowadays even a blender won't package a manual in.
It seems MS wants a piece of Android pie which is so weird
Not weird at all.
The events has proven that the market can currently only hold a duopoly of ecosyastems (Apple's iOS walled garden, and the Android Google Play Store), there's currently no room for a number 3. Microsoft tried hard with their Windows Phone stuff and completely failed. (For once they are on the receiving end of the ecosystem's network effect)
To have any chance of survival, a potential number 3 needs to be able to tap into one of the dominant eco-systems (see Jolla's Sailfish), or risk being neglected by consumer because of the "I miss my very-much needed app" situation.
Microsoft knew it, tried with Astoria, failed to achieve anything workable (but salvaged the efforts into WSL), and now this is their attempt number 2. It won't work for phone (because you actually still need a functional android phone to mirror from), but could be an attempt to feature match Chromebook : You can run your Android apps on Chromebooks' ART containers ? Well you can now also run them on your Microsoft Windows-powered Microsoft Surface (<tiny>...cough... provided that you bring your own android smartphone...cough...<tiny>)
You're forgetting that the content from Netflix has to travel upstream from their servers for the other half of the trip
Actually no, it doesn't necessarily need to travel up. As pointed by other threads discussing this/. entry : Netflix usually sets up giant caches at ISP (that both saves Netflix and ISP's upstream connection bandwith, and also increases quality and decreases latency for clients). So, sometimes (when you're watching something popular), the movie is streamed directly from the Netflix's caching server hosted in the ISP's datacenter to you Netflix app, without anything else happening on the wider internet.
The only bandwidth ever consumer in these case is literally the one you're paying for your connection.
They'll usually stop by your local ISP and offer them a big DVR along with money to pay for the electricity.
if I read correctly excerpts like this one:
During peak evening hours, Netflix usage can spike as high as 40% of all downstream traffic on some wireline operator networks in the Americas
The stat reported by the study are downstream of the "big DVR" cache-server that Netflix collos at the ISP's data center. It's bandwidth consumed on the network between ISP and clients. It's "big DVR to Android app" bandwidth.
When you squint at it, "announcing that you're currently at the receiving end of a cyber bullying campaign (basically, you happen to be notorious on the web. that's usually enough to attract idiots) and thus would like the police to think twice before sending full military-level force on the slightest phone call" (that's how I understand as "swatting concerns") is basically "opt-ing out".
It's being added to a "think twice before sending the tank" list.
Now "What the hell is wrong in your country to the point that your local police has tanks and sends them on simple phone calls" is an entirely different and unaddressed question. Sorry guys, I'll stay on my side of the Atlantic pond, I like very much my calm central European country, thank you very much.
But you need to come up with a sufficiently different way to solve the same problem, or a new way which solve a ton of other problems. (in the realm of (stupid) software patents: see marching tetrahedron vs marching cubes, range encoding vs. arithmetic coding, etc.)
Here some groups of chemists and material engineer must come up with an entirely different recipe (an entirely different chain of synthesis reactions) which happen to give the same end product.
It's possible, but non trivial.
they make it redundant by telling you exactly how to copy.
On the other hand, the patent describes very precisely *what is* the invention and thus how to recognize any corporation attempting to steal the invention.
(Burt patents should be banned for something like software).
Forget about the desktop application, Skype 8 is just the web app wrapped together inside Electron.
Instead :
- go straight to https://web.skype.com/ with your browser, at least you won't have to endure their crappy wrapper.
- use the SkypeWeb lib Purple plugin (either directly into Pidgin, or into something else that is compatible like Telepathy). Though that one doesn't support Voice and Video, only chat.
The webapp also works directly on Chrome and Firefox (apparently Microsoft has somehow ported their code using ORTC to the WebRTC standard ?)
A plugin for the purple engine (as used by Pidgin, but also compatible with several frameworks like Telepathy) that relies on the Web API has been written and functions nicely for Chat, but currently doesn't support Voice and Video (it was started back when Skype Web was ORTC only and needed a binary plugin to work on Firefox. The dev simply hasn't had time to developped that since, but there's no technical limitation nowadays preventing this from happening).
APK doesn't exist anymore. He has been dead long time (due to a burst aneurysm) and has been replaced by a bunch of bots that all blame eachother for trying to impersonate him.
That doesn't explain the deer I see on the road every night on the way to work. They stand right there in the road and look at your car, or worse, jump out in front of it.
Deer have evolved so that, when frightened they freeze and remain motionless, hoping not to be seen by a potential predator, and only start running at the last possible moment to spare energy. Usually it can work with some predators. It completely fails with car which will keep on track, no matter what. (Standard procedure I've been taught at driving lesson is to shut down the light (remove the source of stress that forces them to remain as statues) and honk (toi startle them and make them run away).
Also, like of preyed-on wild animals, deers (and jack-rabbits, etc.) will tend to run in random patterns (to be hard to predict for any predator chasing them) changing quickly directions (so that the predator is at risk to overshoot and miss them), instead of running in straight line (where a faster runner could catch them up.) Also lots of wild animals (squirrel being the most typical of this behaviour) will tend to try to aim for their "safe place" when frightened. If the deer is on the right side of the road, and the wood it came from is on the left side, it will attempt to cross the road to reach the "safety" of the woods, instead of just stepping aside. Both of the above mean that the deer is very likely to jump onto your car when starting to run.
As opposed to animal which grew up with humans and are used to cars moving on straight line and will simply move aside and wait.
The problem is that hedgehogs often sleep in long grass at the edge of a lawn.
...where the robot won't go.
Devices like Robomow or Husqvarna stay within a pre-delimited area and will never move outside of it. They will never go to the edge of the lawn. The hedgehog need to be strolling inside the mower's designated area for an accident to happen.
On the other hand, weed-whacker operated by humans are easy to use to trim the edges of the law, the hedges, etc. and the operator might not notice that in the shadow, there's a small animal about to be maimed.
but I suspect people may set the robot mowers to run overnight when the hedgies are out and about foraging.
No way. In Switzerland (where this non-profit is based), it is illegal to make noise between 22.00 and 06.00. You aren't even allowed to take out your trash to the recycling bin (glass is noisy when you throw it in the collector bin). Anyone programming their Robomow / Husqvarna to mow during night time is going to be in for a fine.
Hedghog's problems come from three source :
- Hedgehogs don't use (swiss-) watches. They are very frequently out also in the morning or early evening/late afternoon. (Which in autumn might still/already be dark). Also the might be out at some completely unusual time, perhaps because they got startled.
- Hedgehogs don't have a "flight" reflex. When feeling threatened, they roll up in a ball. That might be efficient against potential wanna-be predators (spikes everywhere, it's a relatively good strategy), but it's a completely useless strategy against anything that moves automatically.
- A human riding on a ride-on lawnmower or pushing one is likely to notice the brown ball of spike and avoid it. Current gen robots aren't able to notice them and some seem to have enough underneath clearance to roll above the poor animal and mutilate it.
But this isn't specific about robots :
- Weed whacker are tremendously popular here around (to trim grass, trim *hedges* (!) etc.) they have a long arm, and the whacking part is completely un-protected. Means that while trimming, the human operator might not notice that in the shadow of the hedge, the whacker is about to inflict wounds to some poor hedgehog hiding there. These are much higher risk to hedgehogs than robotos due to sheer popularity of the device.
- Cars. Cars decimate hedgehogs. They aren't that much visible to the drivers, specially in low-light conditions like mornings or evening when most people are commuting. And the hedgehog's threat-response behaviour makes them at a high risk to be rolled upon. Each autumn there are massive campaigns to raise awareness about the problem.
They lose the right to sue people who really rip them off (as opposed to Stage 9) unless they defend their rights across the board. I wish this law was changed.
That's only for trademarks.
If Scragnog has called the game "StarTrek: stage 9", Paramount and CBS must show that show that they have put effort into defending their trademark otherwise they lose it and "star trek" becomes generalized (such as band-aid, velcro, thermos, dumpster, aspirin, etc. Name that used to be brands but now just used as generic word for the category, not a specific brand-name).
Note, though, that Paramount and CBS doesn't need to *win*, they only need to *show effort*. The judge can actually rule that there's no possible brand confusion. See Apple vs Apple (back when Apple was only making computer and could in no way be confused with the record company.
Here, the main problem is that CBS doesn't even bother telling Scragnog what the problem is.
Baloney. I love driving, especially offroad in the desert, show me a viable public transport alternative.
That is an entirely different class of situations. Here you're not considering "driving" as a mean of transportation to get from point A to point B, but as a hobby. That's beyond the point of this discussion.
BTW: horse-riding is probably an example of a type of hobby where you enjoy getting around scenery, while offloading part of the driving to some (natural, non-artificial) intelligence.
Now back to track:
Until a train or bus can immediately pick me up right from home on my schedule not theirs, and drop me right at the door of wherever I personally want to go just as fast as I can drive there, public transport can never be as good as owning a car.
This has been extensively developed in some countries (e.g.: Switzerland) and has some fancy name like "hybrid transportation". - The logic is that a very good train system links the big cities and other cities accross the country, with a very decent density of time slots. - Then there are several car-sharing options (either classical stations based, or more recently free floating are starting to appear in some cities). that help you get fast from your door to the train station and from the arrival station to your destination's door. Studies show that such system decrease the reliance on owning cars (1:4 according to study done by ETHZ). (In addition to cars there are even other possibilities: - there are both clasical multi-station based bike/e-bike stations, and free-floating e-bike/e-motorscooter - a year-long ticket for your own bike on train is rather cheap)
So even if you're not in a city center with a tram or a bus right in front of your street that can get you to the train station, you can still quickly and conveniently get to wherever you want.
Also keep in mind that local train drive usually at somewhere between 150 and 180 km/h, whereas highways' official speed limit is 120 km/h. (Train seldom drive at the max 180-200km/h speed supported by the hardware. Also means that whenever there's a problem or delay, the trains can simply catch up the delay by driving faster. Delay are a very rare thing here around).
So given your critera of "I want to arrive as fast as possible":
- such hybrid plans will get you faster : you don't need to wait hours for some bus because you live in the outskirts, you can drive yourself to/from train station at both end-legs of your journey (the nationnal train system's app even integrates these hybrid solutions when giving you routes)
- the train will be much faster between the cities even if completely neglecting any traffic jam on the highway.
And to go back to the article's subject: - this also reduces the amount of time/kms that are driven by stupid humans in the loop (As mentionned by the top poster). - Instead sizeable chunk of the trip (the train part) will be driven by a highly specialized human who has a lot of train and is assisted by tons of modern safety features in modern trains. (Though we still have a couple of short stretch of regional train where the driving is still done 100% manually). - Also, this specific part - driving mostly straight on the highway - is the part which is done at a high speed and where the stupid human car owner is the most likely to get bored and commit the mistakes mentioned in the summary (letting a simple class 1 do the driving alone) (As opposed to short in-city slow trips in desnely packed city traffic).
----
Last few things:
- I'm considering only long distance commuting, which is the type considered usually by proponent of the "door-to-door" car owners.
- For in city (same city) commuting, (even i
Then why do esport leagues choose to play proprietary games over GPL games despite the greater uncertainty in keeping a license?
Just think who has more money to invest into helping you organize your league:
- A giant commercial company like Activision Blizzard ?
- A guy who writes fun games on his spare time on week-ends ?
And whereas the single dev will be just happy if their game gets selected for a competition, a big company has a strong monetary incentive : they can use it as a marketing tool to make the game more popular and make more potential buyers aware of it existence leading to more potential sales and thus profit.
Patronage systems (Patreon, Crowdfunding, etc.) might eventually change that (bringing money in to small devs of GPL software).
In most States that require voter ID, there is a way to get ID for free. Now, the usual cry is "but you have to go somewhere and stand in line and wait around forever and that's racist!" but I guess ANY effort at all is considered racist today.
And keeping with the same reflexion as I started above :
Poor people/minorities/Etc. don't have a wide choice of jobs and option for housing. Usually they live where the rent is the cheapest is some outskirts of a region and work completely at the opposite, because that's where there's work for them. But they can't afford a car, so they need to commute through 3 different old half-broken buses. I they miss one, they'll have to wait a long time until the next. Overall they spend several hours each day just to go to work, which leaves very little time for anything else, even sleeping and eating. No way to get anything else crammed into such a schedule.
US mentality :
- complain loudly that requiring poor people to obtain an ID is racist, because the minority can't cram it into their shitty life, only privileged white cis-het-male can easily do it, it's discriminatory !...
Rest of the developed world's mentality :
- notice that the above life is fundamentally unacceptable. thus builds an actual useful public transportation network so owning a car isn't a necessity to have a normal life. Yes, said network is build using money coming from taxes, we're evil socialo-eruo-communists!
(Also:
- social welfare and un employment benefit means that losing jobs/switching jobs is less a death sentence. If the job is that much shitty, it means you could decide to drop it and move to something more reasonable.
- also in some places, voter-ID is delivered for free to your mailbox, and you can vote for free using mail (and various pilot project for internet voting too). you just need to be registered your address with the local authorities to get your voting material (and lots of other benefits).
- also, when you move in, it is mandatory for your employer to give you a day off so you can register your new address to get all the administrative benefits (including voting material mailed) ).
In general, when something that more or less makes basically sense but conflict due to poor people/minorities/etc. having shitty life :
- US will loudly complain that the minorities are discriminated against, and completely blocks the change that would have otherwise made sense.
- the rest of the developed world will actually try to fix the problems that was a barrage to poor people/minorities. Not only does it enable to pass the change that makes sense, but in the same go could fix tons of other problems that the minorities are facing.
(well okay, here in Europe we also have France, were complaining loudly about everything and being constantly on strike is a national sport).
Which then will cause the treshold for moderation to go way up, as the/b/tards simply don't understand what's the problem with videos of {GRAPHICAL_HORRIBLE_THING happening to cute innocent young girls}
You need somebody whose capability to register disturbing things hasn't been completely number by 4chan, if you want them to be still competent at noticing and moderating disturbing content.
I'm not even speaking about having empathy, just being still able to remember that nails have specifical place where they can go into and that usually doesn't cover much of the human body.
initial data point :
- minorities are less likely to possess an ID.
Logic in the US :
- it's racist to require an ID for voting as all the ID-less minorities won't have their voice heard. (thus don't require ID for voting. But keep requiring ID for nearly everything else in life, and ID-less minorities are still having problems with all these other activities).
Logic in nearly everywhere :
- if ID is such an important thing for so many critical actions (getting a job, among other), maybe we should try to find ways to make it easier for minorities to actually get one ?
- alternatively : make sure to provide free voter-ID to anyone who wants to vote (and that document can also double as a make-shift ID in lots of critical cases).
I do agree with the Olympic committee that video games that promote violence (while I love them) don't really belong under the "eSports" moniker.
What do you mean "promote violence" ? You mean encourage people to become actually violent and start punching people in real life ? That discredited trope has been beaten to death.
Or do you mean that "fighting" is the subject of sizeable chunk of games ? Which is ridiculous given that chess, usually considered the noblest among the mind sports (officially recognized as such by IOC) has "war" as its subject. And that lots of sports that simulate fighting (e.g.: Boxing, fencing, etc.) are official sports.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell happens to your hardware when you replace it with the newest latest "iShiny(tm)(r)(c)" 12-24 months down the line, because the church^H because the WWDC showed a slightly new iteration ?
Usually you hand it out to friends or sell it 2nd hand on ebay/craiglist, etc.
5 years down the line, after several owner changes, the hardware might find its path to some 3rd world country.
To you, a 5-7 years old computer is an old piece of junk that's worthless.
To a developing country : it's still pretty much valuable, and you can get pretty much cheap as nobody else is considering (or for free through some charity, donated old hardware, etc.)
And as long as you keep repairing and servicing it to make it operational, you could still use it a couple of years more.
In addition to shoddy build quality, this software lock is yet another nail on the coffin.
Yet another thing that will make it less likely to find a 2nd hand use.
----
That and there might be rich westerner people traveling to developed world. But given their budget, they'll probably just settle for something more sturdy and easy to repair than Crapple
You mean their underpowered, PLASTIC screen portable that was obsolete before it was released?
You know most people play game for the fun those procure, not for number of MHz that a peculiar CPU in the device has.
Since somewhere in the 90s when technical limitation stopped being to extreme for 2D and somewhere since the 00s when 3D quality was enough to not limit expression, the raw perf of hardware don't matter that much.
What matter is the quality of the games.
And Nintendo is a big enough brand to manage to attract a good number of developers. Thus ensuring to have a decent ecosystem of quality games that most people will want to play.
No matter what the specs of the actual hardware are.
There might be better tablet with more powerful hardware, but these might not have the games people want to play.
But why do they think that *this peculiar time* it's finally going to work after a gazillion of failed attempts by nearly everyone else ? (e.g.: Citrix)
The history is littered with the corpses of failed such attempts.
Why do they think that suddently its going to work better now ?
But, hey, who's gonna pay for it, amiright?
Indeed, you're right this mentality is problematic.
Cue in tons of citations from Margarett Tatcher about "running out of somebody's else monney".
Despite the fact that :
- there are several European countries here around which managed to have successful public healthcare, without being an enconomic shit-hole.
- the health domain is typically the situation where it will end up costing tons of money to these "somebody else"s in the long term if you don't spend a bit now in advance. (usually, prevention costs a lot less to the society than the actual handling of a disease. And that's at the society level. At the personal level it's even worse).
For something that will barely change over a decade (like your VCR that you bought in the 80s), yes manuals would make sense, and some nerds (like us /.) were actually RTFM.
For a modern pieces of equipment, like s smartphone :
well, over the time the manual is written, translated, printed, and packaged into the box (should take the last couple of months of a product development cycle before shipping), the OS would have been going through several revisions, most of them changing its aspect (including changing drastically the menu structure).
And anyway, when you take the device out of the box, you would need to install ASAP some extra security patches, which might yet again change how the software looks like.
In other word, the device will look completely differently between back when the manual was first written and how it looks now.
In fact if you pay close attention, this *already* did start in the late 80s and during the 90s for products that did change a lot.
e.g.: motherboard BIOS.
Ever noticed that back then, each mobo manual fell compelled to also give a detailled explanation of all the BIOS Setup menus ? And how these never actually matched the one you see when you turned on the mobo ? and further upgrade flashes (to support more CPU and RAM variants, etc. fix last minute bugs in some controller, etc.) introduce yet more different options ?
10 years down the line, the mobo's manual is still relevant regarding hardware elements, like position of jumpers and connectors on the mobo.
at the moment of unboxing, the mobo's manual is already out of date regarding the BIOS.
Modern manufacturer have simply come to this realisation regarding devices that are mostly software driven.
That, and yes, most people don't indeed RTFM to begin with, so nowadays even a blender won't package a manual in.
It seems MS wants a piece of Android pie which is so weird
Not weird at all.
The events has proven that the market can currently only hold a duopoly of ecosyastems (Apple's iOS walled garden, and the Android Google Play Store), there's currently no room for a number 3.
Microsoft tried hard with their Windows Phone stuff and completely failed. (For once they are on the receiving end of the ecosystem's network effect)
To have any chance of survival, a potential number 3 needs to be able to tap into one of the dominant eco-systems (see Jolla's Sailfish), or risk being neglected by consumer because of the "I miss my very-much needed app" situation.
Microsoft knew it, tried with Astoria, failed to achieve anything workable (but salvaged the efforts into WSL), and now this is their attempt number 2. It won't work for phone (because you actually still need a functional android phone to mirror from), but could be an attempt to feature match Chromebook :
You can run your Android apps on Chromebooks' ART containers ? Well you can now also run them on your Microsoft Windows-powered Microsoft Surface (<tiny>...cough... provided that you bring your own android smartphone...cough...<tiny>)
You're forgetting that the content from Netflix has to travel upstream from their servers for the other half of the trip
Actually no, it doesn't necessarily need to travel up. /. entry :
As pointed by other threads discussing this
Netflix usually sets up giant caches at ISP (that both saves Netflix and ISP's upstream connection bandwith, and also increases quality and decreases latency for clients).
So, sometimes (when you're watching something popular), the movie is streamed directly from the Netflix's caching server hosted in the ISP's datacenter to you Netflix app, without anything else happening on the wider internet.
The only bandwidth ever consumer in these case is literally the one you're paying for your connection.
They'll usually stop by your local ISP and offer them a big DVR along with money to pay for the electricity.
if I read correctly excerpts like this one :
The stat reported by the study are downstream of the "big DVR" cache-server that Netflix collos at the ISP's data center.
It's bandwidth consumed on the network between ISP and clients.
It's "big DVR to Android app" bandwidth.
When you squint at it,
"announcing that you're currently at the receiving end of a cyber bullying campaign (basically, you happen to be notorious on the web. that's usually enough to attract idiots) and thus would like the police to think twice before sending full military-level force on the slightest phone call" (that's how I understand as "swatting concerns")
is basically "opt-ing out".
It's being added to a "think twice before sending the tank" list.
Now "What the hell is wrong in your country to the point that your local police has tanks and sends them on simple phone calls" is an entirely different and unaddressed question. Sorry guys, I'll stay on my side of the Atlantic pond, I like very much my calm central European country, thank you very much.
Patents don't prevent re-engineering,
But you need to come up with a sufficiently different way to solve the same problem, or a new way which solve a ton of other problems. (in the realm of (stupid) software patents: see marching tetrahedron vs marching cubes, range encoding vs. arithmetic coding, etc.)
Here some groups of chemists and material engineer must come up with an entirely different recipe (an entirely different chain of synthesis reactions) which happen to give the same end product.
It's possible, but non trivial.
they make it redundant by telling you exactly how to copy.
On the other hand, the patent describes very precisely *what is* the invention and thus how to recognize any corporation attempting to steal the invention.
(Burt patents should be banned for something like software).
I'm out of mod points today, but that was too the first thing I though when reading this.
It will mostly end up being used as a poor excuse against the right to repair, despite any good intention that the law had upon introduction.
The web app is basically the new official Skype.
Forget about the desktop application, Skype 8 is just the web app wrapped together inside Electron.
Instead :
- go straight to https://web.skype.com/ with your browser, at least you won't have to endure their crappy wrapper.
- use the SkypeWeb lib Purple plugin (either directly into Pidgin, or into something else that is compatible like Telepathy). Though that one doesn't support Voice and Video, only chat.
The (old, Qt-based) classic Skype is deprecated and isn't supported on Linux at all (won't even connect to the network).
There is an official Beta for Linux, which is basically the Skype Web webapp wrapped together with a Chromium browser engine (Electron).
The webapp also works directly on Chrome and Firefox (apparently Microsoft has somehow ported their code using ORTC to the WebRTC standard ?)
A plugin for the purple engine (as used by Pidgin, but also compatible with several frameworks like Telepathy) that relies on the Web API has been written and functions nicely for Chat, but currently doesn't support Voice and Video (it was started back when Skype Web was ORTC only and needed a binary plugin to work on Firefox. The dev simply hasn't had time to developped that since, but there's no technical limitation nowadays preventing this from happening).
or possibly even APK and his absurdity...
APK doesn't exist anymore. He has been dead long time (due to a burst aneurysm) and has been replaced by a bunch of bots that all blame eachother for trying to impersonate him.
That doesn't explain the deer I see on the road every night on the way to work. They stand right there in the road and look at your car, or worse, jump out in front of it.
Deer have evolved so that, when frightened they freeze and remain motionless, hoping not to be seen by a potential predator, and only start running at the last possible moment to spare energy. Usually it can work with some predators. It completely fails with car which will keep on track, no matter what.
(Standard procedure I've been taught at driving lesson is to shut down the light (remove the source of stress that forces them to remain as statues) and honk (toi startle them and make them run away).
Also, like of preyed-on wild animals, deers (and jack-rabbits, etc.) will tend to run in random patterns (to be hard to predict for any predator chasing them) changing quickly directions (so that the predator is at risk to overshoot and miss them), instead of running in straight line (where a faster runner could catch them up.)
Also lots of wild animals (squirrel being the most typical of this behaviour) will tend to try to aim for their "safe place" when frightened. If the deer is on the right side of the road, and the wood it came from is on the left side, it will attempt to cross the road to reach the "safety" of the woods, instead of just stepping aside.
Both of the above mean that the deer is very likely to jump onto your car when starting to run.
As opposed to animal which grew up with humans and are used to cars moving on straight line and will simply move aside and wait.
The problem is that hedgehogs often sleep in long grass at the edge of a lawn.
...where the robot won't go.
Devices like Robomow or Husqvarna stay within a pre-delimited area and will never move outside of it.
They will never go to the edge of the lawn.
The hedgehog need to be strolling inside the mower's designated area for an accident to happen.
On the other hand, weed-whacker operated by humans are easy to use to trim the edges of the law, the hedges, etc. and the operator might not notice that in the shadow, there's a small animal about to be maimed.
but I suspect people may set the robot mowers to run overnight when the hedgies are out and about foraging.
No way. In Switzerland (where this non-profit is based), it is illegal to make noise between 22.00 and 06.00.
You aren't even allowed to take out your trash to the recycling bin (glass is noisy when you throw it in the collector bin).
Anyone programming their Robomow / Husqvarna to mow during night time is going to be in for a fine.
Hedghog's problems come from three source :
- Hedgehogs don't use (swiss-) watches. They are very frequently out also in the morning or early evening/late afternoon. (Which in autumn might still/already be dark). Also the might be out at some completely unusual time, perhaps because they got startled.
- Hedgehogs don't have a "flight" reflex. When feeling threatened, they roll up in a ball. That might be efficient against potential wanna-be predators (spikes everywhere, it's a relatively good strategy), but it's a completely useless strategy against anything that moves automatically.
- A human riding on a ride-on lawnmower or pushing one is likely to notice the brown ball of spike and avoid it. Current gen robots aren't able to notice them and some seem to have enough underneath clearance to roll above the poor animal and mutilate it.
But this isn't specific about robots :
- Weed whacker are tremendously popular here around (to trim grass, trim *hedges* (!) etc.) they have a long arm, and the whacking part is completely un-protected. Means that while trimming, the human operator might not notice that in the shadow of the hedge, the whacker is about to inflict wounds to some poor hedgehog hiding there. These are much higher risk to hedgehogs than robotos due to sheer popularity of the device.
- Cars. Cars decimate hedgehogs. They aren't that much visible to the drivers, specially in low-light conditions like mornings or evening when most people are commuting. And the hedgehog's threat-response behaviour makes them at a high risk to be rolled upon. Each autumn there are massive campaigns to raise awareness about the problem.
They lose the right to sue people who really rip them off (as opposed to Stage 9) unless they defend their rights across the board. I wish this law was changed.
That's only for trademarks.
If Scragnog has called the game "StarTrek: stage 9", Paramount and CBS must show that show that they have put effort into defending their trademark otherwise they lose it and "star trek" becomes generalized (such as band-aid, velcro, thermos, dumpster, aspirin, etc. Name that used to be brands but now just used as generic word for the category, not a specific brand-name).
Note, though, that Paramount and CBS doesn't need to *win*, they only need to *show effort*. The judge can actually rule that there's no possible brand confusion. See Apple vs Apple (back when Apple was only making computer and could in no way be confused with the record company.
Here, the main problem is that CBS doesn't even bother telling Scragnog what the problem is.
Baloney. I love driving, especially offroad in the desert, show me a viable public transport alternative.
That is an entirely different class of situations. Here you're not considering "driving" as a mean of transportation to get from point A to point B, but as a hobby.
That's beyond the point of this discussion.
BTW: horse-riding is probably an example of a type of hobby where you enjoy getting around scenery, while offloading part of the driving to some (natural, non-artificial) intelligence.
Now back to track:
Until a train or bus can immediately pick me up right from home on my schedule not theirs, and drop me right at the door of wherever I personally want to go just as fast as I can drive there, public transport can never be as good as owning a car.
This has been extensively developed in some countries (e.g.: Switzerland) and has some fancy name like "hybrid transportation". :
- The logic is that a very good train system links the big cities and other cities accross the country, with a very decent density of time slots.
- Then there are several car-sharing options (either classical stations based, or more recently free floating are starting to appear in some cities). that help you get fast from your door to the train station and from the arrival station to your destination's door. Studies show that such system decrease the reliance on owning cars (1:4 according to study done by ETHZ).
(In addition to cars there are even other possibilities
- there are both clasical multi-station based bike/e-bike stations, and free-floating e-bike/e-motorscooter
- a year-long ticket for your own bike on train is rather cheap)
So even if you're not in a city center with a tram or a bus right in front of your street that can get you to the train station, you can still quickly and conveniently get to wherever you want.
Also keep in mind that local train drive usually at somewhere between 150 and 180 km/h, whereas highways' official speed limit is 120 km/h.
(Train seldom drive at the max 180-200km/h speed supported by the hardware. Also means that whenever there's a problem or delay, the trains can simply catch up the delay by driving faster. Delay are a very rare thing here around).
So given your critera of "I want to arrive as fast as possible" :
- such hybrid plans will get you faster : you don't need to wait hours for some bus because you live in the outskirts, you can drive yourself to/from train station at both end-legs of your journey (the nationnal train system's app even integrates these hybrid solutions when giving you routes)
- the train will be much faster between the cities even if completely neglecting any traffic jam on the highway.
And to go back to the article's subject:
- this also reduces the amount of time/kms that are driven by stupid humans in the loop (As mentionned by the top poster).
- Instead sizeable chunk of the trip (the train part) will be driven by a highly specialized human who has a lot of train and is assisted by tons of modern safety features in modern trains. (Though we still have a couple of short stretch of regional train where the driving is still done 100% manually).
- Also, this specific part - driving mostly straight on the highway - is the part which is done at a high speed and where the stupid human car owner is the most likely to get bored and commit the mistakes mentioned in the summary (letting a simple class 1 do the driving alone)
(As opposed to short in-city slow trips in desnely packed city traffic).
----
Last few things :
- I'm considering only long distance commuting, which is the type considered usually by proponent of the "door-to-door" car owners.
- For in city (same city) commuting, (even i
Then why do esport leagues choose to play proprietary games over GPL games despite the greater uncertainty in keeping a license?
Just think who has more money to invest into helping you organize your league:
- A giant commercial company like Activision Blizzard ?
- A guy who writes fun games on his spare time on week-ends ?
And whereas the single dev will be just happy if their game gets selected for a competition, a big company has a strong monetary incentive : they can use it as a marketing tool to make the game more popular and make more potential buyers aware of it existence leading to more potential sales and thus profit.
Patronage systems (Patreon, Crowdfunding, etc.) might eventually change that (bringing money in to small devs of GPL software).
In most States that require voter ID, there is a way to get ID for free. Now, the usual cry is "but you have to go somewhere and stand in line and wait around forever and that's racist!" but I guess ANY effort at all is considered racist today.
And keeping with the same reflexion as I started above :
Poor people/minorities/Etc. don't have a wide choice of jobs and option for housing. Usually they live where the rent is the cheapest is some outskirts of a region and work completely at the opposite, because that's where there's work for them.
But they can't afford a car, so they need to commute through 3 different old half-broken buses. I they miss one, they'll have to wait a long time until the next. Overall they spend several hours each day just to go to work, which leaves very little time for anything else, even sleeping and eating.
No way to get anything else crammed into such a schedule.
US mentality :
- complain loudly that requiring poor people to obtain an ID is racist, because the minority can't cram it into their shitty life, only privileged white cis-het-male can easily do it, it's discriminatory !...
Rest of the developed world's mentality :
- notice that the above life is fundamentally unacceptable.
thus builds an actual useful public transportation network so owning a car isn't a necessity to have a normal life.
Yes, said network is build using money coming from taxes, we're evil socialo-eruo-communists!
(Also:
- social welfare and un employment benefit means that losing jobs/switching jobs is less a death sentence. If the job is that much shitty, it means you could decide to drop it and move to something more reasonable.
- also in some places, voter-ID is delivered for free to your mailbox, and you can vote for free using mail (and various pilot project for internet voting too).
you just need to be registered your address with the local authorities to get your voting material (and lots of other benefits).
- also, when you move in, it is mandatory for your employer to give you a day off so you can register your new address to get all the administrative benefits (including voting material mailed) ).
In general, when something that more or less makes basically sense but conflict due to poor people/minorities/etc. having shitty life :
- US will loudly complain that the minorities are discriminated against, and completely blocks the change that would have otherwise made sense.
- the rest of the developed world will actually try to fix the problems that was a barrage to poor people/minorities. Not only does it enable to pass the change that makes sense, but in the same go could fix tons of other problems that the minorities are facing.
(well okay, here in Europe we also have France, were complaining loudly about everything and being constantly on strike is a national sport).
But in the case of ball sports, there's no law that prevents a league from forming around a variant.
And there's no legal limitation preventing you from starting your own tournament of any opensource GPL'ed game of your choice neither.
Facebook should hire more /b/tards.
Which then will cause the treshold for moderation to go way up, as the /b/tards simply don't understand what's the problem with videos of {GRAPHICAL_HORRIBLE_THING happening to cute innocent young girls}
You need somebody whose capability to register disturbing things hasn't been completely number by 4chan, if you want them to be still competent at noticing and moderating disturbing content.
I'm not even speaking about having empathy, just being still able to remember that nails have specifical place where they can go into and that usually doesn't cover much of the human body.
initial data point :
- minorities are less likely to possess an ID.
Logic in the US :
- it's racist to require an ID for voting as all the ID-less minorities won't have their voice heard.
(thus don't require ID for voting. But keep requiring ID for nearly everything else in life, and ID-less minorities are still having problems with all these other activities).
Logic in nearly everywhere :
- if ID is such an important thing for so many critical actions (getting a job, among other), maybe we should try to find ways to make it easier for minorities to actually get one ?
- alternatively : make sure to provide free voter-ID to anyone who wants to vote (and that document can also double as a make-shift ID in lots of critical cases).
I do agree with the Olympic committee that video games that promote violence (while I love them) don't really belong under the "eSports" moniker.
What do you mean "promote violence" ?
You mean encourage people to become actually violent and start punching people in real life ? That discredited trope has been beaten to death.
Or do you mean that "fighting" is the subject of sizeable chunk of games ?
Which is ridiculous given that chess, usually considered the noblest among the mind sports (officially recognized as such by IOC) has "war" as its subject.
And that lots of sports that simulate fighting (e.g.: Boxing, fencing, etc.) are official sports.