That's just like people who legally immigrated to the US getting all mad at the illegal immigrants. "I had to jump through these ridiculous hoops so they damn well should too" instead of "I had to jump through these ridiculous hoops and they suck so much I wouldn't wish them on anyone else." Sure, it is "fair" for a very narrow-mind definition of fair.
So why not just do it? It's money on the table for the whole ecosystem.
If one company stands up to MS and loses, MS will certainly charge them more for the licensing. But if they win, all the manufacturers will benefit equally as the patents will be invalidated for everyone. So the risk of failing in a challenge is not proportional to the benefit of wining the challenge.
As it is now, each manufacturer can just pass the licensing fees through to the end customer and since all the major android manufacturers (presumably) have roughly the same licensing costs there is no competitive disadvantage to paying the microsoft tax.
Microsoft isn't really being much of a problem here.
You seem to be confusing form for content. Yes, MS is following the form of "FRAND" but what they are FRANDing is itself not reasonable. If MS had a legitimate set of patents, they wouldn't keep them a secret. FFS patents are public documents.
How is having something that is projected into your field of vision legal for use while driving?
It is a whole lot better than having to look away from the road. Sure it is possible to have the display be too busy with twitter feeds, facebook walls and youtube all going at once, but extreme cases shouldn't be an excuse to exclude the normal case.
I'm especially concerned when the author states he has to put his hand up to block the road to see what's on the Google glass's screen..
That's an implementation failure. Either the projection is not bright enough or it needs to have a tinted background - like the inside of a pair of sunglasses.
So... Your contention is that because you know nothing about a product you have not purchased, the people who have purchased also know thing about. Yeah, that's some bullet-proof logic right there.
20 Seconds is usually plenty of time for soda. I used to enjoy freaking people out by shaking a soda can, doing some patter for 20 seconds and then opening it.
I like the guy too, didn't even mind the end of Lost or his ridiculous love for CGI lens flare. But having him direct both star wars and star trek is just wrong - and I don't even have a dog in the star wars/trek fight, still feels bad. It is time for a new set of mythos all around.
It always annoys me how here, on slashdot, for nerds, we love technology and advances EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO BIOLOGY. Then it's nothing but "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" or GATTACA, or I am legend or zombies.
the tech I care about is safety related...I can't wait until all this stuff is standard equip
Add Heads-Up-Display to that list. The single thing I hate doing the most is taking my eyes off the road.
HUDs have been available as high-end options for over a decade now, but there does not seem to be much interest at all in democratizing the technology.
I was hoping google glass might make a good HUD "retrofit," but you can't wear sunglasses with it at the same time.
An alternate way to disprove the assertion would be to show that all bottlers were using 100% HFCS six months prior to the introduction of New Coke. But Snopes's carefully chosen words suggest that wasn't the case.
I think it is much more likely that Snopes just does not know how widespread HFCS was and instead of straight out admitting they don't know, the person responsible for that particular article thought it better to "save face" by wording around the important questions. That still doesn't reflect any better on the Snopes editors, but it means you can't really draw any conclusions one way or the other.
To follow up I looked into the ratio of female to male literacy.
Of the top five countries, 2 of them are primarily muslim: #3 UAE.............. 96% muslim 1.074 ratio female:male literacy #4 Maldives........ 100% muslim 1.018
All five of these countries were once part of the Soviet Union. They all inherited the Soviet educational system, and the cycle of illiteracy was already broken before they became independent. Literate mothers don't raise illiterate children.
OK, still doesn't change the fact that religion is not a determining factor.
Only South Sudan is not majority Muslim, but it was part of a Muslim majority country up until less than two years ago.
So? The female illiteracy rates in those countries is far greater than the percentage of muslims. That means within their own communities, the non-muslims are pretty illiterate too.
Why do people on slashdot feel the need to make points about things of which they have no information?
Although illiteracy is correlated with poverty, it is even more strongly correlated with religion: Ten of the bottom ten are Muslim. Much of this is because they don't educate many of their girls.
Lol. Way to prove the OP's point.
Some of the countries with the highest female literacy rates are also predominately muslim, for example: Turkmenistan.... 89% muslim / 98.3% female literacy Azerbaijan...... 93% muslim / 99.9% Uzbekistan...... 88% muslim / 99.6% Kazakhstan...... 70% muslim / 99.3% Tajikistan...... 90% muslim / 99.8%
While some of the countries with the lowest female literacy rates have significantly smaller muslim populations: Burkina Faso... 60% muslim / 15.2% female literacy Chad........... 53% muslim / 24.2% Sierra Leone... 60% muslim / 24.4% South Sudan.... 18% muslim / 16%
All religion information is from the current CIA world factbook except South Sudan which came from wikipedia's reference to the last census to collect religion stats in 1956.
The purpose of the test is to provide a method for consumers to compare different models with respect to their fuel economy, not to provide a precise prediction of exactly what the buyer's fuel economy will be.
That is the intenet of the test. But the result is that manufacturers "teach to the test" - i.e. they optimize for the test and not for more real-world scenarios.
I think we are nearly at the point were crowd-sourcing could significantly fix this problem. If we could just get a bluetooth profile for wireless access to all the major vehicle metrics included in the next ODB standard (or whatever they are calling it), then everybody with a smart phone could record and publish their own MPG results.
It sill won't capture ALL of the variables, but we can break out things like jack-rabbit starts and performance with excessive passenger weights. Crowd-source that over hundreds of thousands of vehicles and we can get some really useful info. Of course the early adopters won't get all the benefits, but they still could get useful info like how to modify their driving habits to get better MPG specific to their particular make and model.
Mostly to the quick medical response and hardware safety features.
Non-fatal injury rates are also down significantly. From the chart there looks like about 130 injuries per 100M vehicle miles in 2000 to 75 injuries per 100M vehicle miles in 2010.
Even one traffic accident fatality or trauma is too many. It is absolutely avoidable.
Yeah, and Mussolini made the trains run on time too. No thanks.
Sociologists say that the 3rd World War is going on on the roads. More than 1.5 million people will be killed in 2013 in traffic accident. About 10 million wounded.
Dunno about the rest of the world, but in the US traffic fatalities are down about 50% over the last decade - its been a consistent decline that isn't correlated to traffic cameras.
Unfortunately it looks like a review of a bunch of studies indicates that CCTV usage actually has a positive impact on crime with it being markedly so in the case of car parks it seems.
Cite? Lots of those studies miss things like regression to the mean - where the cameras have an initial impact but after a while people just start to compensate like wearing hoodies or they shift the crime to areas without cameras.
I considered that, but the up-mods don't fit that model. Is everybody laughing at joe random no-nothing? Self deprecating humor is boring when the person doing the self-deprecating is nobody anybody knows.
I welcome any and all pushback against monitoring of the public. Here is related news, not quite the same implications, but a good trend none the less:
Watermarking is worse than DRM. Another person has already spelled out how to defang it - compare multiple copies and fuzz the parts that are different.
But the huge downside for the vast majority of regular joes is that it makes all of the customers responsible for "protecting" the videos they watch. If anyone hacks them or snoops the download stream or even infiltrates the server transmitting the video and releases their copy into the wild, that innocent viewer is now implicitly responsible for that piracy. It becomes a guilty until proven innocent situation.
No way am I going to watch a streaming movie, much less pay for it, if it means I have to now worry about the ultra-litigious MAFIAA coming after me with multi-million dollar copyright infringement lawsuits because I didn't know my PC was infected with a virus designed to pilfer the videos I watch.
They get the insurance because law states they must, or it was a requirement for the loan.
Yeah, it doesn't work like that. Perhaps you are thinking of PMI or home owner's insurance.
By the content of the rest of your response it is pretty clear you've never even looked into home warranties - premiums do not go up if you use them. Lol.
Slashdot Mirror
What? I don't know why you got modded up for that because I'm pretty sure that only makes sense in your head. What is "they?" Microsoft?
You would be livid if you saw the full list of some of the ridiculous things that have been slapped with ITAR restrictions. ...
Don't forget Netscape itself was blocked with ITAR.
As has been mentioned already, B&N already won against Microsoft regarding these patents so clearly they're not exactly paragons of validity.
No, they did not "win" - they settled and the settlement was structured to maintain MS's patent charade.
That's just like people who legally immigrated to the US getting all mad at the illegal immigrants. "I had to jump through these ridiculous hoops so they damn well should too" instead of "I had to jump through these ridiculous hoops and they suck so much I wouldn't wish them on anyone else." Sure, it is "fair" for a very narrow-mind definition of fair.
So why not just do it? It's money on the table for the whole ecosystem.
If one company stands up to MS and loses, MS will certainly charge them more for the licensing. But if they win, all the manufacturers will benefit equally as the patents will be invalidated for everyone. So the risk of failing in a challenge is not proportional to the benefit of wining the challenge.
As it is now, each manufacturer can just pass the licensing fees through to the end customer and since all the major android manufacturers (presumably) have roughly the same licensing costs there is no competitive disadvantage to paying the microsoft tax.
Microsoft isn't really being much of a problem here.
You seem to be confusing form for content. Yes, MS is following the form of "FRAND" but what they are FRANDing is itself not reasonable. If MS had a legitimate set of patents, they wouldn't keep them a secret. FFS patents are public documents.
How is having something that is projected into your field of vision legal for use while driving?
It is a whole lot better than having to look away from the road. Sure it is possible to have the display be too busy with twitter feeds, facebook walls and youtube all going at once, but extreme cases shouldn't be an excuse to exclude the normal case.
I'm especially concerned when the author states he has to put his hand up to block the road to see what's on the Google glass's screen..
That's an implementation failure. Either the projection is not bright enough or it needs to have a tinted background - like the inside of a pair of sunglasses.
So... Your contention is that because you know nothing about a product you have not purchased, the people who have purchased also know thing about. Yeah, that's some bullet-proof logic right there.
20 Seconds is usually plenty of time for soda. I used to enjoy freaking people out by shaking a soda can, doing some patter for 20 seconds and then opening it.
I like the guy too, didn't even mind the end of Lost or his ridiculous love for CGI lens flare. But having him direct both star wars and star trek is just wrong - and I don't even have a dog in the star wars/trek fight, still feels bad. It is time for a new set of mythos all around.
It always annoys me how here, on slashdot, for nerds, we love technology and advances EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO BIOLOGY. Then it's nothing but "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" or GATTACA, or I am legend or zombies.
Hhhm, looks like most of these are not biological:
http://slashdot.org/tag/whatcouldpossiblygowrong
the tech I care about is safety related...I can't wait until all this stuff is standard equip
Add Heads-Up-Display to that list.
The single thing I hate doing the most is taking my eyes off the road.
HUDs have been available as high-end options for over a decade now, but there does not seem to be much interest at all in democratizing the technology.
I was hoping google glass might make a good HUD "retrofit," but you can't wear sunglasses with it at the same time.
An alternate way to disprove the assertion would be to show that all bottlers were using 100% HFCS six months prior to the introduction of New Coke. But Snopes's carefully chosen words suggest that wasn't the case.
I think it is much more likely that Snopes just does not know how widespread HFCS was and instead of straight out admitting they don't know, the person responsible for that particular article thought it better to "save face" by wording around the important questions. That still doesn't reflect any better on the Snopes editors, but it means you can't really draw any conclusions one way or the other.
To follow up I looked into the ratio of female to male literacy.
Of the top five countries, 2 of them are primarily muslim:
.............. 96% muslim 1.074 ratio female:male literacy ........ 100% muslim 1.018
#3 UAE
#4 Maldives
All five of these countries were once part of the Soviet Union. They all inherited the Soviet educational system, and the cycle of illiteracy was already broken before they became independent. Literate mothers don't raise illiterate children.
OK, still doesn't change the fact that religion is not a determining factor.
Only South Sudan is not majority Muslim, but it was part of a Muslim majority country up until less than two years ago.
So? The female illiteracy rates in those countries is far greater than the percentage of muslims. That means within their own communities, the non-muslims are pretty illiterate too.
Why do people on slashdot feel the need to make points about things of which they have no information?
Although illiteracy is correlated with poverty, it is even more strongly correlated with religion: Ten of the bottom ten are Muslim. Much of this is because they don't educate many of their girls.
Lol. Way to prove the OP's point.
Some of the countries with the highest female literacy rates are also predominately muslim, for example:
.... 89% muslim / 98.3% female literacy ...... 93% muslim / 99.9% ...... 88% muslim / 99.6% ...... 70% muslim / 99.3% ...... 90% muslim / 99.8%
Turkmenistan
Azerbaijan
Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan
Tajikistan
While some of the countries with the lowest female literacy rates have significantly smaller muslim populations:
... 60% muslim / 15.2% female literacy ........... 53% muslim / 24.2% ... 60% muslim / 24.4% .... 18% muslim / 16%
Burkina Faso
Chad
Sierra Leone
South Sudan
All religion information is from the current CIA world factbook except South Sudan which came from wikipedia's reference to the last census to collect religion stats in 1956.
The purpose of the test is to provide a method for consumers to compare different models with respect to their fuel economy, not to provide a precise prediction of exactly what the buyer's fuel economy will be.
That is the intenet of the test. But the result is that manufacturers "teach to the test" - i.e. they optimize for the test and not for more real-world scenarios.
I think we are nearly at the point were crowd-sourcing could significantly fix this problem. If we could just get a bluetooth profile for wireless access to all the major vehicle metrics included in the next ODB standard (or whatever they are calling it), then everybody with a smart phone could record and publish their own MPG results.
It sill won't capture ALL of the variables, but we can break out things like jack-rabbit starts and performance with excessive passenger weights. Crowd-source that over hundreds of thousands of vehicles and we can get some really useful info. Of course the early adopters won't get all the benefits, but they still could get useful info like how to modify their driving habits to get better MPG specific to their particular make and model.
Mostly to the quick medical response and hardware safety features.
Non-fatal injury rates are also down significantly. From the chart there looks like about 130 injuries per 100M vehicle miles in 2000 to 75 injuries per 100M vehicle miles in 2010.
Even one traffic accident fatality or trauma is too many. It is absolutely avoidable.
Yeah, and Mussolini made the trains run on time too. No thanks.
Sociologists say that the 3rd World War is going on on the roads. More than 1.5 million people will be killed in 2013 in traffic accident. About 10 million wounded.
Dunno about the rest of the world, but in the US traffic fatalities are down about 50% over the last decade - its been a consistent decline that isn't correlated to traffic cameras.
Unfortunately it looks like a review of a bunch of studies indicates that CCTV usage actually has a positive impact on crime with it being markedly so in the case of car parks it seems.
Cite? Lots of those studies miss things like regression to the mean - where the cameras have an initial impact but after a while people just start to compensate like wearing hoodies or they shift the crime to areas without cameras.
I considered that, but the up-mods don't fit that model. Is everybody laughing at joe random no-nothing? Self deprecating humor is boring when the person doing the self-deprecating is nobody anybody knows.
I welcome any and all pushback against monitoring of the public.
Here is related news, not quite the same implications, but a good trend none the less:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/02/22/states-local-governments-join-push-to-turn-off-red-light-cameras/
Really? Is slashdot now making fun of the nerds for being smart?
It wasn't that complicated to understand either, I haven't cared about any of that stuff for 20 years and I could follow along just fine.
Watermarking is worse than DRM. Another person has already spelled out how to defang it - compare multiple copies and fuzz the parts that are different.
But the huge downside for the vast majority of regular joes is that it makes all of the customers responsible for "protecting" the videos they watch. If anyone hacks them or snoops the download stream or even infiltrates the server transmitting the video and releases their copy into the wild, that innocent viewer is now implicitly responsible for that piracy. It becomes a guilty until proven innocent situation.
No way am I going to watch a streaming movie, much less pay for it, if it means I have to now worry about the ultra-litigious MAFIAA coming after me with multi-million dollar copyright infringement lawsuits because I didn't know my PC was infected with a virus designed to pilfer the videos I watch.
They get the insurance because law states they must, or it was a requirement for the loan.
Yeah, it doesn't work like that. Perhaps you are thinking of PMI or home owner's insurance.
By the content of the rest of your response it is pretty clear you've never even looked into home warranties - premiums do not go up if you use them. Lol.