One of the justices asked flat-out if there were technical advantages to having multiple antennas or if it was just a way to get around copyright, and the lawyer dodged the question.
*Of course* the primary reason for having multiple antennas is copyright. It is exactly *because* they have multiple antennas that what they're doing is legal under current copyright law. By ducking and evading the question, the lawyer just looks shady.
From a technical point of view they'd be far better off with a pair of redundant antennas, storing all the shows from all the channels (with deduplication), and then serving them to their subscribers on demand. But that's clearly not allowed under current law.
It's a basic sampling problem. Instead of dedicating all your pixels to a single image, you're basically splitting them up and sampling many different images simultaneously. This will result in lower resolution in the final image than if you took that image with a "standard" camera. On the other hand, it makes it less likely that you'll miss a shot due to focus issues.
It's a tradeoff between resolution and flexibility.
Making the sensor much bigger would allow for more pixels, but would also be more expensive.
The lens is F/2, so you can't get the equivalent brightness of an F/1.4 (though you might be able to get the depth of field in post-processing).
The lens is 30-255, which is pretty good range, but you can't swap it out to go wider/longer.
Tilt-shift type effects (angled focal plane) should be doable in post-processing, but it would depend if they've added that functionality to their software.
Can you, as a licensed software engineer, in good conscience release software under any license with such clauses, without totally violating your responsibilities and duties as an engineer?
I have an engineering degree, but am not a "professional engineer". I've worked for over a decade on proprietary embedded projects based largely on open-source software.
We generally write good code (though there will always be known issues) and we provide extensive support for our products, and charge accordingly.
On the other hand, we also contribute features and bugfixes back to the upstream open-source projects.
There are lots of groups (the NRA, for instance) that have support from a large number of lower-class people. Individually they can't give much money, but there are enough of them that by pooling their resources they get a decent amount of influence.
The problem is that there are relatively few issues that get people vehemently riled-up, enough that they actually contribute time and money to the cause. Also, it's easier to attract people with extreme views.
The upshot is that most middle-of-the-road citizens don't feel strongly enough about things to contribute money for political attention, and therefore are not actually represented in government.
that allowed individuals to contribute directly to *all* candidates, with no overall cap on contributions?
There are under 700 people that hit the max last time around, do you seriously think that decision will benefit the grass roots? Sounds to me like it's aimed squarely at giving the oligarchs more influence.
It is possible for both statements to be true...that is, that there are cases where lethal self-defence is the only way to stay alive, but *also* that on average owning a gun makes it more likely for the owner of the gun to be injured/killed.
If this is the case, the each individual gun owner needs to decide whether they think they're going to be subject to an armed attack in their house, and also beat the odds of being injured.
I worked for over a decade in embedded stuff, mostly Linux kernel development. I didn't do a smidge of database coding the whole time. It just wasn't a factor. On the other hand, I did learn assembly language for five different architectures, found locking bugs in glibc, binary-patched the running kernel for a production fix because the client didn't want to take a new release, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
And now I'm working on a different project that uses databases heavily, so I'm picking it up as I go.
You can "interact with" GPL code just fine, as long as your proprietary code isn't a derivative work of the GPL code in the copyright sense.
So you can exec() it, you can call it from the shell, you can send packets to it and receive responses, in some cases you can even have proprietary code as a module/plugin being called by the GPL'd code.
Major numbers are often reserved for things that break backwards compatibility, minor numbers often denote new features, and the patch revision denotes patches.
Personally I would have bumped the patch rev (the third number).
I'd also love to have proximity sensors giving the distance from any part of my car to any obstacle. It'd make parallel parking a lot quicker if I could get a readout showing how many inches there are between my car and the vehicle behind me.
Rearview cameras can be useful, but unless you've got one like an RV mounted way up high aiming down at the back of the vehicle they won't help much in parking.
The question is not "does she have an excuse not to upgrade". The question is, "why should she be forced to upgrade"? If the computer that she has is meeting her needs, why should she need to pay to replace it or have it upgraded?
A fifth of the light trucks made by both Toyota and Chevy are still on the road after 21 years. The manufacturers don't necessarily support them, but other companies do. Why can't we think about software in those terms?
Theoretically the disk controller could initially access only the spinning platter, and then only the frequently-accessed blocks (reads or writes) would get relocated to the flash drive.
If I come up with a way of doing something, I don't have a problem with you needing to either re-invent it from scratch or else pay me to use my idea.
I do think that if you can show that you really did invent something from scratch *without ever seeing my invention or hearing about it* then you shouldn't have to pay me.
Similarly, a patent should be on a specific implementation, not a general concept. This latter part seems to be a huge problem with many software patents...they try to patent a concept rather than a specific implementation of the concept.
I always thought you could "make your own" from patent filings, you just couldn't sell/trade/traffic/commercialize it.
Nope. Per Wikipedia, "...a patent provides the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention...".
Now usually it's not worth the time/effort to enforce patents against end-users since they generally don't have much money. But witness the patent trolls going after small businesses for "scanning to email" or the use of wi-fi (really, look up Innovatio IP Ventures).
It seems to be common in software patents to try and claim not just a method of doing X, but the whole *concept* of doing X.
So for instance, the *concept* of doing rubber-band bounce-back. Apple has a patent on this. (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7479949.PN.&OS=PN/7479949&RS=PN/7479949)
To me this smacks of patenting an idea, rather than a specific way of implementing an idea.
Sure, it may not make sense for everyone, but I bet there are cases that will see significant gains.
For example, imagine you're running a server with too much data to fit in RAM uncompressed but a lot more (maybe all of it) will fit in RAM if you compress it. So by doing compressed swap, you spend a bit of CPU power (to do the compression/decompression) to avoid a lot of waiting on I/O.
Sure, if you put in a bunch more RAM you could fit it all, but that might require buying new hardware, or maybe you've already hit the limit of what's available and still want more performance.
The fact that GM didn't change part numbers would certainly make it harder to figure out what was going on, because there would be no indication of problems in current vehicles.
Had the part number changed it would have been an obvious thing to check--what's different between the old part and the new one?
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There is nothing that matches the quality of over-the-air. In large cities there can be quite a few OTA channels and the picture is amazing.
Where I live, on the other hand, we have two channels. Amazing picture, poor selection.
One of the justices asked flat-out if there were technical advantages to having multiple antennas or if it was just a way to get around copyright, and the lawyer dodged the question.
*Of course* the primary reason for having multiple antennas is copyright. It is exactly *because* they have multiple antennas that what they're doing is legal under current copyright law. By ducking and evading the question, the lawyer just looks shady.
From a technical point of view they'd be far better off with a pair of redundant antennas, storing all the shows from all the channels (with deduplication), and then serving them to their subscribers on demand. But that's clearly not allowed under current law.
It's quite common to see sports photographers using something like a 100-400mm zoom.
It's a basic sampling problem. Instead of dedicating all your pixels to a single image, you're basically splitting them up and sampling many different images simultaneously. This will result in lower resolution in the final image than if you took that image with a "standard" camera. On the other hand, it makes it less likely that you'll miss a shot due to focus issues.
It's a tradeoff between resolution and flexibility.
Making the sensor much bigger would allow for more pixels, but would also be more expensive.
The lens is F/2, so you can't get the equivalent brightness of an F/1.4 (though you might be able to get the depth of field in post-processing).
The lens is 30-255, which is pretty good range, but you can't swap it out to go wider/longer.
Tilt-shift type effects (angled focal plane) should be doable in post-processing, but it would depend if they've added that functionality to their software.
A belly landing on the tarmac would likely be scary and newsworthy, but there's a good chance that relatively few people would be hurt/killed.
Can you, as a licensed software engineer, in good conscience release software under any license with such clauses, without totally violating your responsibilities and duties as an engineer?
I have an engineering degree, but am not a "professional engineer". I've worked for over a decade on proprietary embedded projects based largely on open-source software.
We generally write good code (though there will always be known issues) and we provide extensive support for our products, and charge accordingly.
On the other hand, we also contribute features and bugfixes back to the upstream open-source projects.
I don't see a conflict.
There are lots of groups (the NRA, for instance) that have support from a large number of lower-class people. Individually they can't give much money, but there are enough of them that by pooling their resources they get a decent amount of influence.
The problem is that there are relatively few issues that get people vehemently riled-up, enough that they actually contribute time and money to the cause. Also, it's easier to attract people with extreme views.
The upshot is that most middle-of-the-road citizens don't feel strongly enough about things to contribute money for political attention, and therefore are not actually represented in government.
that allowed individuals to contribute directly to *all* candidates, with no overall cap on contributions?
There are under 700 people that hit the max last time around, do you seriously think that decision will benefit the grass roots? Sounds to me like it's aimed squarely at giving the oligarchs more influence.
It is possible for both statements to be true...that is, that there are cases where lethal self-defence is the only way to stay alive, but *also* that on average owning a gun makes it more likely for the owner of the gun to be injured/killed.
If this is the case, the each individual gun owner needs to decide whether they think they're going to be subject to an armed attack in their house, and also beat the odds of being injured.
I worked for over a decade in embedded stuff, mostly Linux kernel development. I didn't do a smidge of database coding the whole time. It just wasn't a factor. On the other hand, I did learn assembly language for five different architectures, found locking bugs in glibc, binary-patched the running kernel for a production fix because the client didn't want to take a new release, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
And now I'm working on a different project that uses databases heavily, so I'm picking it up as I go.
Running Firefox 28 on Win7, it said the cert was revoked.
You can "interact with" GPL code just fine, as long as your proprietary code isn't a derivative work of the GPL code in the copyright sense.
So you can exec() it, you can call it from the shell, you can send packets to it and receive responses, in some cases you can even have proprietary code as a module/plugin being called by the GPL'd code.
So under the new Act they'd be "fair", as opposed to "good" or "very good", or "excellent". :)
Major numbers are often reserved for things that break backwards compatibility, minor numbers often denote new features, and the patch revision denotes patches.
Personally I would have bumped the patch rev (the third number).
I'd also love to have proximity sensors giving the distance from any part of my car to any obstacle. It'd make parallel parking a lot quicker if I could get a readout showing how many inches there are between my car and the vehicle behind me.
Rearview cameras can be useful, but unless you've got one like an RV mounted way up high aiming down at the back of the vehicle they won't help much in parking.
Your mom likely has no excuse not to upgrade.
The question is not "does she have an excuse not to upgrade". The question is, "why should she be forced to upgrade"? If the computer that she has is meeting her needs, why should she need to pay to replace it or have it upgraded?
A fifth of the light trucks made by both Toyota and Chevy are still on the road after 21 years. The manufacturers don't necessarily support them, but other companies do. Why can't we think about software in those terms?
But then I do OpenStack development.
Spinning up VMs on qemu via OpenStack running on Virtualbox instances. Whee!
Theoretically the disk controller could initially access only the spinning platter, and then only the frequently-accessed blocks (reads or writes) would get relocated to the flash drive.
If I come up with a way of doing something, I don't have a problem with you needing to either re-invent it from scratch or else pay me to use my idea.
I do think that if you can show that you really did invent something from scratch *without ever seeing my invention or hearing about it* then you shouldn't have to pay me.
Similarly, a patent should be on a specific implementation, not a general concept. This latter part seems to be a huge problem with many software patents...they try to patent a concept rather than a specific implementation of the concept.
I always thought you could "make your own" from patent filings, you just couldn't sell/trade/traffic/commercialize it.
Nope. Per Wikipedia, "...a patent provides the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention...".
Now usually it's not worth the time/effort to enforce patents against end-users since they generally don't have much money. But witness the patent trolls going after small businesses for "scanning to email" or the use of wi-fi (really, look up Innovatio IP Ventures).
I like the Cree bulbs. I just wish they (or any other) were as good as the Philips L-Prize bulbs (93 CRI and 93 Lumens/W)
For comparison:
Cree TW series: 93CRI and 59 Lumens/W
Cree regular: 80CRI and 84 Lumens/W
Philips: 81CRI and 72 Lumens/W
It seems to be common in software patents to try and claim not just a method of doing X, but the whole *concept* of doing X.
So for instance, the *concept* of doing rubber-band bounce-back. Apple has a patent on this. (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7479949.PN.&OS=PN/7479949&RS=PN/7479949)
To me this smacks of patenting an idea, rather than a specific way of implementing an idea.
Sure, it may not make sense for everyone, but I bet there are cases that will see significant gains.
For example, imagine you're running a server with too much data to fit in RAM uncompressed but a lot more (maybe all of it) will fit in RAM if you compress it. So by doing compressed swap, you spend a bit of CPU power (to do the compression/decompression) to avoid a lot of waiting on I/O.
Sure, if you put in a bunch more RAM you could fit it all, but that might require buying new hardware, or maybe you've already hit the limit of what's available and still want more performance.
The fact that GM didn't change part numbers would certainly make it harder to figure out what was going on, because there would be no indication of problems in current vehicles.
Had the part number changed it would have been an obvious thing to check--what's different between the old part and the new one?