The problem with this question is that "scientific computing" is an over-broad term. The truth is that certain languages have found specific niches in different parts aspects of scientific computing. Bioinformatics, for example, tends to involve R, Python, Java, and PERL (the prominence of each depends largely on the application). Big-data analytics typically involves Java or languages built on Java (Scala, Groovy). Real-time data processing is generally done in Matlab. pharmacokinetics, some physics, and some computational chemistry are often done in FORTRAN. Instrumentation is generally controlled using C, C++, or VB.NET. Visualization is done in R, D3 (JavaScript), or Matlab. Validated clinical biostatistics are all done in SAS (!).
Python is a nice simple to learn start, very powerful, and the NumPy package is important to learn for scientific computing. R is the language of choice for many types of statistical and numerical analysis. Those are a good place to start, if incomplete. From there, I'd look at the specific fields of interest and look at what the common applications and code-base are for those.
With regard to the OS, that's pretty easy: Linux (though OS X is a reasonable substitute). Nearly all scientific computing is done in a UNIX-like environment.
This is a semantic argument. The OS has always supported full multitasking. At first, only system services ran all the time and applications paused when they weren't in the foreground. Since iOS 4, APIs were added that allowed various registration of background activities, one of which being the Task, Task Completion, and Local Notification APIs which can be trivially used to establish a thread that would keep an application doing whatever it chose to do for as long as it wanted. The thing is that the background APIs in iOS require explicitly setting up background activity, otherwise an app sleeps when not in the foreground. I don't really see a problem with this as it effectively manages CPU and battery resources in a sensible way, yet it still lets the developer work around them, if necessary, provided that he's willing to go to the effort.
I doubt that the 64-bit CPU is about accessing more RAM. The previous CPU used a 48-bit virtual address space which would be more than sufficient for any phone in the near future, and the 32-bit limitation would be 4G per process - again, unrealistic for a phone, even one that has 8G of RAM.
The new CPU represents a very substantially new architecture with a new instruction set (as well as support for the 32-bit instruction set), more CPU registers, vectorized registers for SIMD parallel operations, encryption co-processing pipeline, new exception system, virtualization, etc. Essentially, the ARMv8 architecture that it is built on was designed anew to be a low-energy server platform. This is a big change and it opens up quite a big opportunity for increasing performance (particularly for tasks that take advantage of the additional registers and parallelism) with no appreciable increase in power consumption.
One things that iOS has always had going for it, compared to Android, is that it tends to be more memory and power efficient. I think that this is really what Apple's looking for. It wants it's tiny phones to have performance as good or better than competitors with just as good or better battery life. And, if they build a phone that's physically bigger (as is rumored), something that will be exceptionally performant and efficient by comparison.
It would be nice if they could make them cheaper too, though. And, pressure vendors to enable hotspot feature for no charge and to lower data rates (and international roaming rates). One could dream.
... Johnny Ive and the rest of the folks working for him did. Jobs did three things: he specifically insisted on being a premium brand and quality to justify it, he hired people that could execute on that, and as the voice of the company he sold the brand and it's products very well.
The same people are there and I don't suspect that they are being asked to do much different. I think that a lower-cost iPhone is not a bad idea -- BUT, it better adhere to the overall quality mantra and still be a premium device in the price-point or that will be deleterious to Apple.
However, Tim Cook, bright as he may be, seems utterly dispassionate about Apple and Apple products. When he gives a keynote address, it's as though he's selling the proverbial widget; he doesn't communicate that he's devoted to the product or that he is earnestly striving towards some grand vision. When Cook talks, you know he's there to sell you widgets - no vision, no excitement, just a product that he feigns a vague interest in so that he can sell them. Cook needs to be replaced - if not as CEO, then as the public face of Apple.
Apple's got a pretty nice tech stack going for it. There's a lot of possibilities there, and while the future of Apple is still in play, it's on pretty good footing. What it really needs to do, though, is pick up the pace on development of it's products. Jobs had a habit of making sure that there was always something new to keep the press coming back to report on the latest and greatest from Cupertino. Whether intentionally or not, Cook is not following that pattern. Jobs would rather suffice for a small but important upgrade than wait unknown periods of time for a show-stopper, and he'd always have product lined up to go when it was announced (again, Cook is behaving more like HP/Dell/Microsoft/Sony in not keeping with that tradition).
Another way to view it is simply that the NSA has undermined what little security there was. The TSA screening process can be used by terrorists to vet agents because of the way it works, reducing security. The NSA, they undermine security not only by taking personal data and making it accessible and reviewable by a large number of people, but they also implement schemes that presumably allow others to do the same thing. It you create backdoors, you have to exepect that you are the only one that will use them; if you add a new channel, you give 2 targets for someone to listen in; if you shanghai a private corporation for intelligence services, you open everyone to that sort of diversion from their purpose.
Complicity has a cost for these companies. Their shareholders will suffer. People will have a justified sense of mistrust of their government, AND big business.
Personally, what I'd like to see is a more deliberative and cunning Doctor, more so than a rogue -- something harkening back to previous doctors. Also more 2-3 episode story arcs. Far too many of the stories seem rushed. The pace needs to be notched down and story given more depth with some more richness to the character. They should pick someone that could carry that sort of role. The only thing I've seen Grint perform in is the Harry Potter movies, and while he did an admirable job as Ron Weasley, I don't know that he'd have the presence to carry the role of the Doctor (perhaps I'm mistaken).
Also, I'd like the Doctor's mortality (and maybe a view into his psyche regarding the subject) to be explored. Presumably, Time Lords have finite regenerations (at one time indicated to be 12) - well, this new Doctor will be at (or nearly at) his final regeneration: will he accept it or struggle to for a way to prolong his life? Will it make him less brash/more timid? Will he consider retirement? Will he seek out his daughter and hand her the torch to become the defender of mankind and meddler in time and space?
Why is it that nobody points to the obvious?... That this is evidence that the NSA (and US government) has intentionally undermined the security of all communications and computer systems. The global financial and communications infrastructure is wide open for anyone that has the key. Every power the NSA has, they have also granted to everyone else on the planet with the interest and means to wield it. They might say, "well, if someone could do that, then we'd know about it..." but I don't believe that it would be so obvious. If someone set up a trade in industrial trade secrets, or skimmed financial transactions properly, the world wouldn't be the wiser. Blackmail, extortion,...
"General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Robert S. Litt explained that our expectation of privacy isn't legally recognized by the Supreme Court once we've offered it to a third party." - that's untrue. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true. Not only that, but many types of giving information to a third party are explicitly granted expectation of privacy at federal and state levels: anything you send by the US postal service, communications with lawyers, clergy, spouses, and medical and mental health personnel, and information provided as part of clinical trials conducted by drug companies or private institutes -- just to name a few.
The reasons that people don't fear sharing information on Facebook, but fear government monitoring:
- People are aware of what Facebook has, and they can control it (even if they can't control how it's used after the fact)
- Information on Facebook is under no pressure to be correct and is unreliable
- Facebook cannot directly: seize all your assets, imprison you, assassinate you, put you on secret no-fly lists, etc.
- If Facebook does something illegal or harmful, they can be sued - not true of the government, particularly secret programs
- Facebook has a profit motive and doesn't want to piss you off, the government has fickle political motives and literally has advanced weaponry, standing armies, to enforce it's policies
TL;DR it's an issue of risk, reward, and accountability
You could enable the the "Develop" menu in preferences and then select "Disable JavaScript" on the problematic page without having to reset anything (you could also open the JavaScript console and stop it). This really has nothing to do with OS X and isn't even browser-specific. There's, of course, a browser-specific answer to it (it only takes a few minutes to create a Safari plug-in to block it).
Buying the good graces of a member of congress is a good investment. Rates have never been lower, and congress has never bee more corruptible. Even if you're not evil, the purchase of congressional support means that they tend to watch your back when they're screwing the little guy. It's just good business.
One thing I don't get about Inhofe and the other climate change deniers is this: why say the hoax is costing you millions when the hoax could just as easily be a business opportunity. I mean, real or not, it just means an opportunity for companies to cash in on environmental friendliness, sell people cures (whether they need them or not), etc. Even if you suppose Inhofe is receiving carnal pleasures from the petrochemical industry in exchange for his obedience, those same companies could turn around and make megabucks on carbon sequestration schemes, higher-priced fuel formulations that reduce emissions 1-2%, etc. People already swimming in cash are in a unique position to jump on opportunities of this sort. Hell, Exxon and GM ought to be able to get huge grants for "research" in making more carbon-neutral petro-fueled vehicles -- we're talking free money!
That's the problem with corrupt politicians these days... They miss the bigger money-grubbing picture.
I saw it yesterday and I am ambivalent. I found it entertaining, but wanting for a Superman story.
There was a slew more action than there was character development. Zod was the most completely developed, then Clark himself. The seemingly haphazard flashback style of Clark's backstory really didn't help. While the film was entertaining, the action was a little repetitive: lots of stuff tearing through buildings and buildings falling over,... and over... and over... and over. The way Zod meets his demise was pretty uninventive and, for Superman, uncharacteristically low-brow. I love Amy Adams, and I appreciate that she's updated and supposed to be a tough-as-nails reporter with war-time cred -- but you just get that from the story or acting (and I'm quite fond of Amy Adams). If it were a little more like the first Superman movie (with Christopher Reeve, as hokey as that sounds) and a little less Fast and Furious, it would have been a stronger movie. If Lois Lane was a little more Kara Thrace than... well, Mary from the Muppet Movie, all the better.
Were I in the same situation, I'd say the same thing, true or not. It might not justify the program, but it might make people feel better about it.
If they want people to buy it, though, they'll need to proffer some proof. Not just some documentation, but something concrete that would be irrefutable. The NSA has the problem that they are coming from a position of weakness. They're in the business of being secretive, they've been caught in a position where they appear to have betrayed the nation's trust, and they'll need something extraordinary to restore that trust.
They should just lay all their cards on the table - declassify all of it. The ne'er-do-wells are already tipped off and working around it, so there's little more to lose if they'd been on the up-and-up. Clearly, if they weren't doing anything wrong, then there's nothing to hide.
That's a foolish thing to do. Now that kid won't report the second bug he found and may just publish it in some innocuous place where it will get picked up by a ne'erdowell and be exploited - something that will no doubt cost more than if PayPal had just done right by the kids in the first place.
The fact is that tax laws are complex and explicitly written to enable these sorts of tax shelters / loopholes. It is the same with fantastical deductions, and tax incentive programs. The fact of the matter is that the company simply pays the minimum that the law allows and no more. Not only does it make fiscal sense, but int he US, it's their fiduciary duty (they could be sued by shareholders for overpaying their taxes).
Congress is huffing and puffing, but just for show. It's well within their purview to alter the laws, the rates,... everything. However, the system that exists now is highly profitable for those that have the money and cleverness to take advantage of it. It means that a US company is richer, that they employ more people (some of whom are in the US), it means that shareholders investments grow, and that rich men with big checkbooks are willing to support campaigns. There's little incentive to make taxation strictly equitable and, less face it, doing a good job of making a simple equitable system that can't be exploited in one way or another is just a whole lot of tough work that nobody has the time or energy to get into.
At the end of the day, this will all blow over and a gaggle of congressmen and senators will give themselves a pat on the back for standing up against tax avoiders before returning to business as usual.
When I purchase software, it counts as a capital expense against my cost center. If, however, I enter into a rental agreement of this sort, it counts as an expense against my cost center. This will more or less mean that departments will no longer be able to obtain Adobe software since we're constant under pressure to keep operating expenses down. The software is no longer an amortizable asset, but instead gets counted as overhead (not to mention, this sort of licensing scheme incurs overhead in its own right to manage).
The practical upshot is that this makes Adobe products far more expensive for a company, and far less desirable overall.
Several have lambasted the judge for making the statement that he doesn't believe that software patents are necessary, saying that he should confine himself to making judgements on matters of law. However, it's important that a judge make such statements if he observes in the execution of his duties that the application of the law and precedent is not serving the purpose for which it was enacted, or is adversely affecting the court's ability to perform its duty (e.g., something precipitates a flood of lengthy but pointless lawsuits that clog the courts and defer hearing of more substantive cases).
It's precisely this feedback which should be informing legislators and prosecutors on how to reform legislation and prioritize enforcement efforts.
In the case of software patents, there's quite a bit of legal, historical, and practical arguments as to why software patents should not exist (at least in the form that device patents do), but there's been very little formal challenge to the idea, and the USPTO and the courts are substantially and adversely impacted by it (not to mention the industry).
Of course there's no dangerous RF. That's just plain stupid.
However, with regard to invasions of privacy... The meters are capable of reporting daily variations in consumption of electricity. Readable at a distance, a third party could assess when consumption levels are very low (house probably unoccupied) or inconsistently low for several days in a row (occupants probably away on vacation). So, what you basically have is a radio beacon that lights up "Rob us, were out".
I imagine that this could be fixed if there is a very good encryption and authentication/authorization scheme -- but how likely is that?
It seems to me that the Facebook app's issues are not so much about HTML5 performance, but rather the way that they handle transactions with their servers. The network performance of the app is atrocious. Look at the traffic of the iOS app and compare it to the Facebook mobile website. How many hundreds of XMLHTTPRequests do you think it should take to render a page?
There's nothing inherently wrong with the HTML5, it's their ludicrous network activity that kills the app.
It seems that if Oracle successfully argues this point, everybody that provides Oracle with a library is going to demand a license fee. Imagine if Brian Kernighan decided that the C standard library ought to be generating more (well, some) income...
Google and Facebook were just NSA and CIA fronts. The best part would be that they have an almost self-sustaining business model so the cost of running it is defrayed. People get cheap software, and the government gets cheap information on the users plus surveillance and tracking devices in every pocket...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this question is that "scientific computing" is an over-broad term. The truth is that certain languages have found specific niches in different parts aspects of scientific computing. Bioinformatics, for example, tends to involve R, Python, Java, and PERL (the prominence of each depends largely on the application). Big-data analytics typically involves Java or languages built on Java (Scala, Groovy). Real-time data processing is generally done in Matlab. pharmacokinetics, some physics, and some computational chemistry are often done in FORTRAN. Instrumentation is generally controlled using C, C++, or VB.NET. Visualization is done in R, D3 (JavaScript), or Matlab. Validated clinical biostatistics are all done in SAS (!).
Python is a nice simple to learn start, very powerful, and the NumPy package is important to learn for scientific computing. R is the language of choice for many types of statistical and numerical analysis. Those are a good place to start, if incomplete. From there, I'd look at the specific fields of interest and look at what the common applications and code-base are for those.
With regard to the OS, that's pretty easy: Linux (though OS X is a reasonable substitute). Nearly all scientific computing is done in a UNIX-like environment.
This is a semantic argument. The OS has always supported full multitasking. At first, only system services ran all the time and applications paused when they weren't in the foreground. Since iOS 4, APIs were added that allowed various registration of background activities, one of which being the Task, Task Completion, and Local Notification APIs which can be trivially used to establish a thread that would keep an application doing whatever it chose to do for as long as it wanted. The thing is that the background APIs in iOS require explicitly setting up background activity, otherwise an app sleeps when not in the foreground. I don't really see a problem with this as it effectively manages CPU and battery resources in a sensible way, yet it still lets the developer work around them, if necessary, provided that he's willing to go to the effort.
I doubt that the 64-bit CPU is about accessing more RAM. The previous CPU used a 48-bit virtual address space which would be more than sufficient for any phone in the near future, and the 32-bit limitation would be 4G per process - again, unrealistic for a phone, even one that has 8G of RAM.
The new CPU represents a very substantially new architecture with a new instruction set (as well as support for the 32-bit instruction set), more CPU registers, vectorized registers for SIMD parallel operations, encryption co-processing pipeline, new exception system, virtualization, etc. Essentially, the ARMv8 architecture that it is built on was designed anew to be a low-energy server platform. This is a big change and it opens up quite a big opportunity for increasing performance (particularly for tasks that take advantage of the additional registers and parallelism) with no appreciable increase in power consumption.
One things that iOS has always had going for it, compared to Android, is that it tends to be more memory and power efficient. I think that this is really what Apple's looking for. It wants it's tiny phones to have performance as good or better than competitors with just as good or better battery life. And, if they build a phone that's physically bigger (as is rumored), something that will be exceptionally performant and efficient by comparison.
It would be nice if they could make them cheaper too, though. And, pressure vendors to enable hotspot feature for no charge and to lower data rates (and international roaming rates). One could dream.
... Johnny Ive and the rest of the folks working for him did. Jobs did three things: he specifically insisted on being a premium brand and quality to justify it, he hired people that could execute on that, and as the voice of the company he sold the brand and it's products very well.
The same people are there and I don't suspect that they are being asked to do much different. I think that a lower-cost iPhone is not a bad idea -- BUT, it better adhere to the overall quality mantra and still be a premium device in the price-point or that will be deleterious to Apple.
However, Tim Cook, bright as he may be, seems utterly dispassionate about Apple and Apple products. When he gives a keynote address, it's as though he's selling the proverbial widget; he doesn't communicate that he's devoted to the product or that he is earnestly striving towards some grand vision. When Cook talks, you know he's there to sell you widgets - no vision, no excitement, just a product that he feigns a vague interest in so that he can sell them. Cook needs to be replaced - if not as CEO, then as the public face of Apple.
Apple's got a pretty nice tech stack going for it. There's a lot of possibilities there, and while the future of Apple is still in play, it's on pretty good footing. What it really needs to do, though, is pick up the pace on development of it's products. Jobs had a habit of making sure that there was always something new to keep the press coming back to report on the latest and greatest from Cupertino. Whether intentionally or not, Cook is not following that pattern. Jobs would rather suffice for a small but important upgrade than wait unknown periods of time for a show-stopper, and he'd always have product lined up to go when it was announced (again, Cook is behaving more like HP/Dell/Microsoft/Sony in not keeping with that tradition).
Another way to view it is simply that the NSA has undermined what little security there was. The TSA screening process can be used by terrorists to vet agents because of the way it works, reducing security. The NSA, they undermine security not only by taking personal data and making it accessible and reviewable by a large number of people, but they also implement schemes that presumably allow others to do the same thing. It you create backdoors, you have to exepect that you are the only one that will use them; if you add a new channel, you give 2 targets for someone to listen in; if you shanghai a private corporation for intelligence services, you open everyone to that sort of diversion from their purpose.
Complicity has a cost for these companies. Their shareholders will suffer. People will have a justified sense of mistrust of their government, AND big business.
Personally, what I'd like to see is a more deliberative and cunning Doctor, more so than a rogue -- something harkening back to previous doctors. Also more 2-3 episode story arcs. Far too many of the stories seem rushed. The pace needs to be notched down and story given more depth with some more richness to the character. They should pick someone that could carry that sort of role. The only thing I've seen Grint perform in is the Harry Potter movies, and while he did an admirable job as Ron Weasley, I don't know that he'd have the presence to carry the role of the Doctor (perhaps I'm mistaken).
Also, I'd like the Doctor's mortality (and maybe a view into his psyche regarding the subject) to be explored. Presumably, Time Lords have finite regenerations (at one time indicated to be 12) - well, this new Doctor will be at (or nearly at) his final regeneration: will he accept it or struggle to for a way to prolong his life? Will it make him less brash/more timid? Will he consider retirement? Will he seek out his daughter and hand her the torch to become the defender of mankind and meddler in time and space?
Why is it that nobody points to the obvious?... That this is evidence that the NSA (and US government) has intentionally undermined the security of all communications and computer systems. The global financial and communications infrastructure is wide open for anyone that has the key. Every power the NSA has, they have also granted to everyone else on the planet with the interest and means to wield it. They might say, "well, if someone could do that, then we'd know about it..." but I don't believe that it would be so obvious. If someone set up a trade in industrial trade secrets, or skimmed financial transactions properly, the world wouldn't be the wiser. Blackmail, extortion, ...
"General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Robert S. Litt explained that our expectation of privacy isn't legally recognized by the Supreme Court once we've offered it to a third party." - that's untrue. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true. Not only that, but many types of giving information to a third party are explicitly granted expectation of privacy at federal and state levels: anything you send by the US postal service, communications with lawyers, clergy, spouses, and medical and mental health personnel, and information provided as part of clinical trials conducted by drug companies or private institutes -- just to name a few.
The reasons that people don't fear sharing information on Facebook, but fear government monitoring:
- People are aware of what Facebook has, and they can control it (even if they can't control how it's used after the fact)
- Information on Facebook is under no pressure to be correct and is unreliable
- Facebook cannot directly: seize all your assets, imprison you, assassinate you, put you on secret no-fly lists, etc.
- If Facebook does something illegal or harmful, they can be sued - not true of the government, particularly secret programs
- Facebook has a profit motive and doesn't want to piss you off, the government has fickle political motives and literally has advanced weaponry, standing armies, to enforce it's policies
TL;DR it's an issue of risk, reward, and accountability
... and copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime.
You could enable the the "Develop" menu in preferences and then select "Disable JavaScript" on the problematic page without having to reset anything (you could also open the JavaScript console and stop it). This really has nothing to do with OS X and isn't even browser-specific. There's, of course, a browser-specific answer to it (it only takes a few minutes to create a Safari plug-in to block it).
Buying the good graces of a member of congress is a good investment. Rates have never been lower, and congress has never bee more corruptible. Even if you're not evil, the purchase of congressional support means that they tend to watch your back when they're screwing the little guy. It's just good business.
One thing I don't get about Inhofe and the other climate change deniers is this: why say the hoax is costing you millions when the hoax could just as easily be a business opportunity. I mean, real or not, it just means an opportunity for companies to cash in on environmental friendliness, sell people cures (whether they need them or not), etc. Even if you suppose Inhofe is receiving carnal pleasures from the petrochemical industry in exchange for his obedience, those same companies could turn around and make megabucks on carbon sequestration schemes, higher-priced fuel formulations that reduce emissions 1-2%, etc. People already swimming in cash are in a unique position to jump on opportunities of this sort. Hell, Exxon and GM ought to be able to get huge grants for "research" in making more carbon-neutral petro-fueled vehicles -- we're talking free money!
That's the problem with corrupt politicians these days... They miss the bigger money-grubbing picture.
Specifically, this port allows either an SD card or USB3 cable to be plugged into the same physical opening. Either will fit.
To be fair, recent events suggest that perhaps truth and justice are no longer the American way.
I saw it yesterday and I am ambivalent. I found it entertaining, but wanting for a Superman story.
There was a slew more action than there was character development. Zod was the most completely developed, then Clark himself. The seemingly haphazard flashback style of Clark's backstory really didn't help. While the film was entertaining, the action was a little repetitive: lots of stuff tearing through buildings and buildings falling over, ... and over ... and over ... and over. The way Zod meets his demise was pretty uninventive and, for Superman, uncharacteristically low-brow. I love Amy Adams, and I appreciate that she's updated and supposed to be a tough-as-nails reporter with war-time cred -- but you just get that from the story or acting (and I'm quite fond of Amy Adams). If it were a little more like the first Superman movie (with Christopher Reeve, as hokey as that sounds) and a little less Fast and Furious, it would have been a stronger movie. If Lois Lane was a little more Kara Thrace than ... well, Mary from the Muppet Movie, all the better.
Were I in the same situation, I'd say the same thing, true or not. It might not justify the program, but it might make people feel better about it.
If they want people to buy it, though, they'll need to proffer some proof. Not just some documentation, but something concrete that would be irrefutable. The NSA has the problem that they are coming from a position of weakness. They're in the business of being secretive, they've been caught in a position where they appear to have betrayed the nation's trust, and they'll need something extraordinary to restore that trust.
They should just lay all their cards on the table - declassify all of it. The ne'er-do-wells are already tipped off and working around it, so there's little more to lose if they'd been on the up-and-up. Clearly, if they weren't doing anything wrong, then there's nothing to hide.
That's a foolish thing to do. Now that kid won't report the second bug he found and may just publish it in some innocuous place where it will get picked up by a ne'erdowell and be exploited - something that will no doubt cost more than if PayPal had just done right by the kids in the first place.
The hubbub is little more than puffery.
The fact is that tax laws are complex and explicitly written to enable these sorts of tax shelters / loopholes. It is the same with fantastical deductions, and tax incentive programs. The fact of the matter is that the company simply pays the minimum that the law allows and no more. Not only does it make fiscal sense, but int he US, it's their fiduciary duty (they could be sued by shareholders for overpaying their taxes).
Congress is huffing and puffing, but just for show. It's well within their purview to alter the laws, the rates, ... everything. However, the system that exists now is highly profitable for those that have the money and cleverness to take advantage of it. It means that a US company is richer, that they employ more people (some of whom are in the US), it means that shareholders investments grow, and that rich men with big checkbooks are willing to support campaigns. There's little incentive to make taxation strictly equitable and, less face it, doing a good job of making a simple equitable system that can't be exploited in one way or another is just a whole lot of tough work that nobody has the time or energy to get into.
At the end of the day, this will all blow over and a gaggle of congressmen and senators will give themselves a pat on the back for standing up against tax avoiders before returning to business as usual.
Something simple like: API-level (revision release date)
Isn't something like "Java 7 (20130514)" relatively obvious what it means?
When I purchase software, it counts as a capital expense against my cost center. If, however, I enter into a rental agreement of this sort, it counts as an expense against my cost center. This will more or less mean that departments will no longer be able to obtain Adobe software since we're constant under pressure to keep operating expenses down. The software is no longer an amortizable asset, but instead gets counted as overhead (not to mention, this sort of licensing scheme incurs overhead in its own right to manage).
The practical upshot is that this makes Adobe products far more expensive for a company, and far less desirable overall.
Lather, rinse, EPEAT.
Several have lambasted the judge for making the statement that he doesn't believe that software patents are necessary, saying that he should confine himself to making judgements on matters of law. However, it's important that a judge make such statements if he observes in the execution of his duties that the application of the law and precedent is not serving the purpose for which it was enacted, or is adversely affecting the court's ability to perform its duty (e.g., something precipitates a flood of lengthy but pointless lawsuits that clog the courts and defer hearing of more substantive cases).
It's precisely this feedback which should be informing legislators and prosecutors on how to reform legislation and prioritize enforcement efforts.
In the case of software patents, there's quite a bit of legal, historical, and practical arguments as to why software patents should not exist (at least in the form that device patents do), but there's been very little formal challenge to the idea, and the USPTO and the courts are substantially and adversely impacted by it (not to mention the industry).
Of course there's no dangerous RF. That's just plain stupid.
However, with regard to invasions of privacy... The meters are capable of reporting daily variations in consumption of electricity. Readable at a distance, a third party could assess when consumption levels are very low (house probably unoccupied) or inconsistently low for several days in a row (occupants probably away on vacation). So, what you basically have is a radio beacon that lights up "Rob us, were out".
I imagine that this could be fixed if there is a very good encryption and authentication/authorization scheme -- but how likely is that?
It seems to me that the Facebook app's issues are not so much about HTML5 performance, but rather the way that they handle transactions with their servers. The network performance of the app is atrocious. Look at the traffic of the iOS app and compare it to the Facebook mobile website. How many hundreds of XMLHTTPRequests do you think it should take to render a page?
There's nothing inherently wrong with the HTML5, it's their ludicrous network activity that kills the app.
It seems that if Oracle successfully argues this point, everybody that provides Oracle with a library is going to demand a license fee. Imagine if Brian Kernighan decided that the C standard library ought to be generating more (well, some) income...
Google and Facebook were just NSA and CIA fronts. The best part would be that they have an almost self-sustaining business model so the cost of running it is defrayed. People get cheap software, and the government gets cheap information on the users plus surveillance and tracking devices in every pocket...