This is likely going to be so easy that I, a non-lawyer, could competently handle this part of the case for Apple.
1) Did you sue anyone in the past for "stealing" your tablet work? No? Thought not.
2) Do you know that other companies, including Microsoft, pushed tablet technology years before the iPad came out?
3) Since you have not in the past pursued claims against others for supposedly "stealing" your work, how can we take your charges seriously now? Again, keep in mind that other companies have produced tablets prior to Apple and you had no objections to that.
4) Are you being compensated for your appearance in court today? If so, how much are you getting and who is paying it?
The only thing Apple is "guilty" of is being the first company to make tablets that did not suck big green ones and that people actually wanted to buy and use. Nobody was able to make the technology popular before them.
I like Wikitravel and think it has value, but on the downside, just about every guide book I've ever seen is better. Then again, I can actually point to places that Wikitravel covers and no guide book does. And Wikitravel sometimes has up to date transportation information (ie. "The new metro is now open in _____") that is missing in printed guide books. But guide books may have more detailed maps, information about places to visit, and better information about getting from A to Z in a particular place.
China and India are on the rise. Brazil and Australia are looking good.
Can you speak the language? What are the immigration policies of these countries?
Given how Australian "Strine" is completely incomprehensible to those of us who don't live there, I think you have inadvertently made a good point about all 4 places with the language question. Note that Australia is pretty hostile to immigration and it can be tough even for white people to get in. India will let you in if you get sponsored and they are willing to work through the bureaucracy but in general foreigners just don't move to India. You would also need to understand that in general Indians are not known for being very open to the idea of cross-cultural marriages.
There are downsides to it for sure - small size and one party politics come to mind - but Singapore seems to have its act together in a lot of ways and if I was a younger person looking to move off somewhere, it might be my choice. English skills in Singapore are extremely high and it's actually a little difficult to find people who can't speak it reasonably well.
I think you raised a great point. I'm not a Libertarian and I regard them with complete and utter disdain, viewing them at best as being horribly, horribly misguided and at worse as being complete morons. The gold standard has long been a Libertarian idea. As you point out, if this was such a truly fantastic idea with little to no downside as its supporters claim, some small country somewhere in the world would use it to get a competitive advantage. I can't find any evidence of any country returning to the gold standard in a very long time. The only thing I can find even close is that some Malaysian government official proposed a pan-Islamic states gold coin be produced to decrease reliance on the US dollar in the region but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
Disclaimer: I'm not a financial analyst, I'm just some dude on Slashdot.
I remember some years ago when SCO kept getting slapped down in court and people still believed the shares had value. I was absolutely amazed at how long it took for the shares to bottom out. But the stock market is not rational and prices do not always reflect reality. I have read pro and con thoughts on Nokia. The pro people are carrying the day right now. Their argument is that Nokia is pursuing a winning strategy with Microsoft and that Asia sales are strong. I think the con people are right though. Their arguments, which I believe carry more weight, are that Nokia's partnership with Microsoft has failed big time. Nobody is buying the phones and even worse, Nokia has had to gut the price of the current ones to get rid of them with the dirty little secret that some buyers may not know that the next version of Windows for Smartphones won't work on the current models Nokia is selling. Also, Nokia is basically cleaning up on the low cost, garbage phones of the industry. Is it really a path to profitability to say, in effect, "We are the king of low end crap phones!"? Apple and most of the major players like Samsung have shrugged off this low cost market and they're willing to let Nokia have it without much of a fight. I suspect that eventually the stock market will realize that Nokia has a losing hand and the price will plummet. My belief about a month ago was that by the end of the year Nokia would be under $1 a share in the US and facing delisting and having to do a reverse stock split to keep from being delisted. I still believe that will happen but I'd move the time table to sometime next year, probably in the first half of 2013. I think Nokia is finished as a maker of smartphones in the developed world but they can hang on as a much smaller company picking up the low cost crumbs of third world sales if they want.
Here's an executive summary:
1. Obama signed a law last year that "reformed" patents so that means the US government fixed any problems.
2. Patents actually weren't broken anyway. (kind of conflicts with #1)
3. Patents are superb for the biotech industry. (Comparing apples to oranges here)
4. We're just helping the little guy mostly.
5. Lots of people make money in the IT industry so it's not broken.
6. We're the only thing stopping pure outright thievery of IT patents.
I suspect that what Hatta said is completely true. I doubt that 100% of what you have is really worth keeping forever. I take photos when traveling and some are mistakes or just didn't turn out that well. One of things I like is that if I take enough photos, some will turn out to be really good. Note that I said "some" not "all".
If you have a friend who doesn't mind you could make a backup to the biggest hard drives you can afford and have your friend store them. I'm an IT guy and on a previous job I actually was authorized by my company to keep a set of backup tapes for our development servers at my house so we didn't have to pay an offsite storage company to store them.
I have a question - are you really going to argue that your photos are so valuable that you can't let them go into the cloud for fear that others might get copies? I'm in no position to judge whether that is true or not and even if you say it is, the rest of us may disagree. I know that some professional photographers have some really warped ideas about their own work and think that the wedding video they just got hired to shoot belongs to them and the paying customer is some kind of leech they'll deign to give one copy to under duress. If you got oodles of old wedding photos, for example, that you were hired 10 years ago to take, I doubt that it's really critical that you keep copies. I participate on a video forum and we see people all the time who want to watermark stupid crap like videos of their kids playing tee ball* because they are so delusional that they think the whole world wants to see their kid. I get that these photos may be just incredibly important to you, but do you really think that others are just waiting to steal them if they go on the cloud? Cloud backup would be your most cost effective solution.
* For the non-North Americans, "tee ball" is version of baseball that small children play in organized leagues. They hit the ball off a tee, hence the name.
It's currently on hold because of their current president and parliament, as part of trying to keep Russia from coming unglued at them. However, if their stated intention to join the EU goes through, it's likely they will become a NATO member state (21 of the 27 EU member states are currently members of NATO). Currently, they engage in joint military exercises with NATO.
As someone who can speak Russian pretty well and has spent a decent amount of time there and still has friends there, I can provide some insight. Basically when Krushchev took over in the 50s he moved some territory from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR. He was from Ukraine and if you look at a map, the move did make sense as it made the areas in question much closer to their SSR capital (Kiev) than they had been (Moscow). The problem was that when the USSR split up that these areas were primarily Russian speaking and ethnically Russian and they still look wistfully towards "Mother Russia". So basically it created a schizophrenic country where half the people think they are really Russians and the other half think they are Ukrainian.
The situation is incredibly complicated but basically the Ukrainian half and the military strongly want to join NATO. The EU? Eh, maybe, maybe not. The Russian half has some people who are adamantly opposed to NATO because they believe all the bs that comes out of the Russian media that NATO is a force of evil and some people who believe that joining NATO will lead to a Russian invasion. Actually joining NATO is about the only thing that would protect them against a Russian invasion. Russia has shown that it does not respect borders (ask Georgia and Moldova about that, although the Moldovan situation is more indirect) and the military and the Ukrainian speakers know that. The problem is that the Russian speaking people are in charge of the government now and they have been trying appeasement as a way to deal with Russia. The Ukrainian speaking people are hopelessly split into 2 warring factions whose leaders were too self-serving to form a united front against the Russian speaking half of the country who have united behind the old pro-Russian party. Ukraine is far too corrupt to join the EU for probably decades to come. Ukrainian people have very unrealistic goals and dreams about where their country should be economically and instead of trying to reach for an achievable goal like "In 10 years let's get to where Poland is today" they instead want to be today at the same economic level of Germany. The recent governments have failed to exploit Ukraine's low cost environment as a possible source of cheap labor for Europe and the educational system in general does not encourage the learning of useful international languages like English which might help to induce businesses to create jobs there. So my belief is that for the next 10-20 years Ukraine will likely not be part of the EU (many Russian speaking people distrust the EU, by the way) or NATO. The only way this will change is if the Ukrainian speaking people unite behind a new candidate yet to emerge who will force change down from the top and clean up the corrupt Soviet style government that is still in place.
Just a random thought: NBC video should be free. They were given a license to broadcast over the airwaves (which belong to the People) and should be sharing the NBC-Broadcast video for free over the air and the net. Else they should have their license revoked.
In my case it's actually a monopoly over the internet (Verizon FiOS or Comcast). No real choice there and why I think these companies should be government-regulated the same way the electric, natural gas, and water companies are regulated. They can't raise their prices without permission of the State PUC, and it should be the same with Verizon and Comcast.
I cannot believe this is currently modded as Insightful with a score of 5. NBC's video is free. They just restrict the free video to specific nighttime hours, but you do not have to pay to watch Olympic coverage unless you want to do so in real time. For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of what NBC is doing, but your specific charge is incorrect. Your gripe about lack of choice on internet providers is just an attempt to change the subject and complain about a real, but unrelated issue you feel strongly about.
Heins will likely join the list of people such as Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems) and whoever ran DEC at the end as the final CEO of a defunct technology company that one time was a major player. But RIM will likely outlast Nokia for whatever comfort that is worth.
Here are some examples of bad grammar that I see all the time from native speakers. It doesn't matter what country they went to school in, I still see them.
1) The belief that "could of"/"coulduv" or "should of"/"shoulduv" are real words instead of "could've" and "should've".
2) The belief that "prolly" is a real word and that "probably" is a made up one. My nephew, who is currently attending college and is genuinely smarter that average, told me that. He claimed that he had never in his life seen "probably".
3) The belief that any time a speaker is puzzled or surprised by something that he or she can just put a question mark at the end of it. For example, "That was the biggest dog I ever saw in my life?" is an example of what now passes for a question. This has become so prevalent on the internet that now even non-native speakers of English with excellent English comprehension have picked it up.
After talking with recent high school graduates (I live in the USA) I have learned that high schools don't teach grammar any more and at best the last time a kid maybe got a grammar lesson was in the 8th grade. I've decided that we're probably at most a few years away from college papers being somewhat similar to mobile telephone messages in terms of spelling and grammar.
As an American, I do think this is absolute crap. However, I've seen a willingness of both American political parties to cross lines that nobody ever dared to cross before so I can't say I'm truly surprised that the US government would push for his extradition while on the other hand not being very fond of the idea of having foreign laws apply to US companies in a restrictive sense. The real reason I think that the US government wants him is that I suspect he was making a lot more money on advertising than he has led on and that is what is really making this into a big deal. The US position is likely that he was profiting big time indirectly from helping people to infringe. That's basically what led tot he Kim Dotcom smack down as well.
If patents actually expired instead of the USPTO allowing the concept of submarine patents, then the situation might be workable. The best idea I've heard is what one of my friends has proposed. This would not apply to drug patents, but for everything else, you have to build a workable device to get a patent. That would eliminate vague software patents that have done nothing but enrich our legal system. However, you have to consider that the USPTO has a vested interest in allowing darn near anything to be patented as doing such continues to bring in money for them.
IWhat does surprise me is that he got a transplant at all in the first place. In Europe, advanced stage cancer patients usually are not eligible to receive any transplants whatsoever, due to the general scarcity of donor organs, and the low expected benefits of transplantation in such a patient. This seems to be different in the U.S., though, otherwise someone else would already have commented on that?
This is 100% speculation by me, but as an American I think this is what happened.
Most Americans have health insurance of some kind. Now you don't have to have it, Without digressing the upcoming Supreme Court decision on "Obamacare" is based on this very issue - that the US government cannot make you buy health insurance. Although somehow states are allowed to make you buy car insurance if you want to drive but anyway.... Rich people like Jobs probably don't have insurance. They can just pay with cash for whatever they need. So whereas Joe Blow with Acme Health Insurance might be told that since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had almost already lived longer than 99% of people with such diagnosis and that the odds were huge that it was going to come back soon and kill him when it did, he might not be a great candidate. However, liver transplants can now be done with partial livers and since the insurance company (non-existent) did not object and he could pay for 100% of it, there was no reason not to do it. US law probably prevents him from being discriminated against on the basis of his prior pancreatic cancer. There's no discrimination if the insurance company decides not to pay for it.
The more people using Craigslist the worse craigslist will abuse it's market share.
No doubt if Craigslist was some how paid before hand, they wouldn't care to send their sharks.
Best advice, people should convince their friends to stop using Craigslist and start using something else.
I fully agree. Know how many times in my life I have looked at Craigslist? Once. Just out of curiosity to see what it looks like. I cannot believe that for a large number of people it is the only site they look at if they want to buy something. My favorites are the people who believe that they simply cannot get cheated on Craigslist and then when they do, they act completely stunned as if such was completely impossible to happen.
Each Trek has positives and negatives. The things that some people may like may be exactly what turns off other people. TOS was campy at times and the cheap budgets of season 3 might not be received well to someone unfamiliar with the previous seasons. TNG was pretty weak in seasons 1 and 7. DS9's episodic soap opera nature has made it hold up very well in my opinion, yet others are completely turned off by that. Voyager got a lot better after Seven of Nine joined, yet it's so obvious that she was brought it for men (the story lines got better too, but she was brought in most as eye candy) that some women would probably be put off by that. Enterprise was mostly excellent in seasons 3 and 4 but the first 2 seasons were hit and miss and its finale was a complete embarrassment.
Just show her a really good season 1 episode of TOS like "Balance Of Terror" or "City On The Edge Of Forever". If she doesn't like those, it's a lost cause. While there are Trek fans who prefer other series over TOS, I've never heard of any true fan who thinks TOS sucks.
Finally, I cannot believe despite the good recommendations on individual episodes that everybody has neglected to mention the following from DS9.
5x22 - Children Of Time - the best episode of DS9
6x02 - Rocks And Shoals - the treachery of Vorta and the blind willingness of the Jem'Hadar to follow orders made this a superb episode.
Yes, we all know that most likely Israel and the USA are behind Stuxnet, but technically speaking nothing has been "confirmed". For diplomatic reasons the US and Israel need this to remain a "Yeah, we know you did it, we just can't offer conclusive proof" kind of thing. Confirming it could cause Iran to declare a state of war. As long as there is a twinge of doubt, the situation remains more stable.
I admit to being shocked to read what Lowery wrote about how advances work. Maybe on the small labels he presumably recorded on it worked that way, but none of the major labels work that way in general. Advances were used specifically to keep musicians in servitude to the recording company by running up debts that they could rarely pay. You can read about the practice here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoupment
I don't remember his name but one US Senator called the recording industry something like buying a house and having the bank continue to own it after you paid off the mortgage.
Of-course, China has much freer market than almost anybody else on the planet, all the businesses that are there, all the people, who moved their investment capital there, all the companies that produce there, you think they are there because China is communist? China is a communist like I am a ballerina.
This is actually a fairly ignorant post and it's not "insightful". It's well known that the Chinese government interferes or "helps" various businesses if they involve state interests. For example, the Chinese government is the driving force in current practices in the rare earths industry, although they are done behind the curtain of supposedly independent companies making those decisions. But as Communist governments in the past have viewed capitalism as an evil and a threat to socialism, it's certainly a valid point that modern Communism is nothing like Marxism or Leninism or Maoism.
China certainly does censor news and the internet. Neither is censored quite as much as westerners might think, but controls are there. And China, like all Communist states, is very terrified that the Communist Party could be kicked out of office if elections were truly free, so they hold out free elections as a carrot to be given out at a some nebulous future date. China has very serious corruption problems. These issues are completely endemic to Communist governments. So in my opinion you are focusing too much on the capitalism and ignoring the other signs that typical Communist problems (ie. corruption, weak laws that are rarely enforced).
They'll just downconvert it to 24 fps for home viewers until some years from now when another high def format comes out that can support 48 fps. So while I think you do have a point, I think it will be rendered moot by the 48 fps version not being available to consumers.
So now I can sleep through this movie at 48FPS like I slept through the rest of the Ring movies at 24FPS?
--
BMO
The double frame rate of the film will carry over into your sleeping. You'll be able to sleep for 30 minutes during The Hobbit and you'll be as refreshed as if you took an hour nap during a Ring movie.
Anybody wonder what the.su domain refers to? It's the Soviet Union. They haven't existed since 1991. Yet somehow people are still allowed to register under the domain.
Thank God I no longer have anything that runs PPC, but being a curious geek I took a look at their website. After some minutes of poking around I wasn't able to find any place that had a price to buy it. I'm certainly not going to buy it as I don't have anything that can use it, but the fact that I couldn't find any place on the website that told how much it cost convinced me that these guys really don't need any money.
"Gift" is not a verb. You cannot create a gerund from a noun.
What's your authority for this pronouncement? There is not now and never has been in the past an official body with the ability to make pronouncements on what is and isn't allowed in the English language. There were a few half-assed attempts to write "official" grammar books in the 1800s where they made such wonderful pronouncements as "you can't split infinitives". But like it or not (note that I deliberately started my sentence - gasp! - with "But" in direct violation of such grammar books) since there's no official body with the power to forbid it, you can "verbify nouns" or "nounify verbs" all day in English.
Back in the early 1950s, it was thought that the real prize of AI was to get a computer able to beat the best human chess player consistently. The reasoning at the time was that the only way this would be possible was for breakthroughs to happen in AI where a computer could learn to think and could reason better at chess than a human. Fast forward to 10 or so years ago where IBM realized that just by throwing money at the problem they could get a computer to play chess by brute force and beat the human champion more often than not. So I'm not surprised that some AI people discount the Turing test. I am not an expert in the field but it seems to me that AI is a heck of a lot harder than anybody realized in the 1950s and we may still be decades or even centuries away from the kind of AI that people 60 or so years ago thought we'd have by now. Part of me does wonder if maybe just like how AI research in chess took the easy way out by resorting to brute force that now it's they'll just say the Turing test is not valid rather than actually try to achieve it because to pass it would require breakthroughs nobody has thought of yet and that's hard.
Slashdot Mirror
This is likely going to be so easy that I, a non-lawyer, could competently handle this part of the case for Apple.
1) Did you sue anyone in the past for "stealing" your tablet work? No? Thought not.
2) Do you know that other companies, including Microsoft, pushed tablet technology years before the iPad came out?
3) Since you have not in the past pursued claims against others for supposedly "stealing" your work, how can we take your charges seriously now? Again, keep in mind that other companies have produced tablets prior to Apple and you had no objections to that.
4) Are you being compensated for your appearance in court today? If so, how much are you getting and who is paying it?
The only thing Apple is "guilty" of is being the first company to make tablets that did not suck big green ones and that people actually wanted to buy and use. Nobody was able to make the technology popular before them.
I like Wikitravel and think it has value, but on the downside, just about every guide book I've ever seen is better. Then again, I can actually point to places that Wikitravel covers and no guide book does. And Wikitravel sometimes has up to date transportation information (ie. "The new metro is now open in _____") that is missing in printed guide books. But guide books may have more detailed maps, information about places to visit, and better information about getting from A to Z in a particular place.
China and India are on the rise. Brazil and Australia are looking good.
Can you speak the language? What are the immigration policies of these countries?
Given how Australian "Strine" is completely incomprehensible to those of us who don't live there, I think you have inadvertently made a good point about all 4 places with the language question. Note that Australia is pretty hostile to immigration and it can be tough even for white people to get in. India will let you in if you get sponsored and they are willing to work through the bureaucracy but in general foreigners just don't move to India. You would also need to understand that in general Indians are not known for being very open to the idea of cross-cultural marriages.
There are downsides to it for sure - small size and one party politics come to mind - but Singapore seems to have its act together in a lot of ways and if I was a younger person looking to move off somewhere, it might be my choice. English skills in Singapore are extremely high and it's actually a little difficult to find people who can't speak it reasonably well.
I think you raised a great point. I'm not a Libertarian and I regard them with complete and utter disdain, viewing them at best as being horribly, horribly misguided and at worse as being complete morons. The gold standard has long been a Libertarian idea. As you point out, if this was such a truly fantastic idea with little to no downside as its supporters claim, some small country somewhere in the world would use it to get a competitive advantage. I can't find any evidence of any country returning to the gold standard in a very long time. The only thing I can find even close is that some Malaysian government official proposed a pan-Islamic states gold coin be produced to decrease reliance on the US dollar in the region but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
Disclaimer: I'm not a financial analyst, I'm just some dude on Slashdot.
I remember some years ago when SCO kept getting slapped down in court and people still believed the shares had value. I was absolutely amazed at how long it took for the shares to bottom out. But the stock market is not rational and prices do not always reflect reality. I have read pro and con thoughts on Nokia. The pro people are carrying the day right now. Their argument is that Nokia is pursuing a winning strategy with Microsoft and that Asia sales are strong. I think the con people are right though. Their arguments, which I believe carry more weight, are that Nokia's partnership with Microsoft has failed big time. Nobody is buying the phones and even worse, Nokia has had to gut the price of the current ones to get rid of them with the dirty little secret that some buyers may not know that the next version of Windows for Smartphones won't work on the current models Nokia is selling. Also, Nokia is basically cleaning up on the low cost, garbage phones of the industry. Is it really a path to profitability to say, in effect, "We are the king of low end crap phones!"? Apple and most of the major players like Samsung have shrugged off this low cost market and they're willing to let Nokia have it without much of a fight. I suspect that eventually the stock market will realize that Nokia has a losing hand and the price will plummet. My belief about a month ago was that by the end of the year Nokia would be under $1 a share in the US and facing delisting and having to do a reverse stock split to keep from being delisted. I still believe that will happen but I'd move the time table to sometime next year, probably in the first half of 2013. I think Nokia is finished as a maker of smartphones in the developed world but they can hang on as a much smaller company picking up the low cost crumbs of third world sales if they want.
Here's an executive summary:
1. Obama signed a law last year that "reformed" patents so that means the US government fixed any problems.
2. Patents actually weren't broken anyway. (kind of conflicts with #1)
3. Patents are superb for the biotech industry. (Comparing apples to oranges here)
4. We're just helping the little guy mostly.
5. Lots of people make money in the IT industry so it's not broken.
6. We're the only thing stopping pure outright thievery of IT patents.
I suspect that what Hatta said is completely true. I doubt that 100% of what you have is really worth keeping forever. I take photos when traveling and some are mistakes or just didn't turn out that well. One of things I like is that if I take enough photos, some will turn out to be really good. Note that I said "some" not "all".
If you have a friend who doesn't mind you could make a backup to the biggest hard drives you can afford and have your friend store them. I'm an IT guy and on a previous job I actually was authorized by my company to keep a set of backup tapes for our development servers at my house so we didn't have to pay an offsite storage company to store them.
I have a question - are you really going to argue that your photos are so valuable that you can't let them go into the cloud for fear that others might get copies? I'm in no position to judge whether that is true or not and even if you say it is, the rest of us may disagree. I know that some professional photographers have some really warped ideas about their own work and think that the wedding video they just got hired to shoot belongs to them and the paying customer is some kind of leech they'll deign to give one copy to under duress. If you got oodles of old wedding photos, for example, that you were hired 10 years ago to take, I doubt that it's really critical that you keep copies. I participate on a video forum and we see people all the time who want to watermark stupid crap like videos of their kids playing tee ball* because they are so delusional that they think the whole world wants to see their kid. I get that these photos may be just incredibly important to you, but do you really think that others are just waiting to steal them if they go on the cloud? Cloud backup would be your most cost effective solution.
* For the non-North Americans, "tee ball" is version of baseball that small children play in organized leagues. They hit the ball off a tee, hence the name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
It's currently on hold because of their current president and parliament, as part of trying to keep Russia from coming unglued at them. However, if their stated intention to join the EU goes through, it's likely they will become a NATO member state (21 of the 27 EU member states are currently members of NATO). Currently, they engage in joint military exercises with NATO.
As someone who can speak Russian pretty well and has spent a decent amount of time there and still has friends there, I can provide some insight. Basically when Krushchev took over in the 50s he moved some territory from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR. He was from Ukraine and if you look at a map, the move did make sense as it made the areas in question much closer to their SSR capital (Kiev) than they had been (Moscow). The problem was that when the USSR split up that these areas were primarily Russian speaking and ethnically Russian and they still look wistfully towards "Mother Russia". So basically it created a schizophrenic country where half the people think they are really Russians and the other half think they are Ukrainian.
The situation is incredibly complicated but basically the Ukrainian half and the military strongly want to join NATO. The EU? Eh, maybe, maybe not. The Russian half has some people who are adamantly opposed to NATO because they believe all the bs that comes out of the Russian media that NATO is a force of evil and some people who believe that joining NATO will lead to a Russian invasion. Actually joining NATO is about the only thing that would protect them against a Russian invasion. Russia has shown that it does not respect borders (ask Georgia and Moldova about that, although the Moldovan situation is more indirect) and the military and the Ukrainian speakers know that. The problem is that the Russian speaking people are in charge of the government now and they have been trying appeasement as a way to deal with Russia. The Ukrainian speaking people are hopelessly split into 2 warring factions whose leaders were too self-serving to form a united front against the Russian speaking half of the country who have united behind the old pro-Russian party. Ukraine is far too corrupt to join the EU for probably decades to come. Ukrainian people have very unrealistic goals and dreams about where their country should be economically and instead of trying to reach for an achievable goal like "In 10 years let's get to where Poland is today" they instead want to be today at the same economic level of Germany. The recent governments have failed to exploit Ukraine's low cost environment as a possible source of cheap labor for Europe and the educational system in general does not encourage the learning of useful international languages like English which might help to induce businesses to create jobs there. So my belief is that for the next 10-20 years Ukraine will likely not be part of the EU (many Russian speaking people distrust the EU, by the way) or NATO. The only way this will change is if the Ukrainian speaking people unite behind a new candidate yet to emerge who will force change down from the top and clean up the corrupt Soviet style government that is still in place.
Just a random thought: NBC video should be free. They were given a license to broadcast over the airwaves (which belong to the People) and should be sharing the NBC-Broadcast video for free over the air and the net. Else they should have their license revoked.
In my case it's actually a monopoly over the internet (Verizon FiOS or Comcast). No real choice there and why I think these companies should be government-regulated the same way the electric, natural gas, and water companies are regulated. They can't raise their prices without permission of the State PUC, and it should be the same with Verizon and Comcast.
I cannot believe this is currently modded as Insightful with a score of 5. NBC's video is free. They just restrict the free video to specific nighttime hours, but you do not have to pay to watch Olympic coverage unless you want to do so in real time. For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of what NBC is doing, but your specific charge is incorrect. Your gripe about lack of choice on internet providers is just an attempt to change the subject and complain about a real, but unrelated issue you feel strongly about.
Heins will likely join the list of people such as Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems) and whoever ran DEC at the end as the final CEO of a defunct technology company that one time was a major player. But RIM will likely outlast Nokia for whatever comfort that is worth.
Here are some examples of bad grammar that I see all the time from native speakers. It doesn't matter what country they went to school in, I still see them.
.
1) The belief that "could of"/"coulduv" or "should of"/"shoulduv" are real words instead of "could've" and "should've"
2) The belief that "prolly" is a real word and that "probably" is a made up one. My nephew, who is currently attending college and is genuinely smarter that average, told me that. He claimed that he had never in his life seen "probably".
3) The belief that any time a speaker is puzzled or surprised by something that he or she can just put a question mark at the end of it. For example, "That was the biggest dog I ever saw in my life?" is an example of what now passes for a question. This has become so prevalent on the internet that now even non-native speakers of English with excellent English comprehension have picked it up.
After talking with recent high school graduates (I live in the USA) I have learned that high schools don't teach grammar any more and at best the last time a kid maybe got a grammar lesson was in the 8th grade. I've decided that we're probably at most a few years away from college papers being somewhat similar to mobile telephone messages in terms of spelling and grammar.
As an American, I do think this is absolute crap. However, I've seen a willingness of both American political parties to cross lines that nobody ever dared to cross before so I can't say I'm truly surprised that the US government would push for his extradition while on the other hand not being very fond of the idea of having foreign laws apply to US companies in a restrictive sense. The real reason I think that the US government wants him is that I suspect he was making a lot more money on advertising than he has led on and that is what is really making this into a big deal. The US position is likely that he was profiting big time indirectly from helping people to infringe. That's basically what led tot he Kim Dotcom smack down as well.
If patents actually expired instead of the USPTO allowing the concept of submarine patents, then the situation might be workable. The best idea I've heard is what one of my friends has proposed. This would not apply to drug patents, but for everything else, you have to build a workable device to get a patent. That would eliminate vague software patents that have done nothing but enrich our legal system. However, you have to consider that the USPTO has a vested interest in allowing darn near anything to be patented as doing such continues to bring in money for them.
IWhat does surprise me is that he got a transplant at all in the first place. In Europe, advanced stage cancer patients usually are not eligible to receive any transplants whatsoever, due to the general scarcity of donor organs, and the low expected benefits of transplantation in such a patient. This seems to be different in the U.S., though, otherwise someone else would already have commented on that?
This is 100% speculation by me, but as an American I think this is what happened.
Most Americans have health insurance of some kind. Now you don't have to have it, Without digressing the upcoming Supreme Court decision on "Obamacare" is based on this very issue - that the US government cannot make you buy health insurance. Although somehow states are allowed to make you buy car insurance if you want to drive but anyway.... Rich people like Jobs probably don't have insurance. They can just pay with cash for whatever they need. So whereas Joe Blow with Acme Health Insurance might be told that since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had almost already lived longer than 99% of people with such diagnosis and that the odds were huge that it was going to come back soon and kill him when it did, he might not be a great candidate. However, liver transplants can now be done with partial livers and since the insurance company (non-existent) did not object and he could pay for 100% of it, there was no reason not to do it. US law probably prevents him from being discriminated against on the basis of his prior pancreatic cancer. There's no discrimination if the insurance company decides not to pay for it.
The more people using Craigslist the worse craigslist will abuse it's market share. No doubt if Craigslist was some how paid before hand, they wouldn't care to send their sharks.
Best advice, people should convince their friends to stop using Craigslist and start using something else.
I fully agree. Know how many times in my life I have looked at Craigslist? Once. Just out of curiosity to see what it looks like. I cannot believe that for a large number of people it is the only site they look at if they want to buy something. My favorites are the people who believe that they simply cannot get cheated on Craigslist and then when they do, they act completely stunned as if such was completely impossible to happen.
Each Trek has positives and negatives. The things that some people may like may be exactly what turns off other people. TOS was campy at times and the cheap budgets of season 3 might not be received well to someone unfamiliar with the previous seasons. TNG was pretty weak in seasons 1 and 7. DS9's episodic soap opera nature has made it hold up very well in my opinion, yet others are completely turned off by that. Voyager got a lot better after Seven of Nine joined, yet it's so obvious that she was brought it for men (the story lines got better too, but she was brought in most as eye candy) that some women would probably be put off by that. Enterprise was mostly excellent in seasons 3 and 4 but the first 2 seasons were hit and miss and its finale was a complete embarrassment.
Just show her a really good season 1 episode of TOS like "Balance Of Terror" or "City On The Edge Of Forever". If she doesn't like those, it's a lost cause. While there are Trek fans who prefer other series over TOS, I've never heard of any true fan who thinks TOS sucks.
Finally, I cannot believe despite the good recommendations on individual episodes that everybody has neglected to mention the following from DS9.
5x22 - Children Of Time - the best episode of DS9
6x02 - Rocks And Shoals - the treachery of Vorta and the blind willingness of the Jem'Hadar to follow orders made this a superb episode.
Yes, we all know that most likely Israel and the USA are behind Stuxnet, but technically speaking nothing has been "confirmed". For diplomatic reasons the US and Israel need this to remain a "Yeah, we know you did it, we just can't offer conclusive proof" kind of thing. Confirming it could cause Iran to declare a state of war. As long as there is a twinge of doubt, the situation remains more stable.
I admit to being shocked to read what Lowery wrote about how advances work. Maybe on the small labels he presumably recorded on it worked that way, but none of the major labels work that way in general. Advances were used specifically to keep musicians in servitude to the recording company by running up debts that they could rarely pay. You can read about the practice here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoupment
I don't remember his name but one US Senator called the recording industry something like buying a house and having the bank continue to own it after you paid off the mortgage.
Of-course, China has much freer market than almost anybody else on the planet, all the businesses that are there, all the people, who moved their investment capital there, all the companies that produce there, you think they are there because China is communist? China is a communist like I am a ballerina.
This is actually a fairly ignorant post and it's not "insightful". It's well known that the Chinese government interferes or "helps" various businesses if they involve state interests. For example, the Chinese government is the driving force in current practices in the rare earths industry, although they are done behind the curtain of supposedly independent companies making those decisions. But as Communist governments in the past have viewed capitalism as an evil and a threat to socialism, it's certainly a valid point that modern Communism is nothing like Marxism or Leninism or Maoism.
China certainly does censor news and the internet. Neither is censored quite as much as westerners might think, but controls are there. And China, like all Communist states, is very terrified that the Communist Party could be kicked out of office if elections were truly free, so they hold out free elections as a carrot to be given out at a some nebulous future date. China has very serious corruption problems. These issues are completely endemic to Communist governments. So in my opinion you are focusing too much on the capitalism and ignoring the other signs that typical Communist problems (ie. corruption, weak laws that are rarely enforced).
They'll just downconvert it to 24 fps for home viewers until some years from now when another high def format comes out that can support 48 fps. So while I think you do have a point, I think it will be rendered moot by the 48 fps version not being available to consumers.
So now I can sleep through this movie at 48FPS like I slept through the rest of the Ring movies at 24FPS?
-- BMO
The double frame rate of the film will carry over into your sleeping. You'll be able to sleep for 30 minutes during The Hobbit and you'll be as refreshed as if you took an hour nap during a Ring movie.
Anybody wonder what the .su domain refers to? It's the Soviet Union. They haven't existed since 1991. Yet somehow people are still allowed to register under the domain.
Thank God I no longer have anything that runs PPC, but being a curious geek I took a look at their website. After some minutes of poking around I wasn't able to find any place that had a price to buy it. I'm certainly not going to buy it as I don't have anything that can use it, but the fact that I couldn't find any place on the website that told how much it cost convinced me that these guys really don't need any money.
"Gift" is not a verb. You cannot create a gerund from a noun.
What's your authority for this pronouncement? There is not now and never has been in the past an official body with the ability to make pronouncements on what is and isn't allowed in the English language. There were a few half-assed attempts to write "official" grammar books in the 1800s where they made such wonderful pronouncements as "you can't split infinitives". But like it or not (note that I deliberately started my sentence - gasp! - with "But" in direct violation of such grammar books) since there's no official body with the power to forbid it, you can "verbify nouns" or "nounify verbs" all day in English.
Back in the early 1950s, it was thought that the real prize of AI was to get a computer able to beat the best human chess player consistently. The reasoning at the time was that the only way this would be possible was for breakthroughs to happen in AI where a computer could learn to think and could reason better at chess than a human. Fast forward to 10 or so years ago where IBM realized that just by throwing money at the problem they could get a computer to play chess by brute force and beat the human champion more often than not. So I'm not surprised that some AI people discount the Turing test. I am not an expert in the field but it seems to me that AI is a heck of a lot harder than anybody realized in the 1950s and we may still be decades or even centuries away from the kind of AI that people 60 or so years ago thought we'd have by now. Part of me does wonder if maybe just like how AI research in chess took the easy way out by resorting to brute force that now it's they'll just say the Turing test is not valid rather than actually try to achieve it because to pass it would require breakthroughs nobody has thought of yet and that's hard.