They changed their name recently, but it still operates as a market: it serves as a place for sellers and buyers to meet and make a transaction and it takes a fee for the service. You can't compare it with a grocery shop selling a box of cereal, the grocery shop has to buy in advance to have stock therefore there are two transactions, manufacturer shop and shop consumer. The manufacturer does not know who the consumer is, but he knows very well who the shop is, and the shop knows who comes to make purchases. in the case of the Play Store purchases are made directly from buyer to app developer.

A rejected patents entails a relatively small application fee, needs a motivated rejection memoir from the examiner, which can be appealed and ensures a long processing time of the patent application.

On the other hand, an accepted patent means recurring renewal fees for the USPTO, and a painless job for the examiner which is paid in part depending on how many applications he can process per month.

Does that answer your question?

Actually, exception is feminine, so we say "une NullPointerException" ;-)

That annoyance has been there for a very long time, before Sun's acquisition. Oracle said they would remove it eventually. They're not being greedier than Sun in this matter.

Many have tried but there is an extremely high barrier to entry. Nobody is interested in an account with a service that no seller takes, and sellers see no point in setting up a service that has no users. There is also the added complexity, and reluctance to give your credit card details to multiple companies.

I don't really get this. Is it this supposed to be illustrative the most environment? A place where you are constantly under stress seems indicative of bad practices to me, and not a place where I would like to work.

The people who invested themselves emotionally, spending years and sometimes hundreds of dollars in in-game items might disagree with this. The fact that it has no value with you does not mean that it has no value for someone else.

Well, you know the drill. Software patents are not legally allowed but this doesn't stop the European patent office from issuing them. And having a patent invalidated is a long and expensive judiciary process.

Like you I've built many PCs and only very rarely have changed the CPU afterward, *however*, each time I've been able to pick a motherboard with exactly the features I wanted, and a CPU with the best characteristics, and for both I could shop and find the best deal. If in the future both are soldered together, manufacturers won't be producing all the possible combinations that exist, they will pick a few generic configurations and we'll end up with less choice and less competition between vendors.

This whole idiocy is intended to force modules devs to actualy do nothing during init so that udev/systemd can advertise faster boot up times.

I think their strategy is to go for the most outrageous first, so that the slightly less outrageous passes as a good gesture afterwards. The judge will probably be fine with this new positioning, although had it been the first thing proposed by apple he probably would asked for something better.

You're correct that power drops with the square of distance, however it does not mean efficiency follows the same relation. It can be improved through resonance. This phenomenon allows the power of the magnetic field to be much higher than the electrical power put in the antenna. Think of somebody pushing a child on a swing. This works because an induction antenna does not simply send energy into space, but it sets up a magnetic field that can be recaptured and reused in the next cycle, adding up the energy. If the system is well built a large percentage of the unused energy can be recycled this way. Transmitters such as the ones used in RFiD aim for quality factors (the ratio of energy input vs energy loss per cycle) of up to 1000. That allows for energy transfer at relatively large distances.

The benefit of the doubt should always go to the suspect, not the plaintiff, unless you take the risk to send innocents to jail for crimes they *might* have committed or intended to commit, which is unacceptable.

They've always looked like a commercial operation to me. I've been reading the Make blog for a long time, almost as long as it existed and it didn't take long for them to start pushing their commercial products. Unfortunately a lot of "open source" hardware companies behave the same. Calling your product Open source -it should be open design, really- is a nice buzzword to appeal to geeks, but as soon as someone actually tests this by exploiting it (and making this possible is the whole point of open source), they shut it down. Hypocrites.

Something that reduces symptoms could be called an effective treatment, no ?