Notice that none of those are actually complaining about the establishment of a unitary court or patent, nor are they saying that this legalizes software patents, which it doesn't. Instead, they say that this could "restart the debate" over software patents. In fact, if you only read the fear-mongering, bolded "software patents are fully enforceable across Europe" in the second quote, you might miss the fact that it's saying that pro-software patent groups want that result, not that it actually exists now.

Mr. Henrion is apparently so strongly opposed to software patents that he's seeing them everywhere he turns. The Unitary Patent is not an "attempt to legalize software patents," it's an attempt to harmonize the current patent system in Europe, which is a silly mishmash of union-wide and nation-specific laws. Specifically, right now, you file a patent application with the European Patent Office, which examines it. If it's allowed, then it doesn't become a patent, as there is no "European patent". Instead, you then also have to file patent applications in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Italy, Austria, Belgium, etc., etc., paying national patent fees to each country. Those countries will rubber-stamp the patent as allowed based on the European Patent Office's decision to grant, so there's nothing added - it's just a way for each country to grab additional fees.

Of course, as a result of those individual country fees, hardly anyone files for patent protection in, say, Luxembourg, or Albania, or Latvia, because the markets aren't big enough to justify several thousand in fees per country (except in pharma, where they can just charge thousands of dollars per dose of medicine and get the costs back easily). In fact, generally, high tech inventors only get protection in the UK, France, and Germany.

As a result of not having patent protection in those other countries, companies also don't invest in those other countries... You're not going to open a manufacturing plant in, say, Portugal, even if the labor is really cheap, if you have no patent protection there and your competitor can simply open a plant across the street and spy through your windows. Nor are you really going to focus marketing efforts in those countries, if your competitor can simply buy the product and reverse engineer it. So, you end up with 1st world Europe in UK/FR/DE, and 2nd (or 3rd) world Europe everywhere else.

The Unitary Patent, on the other hand, is an actual European Patent. Rather than nationalizing in each individual country, you get a single European Patent that is enforceable everywhere in Europe. It doesn't make software patents legal - and in fact, software patenting is explicitly not allowed in Europe already, and this doesn't change anything about it - it just makes the filing and fees more straightforward, while extending protection into those other countries.

The other thing it does - and Slashdot should like this - is that it creates a Unified Patent Court that hears cases on infringement and validity of European patents. And it's not just one old fart in a black robe who doesn't use email and 12 idiots who had the day off from work, it's actually panels of three specialist judges who only hear patent cases and have appropriate scientific or engineering backgrounds (there's a mechanical division, a chemical division, and an electrical division).

Now, there is some opposition to the Unitary Patent, but it's not "zomg, this legalizes software!" Instead, it's coming from companies in those countries that no one bothers getting a patent in that actually are doing reverse engineering of competitor's products. And yeah, they should be upset, because this would force them to come up with their own inventions rather than just stealing everyone else's.

Disclaimer: I am a U.S. patent attorney, I'm not your attorney, this is not legal advice, etc.

Literally every president - and candidate - since Reagan has been called "polarizing". Look at Romney with his whole "47% of the country will never vote for me, so we need to focus on the remaining 53% to win" thing. Why is it an issue now?

Yeah, that's never been abused before...

Maybe it's an issue with HR at your company, not passing resumes of women to you.

Sure, but your earlier comment was that you haven't even seen a woman candidate in years. Unless you've also never seen any male candidates and have maintained the same team through that period, than that random sampling should be much more than 10. And depending on how many resumes you've received and interviews conducted, seeing no women candidates could start looking very strange statistically.

So, industry-wide, sure, it's a thing for sociologists and educators. But your team personally? Maybe there's something you've missed in your position advertising that convinces women never to apply.

Have you tried to figure out why that is, or is it not a focus?

I think you'd be fine. As people mentioned, the roads can be a bit difficult, but take your time (put the game on pause when doing a bunch of road building) and have fun.

As others have noted, this is realistic. There's also a real-world solution for it - exits should occur before merges. That way, there's an empty lane for cars to merge into. By having a merge before the exit, as highway throughput increases, you experience jams.

Yep. Great system, though a little awkward when tipping and they're standing over you staring as you go to push the 10- no, 15- no, [gulp] 20% button. Maybe that's why they don't tip much in Europe.

That said, there's a reason why the US is moving to Chip & Signature cards, but not Chip & PIN. The banks will tell you it's because they don't want to confuse or scare their customers who can't learn new systems, but the real answer is that legally, if there's fraud on regular credit cards or chip & signature, the banks can charge it back to the merchant, who must have failed to verify the signature or ID of the purchaser. If there's fraud on chip & PIN cards, legally, the banks have to eat it. So they're not moving to that until they have to.

Kind of... You know how, even though you only have two ears, you can still determine whether a sound is coming from in front of you, behind you, above you, below you, etc.? You don't need 5 ears or 7 ears or whatever surround-sound standard you think of, and yet you still get a great 3D image. It has to do with some complicated math our brains are instinctively doing, measuring the interaural phase differences of low frequency signals received at each ear, and interaural timing and amplitude differences of high frequency signals. A signal from your right that gets to your right ear has to travel an additional foot and a half or so to get to your left ear, and that results in a phase difference for a signal with a long wavelength (say, below around 800 Hz) or a time and amplitude difference for signals with shorter wavelengths.
Additionally, your ears are not symmetrical, but have a small reflector at the front, a curved reflector along the top and back, etc., and these reflectors have specific reflective and absorptive bandwidths, so signals coming from different directions (above you, below you, etc.) are filtered in slightly different ways.

All of these features make up the head-related transfer function (HRTF) that acts as a filter on a signal based on its frequency and 3-dimensional position around your head.

As an aside, binaural recordings are typically done with things that look like headphones, but are actually microphones placed very close to the engineer's ears, so that the audio they pick up is affected by the HRTF. When you play the recording back over headphones, you get incredible 3D audio. And Neumann makes the KU 100 head-on-a-stick binaural microphone that actually has rubbery ears and microphones placed where eardrums would be.

This standard defines ways to store and process the HRTF so that recordings can be decoded by binaural processors for playback in earbuds or headphones. Importantly, it allows a recording to be stored in a format capable of multiple ways of decoding, so that you can have one track that you can play in surround sound from your speakers, or load up on your phone and play through ear buds, and still get a great 3D environment (binaural recordings don't work effectively through speakers, and surround sound collapses down to stereo through ear buds; this allows one file to play on both).

That makes no sense, both from a physics standpoint and a common sense standpoint. For the former, sound is varying air pressure over time. Distance doesn't come into it, and you don't need to run around in a space to hear low frequencies.

For the latter, the distance between ear buds and your eardrum are approximately what, half an inch? Sound travels at about 1000 ft/sec, or conversely, has a wavelength of 1 ft at 1kHz, 1 inch at 12 kHz, and a half-inch at 24kHz. If your ability to hear low frequency depended on the distance between your ear and the source, then no one wearing earbuds could hear anything below 24 kHz, right? And since most people can't hear above 20kHz, then ear buds would just be silence generators, right?

Or, if you wanted to hear the rumble of an approaching train in the distance, you wouldn't put your ear on the track because "the distance between it and your ear wouldn't be enough to hear low frequencies" and instead, you'd want to stand several feet away?

In fact, as noted above, the wavelength of 1 kHz sound wave in air is 1 ft. At 100 Hz, it's 10ft, and at 20 Hz, it's 50 ft. How many people have 50 feet between their ears and their speakers? Or even 10 feet in most living rooms?

Your post makes no sense, no matter how you think about it.

Not really - Amex puts its CCV on the front of the card. The real purpose is that the CCV isn't encoded in the magnetic strip, and isn't embossed, so theoretically, someone using a magnetic swiper to steal data or someone dumpster diving for those old carbon paper-imprint style records would get the numbers but not the CVV.

But of course, the person who is stealing your credit card info is most likely your waiter, and they have a minute or two with your card over at the POS to copy down the CVV manually.

If so, why aren't iOS devices a target for this?
And Macs are known for being high-priced toys for rich yuppies with more disposable income than sense, hence the $10k gold iWatch, right? Aren't those exactly the sort of people you want to scam, rather than Joe Schmoe with his 10 year old Stinkpad and $20 in his checking account?

As per the XKCD comic, the solution is a social one, not a technical one. Spam callers spoof their numbers, which is why they're so difficult to block, but caller ID spoofing is explicitly allowed by the phone companies, who let the spammers specify a "calling from" number to be included in the caller ID data. However, the phone company knows exactly where the real call is coming from and who is making it - that's how they bill the company for the 20,000 phone calls they make every month.

And why does the phone company do this? Because the spammers pay them decent money, and most people don't realize that the phone company's involved, so they get mad at the spammers and not AT&T or Verizon.

So, the solution is to send a burly man with a wrench to the CEO's office and ask him politely to stop letting companies specify different caller ID numbers, if he would like his kneecaps to remain intact.