You know there is a web interface to Dropbox too? People expect to read their documents, like word or PDF right there online. To do this the service must index the files and read them. Obviously if you encrypt the files, this can not be done.

I use Dropbox as my offsite backup of sensitive information and I trust the information to be safe. Simple, I encrypt the tar-ball with symmetric GPG. But then again I can only download the file vie the web interface if I wish and not view the contents online... buhuhu

That is not fully true. At least in East Germany you owned things. You could own a car and the furniture in your house. You may have hat to wait long to get them, but you bought them from the money you own. In cretin circumstances you could also own a house, but that was rather rare.

Nevertheless the the notion you point out is sort of correct. If you all get the same pay and there is an allocation system based on "need", it is clear that you try to game the system, like work less or "needing" more.

They are building a spaceport in the middle of a national park! Either it is a nature preserve or it is not one. Although I don't count myself to the environmentalist camp, but I see the ideas behind national parks. But in many cases the environmental impact studies are educated guess at best. The 12 rockets limit seems fairly arbitrary and more along the lines of projected SpaceX use of the facility and less on the environmental impact tolerances.

s/Voltaire/Evelyn Beatrice Hall/

She wrote that exact quote in a biography about Voltaire, but Voltaire never said that.

In addition Jürgen Klinsmann was the head coach of the German national team. He brought a good part of the current top players together. The current coach (Joachim Löw) worked under Kliensmann. Löw basically learned his chops under Klinsmann and as such there was little the NSA could have found out that Kleinsmann did not yet know. A testament to the knowledge and talent of Kliensmann is the fact that the US team got so far. (2:1 against Germany is not bad either.)

Probably some haphazard environmental impact study. But once SpaceX has the foot in the door and a need to launch more, it probably can be arranged to higher limits. If they can lay pipelines through a Alaskan wildlife preserve, they can launch more rockets from a national park in Texas.

Now THAT sounds like an awesome movie.

I would say yes, it takes some skill and experience to create simple to understand program. This does not mean that your average programmer can not hack together a functional program. But even your requirements of 2 years worth of training and experience is way more than the TFA would like, it falls more along the lines of "learn programming in 8 hours" type of requirement.

I would wager that the real impact is the opposite. It is like used games, on the surface it looks like a "lost sale" but in reality it provides liquidity. The used phone market then fuels the new pone market, since those that sell the phone do not have / don't want to spend the money on their yearly upgrade cycle. On the other hand those that buy the used phones don't have the money to spend on a new phone. Even though they may have spent the money on a lower end device, it is not a lost sale, since as mentioned before they supported the sale of a high end device, which again has a higher profit margin.

But if MBAs would also get that, that would be great.

And I though you should not drop the F-Bomb near kids...

That already exists and is called the "sport" (ON) or "eco mode" (OFF) controls. Now they "only" influence the shift manual indicator or automatic gear, but that would not be a big deal to wire it as to influence the behavior of the autodrive.

Funny you say that, Mercedes has multi zone thermostats and fan controls with an auto setting. Getting this right is not that hard. They have been doing this since the 90s and it works quite fine even in their lower end cars. The only thing that boggles my mind is that they think you can have one side of the car at 18C and the other at 25C. I always put them at the same setting. Now that they are digital (HW knob & LED display) they could offer a sync option...

"A method of rendering a 3D animation in real time on a computer monitor is patentable subject matter." Just because you don't understand the subject matter does not make it patentable. Your example is a really bad example because it takes 2 coordinate transformations, one linear interpolation and 2 comparisons to go from geometry to pixels. From that point on it is just copying them from video memory to a screen. To anybody with a math background these are a really old hat and just because two specific matrices does not mean it is patatable. Computer graphics are a really bad filed for patetens because you are either in the field of basic math or trying to replicate physics.

Although I don't think that patents are inherently bad, the current burden of proof for software patents are inherently low. As being listed as inventor on two patents and having seen a few others, you can not claim that I totally do not have a clue how the system works. How I and few of my colleagues came to being "inventors" was, we just did out daily work of solving mediocre to boring problems and then someone comes along and is awed in his naivety and pushes us write a few pages about the "invention". This goes by lawyers and a few months later you are an inventor on the patent. To this day I have never invented anything, I just look around me and into other fields and am quite good at applying new ideas to old problems.

Maybe the LZW patents and similar groundbreaking algorithms may be worthy of a patent, but the current status quo you can throw out 95% of the patents, because any person with a modest intellect will come up with a similar solution to the given problem. The only difference is that patent holder had the problem first.

A cease and desist letter does not have to be threatening at all. For example take this C&D letter from Jack Daniel's to an author that used an JD inspired book cover: http://www.buzzfeed.com/bfeld/...

Just because you have a certain legal requirement to do something, does not mean you need to be a total prick about it.

I don't think he was referring to the area around Gitmo and towards the soldiers on guard duty. Sure the "inmates" have a hard time, but the soldiers are on a tropical island and have off duty hours.