Can someone enlightened explain why is Sony in bed with Microsoft and Apple against Google - Sony's only hope for their mobile and tablets division?

Is it the media and games departments that are fighting a war against their own company?

As soon as I think that Sony might be doing something right, they shove their heads up their arse again.

I don't think that statement is correct unless you remove water too.

Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas, and CO2 absorbs just a few percent of what water does.

The thing is that the breakdown is just plain silly.

It doesnt really make sense to have both a "licence cost" ( pulled out of a hat ) PLUS compensation for lost sales.

A compensation as a licence cost * penalty factor OR a compensation for the actual lost sales makes sense.

Both the licence cost or the claim about lost sales are in reality just made up, since there is no equivalent licence available,
and there is no way to actually calculate the damages for lost sales.

If they invented a list price for 10 trillion dollars for an "online unlimited redistribution licence" or claimed 6 billion lost sales,
it would have been obvious that they were just arbitrary numbers. As it is now, they somehow managed to convince the laymens that
contitutes the first instance court in Sweden that the number are solid.

I think it would at least have been possible to argue against the claims. If the ruling is appealed,
and with a new laywer, there is a high probability that the ruling will be different, even though the courts in sweden
are lobbied hard with "immaterial rights conferences" and interest groups sponsored by the media companies.

Isn't this what everyone does today? I thought the whole point of tracker images was personal urls like 'img158294.png'.

It won't help the users privacy a bit, or actually make it worse since users can't ignore image attachments anymore - google automatically hit the tracker url for them...

I don't know, I think it's only Larry Ellison that calls heaps of servers in the basement for "personal cloud" ....

No, it doesn't work that way.

If you are sick and poor and potentially malnutritioned, it's a higer risk that you wont be able to cope with a serious infection.

Maybe some people have better immune systems, but if you get MRSA - and get sick, it's a coctail of very expensive antibiotics and possibly surgery that will save you.

Uhm.

Germany has a population of 82 million. It's about 1/4 of the population in the US, and about 3/4 of Russias. Only US, India, China and Russia have larger economies. It is also one of the worlds most technically advanced countries. They certainly could have technical and economical capability to monitor american politicians.

  It is only for political reasons they probably not are doing that, but you can be certain that they monitor the political situation and the military capabilities of all relevant parties,

You are making it sound easier than it is.

If its an actual complicated problem, the parts interacts. The complexity is in the interaction.
It is also a matter of "leaky" abstractions. There is always a corner case where the abstractions isn't enough.

Business problems, like all real life problems, are hard- but in a toally different way.
You can't rollback death and not even a spoken word, and you may spend days thinking about unsolvable problems,
but the reality is normally not as rigid and fragile as the abstractions and rules of a computer system.

In real life you can bend the rules.

All tools that tries to remove complexity are fighting against the law of thermodynamics.
Or put in another way, they will make simpler problems simpler, and the rest of the problems harder.

There is probably a sweet spot somewhere around where most popular programming languages are today,
somewhere between assembler code and bpel.

It is possible that the expressability can be improved for some types of problem. It is for instance rather strange that no popular language natively can describe relations between entities, and are forcing us to work with data structures from the 60ies as a workaround for the lack of relational constructs.

Free roads seems to fall out of the fucking sky.

I suspect you would cry about tyrants if you suddenly had to pay per passage for them.

Speaking of Hitler, and roads, you might find a connection there, btw.

Thank you sir. Well said.

A large and complex system will need a manegement and regulatory process that *can* handle requirements that changes (or improves), since the analysis can't be made up front (too complex). An incremental and exploratory process is needed, but I suspect that the processes in place within any government isn't responsive enough, as they are clearly geared for top-down implementation.

Obviously won't the short time frame and political descision vacuum help.

A complex problem won't be simpler just because the tool isn't as powerful. All these ideas comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about what it is that actually makes system development hard.

Well...

As the spot prises go UP when they have to shut down a large part of the total production capacity,
then they may actually make more money from their other plants when that happens.

So there's not exactly any incentives to go check the intake filter too often...

... er, yes. I might be a bit thick here, but isn't the phone authenticating the actual charger?

Well, the problem is that a faulty charger may send +-110 volts as "ground" and -95 to 115 volts as "+5 v" and the phone would be perfectly fine until something or someone touches it and provides a path to true ground.

Extra cheap transformers may also create a phantom ground floating at half the nominal voltage.

> Brillant!

FTFY