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Comment Seriously? (Score 5, Interesting) 789

From TFA:

Kiev has received threats of nuclear retaliation from Russia through unofficial channels if it continues to fight pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian Minister of Defence, Valeriy Heletey, announced on his Facebook page on Monday.

This is news for nerds, for people who are supposed to love science. Science is, when you can prove things, reproduce them. An announcement from someone on the losing side who has an interest in dragging NATO into this is not a statement that can be relied on. It is not even mentioned what the unofficial channel, is, nor was any kind of prove provided, like with all the rest of the anti-Russian propaganda, btw.

I expect tomorrow news on ./ to be: The pope said that God is real.

Comment Proprietary image format (Score 5, Insightful) 129

I was considering getting the first version of their camera, but they use a proprietary image format for the original data and requests to open it are unanswered so far. Not even a SDK is provided to access the original data even though it was promised. Kind of disappointing and enough reason for me not to buy.

Comment Re:Medical doctor (Score 4, Interesting) 737

You don't need electricity for soldering, all you you need is something to create heat, e.g. a fire, a needle, and solder: Last time I was on Cuba for a few weeks as a visiting scientists, the power supply of my laptop broke down. I was living in one of those casas particulares, and one of the landlady's relatives proposed to open the power supply (With a saw, because it was glued) . Then he found the bad contact and since they didn't have a soldering iron, he did the soldering with a needle heated in the gas flame. Two weeks later I had to repeat the soldering procedure applying some more tin-solder, but the power supply works without a flaw ever since.

Comment Re:Done on purpose (Score 1) 322

It's cheaper for the IRS to pay the dime to continue to make patches so that they will be available to countless others who are caught with their pants down, [...]

What makes you think these patches will be made available for these countless others? Microsoft will bill very single entity out there for the very same patches, that's quite certain.

Comment Re:The sheer volume! (Score 1) 139

They don't care about the country, they care more about their own selfishness than anything else. Ending the embargo wouldn't make that go away, Cuba would still be a shit hole because its leaders are utterly selfish pricks who use the country for their own benefit and NOTHING else.

Selfish pricks who set a state policy that makes it possible to provide free education and free health care for everyone that is. Cubans have a life expectancy of 79.4 years (USA 79.8) according to WHO estimates and the infant mortality in Cuba is 4.76, (US 5.2) according to CIA estimates. I have been to Cuba a few times, last time was 2006, and I can say they are certainly not rich, most are rather poor when considering "western" standards, but Cuba is certainly not a shit hole.

Comment Re:no. (Score 1) 650

... and commercial Linux distro support, bug and security fixes for their 2.4.0 kernel based releases.

The difference is, that the source code for the 2.4.0 Linux kernel is freely available, so anybody can hire a developer to fix security problems and hardware incompatibilities. With MS Windows and Mac OS there is only one vendor for each who has access to the source code and the permission to change it and fix things. If they don't want to do it, you're lost.

Comment Re:The best the SCOTUS could do is wipe software p (Score 1) 192

Yes, they will. And if you have a patent, then you have a legal right to make them pay you for your idea.

... and you will fail because you don't have the funds to win the patent case, and after the battle is over you will be broke.

Besides, if your innovation was in software, you will probably have to pay off a number of patent trolls the moment you become big enough to be milked and will also go broke, or work most of the time to pay someone else.

Software patents are a lose-lose for the small guy. Without them, the small guy can continue innovating and stay ahead of the big shots.

Comment Re:In other words . . . (Score 1) 409

And don't forget its ability to auto correct

When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered

Comment Re:I can't help but laugh a little (Score 1) 256

Both sides are relentlessly comparing each other to Nazi Germany. The Russians claim that Nazi-like fascist radicals led the coup and the Ukrainians claim that the Russians are behaving like Nazi Germany at the outset of World War II. It's like a bad internet argument.

Only that even the BBC now shows that here are indeed Nazi-like fascist radicals in charge now in Ukraine (especially see the two MP from Svoboda showing the numbers 14/88 at 5:00).

Comment Re:It's still protected by copyright anyway (Score 1) 105

Without patent protection, a lot of software won't enter the market because copycats who haven't done any R&D to create an innovative product will have the same access/edge as people who created the product.

If this assumption were true, then wine should be able to run every piece of software published for MS Windows = Win7 flawlessly by now.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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