The argument gets weaker.

After the "Alice Corp vs. CLS Bank" supreme court ruling which states that "let's do it on an computer", where it is something that is well known, prior art, common practice, etc. is no longer patentable. The court stressed that the ruling was limited to the case at hand, but that hasn't stopped [at least] two lower courts from applying it in new rulings.

Samsung recently tried to apply the ruling retroactively towards the [infamous] slide-to-unlock patent, but was shut down by Koh merely because Samsung didn't raise the argument at trial [they were too late].

But, with the Alice decision, slide-to-unlock is completely invalid, and Samsung [and others] will be able to use this in future proceedings.

Glad you're getting 6Mb/s. A friend of mine has Verizon [east coast] and barely gets 3Mb/s.

I'm guessing that when you say DSL2 and expect 20Mb/s down, you're meaning ADSL2+ [max is 24Mb/s vs. ADSL2 which is 12Mb/s]. I don't know how long 2+ has been out, but you might give 2+ a try if you're not already on it. Even with the bad wiring, it may help with some extra speed. Normally, if you're too far away, the extra 2+ frequencies don't help because they get dampened out, but your case may be an exception.

A couple of other things to try [with building owner's cooperation/blessing]:
- You can pay to have a telco tech string new inside wiring
- There are bidirectional DSL amplifiers that can go inline [~$100]. Normally, they're used to boost a DSL signal long haul (e.g. if a subscriber is [say] 20 miles to the CO, these are inserted every mile or so]. Putting one of these "in the cabinet" [where the telco wiring enters the building] might boost the signal enough to overpower the bad internal wiring.
- I suspect that sonic already thought of this, but if you've got four wires entering your place, trying the "other" pair [inside vs. outside] might be better. I actually had this happen to me, and the tech changed things (e.g. one pair was bad, but the other was clean).

We both forgot to mention that because of the no datacap, sonic also lets you run a server from home 24x7 [which is a TOS violation for AT&T]

sonic.net has no datacaps and no "artificial" speed limits. [Note: I'm not affiliated with them--just a very happy customer since I switched in March].

Of course, I'm assuming that when you said "CPUC" that means California PUC. If so, go to http://www.sonic.net/ and enter your AT&T landline number. They will tell you how many feet you are from the sonic CO. Then, go to http://www.dslreports.com/foru... to see what your likely speed with sonic will be.

I'm 5000 feet to the sonic CO, so I got 1.3 megabytes/second [2x AT&T's elite service]. sonic is also cheaper. And, tech support couldn't be more pleasant or helpful.

In fact, when you post a tech question to a sonic tech forum, you might just get a response from Dane [Jasper]--the sonic.net CEO

I'm in Sunnyvale and I was awake at the time. I could feel it [for 3-4 seconds], but nothing fell. Dining room light hanging from ceiling swayed. Feeling here was less than a 4.3 in Carmel when I was in Cupertino. I've felt worse before. I was shocked to learn it was a 6.0 up north [And I hope the severely injured people recover quickly].

I was awake and felt the Californina quake [I'm in Santa Clara county]. It's probably the 7th or so quakes I've felt over the last 30 years. Where I was it was a small sway for 3-4 seconds. I was lucky [my heart goes out to those more deeply affected]. In the 1989 quake I was in Europe, but came back to find my place had stuff flung everywhere.

My prep [not great]:
- 20 cans of spam [survival rate: one can/day]
- Bottles of water
- Bleach [1 drop per gallon of water from the toilet tank]
- Flashlights with batteries
- Landline phone (with old trimline so that it works w/o power)
- Try to keep my gas tank at least 1/2 full
- Car charger for cell phone
- USB thumb drive on my key ring with copies of all my important documents [*]

[*] Had a fire that gutted half the building near mine once. I had HD backups of data, but they could have gone up in smoke. After that, I got the thumb drive. Now I scan in as much as I can [or print receipt/confirmations to .pdf files]

Perhaps it was "The Green Slime" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

Yes, you could provide power for the death ray when the sun isn't shining.

But, "staunchly" is--it was [probably] a typo. A synonym for staunchly is "strictly" [which flows better, IMO], but "staunchly" would still be acceptable.

As to "it's" vs "its", it's often a toss up for many people as its usage isn't always clear cut [even among scholars and academics]. Consider the coin that might be used. In particular, if it's possessed by its own demons :-)

How about Dr. Dobbs?

And the whole riff about GC. It makes out like it's superior in all cases.

It does mention refcounting as a subset [which perl does just fine with]. But, even with GC/refcount, you still have to break cyclic links in a tree (e.g. parent node has a list of children and each child points to its parent) when you're done or it will never GC. Also, sometimes you have to do something explicit to release resources (e.g. files) at a given time, rather than some arbitrary time later.

Further, GC is the bane of anything that must provide a constant semi-realtime response. With refcounting [can be done even in C/C++ if designed that way], you've got a "pay as you go" system [when refcount goes to zero, you free immediately]. With GC, you're "piling up debt" [of reclamation].

I've got a friend who is working on a java based web server system. When GC reclamation [finally] kicks in, the entire system goes "offline" for 35-45 seconds at a clip. He claims that particular system can be ameliorated with better programming practices (e.g. be mindful when a given construct will produce large amounts of GC), but is hard pressed to convince his colleagues of the need to do so.

And maybe perl. They forgot to mention that slashdot uses it [IIRC]. And TIOBE to compile the stats [IIRC].
http://developers.slashdot.org...

Perhaps. But, if you cared to look at the other posts on the thread, you'd see how calm and rationale he was. Or look at the gcc bug report he filed. The gcc bug has gotten fixed

I've met Linus in the flesh a number of years back and he is truly a calm and mellow guy. He only does the "bullying" for the "shock effect" to get people [with strong egos] to actually start _thinking_.

And there is some precedent for this. A number of years back, gcc was doing an illegal code motion optimization across a spinlock. After literally hundreds of posts on the gcc mailing list about how this wasn't a bug, Linus started using muscle. I would have, too, at that point. When somebody finally pointed out that the optimization was actually violating requirements in the memory model of the [then] upcoming ISO C spec, it took another hundred or so posts before they actually believed one of their own [gcc people].

Since that time, the gcc folks have become more receptive to [rather than dismissive of] bugs filed by the kernel people--which is a good thing.

IMO, cmd.com is [also] a four letter word :)

$lisp?? Was this on McGill's RAX/Music or BU's RAX/VPS system by any chance?

But, Germany wants to be part of the "special club" that has been US, GB, Canada, Australia, New Zealand for sharing SIGINT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... But, most of those are just part of the UK, and they speak English [more or less :-)], so Germany can never really be "one of the good ole boys" ...