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Comment Re:Um no (Score 2) 224

I don't think they're very concerned with easily-divisible numbers—4*7-day months and 13-month years!

13 months is a little annoying, yes; you have to split the months on week boundaries to make quarters. But we actually do have 13 lunar cycles in a year, so this naturally aligns the months with the real moon. And we keep 7 day weeks, which is a win both because we're used to our week, and because 7 days is a natural quarter-moon. And no more "30 days hath December..."

Thing is, a workable Earth calendar never is going to be evenly divisible by powers of 10, because it has to stay aligned with astronomical cycles which are subtly varying; even the Sun and Moon don't strictly align. So everything's going to be a bit of a juggle. Frankly, I think this is the best alternate calendar design I've seen in a long while.

Comment WTF? Both are eyewear therefore the SAME! (Score 2, Insightful) 108

The use cases for google glass (overlaying information ontop of really - i.e. augmented reality) and Oculus Rift (a VR display that supplants and replaces your view with a different view - i.e. virtual reality) are entirely different. That would be like buying a car manufacturer to help catch up with SpaceX in building heavy launch vehicles - yeah, both are things you catch a ride in - but the technology that powers them doesn't cross pollinate.

Comment Re:No, the problem is DVD should not be cheaper (Score 1) 490

The question you should be asking is why is streaming video so expensive that DVD (shipping little plastic discs around) is cheaper than sending bits over a wire?

Because it's the second stupidest deliberate misuse of computational capacity to artificially create digital scarcity since Bitcoins.

The correct way to distribute large files like movies online is to copy the bits as locally to the endpoints as possible, and cache them pervasively at all levels of the network. Nothing would need to be sent more than once down any given cable. It would be fast, cheap, make use of the Internet as it was designed to function, and give us near-unlimited bandwidth.

But that would mean that those bits don't become artificially scarce and can't be tracked and audited by the media companies for copy-protection purposes. So instead of copying, we stream them over and over and over again, generating terabytes of needless, duplicated data traffic, and creating huge bandwidth storms that suck all the capacity out of the Internet.

tldr: Video streaming is expensive because it was designed to be. It wasn't designed by or for you, and it doesn't benefit you.

Comment Re:Gnome = good (Score 4, Funny) 134

They took out the the duel pain feature?!?!?! WTF.

Yeah, I hate it too when I score a counter-riposte to my opponent's flying parry and there's just a beep on the referee's scoreboard and no blood.

Comment Conspiracy or act of legislature? (Score 5, Insightful) 395

In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory.

Marijuana is still illegal, right? I mean, it's it a conspiracy theory if I can point to the status and rules at issue?

Comment Re:The term of art is "obvious." (Score 1) 406

I have a better bright-line rule to suggest: no method patents - ever.

Patents should be restricted to the implementation of physical mechanisms - machines, circuits and widgets. Not pseudo code - like the one you linked. What you linked is an idea - an abstract concept of how to solve a problem. The specific implementation could be subject to copyright protection (for the code) and trademark protection (if the slide style became a hallmark of the product) but a patent? No way.

Comment The term of art is "obvious." (Score 5, Insightful) 406

You're not allowed to patent an obvious advancement.

But patent law is offensively fucked up. Basically, it's a war of money. Both sides line up patent lawyers (one of a very few formally recognized specializations for attorneys in the U.S.) and burn money until someone gives up. This case will almost certainly wind up before the Supreme Court eventually - unless Samsung folds and pays to make apple go away. Fortunately, Samsung is sufficiently profitable that it can saturate the process with more money than required and write it off as a margin cost for continuing to compete in the smartphone market.

Apple's patents are offensively bad. There *is* enough there to require a jury verdict to nullify them rather than a summary ruling by the Court (preferably one where the foreman doesn't lie about having a personal stake in proving that software patents are nearly always valid - like the last trial between these two) but in a sane system of patents there would be no question that "slide to unlock" is a variation of long established design concepts - i.e. a latch.

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