At least it's no longer flying in restricted airspace... :)

Meddia is not the same thing as software, so your examples really don't apply in this case. Better examples are:

ASHTON-TATE CORP. v. FOX SOFTWARE, INC. -- NO. CV 88-6837 TJH (TX).

Lotus Development Corp. v. Paperback Software International. U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts. June 28, 1990. 740 F.Supp. 37, 15 USPQ2d 1577

The interpretation that the federal government is holding forth here is that both of these cases were adjudicated incorrectly.

If the Supreme Court fails to hear the current case, both of those previous cases are defacto overturned.

You can effectively say "goodbye" to the software industry, if companies are allowed to enforce interface copyrights. At least in the U.S.. Obviously, other countries will just ignore the U.S.'s idiocy, and continue on their merry way, and quickly surpass the U.S. in software development, just as they have in other economic areas.

Easy detection method #48:

(1) Send out a large electromagnetic pulse

(2) If it falls out of the sky, it was a drone

This.

It's pretty obvious that this is a punishment for adding encryption to Android devices, and for going to SSL for all web transactions, making it much more difficult to spy, despite administrative objections.

The recommendation is clearly punitive because Google has pissed the executive off, and consistently opted on the side of data protection, and has disclosed many of the recently discovered OpenSSL and SSSL protocol flaws which made eavesdropping easier.

If you're the sort of person who believes any and all business is merely a way to make profit and nobody who creates a company ever actually cares about the task they perform, then sure. Reality is more complex than that.

Re: China. iOS is in the minority in China. Even at the time of the iPhone 6 launch iOS market share was only 20%, but iOS market share always spikes around the time of a new iPhone launch, then falls back down in the other quarters. And China is a special case - Google isn't willing to play ball with the communist government so the services that make Android most useful are all blocked there. Apple cooperates so they can sell iOS as is, getting a built-in advantage. Despite this, Android still dominates.

From their perspective it'd be much worse than higher search rev shares. If Android did not exist, Google Maps would have been wiped out overnight on mobile when Apple decided to go it alone (against the wishes of their own userbase, no less). Android was never about making direct profit, it was always about ensuring Google was able to deliver their services directly to users. They were quite open about this from the start. And judged by this standard it has been an incredible, epic success.

iOS is on the way down anyway. Outside of English speaking countries and Japan it's in the minority everywhere. In some countries, especially European countries like Germany and Spain, the iPhone has been crushed.

The Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was more along the lines of:

Boris: "We need something to distract the people at home! They are getting restless!"

Piotr: "How about a war? That's always worked in the past!"

Boris: "Yes, but against who? We have to pick something close enough to be threatening, but far enough away that they won't come here!"

Piotr: "How about Afghanistan?"

Boris: "Perfect! Whoever heard of a Moslem holding a grudge?"

So... would a foundry based on this tech... be a "wood-chipper"?

These career govt employees feed info to the pres, make recommendations, and fight for their interests. Even if a new pres wants to turn on a dime, Washington DC is a large ship that turns slowly.

Bingo. The old UK comedy "Yes Prime Minister" was a rather cutting illustration of this phenomenon at work.

What happens to someone when they become the prez? Enormous numbers of apparently experienced people begin telling you all kinds of secret things. They stress the importance of secrecy. They tell you about this plot or that plot. They say it's vital they get new powers and they not-so-subtly imply that if you don't help them Women And Children will DIE! And although it's left unstated you know perfectly well that if you don't give them what they want, you will see leaks in the press from anonymous officials that paint you as a prevaricator, as weak, as unconcerned for the lives of Patriotic Heroes And Their Women And Children.

The problem any US President has, and I daresay many other countries presidents, is that they are immediately submerged into a fantasy world woven from the agendas of the people around them mixed with their own pre-existing views, and those people are themselves also in a slightly less extreme form of a personal fantasy world and so on all the way down. A toxic brew of patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, militarism and most of all pervasive classification means that it's impossible for a prez to penetrate the fog of misinformation that surrounds them. They can be manipulated into believing nearly anything because it would take an incredibly strong willed personality to say directly to the senior bureaucrats feeding them classified intelligence, "I think you are bullshitting me and I am going to personally audit your shit and prosecute you if you're lying to me".

Obama is very much NOT a strong willed personality. He sees himself primarily as a reasonable man who finds compromise between different factions. This makes him easily manipulated: all it takes is for people who agree to present him two apparently opposed positions - one extreme and one very extreme - and Obama will reliably pick something that is quite extreme. And the officials around him know that.

In hindsight it should have been obvious. Obama has no real track record of achievement in politics. He supported no particularly controversial positions, or showed any particularly clear thinking. Compared to Bush he seemed like a genius of course but Bush was a fucking man child, so that wasn't hard.

For that reason, Rand Paul fans might be disappointed if he won. I don't expect he would be able to accomplish as much change as people would like.

Almost certainly not. But it looks like Rand Paul is made of stronger stuff than Obama. Paul consistently argues for positions that piss off most of his party. He seems able to come to conclusions about things himself regardless of what other people believe. He seems to have fairly strong principles. He doesn't come across as the sort of wishy-washy people person that Obama is. If there's any US politician that actually might tell the people in his secret briefings "stop bullshitting me or I fire you", it's probably Rand Paul.

That sort of logic holds true when moving between languages that are very similar. The transition between Python and Ruby or Java and C# spring to mind.

However if I need a C++ programmer and need one pronto, I'm not gonna hire a guy who has only JavaScript on his CV no matter what. Learning C++ is not merely learning a different way to create an array or slightly different syntax. To be effective in C++ you need to know how to do manual memory management and do it reliably, which takes not only domain knowledge but more importantly: practice and experience. You need to understand what inlining is. You very likely need to understand multi-threading and do it reliably, which takes practice and experience a pure JS guy is unlikely to have. You need to be comfortable with native toolchains and build systems: when the rtld craps its pants and prints a screenful of mangled symbols you need to be able to understand that you have an ABI mismatch, what that means and how to deal with it. Unfortunately that is mostly a matter of practice and experience. You might need to understand direct manipulation of binary data. There's just a ton of stuff beyond the minor details of the language.

Could the pure JS guy learn all this stuff? Of course! Will they do it quickly? No.

Much more than 40!

For every string theorist, there are two string theories (something to do with pair production....).

I already paid for my internet service. Why should I have to pay again?

You are advocating the Verizon/Netflix model.

Then thank god we aren't a democracy! We're a republic.

In case you *want* to run someone over? Brilliant!

mailto:feedback@slashdot.org