The biggest problem here isn't the question of software patents. It's patents on things that are obvious, or are an obvious progression from something that's already common (eg. taking the manual process of balancing a checkbook and having a computer perform the exact same steps). It's just that software is the field where it's taken root the most, I think because people treat computers as some sort of magic that transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary.

Actually, you know, in the 19th century, the patent lawsuits were flying even more vigorously than they are now. In fact, in the field, it got so bad that it was impossible to create the device.

No, it wasn't a matter of licensing, but a matter that you couldn't build it because the patents were so broad and even worse, they overlapped! And no one was licensing to competitors, so everyone was suing everyone else. And yes, we had NPEs (non-practicing entities, aka trolls) as well.

The device? The sewing machine. Everyone was suing everyone else, and patents were granted that were overlapping. So if you managed to license one, someone else with the exact same thing would sue you. Heck, the only real difference was back then, the inventors held onto their patents and did a lot of the suing.

The end of the 19th century nearly brought a halt to the sewing machine. Until the companies got together and simply bought up every patent around from everyone. Literally buying the peace.

Remote wiping is already possible. What they want is centralized control over the functionality for governing purposes. We're not idiots. Well... not all of us.

Possible, but doesn't' prevent resale. And the same ability to remote wipe can be used to remote kill like how Apple does it.

Someone steals your cellphone, you remote wipe. However ,that someone has a wiped cellphone they can fence to someone for a hundred bucks, still, while you're out the cost of a replacement.

On iOS, you remote wipe, that device is useless. You can fence it for parts, and I'm sure iFixit and others will gladly accept it, but they don't pay too much for non-functional hardware.

Effectively, it's completely useless to steal a cellphone because it can't be used - you can't even use it as an iPod Touch or anything that just merely lacks cellular functionality (say with IMEI blocks). Pretty much the value of an iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch (with iOS7) is $0. Because once wiped, they're nothing more than a pretty piece of aluminum-wrapped glass.

Any idiot who buys a stolen iOS device will find out shortly that they got scammed.

And even Apple refuses to help you until you can convince a court to force them to unlock it.

Right now, steal someone's Galaxy S4 or Nexus 5, and you have a nifty Android phone that still works. Sure the user's data is gone, but you picked it up for $100 off contract. Which makes them still lucrative to thieves who can make an easy $100 off it.

It must work stand-alone: if I'm lugging my phone around with me why would I want a miniscule third-rate smart-watch?

If you're "lugging" your phone around you probably need to update your phone.

Sorry, wrong. Modern phones are pretty damn big, which is probably why smartwatches exist to begin with.

People want big screens, but then they try to use them and realize that they're completely impractical for anything other than a mobile entertainment device. As a mobile communications device, unless you're sitting down, they're impossible to use.

I tried. My friend got a Nexus 5. First thing I did was the usual way I use my phone - single handledly. It was a disaster - even with relatively huge hands, I can't reach all 4 corners. And Android (and iOS, for that matter) doesn't have guidelines that say you should put all the UI controls on one corner of the screen for single handed use. So the inability to use it single handed means I can't use it while I'm out and about without finding a spot to put down my things so I can use both hands to use the phone.

The smartwatch came out from this inability to quickly answer phone calls or do text messages while on the go because you need both hands to use the @()#&%@ phone.

Of course, Samsung likes to mock the fact that the iPhone screens are small, without mentioning that their phones are completely useless for single handled on-the-go mobile use.

Then again, I suppose it's a good way to do snatch and grabs - with a user's hands concentrating on the phone, that shoulder purse or murse is a much more attractive target, since it'll take a good 4-5 seconds for the ex-owner to deal with their phone.

The best part of using SSD's? You learn to make your backups religiously, because they will die and they will die fast. I have some very long-lived SSD's in production (SLC) but each one that I've had fail (I have a stack of about 20 on my workbench which may or may not go back for 'lifetime warranty' claims - do I really want replacements of crappy SSD's?) has gone from perfect to unreadable in minutes.

The main reason why SSDs fail is due to sudden power loss causing a massive corruption of the FTL tables. It's why some come with capacitors - so they can sync the on-media tables with what's in the RAM cache on sudden power loss. There are mitigation techniques that are possible as well that allow for sudden power down without losing data. In fact, the modern SSD is faster than the interface it's on, so compromising performance for data safety is doable.

After all, once you're around 500MB/sec, you can't go faster. If the flat out rate is 750MB/sec, no one will see it, so give up 33% of that speed for data safety so you'll still see 500MB/sec at the interface.

As for your pile of dead drives - chances are a good chunk o them, if they've still got life in them, can be used. Their tables are corrupt, so you should try a ATA Secure Erase (in anything but a Lenovo system - go figure, but Lenovos do strange things). We've used it to recover an SSD in a dropped laptop that shattered to a million bits (which was on and doing stuff).

Most good SSDs respond to typical power down commands as a request to sync data - i.e., when a hard disk is issued the spindown command prior to system turn off, it syncs the cache to the platters, parks the heads, and shuts down. Doing so is far safer on the hard drive than a straight power down (less mechanical wear - a sudden powerdown switches all the platter spinning energy into the voice coils, which flings the heads to the parking area violently. It's why a soft spindown rating on a hard disk may be 50,000+ load/unload cycles, while a emergency spindown is only 10,000 or less).

Likewise, smart SSDs do the same thing - they see a spindown command and use it as an opportunity to sync the tables to media, and then report to the host that they're ready to be turned off.

We used the hdparm method of sending the ATA Secure Erase command to the drive, it works, takes about 5 minutes and recovers and SSD to the condition it was in before failure. The only thing is that previous wear doesn't reset (of course), but the drive is still as reliable as it was brand new - just because the tables were corrupted once doesn't impact a thing after a secure erase - it's basically used to recreate brand new tables.

Judging by this, the speed is about the same as other comparable SATA III SSD's, with a little bit of a boost but nothing dramatic.

You know what the problem is? SATA3 is too damn slow. Yes, a modern SSD has hit the SATA3 bandwidth limit of 6Gbps.

The interface is now the bottleneck - something that hasn't happened in disk storage systems for a long time - it took SSDs to actually saturate a SATA3 link with a single drive, and SATA3 was created with SSDs in mind. And we've hit the limit again, far before SATA4 is even a draft.

It's why we're having PCIe SSDs that easily get 750MB/sec reads and writes.

IOPS is where we can improve.

before crows figure out how to use youtube

They already have - there are plenty of crow videos on YouTube. Instead of learning how to use a camera and YouTube, they've trained ape-descendents to do all the hard work for them.

I'm sure you can find a video of these crows doing their tests on YouTube.

I didn't know there was any lack of competition in the video serving market. Other video websites seem to find it hard to compete with YouTube. What makes Yahoo different? After all Yahoo hasn't been a force in anything much since the days when web-links were magenta and underlined, and most web page backgrounds were Windows grey.

What other sites are there?

Vimeo is probably the biggest alternative, and they have a good following for the "high quality indie film" market - given the videos I see posted there tend to be well produced and edited short films and other videos. It lacks the "rawness" of YouTube. But it seems to work well.

Twitch? That site is geared towards videogames. It offers livestreaming of events (with 30 second commercials every 30 seconds it seems) meaning it's not only pointless for non-videogame content, but the commercials are intrusive, loud, and really get in the way. It's only seeing a resurgence because both the PS4 and Xbone support it natively. But it lost a fair bit when PS4 voyeurs got caught up streaming amateur porn forcing Twitch to hide PS4 streamers away and close down a bunch of accounts.

The other two I can think of are Dailymotion and Liveleak, the former doesn't seem to do anything YouTube can't, except maybe mobile, and Liveleak, well, they seem to be for posting stuff some people don't want the public to know.

The other reason is well, the two biggest smartphone platforms natively support direct YouTube uploads. And Vimeo got ground because they were the first to embrace mobile by offering HTML5 video content shortly after iPhone first came out. (YouTube took a bit longer because well, everyone had the YouTube app)

Unlikely. Large earthquakes don't provide smaller warning quakes ahead of time. If anything, we can rest a bit easier knowing that pressure has been released from the fault. I did feel it too, but living in Venice, a good distance from Brea and Orange County, it wasn't very powerful.

There is a theory that an earthquake does two things - it sets the next stress point, and the shaking may loosen and nudge other sticking points. The end result is the first may be a spot that can't handle the newly imposed loads and fail (another earthquake), the second is that even stable areas of the fault now have lubrication and can slip past each other where before they couldn't, forming yes, more earthquakes.

Unfortunately, there is no way to tell when the next quake will be a big one, a small one, or a devastating one.

The evidence has been that the number of earthquakes around the pacific rim ("ring of fire") has been increasing because of it.

It think the end result is pretty much "just continue on with life" - whatever the risk has gone down because of that failure may have increased the risk elsewhere (as in, not in the exact same spot - no one said it couldn't happen a little way down the fault).

All yeast dies off from alcohol at some level. If this is a serious commercial adjustment to the organism then I would be working on increasing alcohol tolerance. This would give better yields for the distillers and new wine and beer/ale/mead concoctions that will be ass kicking.

Or, Montsanto will, besides owning the entire food business, also own the entire alcoholic drink business as well.

Welcome to the new world - where the only thing you can have is specially filtered water. After all, a plain glass of tap or bottled may have Monstanto yeast in it, and you'll need to license that bottle if you want to drink it.

Actually laymen tend to think carbon fibre is very cool. It actually gets used in a lot of gift products that have little or no justification for it's combination of lightness and strength. E.g. Carbon fibre lighters, pens, smartphone cases.

And most of that is probably faux carbon fiber too - just a fancy design printed on the plastic material they're using. Do it via hydro-dipping and it conforms to the surface in ways the real thing would, too.

It's far too pricey for cheap ass geegaws - if it was really carbon fiber, it would be way way up there in price.

Now, carbon fiber is great at absorbing energy - shattering consumes an immense amount of it. Unfortunately, I'm fairly certain you don't want shrapnel going everywhere in a crash lest it impale passers-by. They get away with it in F1 because the spectators tend to be well set back from the track for that reason.

This isn't so much about a paid subscription as it is not having to pay Apple for each copy of Office sold. This is their way of getting around that. Wonder how long it'll take Apple to close this loophole in the future...

You're under the impression that it matters to Apple that people skirt the rules like that.

Guess what? It doesn't. The only thing is that for payments in the Apple ecosystem, you use Apple's payment provider to provide less confusion and annoyance to users who may wonder if the box with their credit card number in it is secure.

Apps are just a way for Apple to sell more hardware - apps, books, movies, music, etc., iTunes makes some money, but it's not at all clear how much profit it makes or if it goes into their data centers.

Contrast this to Amazon, where sales of hardware are a conduit to sell more content. So Amazon would have a problem if you did this because they want to sell content.

Android is open source.
Both countries have the resources to go through Android with a fine toothed comb.

And AOSP != Android. In fact, who knows what code that Samsung tablet is running. There can be plenty of proprietary code on Android that's binary only, and no amount of analysis of AOSP will find them because that's not the code running on the tablet.

Code for the GPU is often closed-source. As is camera code, DSP code (for audio), etc.

And hell, If it's Samsung, it probably ships with Google apps as well, powered by root-owned Google Services Framework.

They'd actually be better off dumping iPads for those chintzy $100 tablets - those tend to be practically pure Google and very little of it is proprietary.

Those proprietary blobs will will you.

In fact, you have to pay Tesla $600/yr for service. That includes roadside assistance and so on, and covers all of your service needs completely. It is a bit offensive though, and the news did lead to cancellations. It's a staggering amount of money compared even to a German car. On the other hand, I'd bet you a fairly large amount of money that it will simply have less failures in general than most other cars, simply by virtue of being an EV. On the gripping hand, there's no shortage of customers even with these terms.

That $600/yr service is optional. It's recommended, and Tesla will cover all consumables except tires for it. And it's flat rate, too - it's just $600 a year for all the service you need.

Most cars require a "major service" every couple of years, which can easily run into a couple thousand bucks, and service on German luxury vehicles can easily be $500 per visit, twice a year or more.

Tesla, OTOH, charges $600 for it all inclusive. And it includes a loaner (for a few more bucks, they'll let you take out a Roadster instead) for the duration.

It's a steal to get service for $600 all in, especially with all the perks. Dealers HATE Tesla because of it - they don't make much off selling new cars, the make it up selling service.

Throw your storage devices into a black hole, and make sure that your data gets preserved for eternity.

  Coming soon, the ability to retrieve the data from the event horizon should it be required again.

Or, down on earth...

It's utterly trivial to write a backup program. Anyone can do it.

The hard part's writing the program to restore from that backup.

The one thing that might have been missed is that the numbers are probably based on IC engine vehicles. The numbers may be very different for EVs as the construction of a battery/electric drive train is very different than an IC drive train. For example, t takes a lot more energy to build a ton of batteries than it takes to build a gas tank.

And the calculation doesn't get simpler, because you also have to add the energy used to create the engine, transmission and differentials in the IC drive train which an electric car doesn't have.

Then add in the necessary servicing costs and fluids that get changed to maintain said engine.

You see, IC engines require a lot of maintenance, while an EV can go for years between services (mostly replacing consumables like brake pads, wipers, bulbs and whatnot).

It's one of the reasons why dealers hate selling EVs - they don't make much money on them and they generally require a lot less maintenance over their lifetime - instead of bringing your car into the dealer 2, 3, 4 or more times a year for scheduled maintenance, an EV can often get away with one, maybe less services a year.

And generally cheaper service as well - so cheap Tesla charges around $600 for it inclusive of all consumables other than tires. IC drivetrains may require just a oil change and fluid check for the few times, but start including checks on all the other bits and pieces needed to support the engine and you can easily end up with $2000+ on service costs.