I think he means that they'll be bribing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontributing to both political parties to pass some laws.

Presumably it will be illegal, just as many other knockoffs are illegal. It's also very likely that many of them violate Apple's trademark as well so even without design patents these would still run afoul of the law.

I think you're missing the point.

The point is that in the very near future, guns will be incredibly easy to manufacture. It does not matter if you ban sales. If someone really wants a gun, they will be able to machine their own, and not too terribly long after that, simply feed a series of instructions into a machine that will create the gun without any required skills on part of the person pushing the button.

The point is that you can't solve crime and gun crime with restrictions in a future where it's easy to get a gun whenever you want one and it's even harder for the government to clamp down on the manufacture and distribution. That will not stop criminals or crazy people who really want to harm others. The point is that you need a good social safety net that can prevent people from turning to crime and provide medical help to people who might express violent tendencies so that they don't go on any kind of rampage.

The funny (tragic) part is that the kind of people who tend to be strongly pro-gun, also tend to be strong against social programs that could prevent a great deal of the violence typically associated with guns.

Well "and God said . . ." occurs in book X of the Bible which is a fact. Much like any quote can be a fact in and of itself, even if the content of the quote is of dubious truthfulness or outright incorrect. Never mind websites that are designed around debunking myths or other incorrect information which is contained on the page as a matter of reference.

This is a difficult problem to solve and there are a lot of edge cases that need to be considered to avoid poor rankings.

Sometimes a particular problem has already been solved, but that doesn't mean it's not worth taking the time to code your own solution in order to improve your own abilities and to engage in the kind of thinking necessary to develop algorithms and solve difficult problems. You learn a surprising amount of things when you have to build or implement something yourself as opposed to taking something that already exists.

While there's definitely a business case to be made for using existing solutions, if you're doing something on your own and don't need it immediately, there's no reason why you can't take the time to roll your own code and likely improve your abilities and knowledge in the process.

A two party system practically guarantees that any major issues will devolve into a for and against and then basic tribalism takes over and people choose sides not based on merits or evidence, but simply based on which group they belong to. There are even some scientific studies that suggest presenting strong evidence will do little to actually change these beliefs. A lot of people don't care about global warming all that much and only assume a position based on their party ideology.

We need to change the voting system to something that breaks up the two party system. That will remove a lot of the idiotic deadlock over some of these things that should be moved to the non-issue category.

The reason they and every other company file all of these crazy patents is because it's much, much harder to sue them if they can pull out their own patent in the trial. At that point the other company now has to prove that a patent granted by the patent office, which basically says that this patent is a unique and different implementation than any other existing patented implementations, is somehow invalid. Good luck with that.

There is no buying into the game or not. Either you play it with a good strategy or you get rolled over and learn to play smarter the next time if you don't want to lose. Agreeing or disagreeing with the rules won't change them, and since next to no politicians really care about patent reform or have any understanding of it at all, it would take a lot of money to lobby for a reasonable change, which assumes that anyone opposed won't spend just as much if not more to make your efforts useless.

They wouldn't call it by that name, but they would talk about the potential jobs that could have been created to build and maintain the pipeline. Realistically most politicians on either side of the aisle care very little about the pipeline. A few of them might represent vested interests and have more reason than others to care, but for most it's just about slinging mud or using it as a means to attack the opposition.

It would be interesting to put some measure to vote before Congress without allowing the party wranglers to establish the party line beforehand. Outside of a few hot-button issues, I suspect that there wouldn't be anywhere near as much of a pattern to the votes as there is after one party decides that they need to vote for or against something just to oppose the other side.

For most issues, your average Congress critter simply does not care one way or the other and is entirely happy to fall into line as it removes the burden of actually making a decision.

Not quite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_(series)#Games

It seems that they reserve the numbered entries in the series for those which have a completely new game engine and that they don't count any of the handheld games as a major release. Depending on how you want to count the different games, Grand Theft Auto V could be the 15th installment in the series.

You're not wrong, but you are getting in the way of everyone's two minutes hate over patents.

The only reason they patented it is so that if they do make an actual product, it's harder for any patent trolls to sue them.

It's very likely that there are dozens of incredibly similar patents floating around out there, but the fact that Apple has been granted a patent for their implementation means that it's far more difficult for someone else to sue them because Apple can always point to their own patent as proof that the patent office obviously considered their implementation different enough and therefore unlikely to infringe.

It really doesn't matter though as I don't think Apple will actually bring this to market. They've got patents for hundreds of other things that have never seen the light of day, but when you're a billion dollar company, spending a little bit of time and money to potentially stop any lawsuits targeting your company are worth it.

There's that aspect, but it's also so that if Apple ever does make a product like this (they probably won't) it will be far more difficult for some other company with an overly broad patent similar to this to sue them.

If the case were to go to court, all Apple would need to do is point at their own patent in claim that the patent office obviously thought their implementation was different enough from whatever company X has (Apple's patent might even list Company X as prior art. The actual patent has) and then company X has to argue that Apple's patent is invalid or it will have a really difficult time getting any damages.

The patent system has turned into an arms race where it's far better to simply patent something you might never produce just because on the off chance that you do, someone else probably has a patent that's similar enough to sue you over it. Basically the cost of filing for the patent is less expensive than the cost of dealing with the legal costs if you don't have one.

I'd avoid SVN for anything that isn't a flat text file, otherwise it becomes a pain to merge or determine what the actual difference between two files is. I'm not aware of anything that will make viewing diffs for Word documents human readable. Never mind that some of the people who need to use it will probably be a afraid of it or have even more basic problems like forgetting to commit.

If they're not doing anything that requires absolute security or precise formatting, something like Google docs might work reasonably well. It's simple to use and doesn't require the users to understand the complexities of version control. No idea if there's anything that can be hosted locally in case the company can't or would prefer not to put the data on Google's servers.

Citation needed.

There's a slang dictionary that lists it as a slang word for "penis" from ~40 years prior to it appearing in Bugs Bunny cartoons, but it doesn't appear to be used in that context in the cartoons. The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the term may have been used ironically prior to the cartoons to mock an individual as a poor hunter rather than it's original meaning of a great hunter, but notes that it wasn't until the 80's that it was widely used to mean an idiot, geek, etc.

If you have evidence to suggest otherwise, please let me know. I couldn't find anything to support that claim after a few minutes of Google searching to support that it's been a well known slur (I can't recall hearing it recently so it may have fallen out of favor) outside of the generation that grew up using it. Seems far more likely that a cartoon unintentionally lead to the language shift because it used a reference that children were unlikely to understand as anything other than an insult.

All of that aside, "nimrod" is at worst on the same level as "dork" or "geek" but is probably closer to calling someone a "doo doo head". Only a nimrod would try to insult someone by calling them a nimrod.

20% yearly growth means that they will double their revenue in a little under four years.

People's failure to understand exponential growth is astounding.

To think Google needs an increasing rate of growth on top of an already immense, but consistent yearly rate of growth to be successful is idiotic. Ten years of 20% yearly growth would mean that Google has roughly six times the revenue as they do now in a decade. If you had a 10% increase every year in the growth rate, after a decade Google would have over 100 times their current revenue. The first example might not even be realistic and the second doesn't even come close to making sense.