This is true. I'm questioning that said patents are really such an "ace up the sleeve" if someone else is beating you to market with devices that already do what your patents purportedly cover. There's only a limited set of physiological sensors that are going to be useful in headphones and that aren't already in their phones, and LG just nailed the main one. Body temperature would be the next obvious.

IMHO, Apple's ace up its sleeve is the same thing it's always been... to ability to pump out a product that's just plain nicer than anyone elses product. Patents just muddy the water.

But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with 'one or more integrated physiological sensors' designed to help users keep track of their body stats.

You mean like these. Somehow, I have a feeling those patents might not be as useful as someone might think...

Vim is pretty much the standard vi/editor/$VISUAL on every Linux distribution I use.

It is for me too, after I type "apt-get purge nano".

I assure you, I mean lazy in a very complimentary way here. ;-)

Oh, I understand what you mean. But calling it "lazy" is... well, lazy.

Programmers are generally not lazy people. They're willing to work pretty hard at stuff that matters or that they care about. They just don't like to waste their time, nor do they like to do poor work.

Tedious manual error-prone processes that could be done more efficiently and correctly by making a machine to do it are exactly the sorts of jobs programmers don't like to do.

Granted, not wanting to do a job the way someone expects you to do it or the way it's always been done might *look* lazy...

More useful things have been invented out of an express desire to be lazy than I can even count.

Not so much a "desire to be lazy", but more about pre-empting laziness.

Laziness is like entropy; it's gonna happen.

Tedious manual processes are inherently error-prone. If everyone is conscientious and on-the-ball, things generally work, albeit less efficiently than we'd like. But that's not sustainable in the long term... eventually, people get into a groove and start getting sloppy.

Designing, writing, testing, and rolling out (usually against the inertia of an existing process) a program isn't lazy. It maybe allows the programmer to be lazy later, but in the short term actually a lot more up-front work. It's just a shedload more interesting that the actual work it's replacing, which is usually the main motivation for doing it at all.

Actually, if you read it carefully jcr was suggesting that the OP should harm himself or self-pleasure himself. Or, perhaps, smuggle his digs through a security checkpoint. The specific interpretation is entirely dependent on that individuals personal lifestyle choices.

What do you mean "third party apps"? The summary and TFA claim that this one is in the official Google Play store.

Good point. Mind you, that kinda makes anyone who installs it even dumber than I would have thought.

Easy: Don't. Fucking. Install. It.

This is yet another piece of software which the user needs to download, enable installation of third-party apps, and install. Or the user might've installed it from a dodgy app store (in which case their device is likely already a teeming mess of malware).

Either way, the user needs to do something we've spent the last umpteen years trying to indoctrinate people against.

Wake me up when someone starts injecting this stuff through advertisements in web pages.

Perhaps if your PC runs on an ARM processor, it would be simple.

ARM emulation under x86 is feasible. Google "libhoudini". Whether it's simple is another question, but the pieces are there.

What if Google also opened a subsidiary in a country that banned garb like that required by Saudi Arabian law? How do they follow both laws at once across their entire organization?

Generally speaking, if the corporation can demonstrate that it's not possible to implement the law of all countries it operates in, and within any one country it *does* follow the laws of that country, that's good enough.

The problem is, if you actually read this particular ruling, Google didn't actually demonstrate that. Their argument was, in a nutshell, "we're a global operation, the database is hosted outside your country, so your order doesn't apply to anything except .ca".

Where the database is hosted doesn't matter because it's pretty much a given that google.ca and google.com and google.* are essentially the same place. If google.ca can have a result blocked, that same flag can be applied globally. So that argument doesn't really pass the giggle test.

The fact that Google (or Twitter, or Facebook, or...) normally only blocks certain content in the country that ordered the block is a corporate policy decision, not a technical or legal limitation. Child porn, for example, is something they can and will block globally. But corporate policy is not the law in any particular country.

So, that leaves the "we're a global operation" argument. And the judges response to that argument was, pretty much, "Good. Then you can block it globally, too."

In other words, someone made an assumption that all you have to do to stop a court ruling at the border is to point out that there's a border. The judge didn't buy it. Better luck in appeals court.

In other words, in this judge's opinion, since Google works on a global scale, they should be subject to the laws of all nations at once.

I think it's more that Google has a physical and legal presence in Canada (and many other countries to some degree or another), and hence a Canadian court order can apply to their entire business. The consequence of not following that order is that there are Google people in Canada who can be jailed for not following that order.

Companies who are only physically present in one country but have a web presence wouldn't be affected by court orders outside of their own country since that leverage doesn't exist, and many (if not most) foreign courts would likely toss a case due to lack of jurisdiction. In countries where a multi-national might have a small and/or expendable presence (i.e. a local shell company staffed by contractors), they could get away with ignoring a local court order with minimal risk (i.e. they might lose their .xx TLD).

No doubt Google Canada is set up as a separate subsidiary corporation and they think that there should be some sort of legal firewall at the political boundaries, but the funny thing about multi-national corporations is that these firewalls are always quite permeable when it comes to money flowing in a particular direction. So, why can't court orders follow the money?