Wave was marketed as a successor to e-mail, but (1) that just confused everyone (because what does "successor to e-mail" even mean) and (2) in my experience that was not a good way to view it.

A simpler way to view Wave was as a federated form of Google Docs with added support for threaded conversations in the style of e-mail threads or chat logs.

If we want to break it down, Wave is/was a federated, personal, realtime, wysiwyg wiki with strong support for threaded conversations, sharing, history, and privacy and access controls. This combination of features means that wave can be used for a wide variety of communications from chat to e-mail to blogging to collaborative document writing.

Wiki: I'm going to assume you are already familiar with the "Wiki Way". Basically a "wave" document is a wiki page that you create and can freely edit.

Threaded: While wave allowed multiple users to edit document as holistic entities, it also supported structuring documents as a mailing-list style tree structure of threaded replies. Private side conversations not visible to the entire group were also supported.

Realtime: Perhaps the most important feature of Wave was that your edits were instantly viewable. If you and a friend make successive edits, it can be used as a chat system. (Wave had support to make this easy and so each additional edit could be appended at the end.)

Personal: The wiki documents that you create exist in their own private namespace (e.g. just like documents on different webservers) and usually (always?) are just internal identifiers not intended for to directly manipulate. This avoids the problem that standard wikis have of dealing with contention for document names.

Sharing: You could send a "wave" document to another user and have it appear in their inbox. You could also invite others to participate in an existing wave. Your inbox would also be notified when a wave that you were watching was updated (e.g. like how you receive a reply to an e-mail).

Privacy: Wave documents are by default not publicly visible and have sophisticated and easy to use access controls.

WYSIWYG: User's edit their documents as they would in any modern word processor or e-mail client without having to know about any sort of wiki syntax.

History: Like any good wiki, wave supported viewing older versions of a document.

Federated: I can run a wave server and you can run a wave server and both of them can interoperate. This is similar to how different companies can run different e-mail servers and unlike private communication systems like Facebook messaging. For people who want to maintain a free internet, this is an important feature. However, unlike e-mail, the authoritative copy of the document stays on the creators host. Though there is support for caching, I never clearly understood where wave fell on the problem of hosts lying and trying to rewrite history.

In the end, Wave was a good product that was marketed poorly (the marketing explanations left people not knowing what it was). The efforts to make it federated required the creation of a public spec which also probably slowed down development.

I think Wave was an awesome idea and others should build on its concepts, but shouldn't tie themselves to how those ideas were implemented in wave. In particular, the rise of Facebook may have changed what people expect from their communication platforms so some of Wave's ideas may need to be updated to encompas that. (I don't use Facebook so I don't know what those changes would be.) But if the next social platform were to support Wave-like ideas, then it could be very nicely positioned as a Facebook-killer as it could represent a next-generation advance in social platforms.

If the legislators aren't creative enough to make a law that makes driving with an open laptop in the driver's lap illegal but not an open laptop in the passenger's lap, then they have no business being legislators. (Not that that has ever stopped them.)

(Side note, someone else in this thread posted the actual California law. I was misled by the AAA summary. Unless I missed something, there is no "equipped" requirement and it includes "business applications" in addition to TV broadcasts.)

So would it be illegal for a passanger to use a laptop?

Note the key words "equipped" and "usually displaying a television broadcast". Wearing Google Glass does not "equip" the car with a video screen any more than the passanger holding a laptop does. Also Google Glass is not "usually" used for displaying a television broadcast.

Making Google Glass illegal while driving might be a good idea, but what you're citing doesn't apply to Google Glass.

Why would the pilot program use the more expensive, harder to implement option of meters if they don't intend it in the real program? Unless there is a really good reason that the pilot needed meters instead of odometers, I can't believe the claim that the meters are "just for the pilot".

Nixon was pardoned for any crimes he "might" have committed, so I don't think it requires admission of guilt. (Though there might be a perception of guilt and political fallout from that.)

Even if it did, Obama could just pardon him on his (Obama's) last day of office. If they delay the trial with pre-trial motions for a couple of years, the pardon would come through before anyone does any time.

(Of course, given that there isn't any real suggestion of an actual trial, this is all academic speculation.)

Under a chosen plain text attack, an attacker would know m.

Thank you for pointing that out. I was wondering how this jived with the no-prior-restraint doctrine.

What mechanisms do other nations have to make prosecutors pay for over-charging? I presume it's not a monetary fine because that would bring a whole host of issues, but I'd be interested to hear what mechanisms have been instituted.

Not just Polish courts, most courts have much bigger limits on self defense than what people realize. For example, in most US states, if you have the option to run or otherwise escape, then you must. If the attacker stops attacking even briefly or becomes incapacitated, then you must stop counter attacking. If you don't, then you become the attacker and they have a right to defend themselves.

Most people's notion of self defense is more akin to an action movie scene than what is actually legally permitted.

I can think of at least three rational alternative that while unlikely prevent any claim of "no doubt".

1. Man tries to secretly steal from woman. Woman catches man. Struggle ensures. Woman claims rape b/c she thinks he is more likely to be punished that way.
2. Woman and man get along. Man decides to stop, but woman wants more. Fight ensues. Woman feels she was scorned and makes up rape claim.
3. Woman and man get along. They start discussing things. Big argument starts. Fight ensures. Both woman and man hurt. Woman makes up rape claim to cover why she has a black eye.

None of these are particularly likely given what we currently know, but it is absurd to have "no doubt".

Under her version of the story, how did her stuff end up in his room? Theft wouldn't exactly be at the top of someone's mind after being beaten back from attempting rape.

(I say this without making any commentary about the veracity of her story. We armchair detectives don't have the tools to make a judgment, and it would be hubris to do so.)

Do you have a citation for those numbers? I'd like to be able to use them when I'm discussing this topic with people.

Keeping in mind, of course, that this is just a thought exercise (IIUC, the court ruling does not rely on this line of reasoning), you are right that I overlooked the fact that usually "genes do not spring into existence as a result of sex". (Though we still have to consider novel gene mutations regardless of where they come from.)

Since the patent under discussion does not apply to a genome (I doubt any DNA patent does) but rather to particular mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, if the patenter created/discovered the mutation before it's first occurrence "in the wild", then the defense of the original poster would fail. ("First to file" instead of "first to invent" complicates this, but prior art may get us back to the same place.)

That then leaves two potential loopholes (though they do not apply in this case). First, just as pharmaceutical companies can breathe new life into old drug patents by tweaking an "irrelevant" part of the molecule, it is conceivable that companies could patent variations of the mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that have not yet occurred in the wild. Second, companies could proactively patent gene mutations that have not yet occurred, but that they think will become important (e.g. some other mutation of BRCA1 that they think would cause cancer if it eventually occurred).

I don't know enough about gene mutation rates or interactions to know how feasible these loopholes would be, but I might hesitate to rely on this defense because of these loopholes.

But what if someone created/discovered a gene you have before your parents did? In patent law (unlike copyright), independent creation/discovery is not a defense. All that matters is who was first. This means that protections against DNA patents need to be based on a stronger line of reasoning.