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Comment Re:Police have legal immunity (Score 1) 455

More than that - this will bring every aspect of citizen behavior under the purview of law - which is quite dangerous.
The way the laws are structured, everyone breaks multiple laws daily - most of the policemen turns a blind eye to them - since from a human point of view they know that these are not important.
With camera following them all the time, they will have to leave their humanity aside and will start following the rules mechanically - which I think is more dangerous.
I voted for - not required - since I value a lenient law as more valuable than human excesses which can happen in any job.

Comment Re:Why the exodus ? (Score 0) 124

I do see a lot of bigoted comments in the whole chain.
Do understand that all the things mentioned here are part and parcel of developing countries where concept of equality etc takes time to manifest.
Since we are going the anecdotal way, amongst my friend circle it is quite different. None of us bar one stayed in America and not because manual work is beneath them. Everyone wants to stay in India now, due to myraid reasons ranging from bigger opportunities, parents a,d relations etc.
Similar to Japan being made,fun of and then later respected, I believe similar path will follow for all the developing countries china, India and Nigeria included.
Please consider that just 3 years back this same forum used to make fun of code quality etc, which nowadays I don't see. Consider first that humans are equal other than,in the opportunity that they get, then all these things wil be secondary.

Comment Re: Call it... (Score 1) 263

Or binary hadron collider?
Is it possible to have two circles of say same circumference each and then redirect the electron/protons to a junction between them where it can collide? With such a contraption, we can keep on revolving the protons until it reaches the required speed.
Obviously this would have been amongst the first ideas to be checked and rejected, but what are the negatives in this idea?

Comment Re:Tough ship (Score 1) 361

Since one possible reason is overloading, when they were towing it, how many containers did they drop to sea. If they had dropped enough they could have saved the remaining? Or is my lack of shipping knowledge showing here?

Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.

Comment Re:irrelevant (Score 5, Informative) 291

Very true. I always wanted to be an inventor, and have now more than a few patents. My first few patents were taken by the company where I was working during that time - even though it had absolutely nothing in common with the work I was doing for them - even the domain was completely different.

Primarily due to this, and partly due to the fact that they did not even implement the patent and try to sell it - rather they wanted the patents to bolster their resume when they went to their clients -, I left them and decided to work for my own. Started 2 companies till now, nothing has gone anywhere - but at least my patents are mine now.

I consider these total takeover of any work done to be a big deterrent to innovation overall. If I am coming with an idea, it should be mine and mine only. I am being paid for the work they expect me to do in the company - not thinking of ideas of my own. The companies doesnt even pay well for those patents and then complain that they are not innovative etc. I do understand that a very small percentage of patents make money, but for an inventor, it is his baby - giving pennies for it is like insulting him.

Comment Re:And this is news? (Score 3, Insightful) 120

I would prefer this much more than the umpteen politics and yro posts here.
So, even though it might not pique your interest, there would be many others who might be interested.
Also, look at the comments on that site. It is quite illuminating and does give an idea of how computers really came through.
History does teaches lessons a lot.

Comment Re:*different* scores for *standardized* tests (Score 3, Insightful) 622

I feel this more Anti-Black and Anti-Hispanics than anything else.
My understanding is that the biggest factor to a persons growth is the expectation upon him/her.
If a person is expected to be incompetent, more often than not, they grow to that role.
This is very well elucidated in Tipping Point, wherein a research found that if there are more than 5% of high-income people in a locality, automatically, within 10 years, the high-income people percentage goes up (to around 40% - I dont remember now), because the overall expectation on others goes up - from their parents, spouses etc.

Here, when the expectation is that Blacks and Hispanics are of lesser competency than Asians and Whites, they will grow to fill that role.
Such a rule, from a group of scholars, is quite shocking indeed.

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