Certainly the TFA is junk, and recognizing a traffic light would be relatively easy to do. But why is there no real information on the Google Car that is public? All I ever find is vague marketing blurbs and misleading statistics.

It would be very interesting to know what it really can and cannot do. And how the software was put together. Do they build a full scene graph or just use 2 1/2 D modelling? How do they go about the planning issues? Etc.

But nothing. Just marketing hype. So TFA is actually good if it flushes out some real info.

The new dialogs will be dumbed down so they are useless. The old dialogs will remain but have zero development effort to maintain them. So in order to find things you need to know when the OS features were added, and thus what type of dialog to use. Or know the third party apps to use, like Sysinternals used to be.

Remember that sys admins and slash dot readers are less that 1% of PC users. They are irrelevant to Microsoft. Be like Apple iPhones, that is the key to success.

I'd say that the fear is being managed remarkably well. For a small threat it has been raised into a major issue, with the promise of additional funding for homeland security. Fear is good for business.

+1. I'm surprised we have not seen this already. Given that people filing personal patents are likely to already be experts in the field, and therefor employed in that field. Just make absolutely sure that you have plenty of written evidence that your employer asked you to implement what violates your patent.

As an employer, I would not employ anyone that had a personal patent. Red sign. Anyone that self interested is not going to be my puppy. And he will keep any good ideas he has while working for me to himself so that he can patent them later.

The original purpose of copyright was to *promote* creativity. The current purpose is to protect mickey mouse, 70 years after production.

Legally it is pretty obvious that an API is copyrightable. If Google had used the same ideas in the API, but expressed them differently with different function names, arguments etc. then fine. But this is an exact copy.

The law is, of course, bullshit. It is the SCOTUS job to defend the law. Fortunately we can rely on our elected representatives to improve laws as circumstances change ... not.

IBM and others have a long history of patenting pointless aspects of plugs and interfaces to prevent competition.

(I always thought that it was dumb of Google to copy the API. Why risk everything on a legal case?)

SRP enables strong security from weak passwords. It does NOT rely on Certificates Authorities at all.

Never heard of it? Then have a look at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Instead of spending billions for NASA to maintain the ISS and other dubious enterprises, why not just pay ISRO some of our small change to do it for us. I bet you they could have put a rover on Mars for less than the cost of the wheels on Curiosity. For the cost of Curiosity we could have a rover on Pluto.

There are no doubt a small minority of Muslims in Australia that just might commit violence. The sort of unreasonable, widespread and unjustifiable arrests and other attacks by the Federal Police might just be enough to push them off over the edge.

Remember, that terrorists do not just kill people "because they are evil" as we are told. It is because they are fighting for a (mad) cause which they are willing to die for. With this sort of action the police might just push a few of them over the edge. Plus our recent attempts to stop them going to Syria, which means that the Australian government is essentially supporting the truly evil regime of Bashar al-Asshard.

If a bomb does go off that is great news for the Federal Police and Asio. Much more funding, even more powers, happy days.

That was the effect of the Sydney Hilton Bombing back in 1978. Despite the fact that it is almost certain that in that case the police planted the bomb! (It was not meant to explode.)

Obviously the embargo is nothing to do with the less than perfect human rights in Cuba and everything to do with the large and very vocal Cuban community in the south that hate Cuba with a passion. (Castro et. al. are not angels, but they were never as nasty as Pinochet etc.) The bay of pigs was embarrassing but long before the far more embarrassing Vietnam war, yet Vietnamese are now friends.

But what is in it for the Democrats? The US Cubans hate the democrats anyway and will never vote for them. So why would Obama do such an obviously wrong thing with this endless embargo? Is it just habit?

One that a slight slip anywhere in millions of lines of code could produce random memory corruptions with unpredictable consequences. Who would have believed that anybody would even dream of using a language with constructs such as ptr++. And we are surprised to find bugs...

+1. And obviously so.

+1

+1. Astronauts are obsolete technology, get over it. People may soon become obsolete for many other tasks as well.

An at least vaguely meaningful measure might be how much it raises the radiation in given environments compared to the background radiation. If 1% then it is not very significant regardless of how many trillion Bequerels are involved.

The experiments on the ISS are almost worthless. A solution looking for a problem. Certainly not worth their huge cost. The reason for having the ISS is most certainly not the science.

And for the enormous cost of servicing the Hubble it could have simply been replaced, several times over if necessary and with the latest technology each time.

The new Webb telescope will not have any human servicing, being too far away. If it needs any, a robot will be sent up to do the job.

Anthony