You seem to be living under the illusion that the government is here to help and has your best interests at heart. The government only bends to the people's will by direct action of the people. If you want to petition the government to come to the people, more power to you. Until then however, we will have to go sit in their offices and bitch at them to get what we need, and we need to ensure that we can all do that.

That is a stupid and ridiculous statement. This is the 21st century, and air travel is the most common form of transportation for nearly all people is by air, to exercise their constitutional right to petition the government. Burying your head in the sand and pretending that horse and buggy is still an option is simply stupid. The government must change with the times, and these times predominantly use air travel.

These "permanent injunctions" are rather stupid. They do no one any good. The only question in cases like these is: "how much does the infringer owe?" If someone figures out how to make more money with your patent than you do, then they should be allowed to do it, but they should have to pay for it. Presumably they'd pay less if they got a license first rather than going to court. Never, ever, should a court grant a permanent injunction, or stop the sale of anything. It harms the market, harms innovation, harms the free flow of ideas.

We need compulsory licensing of patents. (And copyrighted material too, for that matter, now that the marginal cost of distribution is zero)

Why are we not doing this for passwords too? Every site on the internet shouldn't need to store a plaintext password. Does there exist an algorithm by which a site owner could send the salt, the user hashes with his password, and the site owner can tell the password is the same, without actually having the password?

You're right on most of that. Oh well, ad-blockers for half-finished weekend projects it is... and using Android will continue to be a miserable experience.

P.S. I think I've been isolated, using only FOSS since about 1995. Android was my first re-introduction to the bad-old-world of closed source. It's a chaotic shit-show and I hate it.

P.P.S. I thought everyone on Android was using Google's AdMob? Which made me think Google could force some improvements to the situation...

I've been sorely disappointed with the Android Market/Google Play. First, the ads are a throwback to the punch-the-monkey style ads. They're invasive blinking colorful shit that takes up valuable screen real estate on a small screen, and suck your bandwidth and battery. You're paying not only with the mind virus they install, forcing you to look at them, but also with your bandwidth and power bills. Second, the app market seems to be full of half-finished weekend projects. Very few of the apps in the market are even worth downloading, and for any given purpose you will find 100 apps that you have to sort through. Often you have to pay just to discover that the app doesn't do what you need. The open source community isn't much better -- let's face it, most things on freshmeat/sourceforge/github are half-finished weekend projects. But every once in a while someone comes along and finishes someone elses project, or a collaboration lets those projects get a bit further. This never happens in the ad-supported market. Everyone is jealous of their half-finished crap, so you have an explosion of completely crappy apps. Even the open source ones that appear are often shrouded in mystery and some dickhead with a compiler is getting a money from ads, while the original developers get nothing.

To mitigate the poor quality, security, and ad-annoyingness of that market, I offer the following proposal to Google:

• 1) Require that anything in the android market have its source uploaded to a Google repository. Create a license that allows collaboration, and also a fair-share distribution of any funds to contributors (perhaps using repository commits as a metric), while legally disallowing wholesale forking of the code. (Or perhaps allowing forks on the master repository only, but tracking funds that need to go to the original authors)
• 2) Have all apps compiled by Google. Disallow binary blob uploads appearing on the market. (for security)
• 3) Give the ad library a "master switch" to turn off ads in an app, in exchange for an amount of money commensurate with the proceeds from ads. Therefore all ad-based apps can become no-ad apps in a uniform way.
• 4) Make the ad library a separate app (ad server) with its own permissions so that the app, and the ad library can have separate permissions. (for security)
• 5) Make all paid apps "try-before-you-buy" with a reasonable time to evaluate, like a few days. The current 15 minute window is only useful for users that click on the wrong thing, it is not nearly long enough to try most apps.
• 6) Finally, addressing TFA, return to the text-based ads that made Google famous, and get rid of the current invasive android advertising.

Yes, a tiny fraction of users will be able to download apps and compile them themselves, but this is also the same set who might become contributors. Requiring open source will seriously discourage malware, and in the event some gets through, it can be detected from the source, and you will know where it came from through repository commits.

The fact that Google achieves a 66.66% success rate in acquisitions is amazing. Most M&A's have a success rate of 17%.

According to a quote from the Wharton School of Business:

"Various studies have shown that mergers have failure rates of more than 50 percent. One recent study found that 83 percent of all mergers fail to create value and half actually destroy value. This is an abysmal record. What is particularly amazing is that in polling the boards of the companies involved in those same mergers, over 80 percent of the board members thought their acquisitions had created value.

— Robert W. Holthausen, The Nomura Securities Company Professor, Professor of Accounting and Finance and Management

http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/open-enrollment/finance-programs/mergers-acquisitions-program.cfm

I'm not certain that there would be a significant performance increase from such a low-end processor. The VIA C7-D 1.8 only scores 333 on Passmark, which puts it in the range of an early-model Pentium 4 or Athlon XP from circa 2002.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=VIA+C7-D+1800MHz

It's also a 32-bit processor, so you're going to be capped at 3GB of RAM.

As an alternative, you can easily find used 4-5 year old Core2 Duo systems for $100-$200. They're 64-bit and will score 1300 or higher on Passmark.

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-755-Performance-Intregrated-Professional/dp/B004HPMH9Q/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1330885080&sr=1-4

I always attributed those to people playing around on VMs or their user agent strings.

But given the "640K RAM should be enough for anyone" mentalities I've seen around here, I'm not certain about that anymore.

I think the books of Alastair Reynolds are quite accurate, describing fleets moving near light speed. In such a case all you really have to do is arrange for some debris in the path of the oncoming fleet (e.g. sand) and that will take it out.

One thing that has always annoyed me is that I've never seen a reasonable treatment of space wars in orbit. No one gets the orbital mechanics correct. There are a lot of counter intuitive things there. For instance, you wouldn't want to shoot a missile directly (line of sight) toward an enemy. If he's in a lower orbit you'd actually fire it backwards from the perspective of your orbit. The missile would lose orbital energy until it reached the target's orbit. Likewise, if he's in a higher orbit you'd fire it forward, in the direction of your orbit. (Thrusting toward or away from the planet you're orbiting serves to make your orbit elliptical, but doesn't raise your orbit) One also needs to be very careful about overtaking your target. There may be tactics like overtaking an enemy by dropping to a lower orbit, then thrusting back to the enemy's orbit. A dogfight would be a very counter-intuitive affair. I wish someone would make a little space sim that had the physics correct, and let players figure out the appropriate tactics.

All that was assuming attacker and target are in parallel orbits (concentric circles). If the're not, say one is in a polar orbit and the other is in an equatorial orbit, there is such a substantial difference in their energies that any collision would be devastating, so again just dumping debris that intersects the orbit of the target would be sufficient to wipe him out.

There are lots of other tricks. The slingshot effect, for instance, is used to hurl probes out to the outer reaches of the solar system. Essentially, the probe steals angular momentum from the planet, boosting its own velocity. The lowest-energy and highest-speed path to reach a given point can often involve such bizarre trajectories. NASA uses big computer programs to find these paths, see the Cassini probe's trajectory for an example. If you have thrusters, you can enhance your slingshot by thrusting at the point of closest approach (the velocity bump you get by thrusting there is more than thrusting at other times).

You might claim all this orbital mechanics junk can be circumvented by using lasers or particle beam weapons. But light feels gravity too, so one has to calculate the effect of bending on the laser's trajectory from planets and other orbital bodies. Another important point is that diffraction from the aperature of the laser's lens is substantial when the target is planetary-distances away. Your nice narrow laser beam will be a harmless diffuse mess by the time it gets to Jupiter.

Finally one should bring up the Lagrange points. These would probably be the ideal place to put weapons platforms, refuelling depots, etc. But there are only a handful of them, and an attacker would know where they are on approach, so would probably send the first volley toward them, before he could resolve any infrastructure there.

All in all, I think orbital wars would involve a lot of calculation, a lot of waiting, a lot of un-spectacular deaths (e.g. no explosions but running into debris instead), and a lot of speculative offense. You want to fire before you can see your enemy, to take advantage of orbital mechanics. Your weapons don't need lots of energy or explosive power, you can just use orbital mechanics to your advantage. But you have to be willing to wait.