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They are, they already do what you describe. The author is a troll.
I don't have any iDevices so I can't judge who's correct on this but there does seem to be some controversy. I think there are plenty of other reasons not to get an iDevice anyway.
To answer your rather silly question, if it's an effective weapon, of course someone will eventually use it to kill someone else since violence is part of human nature. Maybe the first victim will be an innocent child or maybe it'll be a pedophile threatening an innocent child.
At $17-22,000 a piece, I doubt any person who isn't already the enemy of some government will be killed with one of these for a long, long time.
Indeed, that's exactly why this weapon will have no effect on public safety as some seem to think. Someone who can afford that much for a single weapon can afford various other extremely effective means of murder.
THIS is why I give my business to companies like NewEgg, and have and will NEVER buy a single damn thing from ones like Amazon.
Amazon settled because it is also a patent troll. Blood runs thicker than water, especially between patent trolls.
Amazon are not pure patent trolls or they would not have been sued. They actually use their technologies. I'm not saying they are squeaky clean, I certainly didn't like their 1 click patent, but they are not a complete troll.
Indeed, the genius of the pure patent troll company is that I can never be attacked in the same way it attacks. Since the troll company doesn't produce any useful products or services, there's no activity it does which could be considered for patent infringement, at least until one of them is granted a patent on enforcing patents as a business method.
Big corporations wield large portfolios of patents as weapons all the time, suing and countersuing each other when it looks like that action will help profits. While this is a very damaging abuse of the patent system, it's quite different from the type of trolling described in TFA. Also, the fact that Amazon chose to settle has little to do with how that company may have abused their patents in the past. They made a decision calculated to be best for their bottom line, whether that was a correct decision or not.
As a customer, I think it's a mistake to make broad buying decisions based solely on one aspect such as the suits described in TFA. I've been a customer of NewEgg for years because they have good prices and service and now I have yet another reason to use and recommend them. I've also been a customer of Amazon, especially of their music store which has long provided downloads unencumbered by DRM, proprietary formats or requirements to use specific client software. OTOH, I'd never use Amazon's Kindle system with its very restrictive DRM and other lock-in mechanisms.
I work with a developer who is 10 years my senior, but still doesn't understand how to write concurrent code
Concurrent code isn't new. If this guy doesn't understand it then his problem isn't that he has neglected to stay current, but that he was never very skilled to begin with.
Writing concurrent programs is not new but that doesn't mean it's easy. It started out difficult and unfortunately remains that way when using most of the primitive tools commonly used such as threads. There is an increasing need for better abstractions to manage concurrency than have typically been available.
When will the first assassination occur with this weapon? That is the real reason it exists in the first place. As target shooters have already said, it's meaningless for sport shooting because it removes the skill component. For hunting it's like using explosives to catch fish, no fun if for anglers who enjoy the sport.
The target audience (pun intended) is extreme gun geeks, psychopathic hunters and assassins. So who will be the first human victim?
By using the term "psyochopathic hunter" do you mean to imply that a normal hunter weeps for the death of his prey? To answer your rather silly question, if it's an effective weapon, of course someone will eventually use it to kill someone else since violence is part of human nature. Maybe the first victim will be an innocent child or maybe it'll be a pedophile threatening an innocent child.
There's also the fact that any trained sniper already has a ballistics computer and range finder wherever they go. It's called their head. Like you said, this is nothing but a toy for people who want to pretend to be snipers or excellent marksmen but don't want to take the time to actually earn and develop the skills.
A rifle is nothing but a toy for people who want to pretend to be true marksmen without relying on the power of their own muscles to pull back a bow string and their own skill to judge where to point the arrow. Chemical propellants and targeting aids like sights are for wimps!
If you want aim assist, play a console FPS. Otherwise, what's the point? I enjoy shooting, but to me this is not shooting. To quote Ace from the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers: anyone can push a button. I have hunted, shot skeet, and done some target shooting: the fun, the adrenaline rush, comes from knowing you hit your target. My longest shot was about 175 yards with a
I understand the sentiment and can understand how this would seem less challenging and sporting than using the more traditional rifle. However, you could apply the same logic the rifle you used. A bow hunter might scoff at how easy it was to use a
You haven't seen the drivers on the Garden State Parkway. Speed Limit varies from 55 to 65 mph where there is no construction happening and people typically average 75 mph, many easily go 80 mph. In the short term, these drones will catch a lot of offenders. I'm pretty sure of that.
So, you're saying the reward is a dramatic decrease in transportation time efficiency?
The service runs in the background and launches iTunes when the phone is plugged in. It's quite handy.
Even handier is a mobile device that can connect to a Wifi network and do everything directly over the Internet without needing a PC host. I thought Apple was supposed to be about ease of use and simplicity.
All of this was discussed in TFA.
true, but why make it easy for them?
Of course, if fed.gov wasn't a giant pack of idiots, they wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
If it's currently easy to identify traffic from China by IP network, blocking those networks would make identifying traffic from Chinese attackers more difficult since it would never come from a known Chinese network. Also, are you saying the federal government should be running private companies' Internet security as well as their own? The fact that agencies have been penetrated does not necessarily mean they're idiots. Network security is hard and no computer is completely safe unless it's switched off and unplugged. Perhaps the mistake the Federal government made was creating the Internet in the first place.
Null route all the Chinese networks, problem solved. Worked great on my mail server, amount of spam I got dropped massively.
The attackers aren't idiots. They'll just start using proxies.
That is part of why I avoid travelling to the US. Their house, their rules, not for me thanks.
I have heard of US border police searching computers carried with people entering the country but I haven't heard of them demanding access to information that isn't physically present. In any case, neither policy is appropriate for a free society.
Please keep in mind that my 3 year old Android phone is more powerful than any PC was in 1990.
How much can you do with that computer in your pocket without depending on "the cloud"?
I see the two comments up top completely missing the point, as does the original submitter.
only about 15% of them had a clearly identifiable license in their top-level directories.
This is why. And this is because they don't understand copyright law and don't realize that unless they explicitly put the code into the public domain or apply a license, no one can touch it without violating copyright law.
It's probably a mixture of that and outright laziness.
I don't think it was explained well enough in either TFA or the Slashdot summary. However, it does say that only about 15% had clearly identifiable licenses and that GitHub's default is "all rights reserved". Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the vast majority of code on GitHub is not Free or Open Source software, but is licensed as "all rights reserved". If I understand correctly, that means that technically, no one has permission to even download the code from GitHub, let alone extend and share it.
If you look like your driver's license photo -- see a doctor. If you look like your passport photo -- it's too late for a doctor.