Well let's take a process like "quenching steel" compared to regular steel, you still have all the same basic ingredients, you heat it up and cool it down but really the rapid quenching brings out new and novel properties in the steel. It surely should qualify for a patent, it's not like the regular steel smith has a patent for everything his smithy could do - yet the smith has never done or even thought about doing. In the same way it would be absurd to patent the Turing complete machine and say all software is merely the application of machine states. On the other end of the spectrum if you add 0.01% table salt and claim your quenched steel+salt isn't infringing on any patent because it only says steel, the courts will laugh at your attempt to trivially avoid the patent. Most software is like that, trivial changes of inputs, instructions, ordering etc. are "new" but not in any sense novel while software with new functionality that's never been done before sounds novel and non-obvious to me.

No, because the obvious answer is yes. But do you have to lump it together with tests to measure specific knowledge? I've had years of regular full time onsite university education, if what I need is to prove my ability in a specific topic then that should be possible without requiring a meager and largely irrelevant addition to my general interpersonal skills, particularly if my available hours, location or other duties make it impractical or impossible. At least anything that can be reasonably accomplished through exams and exercises, I don't really see how we could let loose doctors and lawyers without real world experience with real patients and clients which necessitates a controlled training program. Most fields are not like that though, if it's all on paper or computer or with inanimate objects then you should be able to read yourself to a degree in most STEM fields.

As the highly abused saying goes, the proof is in the pudding - in this case the grey matter. If the brain is capable of having this processing and storage capacity, interconnectivity and power requirements then surely so can we, if we don't it's because our silicon-based technology is inefficient and inferior compared to the organic "technology" of the brain. Using custom silicon that mimics the brain - rather than trying to emulate it on a Von Neumann architecture - it should be doable in the same realm as supercomputers, I saw one research paper that said based on the size of emulating one and one neuron it should eventually be possible to do it at the size of a car with a 10 kW power supply. Still, the real issue is that they're not usable for anything else than research since we really, really don't have a programming model for a system like this.

Yes, but good luck finding out what that jurisdiction is, at least they don't seem to have much luck in locating and shutting down hidden services. If you only really need a DNS name that'll stay constant and that doesn't need to be "easy" then the onion system would be just fine, you own them by virtue of owning the private key and they all look like ebiueabv35rwas.onion. Unlike an IP you can move the key around and run your site from any box you want, which is the most essential part of DNS. You probably won't type it up but if you find it on some web page somewhere and bookmark it you'll have it.

Yeah right, a robot that smart at complex tasks will use lesser computers and robots as tools the way we use them as tools. You think companies will deal with hiring and training employees with all their quirks and unreliability when they can put in a purchase order for a $10 sensor and a $2 micro-controller and have the complex robot tell it how to do the job? Not bloody likely. Most of the reason computers suck at what they do is because we suck at telling them what to do, well I expect a robot to suck equally bad at telling a human what to do, while it should be excellent at simulating what a cheap piece of hardware could do and could transfer that control software with perfect accuracy in no time. Even the Matrix plot that we'll be living potato batteries is more plausible than that they'll need us for simple tasks. We have a baseline for living, computers don't.

As far as I know, that is not really true - the copyright holder can choose to ask for actual or statutory damages and while it might have an impact on where you end up on the $750-150,000 statutory scale you can't prove your way below the statutory minimum. And that is pretty damn steep for a dollar tune or porn flick. You can knock that down to $200 if you can prove you're an innocent infringer, but then the burden is on you to prove that.

Yes, it's more like this: Imagine if you took a sack of marbles and spread them infinitely thin, you'd expect that the distance between any two marbles to also grow to infinity. This is proof that primes are not like this, no matter how thin they're spread they'll cluster in pairs less than 70 million apart. The conjencture is that you'll always find another pair 2 units apart (like 5 and 7, 11 and 13 etc.) no matter how big the numbers get.

The long story is here (PDF). Motherboard will still do the heavy lifting from 12V to 2.4V, but the integrated VRM will distribute it. Advantage is extremely clean, fine-grained, low-latency and flexible power supply to deliver exactly as much power to where it's needed and probably - this is just speculation on my part - allowing the CPU to work on a wider range of voltages since there's less noise and ripple so you don't need the same tolerance limits. It sounds perfect for smart phones, tablets and laptops that are primarily battery-limited, nice to have for average machines but potentially an issue for overclockers. All you need is cooling though, it shouldn't limit overclocking if you can keep the temp down.

Actually I'd argue exact the opposite, this is the earliest possible convenience where it is possible to say when and what features will be coming with reasonable certainty. Post-launch reviews are fun but most of the news are about upcoming products/services/changes and really what you just said - it won't actually be in distros on release day anyway. So you can read about it now, it'll release in two months, be in most distros this fall and in Debian in 2016.... maybe. That said, in the rush to get this story out and get page hits they forgot the part about making a decent summary of what's new and why it should matter, but hey... it would be the right time.

Well if our plane crashes deep in the snowy mountains with some passengers killed on impact with no rescue in sight and it's either eat or starve to death, I'll be happy to bury you under a tombstone that says "Here lies a true ethical vegetarian". Just kidding, actually I'll wait for you to die and eat you too. While I haven't eaten human meat there's a lot in the don't ask, don't tell category that tastes just fine until you hear what it is...

Generally no, only as payment for debts, products consumed or services already provided like eating at a restaurant and paying afterwards. Stores can refuse you for having too large money like $100 bills, too small money like tons of one cent coins or pretty much any reason they want. Having legal tender doesn't force anyone to do business with you.

From the question:

What you said:

And if those people moved either up or sideways to continue to provide that benefit, that is great. The problem is when those people are still doing technical work that lead to bad code, bad design, bad practices and bad solutions that they can do by virtue of their seniority. It's very hard to rein in someone who has more experience, longer work history and who has more management clout from making bad decisions even when they really are bad. There's at least three ways to make a senior person butt out like trust, vanity or distraction. The best is of course if they just relinquish control if they trust me, which usually comes along. If that fails, there's always vanity as no senior person really likes to hear he's dealing with the nitty-gritty implementation details and the third is just to run up requirements/business side issues until they leave more of the tech side to you.

Is it a bit cynical and cruel? Perhaps, but I really don't want to have a manager that I feel is holding everyone back, push them towards where they can shine and leave me some room to shine on my own. The best managers seem to have this figured out on their own, they know when to provide direction and guidelines but also when to back off and let the people who know all the details make the right decision. But the world isn't full of great managers and really, you can waste a lot of time and great code writing a flawed system that can't ever really work and perform the way it was supposed to. And nobody cared how great your wall was when the whole house caves in.

Interesting article, but some points there are really off:

Well yes, they need that to connect the call. If we do a person-for-technology substitution like they do, you'd have to tell the phone operator where to connect you do. That person would functionally have to know and process that information and the operator could volunteer or be forced to testify as much. I don't see how you can argue that knowledge that you force on third parties - unlike the contents - could or should be protected.

The alternative is encryption. That way you can have security of content, but not of non-content since the third party still needs to know where to deliver it.

Anyway, despite their minor disagreements they both quite clearly say that anything you store online is free game today.

We're heading down the same slippery slope here in Norway, for example now with the data storage directive ISPs will have to collect and store source and destination for email service and position every time your phone gets a call, text or uses the Internet - that is practically all the time for a smartphone, so far not the content though. When people pointed out that it is only email, if you send say a Facebook message it's not recorded they got the deer-in-headlights look and a mumbling about extending it. If you're concerned about unconstitutional wiretapping by the NSA in the US, don't worry because Sweden made it legal through the FRA law.

Some countries might be slipping worse than others but I really don't see any going in the right direction anymore.

Fast, cheap, good - pick two? >:-) If you have a modern system, no OS should take a significant amount of resources on its own. Don't waste just to waste but as long as developer time is a limited resource, I'd rather have more features, higher quality and better performance than lower resource usage. The hardware is there to be used, that's what it's bought for. Hell, I regularly run an application that likes to chew through it's whole 32 bit memory space (4GB) and I let it because I still have 12 to spare and there's no direct replacement and it mostly works. What you care about is simply nothing that I care about at all, but then so I took your advice on my machine in favor of Windows 7. If Microsoft continues down their path I might have to migrate to Linux again, but if so I'd like a few other things than efficiency. Otherwise it might be a Mac, but I'd rather not.