Not exactly. The plates in this case are input to the machine, not the machine itself. The machine is the device that takes the input and produces the output. Different printing processes may use that input in completely different mechanical ways to produce the paper output and those may be patentable.

In a computer's case, they believe the software is the machine because it takes input data and produces some output data that has been processed in some way. It fits their definition of a machine as far as patents go. But this is horrible in the software world because you could then argue that every formula you use in an Excel worksheet is a machine by that definition and that's absurd.

I agree that media might play into our Canadian perceptions of the U.S. in that we have the benefit of getting news from non-US sources. Granted they're mainly Canadian, but they're not so tied to Democrat or Republican parties so they are less biased in either direction and give use fuller coverage.

We can see how people are unaware of facts on either side of debates because the news they watch is biased and never gives opposing view points or opposing facts. We can see how religion is trying to push itself into your government, laws, and education even though your constitution specifically tried to separate it. We see how you screw the poor in your country by denying minimum wages for people who end up having to work 20 hours a day just to survive. And we can see the stupidity of how much money America wastes on things like the military given that no other 15 countries in the world could possibly be a threat! And we see how you're constantly involving yourself in other countries politics in order to push your interests which causes them to dislike you.

And now, your U.S. Senate just passed a bill preventing the signing of a NATO international gun control treaty because it could prevent U.S. citizens from selling weapons to your own enemies! The only other countries that didn't sign were Iran, N Korea, and Syria which makes you just as bad as them. How can we NOT consider that stupid??

I'm not saying we don't have our own issues and have the same problems seeing them in our media, but it's usually internal to our country and doesn't affect the entire world.

I have a Dyson Ball vacuum... Does that count as a sphere? Though, I must admit that if I had any fruit flies in my vacuum, I'd probably throw them out instead of take pictures of them.

Next year, they'll be so panicked they'll just have us all run it at home on our treadmills.

Don't they realize that you could use one of these items to make the other into a big spear?

So, apparently you're allowed to collect and share all this information about your children, but God forbid they collect a single detail about your guns! Or maybe you just need a private marketing company to do it since Congress made laws that prevents the government from doing it themselves.

That said, we tried gun registration in Canada and it failed miserably due to the cost.

Linus wants you to be able to run that Linux application you wrote in 1995 today, but if he broke the VMware kernel module three times last week he does not care. One of the reasons they dislike them so much is that modules can barf all over the kernel, at least before they refused to look at any bug report with the nVidia blob loaded.

And that is why Linux on the desktop will fail. If he and the community don't care about 3rd parties adding capabilities and features to the kernel (the equivalent of drivers in Windows), it will never be mainstream. No company is going to waste their time and money to develop for the Linux platform if they cannot expect reliable support for their efforts. Can you imagine that Windows would have ever taken off if they didn't care about making sure other company's code worked on the system reliably over time? I'm surprised the nVidia was even gracious enough to provide a driver given the hostility toward them. The users's and gamer's are begging nVidia for it, and the kernel team couldn't give a care less about providing a stable system for them to work on. Windows had graphics drivers in the kernel from NT4 through XP I believe, and I'm sure Microsoft put in some effort to help make sure that 3rd party drivers worked reliably. They didn't just tell them to go away.

VMware is a user based application that does require some kernel modules to operate. In 13 years, I've never had a single problem with them adding their 3rd party drivers to the Windows OS, and patching Windows afterwards has never caused those drivers to fail. If Linux cannot provide this same reliability, nobody is going to accept it on their desktops on a large scale. I can just imagine how scared a helpdesk in a company would be the day after Linux desktops all do their scheduled "apt-get update".

We've been patching XP monthly since 2002 and I'd bet that 99% of us have never had an app or driver break on us. Graphics, sound, or network didn't disappear all of a sudden. All my productivity apps kept on working.

There were some issues around SP1 because of the whole network security change with the new firewall, but most software handled that fine. In the worst case, you either turned it off or apps updated to work with it.

Unfortunately it's not Torvalds you should flip the bird to.

Linus does hold some responsibility in this. The ABI starts at the kernel layer and it certainly isn't stable. It seems like every time the kernel updates on a point release, a.b.c to a.b.d, something in the kernel has changed.

Have you ever tried to run VMware as a host, or even the guest tools? Or the Hyper-V guest tools? You update the kernel once and all of a sudden you get compilation errors because of missing functions because things in the kernel have changed. I wouldn't mind if it was a major release like 2.36 to 2.37 or 2.x to 3.x, but a point release should not be changing the ABI. I gave up on using VMware to host machines on a Linux server because it broke so often. I'd have to wait days or weeks for someone to create a patch or for VMware to release an update.

At the least, it should never remove a public function in a point release. Microsoft never removes functions in updates, it just adds new ones with the new feature. Yes, that is messy, but they never break user or driver code! I thought this was Linus' mantra as we've seen in the audio patch issue a couple months back. He needs to make this apply to third party kernel modules and drivers as well.

The post is about Linux on a PC desktop being broken.

He specifically mentioned that embedded devices work well because they never get updated. No one patches individual packages or rarely even the Linux kernel by itself on an android phone. The update replaces the entire phone OS (kernel and supporting processes). And since user apps are written in Java, they don't see the changes underneath them.

Embedded devices also have constant known hardware. They don't have to support 450 different graphics cards, monitors, network devices, etc. They need one driver for each peripheral and it never changes. It's very easy to support that type of hardware and Linux is absolutely the best choice for it.

Actually, Windows 8 has come up with the perfect solution to your question. The file copy progress bar is a bandwidth graph so you get to see how fast it's going and how much is left.

They even added a pause/resume capability to it which is very useful. And if you start more file copies to the same destination it shows additional graphs in the same status window.

Here in Calgary, the cameras have two purposes. The first is a normal red light camera, the second is for speed on green. Basically, it's just like multinova except it's right at the intersections. So if you speed through the green light you will get the ticket.

I wish we could get rid of the red light piece of it, but keep the speed camera. I figure that stopping people from speeding through intersections is a lot more useful than catching speeders along long stretches of road where there wasn't going to be an accident anyway.

Actually, I don't blame Joss for those cancellations. I think it has more to do with Summer Glau. I like her, but every sci-fi show she gets on seems to cancel within a season or two. Not her fault, she just seems to bring bad luck.

Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse, The Cape, and Alphas. She was on The 4400 as well, but I think that show might have just lost its point.

Once the cops have arrested and locked up every kid with an interest in guns or other weaponry, the military isn't going to have anyone to sign up... Actually, neither will the police!

I wouldn't be surprised if 95% of today's police didn't become cops because they wanted to play with and use guns in some way. As kids themselves, they probably drew pictures of them, collected them, played with toy guns, etc. Just a bunch of hypocrites.