Well said.

This "no expectation of privacy in public" is one of the most evil privacy memes going around. Traditionally people have had little expectation of privacy in private since they lived close together with their families and neighbours where everything could be overheard. They would go out into the country / forest and be alone and talk; have political gatherings etc. There was always a risk of spies but the "expectation" was "privacy".

Now, we all live closer together. The expectation of privacy becomes something only for the Rich. They can afford to live alone in large houses with walled gardens and private recreation facilities. You might have enough space to have your own house with your family. Most people end up with no possible place where they can expect privacy except in what the grandparent would call public.

Biggest irony: the US supreme court; an institution created by people who met "secretly" in "public" to plot about the overthrow of their British rulers would agree with the grandparent. That does not make it right. That just means that their enforcement of the US constitution is quite selective and that they should be seen by most Americans as a dubious or possibly criminal institution.

I think you have misunderstood the situation completely. That has already been done. The plan now applies to all the Snookie Kardasian surprised coming out of the shower with Justin Beiber-Lopez stories. For those the use of a DSLR makes the whole thing look staged and will also breach the maximum resolution "privacy" agreements with the celebrities. That's why an iPhone is perfectly suited to this.

How about total lack of competence combined with arrogance backing up the lack of information transfer from the Dutch? The original doctor mentioned that the Saudi labs checked for swine flu and then stopped working, which was the point at which he sent the sample abroad. The Saudis mention that there was then a multi-month delay before they were informed of the result from the Dutch lab. Whilst they shouldn't have been waiting, incompetence is impossible to avoid and so the Dutch get the blame for that part of the delay.

By the time the Saudis have had the delay and start looking for the virus, it seems the patients were dead or cured, so it's more difficult to find. When they finally do that, they find that most of the main international labs already have MTA agreements with the Dutch lab. Whilst I don't know if they make any legal difference in theory, I'm sure that any lab has to think carefully before accepting a separate sample and having MTA like obligations in two directions. The risk of a lawsuit is clearly there.

Overall neither side looks good, however it's very clear that patents and IP rights generally are behind the whole problem. If they aren't eliminated from the equation somehow there's a real risk that a future epidemic will take hold where it could have been easily stopped if there were less of a delay.

the virus material still belongs to the original provider (in this case Erasmus MC) and that the recipient cannot give it to other labs. It also asks for written consent from Erasmus for using the virus for commercial purposes.

After which I can't see how anyone can claim that this MTA doesn't slow down research. Think about the fact that producing and selling a vaccine is a "commercial purpose". Pharmaceutical companies do not operate as charities.

From this article hare

The Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), to which Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands are parties (as are practically all other UN members except the US), establishes obligations for access and benefit-sharing for biodiversity, including prior informed consent of the providing country and mutually agreed terms for utilisation of the material. These obligations are further detailed by the Convention's Nagoya Protocol, which is presently gathering ratifications for entry into force.

The situation of Erasmus having obtained the virus and placed intellectual property claim over it without the consent of the Saudi government and without an agreement for benefit-sharing appears to be at odds with the requirements of the Convention.

Basically the Saudis and the Dutch lab are both fighting over the IP rights.

I would be really really interested to the reason for this. Your suggestion is possible; Look at the quotes in my other comment though and you see that part of the delay is probably because they simply didn't realise they had a new disease. The most interesting bit though is that it seems that they only just agreed to a new transfer

“But now... we’ve got an approval to move these samples and they will be shipped for testing,” he said.

(from this Alarabiya article.) and note this, from the original article (with my emphasis)

The PIP augments the International Health Regulations, creating a series of understandings that are flu-specific regarding sample sharing, patents, and profits from products derived from viral discovery. Chan's response to Memish's accusations no doubt stems from her concern that the Saudis could invoke provisions of the flu-specific PIP, demanding control over the MERS-CoV samples, patents, and products.

In other words; the Saudis now believe that they have a legal basis for control, even if they share. Before they were worried about this. And notice, the same article mentions that the Indonesians did exactly that so this is not something that's being thought about for the first time.

I took my username specifically to remind me to read the article. In this case, the trollish bit is that I read not just the original article but a few more. The accusation is good though; keep it up and keep trolling all of us with it whenver you can.

These suspicions were confirmed on 28 May by Science magazine, to which Erasmus admitted an as yet unpublished claim over use of the virus.

(from this article)

Erasmus determined that it was a new coronavirus (SARS is another coronavirus), but delayed several months before making it available to others.

(same source)

Saudi Arabia's Memish complained at the WHO meeting that there was a lag of three months, between June and September 2012,

(article linked from summary above)

That's a strong statement you are making there.

Why does the problem have to be one or the other? Why can't it be both, but especially the involvement of patents in medicine and especially in patenting pre-existing natural gene sequences and their derived products? For clarity I deleted a section of your post where I have no comment

I hate to be the first Slashdotter to defend our editors, but he didn't say "a patent". He said "obstacle to treatment: Patents". And in this case it's 100% right if you read carefully.

The Saudis don't want the material transferred from their country except by a special mechanism which guarantees them the Patent rights. That is slowing down the rate at which the virus gets to people. The lab which has a sample doesn't want to distribute it without special agreements about patents. Again, this slows down the transfer. If the lab was not motivated by patents then it could simply say "all patents based on this material must be shared freely and without patents", however they don't do that.

In all cases; if there were no potential future patents involved then the information could be shared easily and quickly. Patents and greed about them are the problem here.

Just ignore the trolls. Sometimes even me. Responding to them doesn't do any good unless you just occasionally enjoy a good flame war for the fun of it, in which case you need to be lots ruder than that.

BTW; what rubs me up the wrong way about Sarah's posting is really this

However, none of them address the factor that has the biggest impact on the quality of your codebase: Other People.

Ever since Knuth designed web and espoused Literate Programming there has been no possible way for a person properly educated in CS to not know that the main problem of software is communication with other human beings. I mentioned agile a bit glibly (it's a 1st post; it has to be fast and funny) but I really mean it as a strong comment to this overall. Agile software development process which was designed very much to talk about how people work together and the founders of it put this very explicitly in their manifesto.

Even those two movements are themselves just statements of ideas other people had done often before. Either Sarah is ignorant of this or she deliberately picked a bunch of methodologies which are trying to solve different problems and ignoring the ones which are related to her topic. Either thing would be a bad sign. If you are just getting into this subject then you should start reading up around the many interesting ideas related to this that have been around before. Recent (since the 90s at least) programming language design has been very much based around the idea of programming languages as human to human communication.

The number that I do believe is that paid app usage downloaded from Apple's store is much higher than the same thing from Google play. However that's a Google vs Apple financial comparison and isn't the one relevant to my arguments. For Apple devices the only software source is Apple's app store. For Android devices there are many sources; direct download; Amazon; 3rd party stores; Free software repositories like F-droid etc. This quite likely more than accounts for differences in the number of apps installed per device etc. which have been reported in the media. Remember especially that the Android users who have the most apps are also the ones who will be most likely to have a rooted device where at least some of the apps will be invisible to google. I think that these are completely missed in most reports on Android software usage but are things which will have a strong influence on the platforms' futures.

If you want to maximise revenue on your first version of a proprietary app, I guess that you might still be better to go with Apple App store. Even here I am not sure. If you are trying to reach the maximum number of people with your app, I would suspect that Android is already a clear winner.

Now, the final question is, which will give the better long term ROI. I would guess that we are already at the stage where revenue in Google play will overtake revenue in Apple's app store in the lifetime of any reasonable app. In which case, it seems to me that the that the people going for iOS are just making a mistake because they haven't yet realised that things already changed or are doing it because it's easier for them at this stage than converting over. That decision will change soon.

• longer loiter time expected - weeks rather than hours
• much cheaper / more of them - 5-100k dollars rather than 100 to 10000
• belonging to "other" countries - especially unstable ones likely to lose control of them
• more likely to be needed as armies are "demanned" and so remote systems will need to be able to defend themselves

This isn't a true quantitative change but the qualitative change is enough to make this worth reconsidering seriously. The Soviet Union's automated retaliatory systems which were designed to strike back of the Soviet leadership were all killed would probably also come into this category in many ways.

You point to a page which starts talking about smartphones as if they were melons, but in this case you are not talking about melons. Overall the article shows a serious lack of knowlege about the industry. These are smartphones and they work differently. In the case of smartphones, market share really is winning and you should remenber that that is exactly what kept Nokia dominant in the market from around 2000 to 2012 even as their technology lead was quite dubious. So far in the industry, market share dominance has only been lost not won; In Motorola's case by failing to transfer to digital. In Ericsson's case by failing to secure their logistics supplies against disaster. In Nokia's case basically by suicide. Apple doesn't count since they never actually achieved dominance; their situation is closer to that of HTC, Sony-Ericsson or Motorola recently which fought hard, came close, but could never defeat a bigger opponent.

The main point is simply the scale effect. There are a huge number of costs in the smartphone market which are fixed. These are, for example, development of hardware and underlying software. Some of these, such as making a new device driver for a camera, have to be done once per model of phone. Some of these, such as adding a bluetooth device driver, or improving the user interface, have to be done once for the entire OS type. Since these costs are spread across all Android users, that reduces the cost of the phone massively which means that the manufacturer can sell it cheaper whilst at the same time making more profit. Note that Samsung made a huge profit on Android phones.

Android manufacturers, like the PC market around 2000, are somewhat fragmented and use a number of different processor and technology vendors. At small scale that could be a problem since they have to go individually and negotiate prices. However, the Android market some time ago went beyond this to the stage that there are many different competing suppliers. This means that the producer of an Android phone could just sit there making small design changes and adding new technologies as they are delivered by the suppliers. Their phone would still improve as fast as the competitors using other systems.

The final most important point is that, Android just has become the standard software platform. If you are a big company and you want to reach 60% of your customers with a new App, in most countries you can simply produce an Android application and you will get there. All other platforms, even iOS, will just be a small incremental change that frankly isn't worth it until you know exactly how successful your app will be. Android just is, now, the standard platform to start on. New App development will be done there and so all other platforms will lag behind.

The biggest weakness of market dominance would be if, like Apple, the Android manufacturers became lazy and stopped improving now that they are dominant. Samsung might sit there doing nothing for a year or two, just producing an S5 slightly upgraded from the S4 and raking in the profits. However, that's the great thing about Android being multi-sources. Since HTC stopped concentrating on Windows phones and went back to Android seriously, there's a real alternative to Samsung. With Motorola actually looking like they might comeback, there's another alternative. All this means that, even with market dominance from Android, there will likely be more advances.

This is a bit sad in a way. Android is not the best mobile system ever (that goes to Nokia's old Maemo/Meego on the Nokia N9) I think that the system which challenges Android in future will have to be Android compatible.

Oh my god. You don't say. Here I thought it was run by intelligent giraffes from Alpha Centuri. All these years of deception. I'll just give up now. Your insights have suddenly made me realise none of us are worthy to inhabit the same world as you.

It gets even stranger. Not just a site with "people" but those "people" have viewpoints. They write as if those views are true. Probably you are implying that the actually believe those views. Really? Amazing. What insight; what brilliance; a new level for mankind. You should apply to run Harvard. I'm sure they will take you as their leader on the basis of this comment alone.

Wow; such originality; such vision. I am sure that if we searched all the sites on the entire internet it would turn out that nobody had ever previously thought of such a comment. An answer to every question for which the commenter is too stupid to come up with a witty retort. A simple way to do down every point for which the poster can't think of a response. You are a genius; so full of yourself and yet so empty. Astounding.

Look; I am calling you out because you are stupid. I've already ripped you apart on this. Let me spell it out again. Web sites are not hypocritical. People are hypocritical. There are more than two people here. The fact that Alice posts "it's okay for me to steal" and Bob posts "it's not okay for you to steal" does not mean that Slashdot is hypocritical. It means that there is more than one view here.

Oh, and calling PHP new doesn't make it new. It also doesn't make it any good. That is a language which has been broken for years and I have no idea why you would want to boost it.

How do you manage to keep the two bits picked out bold in your mind at the same time. Doesn't it hurt?