I don't blame China, I blame Canada. Ask yourself, who stands to gain most from a warming earth? That's right, those beaver loving moose riders living in America's hat.

I'm thinking of moving to Finland.

I love Rails, I tolerate Ruby, but man, "members of the Ruby community" are insufferable.

No, the labor will be done by robots, but robotics technology will still be covered by patents. The conflicts between patent holders on the robots' software, hardware, middleware, wetware, upware, downware and stemware will become so intense that eventually everyone in the country will be a patent attorney, waging eternal war for injunctions against rival patent Attorney-Lords.

The litigation will be glorious! The streets will run red with tape! Motions to dismiss will lie strewn about the courtroom, cleaved in twain, affidavits snatched from their authors' teets and put to the flame! May Prior Art be with us, brothers, for tonight we dine in District Court!

Basically, Thunderdome, but with more paperwork.

I think you forgot to put in that whole "industrial revolution middle class-y thing." I seem to be not wealthy, having my enemies driven before me while I hear the lamentations of their women, but I also don't seem to be toiling in the dirt under constant fear of the lash. Hmmm....

British Columbia, Canada.

My thought was "they've patented RPC (remote response of an object to an input). Or possibly HTML (terminal system displays an object according to its own capabilities)."

Exactly. The question to ask is, "what's the endgame?" When Joe Hacker says, "huh, I've got this video file on my computer and I'd like to save it to disk, but the computer..my own computer...is saying 'no.' That ain't right," and so he puts together some code that gives you a "save" button on YouTube videos, his goal is exactly what it looks like. To skip ads and save videos and generally have your own computer do the things you want it to do, and not the things somebody else wants it to. And when he gets sued, the endgame for Joe and the users of his software is to retain the ability to keep skipping ads and saving videos and having control of their computers.

But Microsoft doesn't give a shit about their users' ability to skip ads or save videos. Their endgame is...unclear. It could be as simple as access to Google's API so that MS gets a 'polished' WP8 youtube app and their users once again sit through ads and can't save videos. Or this can just be a bargaining chip in a completely unrelated negotiation. But the instant MS gets whatever it is they want from Google they will drop the ad blocking and file saving features regardless of the "overwhelmingly positive feedback from users."

Around here, .05 is considered impaired. Your license is seized for 3 days (first offense, up to 30 days for your third), your car is often towed and impounded, and you get to go to court. It's often about $4000 after all is said and done.

There have been all sorts of issues with this. One is that you are tried and convicted at the side of the road with no chance of appeal, possibly due to a faulty machine (and many cases have been tossed due to a suspected bad machine).

There was a case where an older woman who rarely drank had sip of champagne at a celebratory dinner, and drove home. It was dark, she got lost, and made an illegal u-turn. An off-duty police officer was behind her, and pulled her over, got a cruiser to show up, and had her charged. She had poor lung capacity, so it took them over 2 hours to come to the conclusion that they couldn't get a breath sample (they charged her an additional $500 penalty for failing to provide a breath sample).

The woman knew she wasn't over the limit, so she took a cab to the hospital, and got blood drawn; it showed that there was no alcohol in her system. Eventually, the charges were dropped, but she had spent about $10,000 on lawyers by that point.

That's a good guess, but wouldn't Samsung rather have the technology and any potential patents?

Samsung is pretty good at making smart technology moves - buying factories, and other companies at the right time, and then dominating the market. You would think that this would be a nice technology to have with their tv/tablet/phone/laptop screen technology.

So maybe there are issues with the company (inept management, etc), intellectual property (ie the violate someone's patents), or technology (there are still significant barriers to overcome).

Or maybe Samsung sees the future on OLED, and doesn't want to spend resources on a stepping-stone technology that will disappear without a ripple in a few years.

Questions questions.

I worked at an NRC institute from 2002-2011. It was a fantastic place though it had faults. Each Institute was a mini-fiefdom in which the respective Director Generals held all the power. A lot of blue sky research was done, however in reality a lot of it would be considered "mental masturbation"; papers were published but never referenced. Or papers would be whipped up so people could attend conferences in nice locales . For too long NRC acted like an academic environment where money didn't matter: there was always a new bag of money next year.

Many Institutes had overlapping work with other Institutes but didn't collaborate. In fact the way the IT infrastructure developed was also very silo'd, it was next to impossible to work with other sites because of various local policies.

NRC has needed a good kick in the ass for a number of years. Previous presidents talked the talk but did nothing. In the end the Old Boys Club endured. The current president has been given his orders and is executing them. He's collapsing ~15 years of pain into ~3. Much of the blame for this should be put on the previous presidents.

That all said, I'm not a big fan of everything that is going on, but if you look at this as a soft reset for NRC, things will get better.

Bottom line: if anyone at NRC says things were Just Fine before, they are delusional or lying.