Comment Re:Caps Lock Key (Score 1) 806
"Serial Number Entry Technician"? I work in Serial Number Quality Assurance, you insensitive clod!
Anyway the holy grail of choice would be a phone that is $500 or less that support CDMA and GSM on Verizon/T-Mobile/ATT/Sprint..
From what I've heard, this is basically impossible (so far) due to antenna and radio design problems. At least on the GSM side, you can apparently support either AT&T 3G or T-Mobile 3G, but both doesn't fly. (There's money to be made for a handset maker who did so, if only from not having to manufacture multiple SKUs for different networks, so it's not a lack of trying. The BB Storm is close, but still doesn't support all 3G frequencies in the US.)
Sounds like 'uneducation' to me. The problem with learning at your own pace is that not all students are naturally curious, and even those who are are most likely not naturally curious about every subject that needs to be taught in the world. Learning should be fun whenever possible, but not all things are pleasant, and children need to learn that some things require work and discipline. Outside of research labs, very few individuals in life are able to do or think about just what they want to do.
From a cynical point of view, it sounds an awful lot like the people I know whose parents had them home schooled but then didn't actually spend any time teaching them anything. They didn't end up learning anything and now aren't really prepared to get a job that pays the rent.
I don't think it's impossible to make it work well, and for a certain kind of kid I think it would be fantastic. Unschooling would require a lot of involvement from parents, though, probably a lot more than public school would, and I expect that some portion of parents aren't willing to provide that involvement. I'd worry that those parents will latch onto unschooling as a way to justify letting their kids do whatever they want without any supervision.
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
If you go down that road then you end up with the world we have today: developers first look at the spec, and then they try to find out whether or not that part of the spec actually matters to the real world of browsers. The HTML5 editors want a better world, one where the major browsers are actually 100% compliant. They may not get there, but they definitely won't if they put things in the spec that browser vendors have said outright that they won't implement.
I go to NYC and it's like heaven
Indeed. I live in NYC, and since it has a sufficiently extensive network, I don't ever need a car, so my yearly transportation costs are $972 (soon to increase to $1068), paid for with pre-tax money. That's less than a lot of people pay just for insurance on their car, let alone gas or maintenance.
While I appreciate the anecdotal reference here to supposedly a successful economic situation, I'm still not convinced that this company would have made less money without the patent process in place.
...
In this case, I'll bet the patents were used in a defensive mode, where the chemical processes were implemented with the understanding that a patent troll couldn't stop them.
Actually, they definitely did make more money than they would have without the patent process. The chemical industry is one in which it's difficult to come up with a chemical that does a specific thing, but easy to produce a lot of a chemical once you have it. The patents weren't used to protect the company from patent trolls, they were used to protect the company from other major chemical companies. Without a patent, if they came up with a new chemical and put it on the market, another company could come along, analyze what they were selling, and produce substantially the same product without putting in the time and money upfront for the R&D. That would seriously reduce the profitability of coming up with new chemicals.
And no, I don't love the patent system (I wish it were completely abolished), but it is an unfortunate evil in today's engineering environment. I have yet to meet a single individual that I know personally or have been able to shake their hand who has made a single penny off of a patent, yet I know dozens of individuals who have had them granted and have even developed patent-worthy concepts of my own.
There are some industries in which the patent system works like it's supposed to. My dad was a chemist until he retired, and he generated a number of patents which have been really valuable to him and the company he worked for. It costs a lot of time and money to come up with chemicals that do interesting things, and patents makes it so that doing so is profitable.
Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.
Are you thinking of some other product? Orkut has been a Google service since the beginning, and is one of the top social networks in the world (though not in the United States).
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 30 years, then yes.
So you're saying that it's self-explanatory once you've been exposed to it
Far out. I'll slap the next person who tells me Unix is hard to use, if that's Microsoft's idea of user-friendliness.
Because "-rw-r--r-- 1 root root" is so self-explanatory?
If all else fails, lower your standards.
