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Comment Re:Digia ? (Score 1) 152

They've been around for more than 15 years so take that for what you will. There is no guarantees that any company won't go under but they seem solid enough.

Except that I'm pretty sure their biggest client was Nokia for most of these 15 years, so good luck to them.

Comment Re:Fill me in, eh (Score 1) 54

In Canada, does their Supreme Court make laws? Or did the court just interpret an existing law which will be quickly altered to void this inconvenient decision?

It depends on how you define "make laws". Technically, the legislature in Canada is supreme - they make the laws. Just like in the US. But all laws are subject to the Constitution and more specifically the Charter, which means that they can be struck down by the judiciary; i.e. Canada has de facto judicial supremacy. And of course, the common law is judge-made law, just as it is in every common law country.

But in this case, yeah, the legislature can just go ahead and introduce a new law that it thinks will pass the judicial test. That's how the system is supposed to work anyway.

But the constitution is irrelevant in this case, this case was all about regular law. So this is about common law, which is what the judges use to interpret the laws passed by parliament. So Parliament can absolutely void all of this by changing th statutes.. But the last time time they touched copyright law, it was hugely controversial, so I don't expect this government or any government to expand political capital doing that in the near future.

Comment Re:The underlying map data is key (Score 0) 179

Google didn't make their own maps, neither did Microsoft or Nokia or Garmin or Tomtom. They all buy their maps (the raw data) from a small numbers of companies like Maptech or Teleatlas who do all the hard work. Apple can buy their maps from the same place... The real challenge for Apple to make their own maps application is that they don't have Google search to find stuff on it.

Comment People need mediation (Score 1) 226

Even if the polling could be made to work to get a true representation of the people's will (and not of some determined hackers, social engineer or just well organised group), there is a much bigger problem. One of the important uses of representative democracy is that the People are often wrong about the details, and you can't let them make all the choices. As an example, see California, which has a very strong popular initiave system (referendums), and they voted themselves low taxes and lots of services, and now the state is more or less bankrupt. And California how has a constitution that runs hundreds of pages with all kind of crap added by referendums. You can't trust the average man to know what's best in details. That why we vote for politicians along broad principles and let them figure out the details.

Comment WebOS is ahead (Score 4, Interesting) 94

1. I'm not convinced at all that HP is giving up on WebOS, if they had wanted to get rid of it, they could have sold it for a lot of money. There are many interested buyers.

2. WebOS has a huge advantage, it already exists. Tizen doesn't. Intel had announced that they would announce the architecture at Linuxcon Europe, but they had nothing to show. Rumour is that they're still in negotiation with Samsung.. And doing this kind of work in a joint venture is always a terrible idea as there is no clear direction. On the other hand, WebOS exists, works and is on devices already. And it seems HP is still investing in it. Also WebOS has applications, Tizen doesn't, it doesn't even have any defined APIs, no one knows what will be in it, etc.

Comment Arafat, Hu Jintao, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter (Score 1) 188

They're all engineers.

It's not that uncommon at all. Also, the majority of the members of the executive committee of the communist party of China (the center of power in China) are eng. too.

Engineering tends to attracts the best and the brightest in dictatorship as it's seen as safer profession where there is less risk of angering the regime. And well, law of example is less important when you have mostly political trials..

Comment Re:In related news (Score 2, Informative) 460

Seriously you're asking a linux developer his opinion on BSD? What answer were you expecting?

Something that doesn't make him sound like a complete idiot?

The core of Mac OS X borrows heavily from BSD, so one could legitimately argue that BSD is now the most widespread UNIX variant. In fact, I wouldn't swear to it, but I suspect that makes BSD (and Mac OS X, specifically) more popular than all of the other Linux and UNIX variants put together.

1. Lennart is NOT a kernel developer. He is a userspace developer who wrote many important pieces of infrastructure for all free operating systems.

2. Lennart is trying to make Linux more like OSX.. What he is saying is that the other BSDs are way way behind in features. Apple had to radically change BSD to make it suitable for a desktop, and Lennart is doing the same.

Comment WebRTC Open Code is missing important bits (Score 5, Interesting) 199

The WebRTC code that was released is missing many important bits that are required to compete against Skype. The most important is probably a bandwidth management engine, the code that's currently public just sends at a pre-configured bitrate. That means it can only do low resolution video with a shitty quality.

That said, Google Talk in GMail and Android have a dynamic bitrate stuff, and I expect they will be released at some point. I should also mention that Farsight2/Farstream using in Empathy and Pidgin are currently gaining the same kind of bandwidth management that Google is doing. So we should get at least two independent open implementations soon.

Comment India already does that and more (Score 1) 187

Last year, when I visited India, the world's largest democracy, I tried to buy a pre-paid SIM card. They asked me for a photo, proof of address (like my hotel's address) and a photocopy of my passport. It seems it's standard in India since the Mumbai attack.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

Comment 37% more likely to die? (Score 1, Redundant) 341

It's interesting that women who sit more than 6 hours are 37% more likely to die. I'm curious to know the absolute percentage of women who die versus the women who don't die. I heard the Virgin Mary didn't die (but went to heaven directly). I'd be curious to about other women who have similar advantages.

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