Britain should know better than to ask for such an idiotic thing in the first place.

Well, no actually. You're assuming that British people study the US constitution - they don't. Secondly, it is up to the American people to determine how to interpret the US constitution. There is nothing idiotic about that.

If a friend and ally makes a request, you can certainly consider it (before you say no). Constitution or not, quite possibly the specific videos in question might infringe some law or regulation, so there could be reasons to take down these videos if you look hard enough.

I think it's a massive simplification that you are going to join a project to "fix up stuff". You need to know what needs fixing, what is important to fix, what desperately needs to be fixed. Otherwise you are just going to be tweaking hardly used, unimportant, soon to be deprecated code. Your contribution will be welcome but irrelevant.

If you like Boost: download it. Use it. You absolutely must be using it. Read the mailing list. Find out where the real problems are for yourself. Then discuss making fixes with the other devs.

1. You expected people who came up with OpenOffice.org as a name to come up with a "good" name ?
2. You're a xenophobic idiot. There are many other countries outside your own one, not all of them speak English
3. No one in the US will care anyway. They'll autoupdate to the next version and barely notice that the name changed. It will still be free and arguably better than MS.

... but after skimming through the code, I'm not terribly surprised to hear that it has issues, because there are virtually no comments or design docs.

And they used the old coversheet for their TPS reports.

Seriously though, how can you expect them to have design documents ? Four guys putting together a prototype version of something they have no idea what will come out in the end. Once interested parties have had a chance to play with it and see what can be done with it, then a serious attempt can be made at defining exactly how it is supposed to work.

I'm not saying the patent system isn't broken, but...

• It's not a software patent
• Let's see the author/owner try to extract license fees from someone, anyone
• The patent system is not about holding back stupid ideas. You are allowed to patent both clever and dumb inventions
• It's not funny and it's not clever

If I understand the story correctly, the company lost a lot of money because of a patent they thought was a bit stupid, decided to get patent protection for all their new projects, this guy and his buddies thought it would be a great idea to waste even more money patenting dumb stuff. Does he still work there ?

If the RISC patent was so obvious, why didn't the company spend money getting it invalidated and then get all their costs back? (rather than wasting it on something they believed to be pointless)

Surely they'd notice if they can't get online

I'm sure you could game it by switching the routers on but disabling WiFi, change any classes using computers so that the work they are doing doesn't need it or can make do with a few wired connections. Surely not every class needs access to the net. The kids wouldn't notice the difference and still go home saying "school makes them feel ill".

What they actually need; is some kind of proof from which to start making a hypothesis. But so far they have no proof whatsoever, just "concern".

A simple test: switch off WiFi for the first week of term without telling anyone. See if the number of complaints changes.

This is the real problem right here:

Professor Magda Havas of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., who does research on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation, issued an open letter to parents and boards saying she is "increasingly concerned" about Wi-Fi and cellphone use at schools.

So no real hard evidence, just "concern". When are the experts going to take responsibility for giving clear and fact based advice. Wait, oh here it is: Magda Havas' homepage where it seems clear to me she has already made up her mind in advance and is very vocal about publicising herself. I'm surprised she's not out there campaigning against water fluoridation and wearing clothes made from mixed fibres.

This is what happens when Psychologists study something technical. At first I thought that I must be an exception because I look at the quality of the video I want to watch, but then I read the article.

Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content.

Bit rate is not the same as quality. Changing the bit rate is not the same as changing the quality. Different rate-distortion algorithms can allocate bits differently depending on how many bits are available. It's not really a suprise that a lower bit rate video can have higher quality.

I haven't read their paper but I would guess that they didn't look at what bit allocation strategy would be chosen depending on the bit rate. Furthermore I expect they just plonked the coded video on a laptop and showed it using Windows media player; so they didn't take into account that higher bit rates can have choppier playback and again it all depends on the specifics of the codec, whether it needs a lot of grunt for decoding or it puts all the effort in the coding part. There is actually a lot of work involved in preparing video for storage on a DVD or transmission, it's not just a question of selecting a bit rate.

If their article didn't say things like "probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or" then I might believe they knew what they were doing. Had they Googled things like "MPEG video quality assessment" they would have found that there is a lot of work in this area, done before video coding standards are finalised and with the help of psychology!

This is totally a non story. Man tries to write proof of concept malicious phone app. There is so little content in the story, the BBC can easily re-use this story again and again without worrying about it losing relevance. Any vaguely competent programmer could have easily done whatever they did (don't bother checking the article they don't explain anything). The sad fact is, there probably really are thousands of "hackers" out there trying to write malicious apps and we should all be careful with security blah blah blah, but instead of leading to any actual news in this area the BBC only want the "big bad Internet" angle.

The BBC have never quite "got it" when it comes to technology and technology stories. Everything has to be dumbed down enough so that the technical content is zero, but I don't think this is because they are trying to make it easy to understand, it's because they never understood themselves in the first place. Therefore, they eat up promo stories like this one, fed to them from companies in the IT security business saying how "scary" things are, and amping up the FUD.

At the end of the day, you don't need to go to the trouble of writing a malicious app; as Kevin Mitnick would say, you just ask people for the information you want. But c'mon BBC, a 14 year old would be able to write a much better, easy to understand, technically competent, story with some detail. I'm so glad I'm not paying a TV licence fee any more.

The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command

Although the demo was mostly Warhol using fill on a digitized image, you can clearly see him using some screenmode with >32 colours, which would have been a struggle for the average PC of the time as they usually had motherboard graphics only. Also Windows 2 was nowhere near as slick as Workbench 1. The Amiga had hardware sprites giving smooth pointers (or is that "cursors" ?) since day 1.

At that time PCs were only used for boring spreadsheets and business applications. The turning point was Doom, after which people got interested in graphics and sound hardware; and the PC became a lot more general purpose as a media machine.

Amiga started the revolution. If they hadn't shown what was possible, we would all be much more split between applications based computing and gaming consoles.

Why are the big companies cheapest products $200 or more?

1. Because they are trying to make a profit for their shareholders, their company and most importantly so they can continue having jobs.
2. Because they have to recoup research and development costs. The commercial market demands products that are progressive. Not many people would buy a tablet running Android 0.9, certainly not enough to be viable. For schools though, functional is all that matters. So what if the kids have to wait a few seconds longer for their browser to load up a page ?

Remember the MacBook Air teardown where they showed it could be made cheaper ? Of course it can be done if you cut all the corners and you're not interested in profit.

Hopefully, after (if) these get rolled out in India, the other manufacturers will start competing a little harder.

As an engineer I just love how people anticipate that gadgets will continually fall in price and "hopefully" get even cheaper. While I'm working my ass off to get something competitive out the door that might make me enough profit to pay for food, electricity and internet.

I hope someone undercuts your job!

Also, if this Indian tablet supports flash, I'll have a nice little chuckle.

Supporting Flash is a political decision not a technical decision. What makes you think a bottom rung ARM will run Flash anyway ?

It just means that the coders implemented functions with the same names

They copied the API ? Then the question is it possible to copyright an API ? AFAIK, it is. So this is not permissible. However, it seems that some of the API was copied from BSD, not UNIX, and the BSD licence allows you to do this.

Counter argument: just suppose libelf was a Linux creation. SCO writes their own version with exactly the same API, but it's closed source. They sell their version as part of UNIX^TM. A Linux kernel developer comes across the header files for SCO's version during their day job and notices the API is identical. OSS community up in arms ? GPL violation claim ?

No, this is completely fair. It's patented and as such is protected IP.

The guy may not like it, he may not agree with the patent but it's not his judgement to make. If it is patented he can't release his version to the OSS community and he can't give it away for free. He can use it at home for his own personal use though.

I didn't think this was a "nastygram". It was a polite letter pointing out potential patent infringement. It was clear, concise and firm; exactly how you should word a necessary legal warning.

If he puts his code on an EU based webserver and someone downloads it in the states then it could be argued that he is distributing his code in the states - that's why it's a grey area and one you don't want to be in unless you have deep pockets.

The second C&D letter about his blog post he can safely ignore. Unless he is giving out the code, I can't see any way he could be infringing.

You're right, it's not newsworthy: "Guy doesn't understand patents, nearly releases IP patented by someone else, gets a warning letter from a lawyer".

Similarly, the Longyan bureau of land and resources in Fujian province reportedly meted out administrative punishment to a Japanese who measured 195 locations inside Longyan and located 80 of them on his map.

It sounds to me that this could mean: he got a caning because he took 195 photos with GPS logging and looked up 80 of them.