Because 5.6 is the largest ever recorded in the state, perhaps? Just because it's normal or boring to someone in another part of the world doesn't discount this as news. If 1/3 of the population of Europe were on the brink of starvation, would it be normal and un-newsworthy simply because there are countries in Africa where that (or worse) is normal?

Using your logic, it can be argued that nothing is newsworthy here, simply because in all probability, everything interesting has already happened on a larger scale somewhere else in the universe.

You're missing the point. Lawyers do that all the time because they get caught up in technicalities, and it's why they are so despised. Back away from the case, look at it objectively, and you can see that the legal frameworks surrounding patent and copyright are fundamentally broken. Laws are supposed to come into existence because of a fundamental need to protect. When they become subverted and abused, like the entire "intellectual property" industry has done, they start damaging far more than protecting. In the same way that the First Amendment does not protect you yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or threatening to kill someone, patent and copyright law should not protect trolls or obvious implementations.

Your argument largely consists of "this is legal", and while that may be true, that was not the point of the parent post. The point of the parent post was that for this nonsense to continue provides evidence of a fundamentally broken system because it has been many many years, and this case has been dealt setback after setback, yet it's not done. If the system is so overly complex and backlogged that it takes, what, almost a decade for this sort of thing to be resolved, that is a massive problem.

NPRP is the last line of defense? Cool. Glad they didn't cut the first line of defense, which is the engineer team that is responsible for creating a superior product in the first place.

I'm confused. I've been doing voice search on my Android phone for quite some time. Google has been collecting this data for at least a year (probably longer), and also has voicemail transcription data as well, so accuracy is not an issue.

I actually much prefer having it take me to Google search results instead of just giving me one answer, because sometimes my question is not that simple. Most of the time, the first search result is accurate, but I like having the options there.

I guess maybe I just prefer to have the answers clearly referenced. Maybe if I used Siri, I'd understand what all the fuss is about. But ultimately, I have zero interest in using the iPhone, because I do not like iOS.

No you won't. You'll almost certainly be dead.

[quote] The fact that we're STILL talking about Fukushima instead of getting basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers fixed just goes to show how much of a media circus this Fukushima is.[/quote]

I seriously cannot stand when people use this argument. "We" are not a singular collective with only one focus. Nuclear plant engineers and operators world over need to know the exact details of what happened so that precautions can be taken at the other plants that are in potential flood/tsunami areas. What can those people possibly contribute to rebuilding roads and sewers, or changing the designs of other buildings in those areas? The nice thing about being human is that we're not the fscking borg, and we can actually have a whole crapton of individual pursuits.

Seeing as how RIM is Canadian, this has already been done: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109370/

[QUOTE]That's irrelevant. Individual humans behave unpredictably. People, en masse, behave in ways that are actually highly predictable because the unpredictable actions of one person are balanced by the "unpredictable" action of another person doing something relatively opposite.[/QUOTE]

Very true. But also irrelevant, because of unequal wealth distribution. The "unpredictable" actions of a few led to massive economic disruption that cascaded.

If the need is that significant, why did you not have spares, or good warranty support? Mission-critical systems should be supported in a way that absolutely minimizes downtime, and if your drive failure plan consists of ordering drives from somewhere, then it either isn't mission-critical, or you did not actually have a plan.

As opposed to not announcing it, and inducing a temporary panic when the warning goes off all over the country and nobody bothers to read/listen to the "oh hay, that was just a test kthxbai" message?

Funny, I would have flipped that around... seems those with resources and influence try to gain information for blackmail/leverage on government. So it's a rather incestuous relationship, and frankly I wish they'd just leave average citizens out of it.

Canada???

Good luck with that one. :/

Thanks. Now I'm going to have nightmares about what it would be like if Lucas decided to just completely re-make Episodes 4-6.

"take money away from people who have a lot of it"??

When the fuck did paying your fair share of taxes become akin to theft?