Actually yes, it does. You can patent the *specific* hardware implementation of a task. Someone else could then do the exact same task with a different implementation and bypass your patent.
For example, Setuid was patented by Dennis Ritchie in 1972/1979 (applied/granted) based on the hardware implementation, as shown in the patent abstract.
Every license plate is, by definition, "distinctively unique". Just sayin'
Time to go back to the dictionary: you have confused distinctively with distinguishably.
Those words were from the Snopes article not me. Furthermore, having gone back to the dictionary, I would argue that those words are redundant used together and unnecessary to the description of a vehicle license plate - which are each unique and, therefore, distinct.
Sure, it's a bit pedantic, but it's been a slow week...
*sigh*
I wonder if I can get a license plate that says that.
Just to pick a nit with that Snopes article. The first paragraph says:
Allowing motorists to obtain personalized plates provides them with an opportunity to obtain something distinctively unique, something that commands far more attention than the usual humdrum string of letters and digits.
Every license plate is, by definition, "distinctively unique". Just sayin'
Sure, we could provide them access to our educational system, but who's going to pay the schools then?
[ Damn it! ] Or, we could deny them access.
[ Sorry, I learned to type at US school...
They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science...We are giving them the skills to figure that out,
Mayor Bloomberg advanced in 2011 ('we are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities,
Giving? Seems like they're paying us, investing in our universities, to study and earn their education. They pay for a service/product US universities are providing. Isn't that how Capitalism works? Sure, we could provide them access to our educational system, but who's going to pay the schools then?
I think part of the problem is that Boeing defined what components they needed, but not necessarily completely how they were to be built or function internally (for things that have internals). For example, they may have specified an electronic component by its inputs/outputs and working/environmental tolerances, but not anything about the internals. In theory, this "black box" approach should work pretty well, but - as we programmers know - side effects, edge conditions and unknowns are a bitch.
In the case of the Li-Ion battery and its external monitoring/charging equipment, different assumptions may have been made on either side. As for other components, sometimes one needs to know how they're to be assembled to make them correctly.
My slide rule back in 1965 was intelligent, but it wasn't sentient.
Technically, the person/people who created your slide rule were intelligent *and* sentient.
The slide rule itself is just a stick with lines and numbers on it. The credit goes to its creator not the object.
It seems unclear to me that human brains produce "intelligent behavior." It seems to depend on the brain. Only a few per hundred seem to work really well, but up to half of them can file TPS reports.
The popularity of TV shows like "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" and "The Housewives of _______", not to mention the people actually *on* those shows, would seem to support your thesis.
It'll be nice if there could be a JIT or some other accelerator for Perl.
If Perl isn't fast enough for you already, you need to cut back on the caffeine / amphetamines.
I'm not sure Perl can be any faster for most uses.
For example, I wrote a Perl script to display installed Solaris package information that runs faster than the native (compiled) utility. This script opens/reads/parses/displays 1500 files (each in a different folder) in 0.25s (1/4) where the native Solaris utility takes 7s (seven).
And for me, writing code for corporate use... Reliability trumps shiny any day of the week.
Though, for us Firefly fans, reliability is shiny.
One of Perl's biggest uses was web development.
And (way) before that, its biggest use was - and is - for sysadmin administration tasks. From Wikipedia:
Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier.
Perl gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its parsing abilities.
I used Perl in the '80s (yes, I'm old) for sysadmin tasks way before I used it for CGI and web-server tasks. I still use it everyday for commercial production sysadmin and programming projects on both Unix and Windows. (P.S. I've used Emacs since the '80s too.)
I'll stack my productivity and code usefulness with these tools against any one/thing else, anyday...
we have found no major quality or technical problem' with the lithium-ion batteries
How about several (many?) minor issues that, when taken together, add up to "the problem"? Also, since at least, one of the batteries was fried almost beyond recognition (from a photo I saw), how do you know there was no problem?
So are only safe if we run an OS on an isolated partition which has nothing but a web browser and the other partitions are automatically unmounted while the web browser OS is working?
Actually, we are only safe while the system is powered off, disconnected from all cabling and still in the box it came in. Trust me. After dealing with security weenies and various system lock-down methodologies for many, many years, a truly "secure" system (to their satisfaction, anyway) is unusable and you might as well not even bother to unpack it.
On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN.
