Indeed, re-inventing the wheel isn't the hallmark of a quality leader, IMHO.

In fact, it points in a very different direction.

Why does a '90210' kid have a phone with a custom shell? (not a snap-on case, but actually custom-made OEM casing) I'll tell you why; to set them apart, make them feel like they're important and part of an exclusive group.

So... why would the 'Rominee' have a special "VP App" made, when all it really does is send and receive messages like a boatload of other vetted wares? Same reasons, I betcha. Does that sound *united* to you?

Dunno how the reviews look on the AppStore® side, but the Android Play Store listing for "Mitt's VP" is- blo. wing. up. Astroturf and flames make for one especially polished turd, apparently. Caveat emptor! The 'droid version is roughly 12MB, requires registration (or FB link) and has to run in the background. It must be loaded there, patiently waiting for the announcement to come and <sarcasm>couldn't possibly be steering a metric crap-ton of ads in your direction</sarcasm>.

Here's the questions I'd have for him: Why did you have a special app made, rather than use existing social communication apps? Why not use a hash-tag, a Facebook page or some other medium that's readily available? What makes the existing infrastructure so un-worthy that you have to make a somewhat insignificant-, yet very public decision through an exclusive channel? Does your campaign value this style of "exclusive membership" over public transparency? And how would that be reflected in your as-of-yet-imaginary administration?

The last questions, I put to the reader: Why would you vote for a guy that behaves and speaks as if <pointing@>you</pointing@> don't matter? How much would it take for you to vote against such a candidate, (i.e., voting for someone else) just to make sure he doesn't win? How much exclusion would you be willing to tolerate from your government?

I don't often respond to AC's, but when I do, I prefer to usurp AC's point.

Fashion... that's a good idea. I like that.

No, really... it makes more sense than other allegories. Think about it, people buy clothes; some for function, some for style. People buy software; some for sheer functionality (Linux packages, some PC offerings) and others for more stylish flair. (most Mac software, also some PC offerings but Adobe comes to mind the most)

Every new season, it seems there's a new fashion. Designers and textile plants keep striving to stay on the cutting edge. Every so often, it seems that some software bundle is being upgraded. However, developers aren't always striving to stay ahead, but only to be different enough to keep from being sued. Starting to see the similarities now?

And by the by... clothing may not be patented, but zippers are... so are snaps... even cuff-links. Still, point taken. These patents do nothing to protect the design of clothes that feature them nor prevent others from innovating their own fasteners, they simply prevent others from manufacturing the exact-same fastener mechanism.

So, why would the software business model suffer if there were no patents? Frankly, I don't think it would because it--and every user bound by their efforts--suffers for it now. It would remove this bass-ackward economy of patent litigation and infringement maneuvering, a sub-economy that should (IMHO) be outlawed by the UN. Competition without the fear of patent mongers would foster innovation at a faster pace and drive the larger firms to keep up with the smaller, agile indie developers. They pound their files in an earnest display of defending their innovation, when the line between true innovation and simple tropes or conventions becomes increasingly thinner. In fashion, you can tell when it's a knock-off... so guess what? We can tell when an app is a knock-off of a more popular app, too! Ultimately, it comes down to the label; whether it's sewed into the hem or printed on the CD.

So, it begs the question of why this patent system still exists? It's easy, really. The largest developers and the largest stakeholders in tech are so afraid of having to rapidly react to competitors that they move their legal teams instead. They know a dedicated partnership or legal firm is going to move much faster than it would take to compete with actual innovation. They can fire off a C&D faster than a gold CD.

We hear this rallying cry from the behemoths, "too big to fail," when it should be, "too ponderously slow to compete." (Hello, Mr. Ballmer)

IANAL, but let the litigation fall back to where it belongs; contract law. Every EULA has a clause about reverse-engineering or hacking the software. If there's an infringement, then let it be covered by that clause. Let the so-called "patents" (e.g., a 'right-click' or context menu, a vertical scrollbar without calling it a 'vertical scrollbar', et al) be diminished to a more-fitting role; as fashions past.

The burden of proof with software should be a simple test: Is it ripping-off an original? True, that would have to be coined in legal terms that must take about five pages to be fully vetted, but it's still a simple test. In the simplest sense, "ripping off" would mean that the defendant (the non-innovator) is clearly and obviously re-using illicitly obtained resources in the design of a product that is intended to make a profit at the expense of the innovator in a directly competing (apples-for-apples... um, no pun intended) market.

A Note to The Legal Community: Seriously, let's take Occam's Razor to this; look at the number of active patent suits, get enough of a read-in to see what it's really about, then look me in the eye and tell me that this isn't out of control. If you need further evidence, then take a look at what Apple just landed in their patent coffer.

Parent makes an excellent point, regardless of the veracity of the work. (I'm not questioning it, but remember this is /.)

Regardless of the exact science, the point is that grand "geoengineering" plans should be considered very, very carefully. If the plan is to create a carbon-sink, what else might be displaced by this process? It's the classic sci-fi disaster-movie premise; mankind makes grandiose plans to make things better, but the near-sighted application of insanely powerful technology comes back to bite him in the ass. Have we learned nothing?

I mean, humans are largely carbon-based protein chains anyway... should we really be sending our own building-blocks to the bottom of the ocean? Is carbon really such a culprit that sending it somewhere so inaccessible is a plausible solution? As parent suggests, such drastic displacement of a specific element can have far-reaching effects, some of which make Climate Change look like a minor sunburn in comparison.

With so much controversy over Climate Change, Warming Trends and the so-called 'carbon footprint' that so many have painted-up to be the villain, should we be doing anything this drastic?

My answer; no. What about methane? ...ozone? ...the diminishing resource of trees to recycle and filter out CO2 in the first place? Looks like humanity is up to its old tricks; the inept manipulate the insecure to direct the incompetent into doing the impossible for implausible reasons.

I, for one, welcome the chance to volunteer for off-world exploration.

I am a Denver resident. I've seen my last three movies at that very theater. This act has chilled us all to the bone. It's like Columbine, but without any parents to blame. The suspect was a post-grad working on his doctorate; in fact, he was in the process of dropping out.

TP quotes one news article, but that news correspondent made an incorrect assumption. Those doors are steel construction with 1/4" thick bang-plates; you can't simply kick them in.

The gunman did not "sneak in"... he sneaked out after buying a ticket! His white car was parked strategically by those exit doors at the back of the building. He propped those doors open on his way out and geared-up for a few minutes before going back in through the same door. He basically used the same loophole that employees use to get high during a shift. (Plz... that's not a generalization; I'm sure most cinema-trons are hard working and honest.)

So, for anyone that's going to say that theater rules or municipal code would have prevented it, you're full of it. This may have been prevented with better building security at the exits, more attentive staff (or just more staff for an important midnight event) or even a person that notices this douchebag propping open a one-way exit and just closes the door behind him. At least then, the gunman would have had to walk around the building or drive his car fully-armed and quite obvious. The police response that night was so quick because they were already at the mall to help direct the increased traffic. If his route back into the theater was blocked, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to stun with gas or have his "fish in a barrel" target range. Sure, it wouldn't have stopped him from making trouble, but it very well could have prevented a massacre of this scale.

One thing has been made very clear; there is no legislation or body of intelligence that prevented James Holmes from owning, loading and carrying a devastating firearm into a crowded theater. Up until he started shooting people, James Holmes did everything by the book. That's the scariest part of all. How many states ban assault weapons? Care to guess? Just five. How many limit or regulate the sale of assault weapons? Three. What does that leave us, Mr. Wizard? That leaves us with forty-two states that don't do anything about the sale of assault weapons.

You guessed it. Colorado is one of those forty-two states.

A massacre has never happened simply because we were missing a specific law. An armed victim is still a victim. A massacre cannot be prevented by passive technological security measures or even active security screening, for those are simply patterns and obstacles to a persistent attacker.

A massacre happens because the attacker knows that people just don't give a damn.

Look, this is not controversial. I get that there's this collective "awwwww..." about not getting any sneak-peeks into 48-fps 3-D. Bi-ig de-eal. I grew up in the 80's, enduring both bi-axial (grey glasses, crappy 3D effect) and bi-chromatic (red/green or fuchsia/teal glasses, really crappy 3D effect) movies. The biggest revolution in 3D technology has been the digital projector. Sharper images, sub-conscious mechanisms like "triple flash" and snappier frame-transitions are what we have to thank for Avatar, Toy Story 3, TRON:Legacy and other blockbuster hits in the cinema. The biggest problem with those? Even those snappy and sharper images were displaying at under 48fps frame-rate thanks to sub-par projection booths. The RealD and IMAX-3D technologies already account for 48fps rates, but it's the aging projectors that can't handle it.

Peter Jackson is collaborating on bringing yet-another-iconic tale to the screen but only pushing the 3-D technology from the production end. Distributors and Blu-Ray publishers are worried about this because it will make their products look like Jaws 3 or worse on old equipment. (Anyone? Bad 3-D shark 'splosion with eyeballs shooting through the water? Gosh, you're all just a bunch of kids.) Cinema chains are sweating it because now they have to uphold the specific 48fps standard for the year's most-anticipated holiday-season blockbuster.

I, for one, welcome our higher-framerate 3-D overlords, but I ain't paying twenty bucks for snacks.

No, it's not.

Took long enough to finally address the question raised by TFA, but then again, this is /. after all.

The long answer starts something like this:

The now controversial label of "Global Warming" (lately modified to the politically correct term, "Climate Change") is not saying, "it's gonna get hotter," or even, "it's gonna get hotter and colder." What Climate Change means is that the global climate now contains more energy than has ever been recorded. This not only spells bad news for the Almanac, but it means that weather is now weather^2. More thermal energy means that weather patterns are more energetic than ever. The global dynamics of weather patterns all seek equilibrium, but the greater amount of energy in the equation creates the more energetic patterns in the process of obtaining that equilibrium. As a side-effect, basic high and low temperatures are more extreme. Other side effects include, but are not limited to increases in: wind speed, energetic discharge (lightning), precipitation volume, precipitation duration, extents of upper atmospheric moisture currents, relative size and force of atmospheric disturbances, and so on... What this means to our infrastructure can be summed up in three words, "time to go". The combination of greater climatic extremes and sheer aging materials adds up to a mounting cataclysm of decay.

I apologize for the lack of citations in this post, largely due to the sheer volume of "It's bunk! You're bunk! I de-bunk your bunk! Bunk you!" and other noise regarding this complex-yet-positively-simple matter. The world is changing, and not for the better. The people of Earth seem to be content with bickering over who gets the blame, who places the blame and who appointed these people to say who gets the blame in the first place. Meanwhile, sea walls are being battered, towns and even cities are continuously bombarded by forces we cannot predict and the people we relied on to make these things work in the first place are locked in such ferocious browbeating with each other that the impending doom is being thoroughly ignored.

Anyone who says that Climate Change violates any law of thermodynamics has clearly mucked up the equation; absorption rates for land and water are drastically understated, not to mention the surprisingly significant impact of ice melt. The atmosphere is not the heat sink, the land and water are; the air is reflecting heat energy back at the Earth, the air is not absorbing it. It's a different property altogether. None of these arguments really acknowledge diurnal thermodynamic forces or localized dynamics anyway, making them inherently flawed. They all over-simplify the factors and call it science... or is that what we've come to call "science" nowadays?

So, can our roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, buildings and technology take it for much longer? We shall see.

You got FP and that's what you said? Really!?

Here, try this one:

FTFY

Any FP can get modded Funny; try for something more the next time you find yourself there.

Hear, hear!

IIRC, the "First Law of Robotics" is how the robot, "shall not perform any action that would cause harm to a human."

So... what actions are we talking about here? Vibrating? Playing tawdry ringtones? Playing music too loud? That's about all the "actions" that can be performed by even the fanciest smartphone. (i.e., out of the box) Everything else entails the relay of information from somewhere or something else; it's more of an information portal than a robot, if you... y'know... think about it. That information didn't come from the phone, it came from a server. Implementing all three Robotics Laws on the phone wouldn't even change that one whit. If you say that a Galaxy Nexus or an iPhone could be made into a robot... sure, but that's true of any computer ever made. It is not, itself, a robot in any way, shape or form.

So, @OP: Yes, please do implement the first law of robotics. Now, go find yourself an actual robot that is capable of performing actions potentially harmful to humans. A Roomba® could very well give me sore toes after a botched pedicure attempt. Are you saying devices should be inherently safe, that it should be designed-in as well as built-in for safety? Then you're not implementing laws on devices, you're implementing laws on manufacturers, developers, distributors and service-providers. Good luck with that.

Here's a cause worthy of legend; go implement the First Law of Robotics (just the first one, for starters) on military drones. See how that works out for ya.

Indeed. Shades of many predicted futures are unfolding before us. What's important is the future that we strive towards.

Television Advertising is an aging enterprise; we can see the wrinkles, hear the joints make disappointed sounds and smell the death in the air. Advertising Production continues to be vibrant and fresh at the forefront, but also dated and tiresome at the rear. Advertising commerce and leadership is even more atrocious; gaudy incentive-based models and over-wrought statistics models that snuff any possible gains from consumer feedback by dissecting them until the results are almost completely irrelevant. It's a most appalling beast.

In the U.K. and around Europe, the model is to provide a block of advertisements at the start of a time-slot, then play the show in its entirety. This is better in two ways; the story is told uninterrupted, and one avoids the gross repetition of ads that bombard us about the most trivial of purchasing opportunities. (see above about the "least of competitive differences" for some good examples) Speaking of repetition, it seems that nowadays it's not uncommon to see the same ad twice in a row. Are they also trying to drive us insane with dejá vu?

So, maybe our new DVR culture could take a page from that get-it-over-with-firstly model. Dish® has taken the extreme stance of, "our technology, our customers, our rules" and they're welcome to pursue that suicidal path. (Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!) Here however, is a possible compromise; use this revolutionary technology to re-structure advertising. (vs. eliminating it)

Here's how that would look: Say you've just recorded the latest Big Bang Theory and are about to watch from disk. The prompt on the screen says, "Would you like to group all ads before watching the show? This will eliminate ads during the program." The magic lies in the grouping; heuristics have determined which ads are duplicate, which are longest and which are shortest, which are local and which are national-feed, etc. It then proceeds to present the ads in rapid-fire fashion (to which we are accustomed) in a specific sorting order, such as national-then-local, or longest-to-shortest, or some other scheme. (configurable, perhaps?) Add to that, when the ads are complete, the DVR announces the beginning of the program with a signature tone and a short pause, which may be skipped if you're sitting right there.

In this way, the DVR finally stops resembling its linear-tape predecessors and truly emerges as an indispensable tool of the Digital Age... and without burning the ecosystem that spawned it. If left unchecked, techniques such as DVR Proofing vis-a-vis storyline-integration advertising, (where you have to watch the ad because it is actually part of the story/episode) contextual advertising and addressable advertising become not only necessary evils, but the norm.

Dr. Sagan was most insightful about one thing above all; the most advertising money is thrown at the least of competitive differences. (e.g., light beer, chewing gum, fast food, automobile dealerships, etc)

The American viewing audience is no longer taken-in by commercials. There's nothing "magic" about TV any more. We know that advertising is meant to deceive, persuade and ultimately to control our consumer buying potential. This is being taught in early education under Social Sciences; ergo, the adults today knew better long before they had a consumer vote. We're not the brightest bulb, but neither are we that easy to fool.

I don't think anyone really views commercials as any form of inspiration or as fostering loyalty to a particular brand... it's all just another form of entertainment.

Let's look at it this way; advertising as entertainment. It's fairly natural, and supported by psychology, that we are drawn towards that which amuses us. Yet, we as a nation are conditioned to focus our attention for roughly ten minutes before taking a "break", vis-a-vis the commercial break. The idea behind that was to brutally interrupt the story in order to hijack that attention into exerting some kind of influence about how we spend our money. We're so conditioned to stop paying attention at regular intervals that it has subsumed our very culture; note that most online videos are no more than 10 minutes, unless of course they are based upon a broadcast program. Ratings for blocks of programming that are only 10 minutes long (slated as a 15-minute program, including promos/ads) are surprisingly popular, despite that the content is neither enriching, nor terribly captivating. Is our tendency to enjoy small "chunks" of storytelling getting the better of us? Do we prefer the format to the substance?

Ask yourself this: Could an epic story-arc, such as Game of Thrones or True Blood, be told in 10-minute episodes? Changing the timing really does change the story.

This ideology is so prevalent that documentaries (the shows that are supposed to be enriching and substantial) and so-called "reality shows" re-hash the premise of the episode and/or the most recent happenings upon resuming after every commercial break. For an hour-long show, that ends up as 5-6 times re-telling what the show is about or catching us up. This burns our attention, burns valuable broadcast time and burns those of us that actually want to pay attention. No wonder we're thought of as dense.

Um... you do understand the circumstances that would necessitate an "isolation" event, right? By the time BART declares a problem and shuts down your phone, they've already become aware of an emergency. Calling 911 is moot; the fire (or bomb scare or disaster, etc) is probably the cause of your cell going dark. In fact, that might be comforting... someone already knows what's happening.

BART may be doing a favor to Bay Area Municipal Services by mitigating dozens (hundreds?) of redundant calls.

The point about the heart attack is still valid, but then again you wouldn't exactly be safer having an infarction in the middle of a "situation" with or without a working cellphone. The phone isn't going to save your life, but people could. To that end, could the EMT's get to you amid the chaos? Could they even find you? (GPS is also moot; underground, remember?) Are you going to dial while you're seizing? Maybe someone around you could help? Maybe someone is a doctor? (maybe not?) It's really not that different than any other time having a heart attack; you either get lucky or you don't. The lesson here is; look after your own health, dammit.

Here's a scenario; the terrorists have called in a bomb threat. It's determined to be a remote triggering mechanism and likely tied to a cellphone. Would you want your personal freedom to call/text/email someone at the expense of sustaining the very technology that makes the bomb go off? Cutting the signal could very well grant the space to de-fuse the threat. Is that what your precious mobile service is worth; innocent lives?

Next, you would probably argue that cutoff should only be "last resort"; only after confirming that a threat is tied to cellphone services. Here's a likely dramatization of such an event:

Field Agent: "Dispatch, Bravo Delta"

Dispatch: "Go Bravo Delta"

Field Agent: "Indigo Echo Delta, package visible"

Dispatch: "Indigo Echo Delta confirmed, report status"

Field Agent: "Package is hot, trigger remo--" [burst of static]

Ka-boom.

The insurgent in this scenario had a public-band scanner and heard the conversation as it happened. He(She) blew it up before anyone learned how to disarm it.

That conversation would have continued if the bomb (or bomber) was cut-off from the signal. Think about it.

If you need to make a call so badly, take the stairs.