frezik

Doesn't matter. If you're the first one to get a patent, it's all yours. There's no provision in the law for independent invention.

Glad I wasn't the only one who picked up on that. Usually I'd go with incompetence due to Hanlon's Razor, but given this is coming from a lawyer from a huge corporation, I'd say it's deliberate.

Patents are public documents. The intent of the system is that you have a monopoly on something for a set time, but after that, anybody can make it based on those documents alone.

So it doesn't matter if it's in the iPhone or not; it's still patent infringement.

You might want to embed this inside a larger language. That wouldn't necessarily preclude using a Turing Complete language, but you wouldn't want it to be a complicated one.

Not really. Even RMS only mentions the distinction in passing. The fight has simply gone out of this one for everyone who isn't ESR, probably because the late 90s was the last time he was relevant.

But a lot of them use GCC, too. Atmel, for example.

Seems like ESR is still fighting the Open Source vs Free Software battle of the late 90s. It hasn't dawned on him yet that everyone else thinks that there's little purpose in cannibalizing the movement over minor philosophical differences.

The OP probably needed to clarify. English having a simple alphabet gave the US a leg up on personal computing compared to the KJC countries. It's only one contributing factor, though.

This story has played out before. Last time, it was Object Oriented databases. What happens each time is that the traditional RDBMS's pick up a few of the features, and then we keep using them until the next contender comes along.

There's nothing to contradict it, either; not all the plot points have to be served up on a nice dinner plate. If it fits nicer than the matrix-within-a-matrix theories, then might as well go with that.

If he actually has telekinetic powers, this scene doesn't make sense:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYawJGlEh3k

His powers don't work on the flesh-and-blood Bane/Smith. He can't swipe the knife away from Trinity's neck at a distance. He can't easily beat Bane/Smith in a fistfight. The best he gets is to see Smith's machine form after being blinded.

All of his powers shown in the real world are against machines, never flesh-and-blood humans.

I think what he was actually getting at is the Discount Window. These are often very short term loans, perhaps a matter of minutes, made to cover a short term liquidity drop. If you add it all up over a year, it could very well add up to several trillions without adding those trillions to the GDP.

It all gets paid back with interest, though. None of this is anything new.

Neo only uses his powers against machines, shutting down the sentinels at the end of Reloaded, blowing stuff up on the way into the Machine City, and in being able to see Smith's alter-ego in the real world. None of that is incompatible with having a wireless transceiver in his brain.

US GDP in 2012 was $15.68 trillion. You're saying the US government gave away more than a year's worth of productive output? You'll excuse me if I say citation fucking needed.

I never liked that particular interpretation. It was too obvious and had been done better elsewhere.

I preferred an alternative explanation, where The One actually comes in two parts, a program in the matrix, and a human in the real world with a direct neuro link to that program. Neo's powers are expressed in the real world because he still has a direct link to the machines.

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/essays/understanding-th...

I liked the sequels a lot better once I read that. They're still not genius cinema, but they're better.

I've tended towards criticism from the opposite direction (which can also apply to The Matrix). Its philosophical underpinnings have been done by other works of fiction to greater depth, but those stories tend to be impenetrable for most people, much more so than either Inception or The Matrix were. See Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer, for example. Or even Nolan's own Memento.

Putting it in a more easily-digestible form is a useful thing to do, which tends to blunt this line of criticism. There are some philosophy professors who really appreciate these movies, because they provided nice reference points that their students already know about, making it much easier to teach certain concepts.

Block ciphers can be easily made quantum-safe by doubling the key size (see "Grover's Algorithm"). We might have to update everyone's browser to support extending AES to 512 bits, but it's doable.

The real problem is public key ciphers that rely on prime number factorization. Eliptic curves are one solution, but the only people who seem to have in-depth knowledge about them are in the NSA.

That's the opposite of a conspiracy nut. One person is not a conspiracy.

Don't speakers/mics tend to have a built-in cutoff? I've played with generating higher and higher frequencies before, and I was able to hear it up to 18kHz. That's probably hitting the high range of my own hearing, but there was an audible pop when the speakers started playing that frequency. The sound card seemed to simply refuse to play that high.

I suppose the malware could be working at a low enough level to override a cutoff in the sound card's firmware. But then wouldn't it have to implement drivers for almost every kind of sound card in existence?

Design by Committee doesn't give you well-thought-out designs. It gives you crap like WEP and USB, where many competing voices try to drive the design in their own way.

In fact, being well-conceived and svelte is evidence that it was just a few very smart people, perhaps just one.

MIT has worked on that as well.

Chelyabinsk-type cases are exactly why this is needed. Asteroids big enough to cause mass extinction events are rare, and hardly worth talking about except in the extreme long term.

However, much smaller asteroids that could potentially destroy a city are more common. If it struck in the right place during a contentious period of international politics (say, the Cuban Missile Crisis), it could easily be mistaken for a preemptive nuclear strike. Of course, the radiation pattern would quickly disprove this, but such evidence is not likely to defuse the situation if there's a lot of hot-headed people running around.

In such a case, just knowing ahead of time that it's coming would prevent a catastrophic loss of civilization. That's not even counting the humanitarian effects of evacuating the people in the predicted strike zone.

Because I want to differentiate between JPEG, GIF, and PNG images? The how is going to be different for each one. Without the protocol telling me, I can only make a reasonable guess on how to process it.

No, these are design flaws that anything over TCP/IP needs to deal with. In particular, closing the connection to indicate the end of a file transfer is really bad (what if somebody pulls an ethernet cord?)

Fix sliding window? I don't think you understand TCP. This is an optimization to TCP to prevent the need to ACK every packet. It means fewer bytes on the wire and less CPU load for TCP processing, while also maintaining a respectable degree of reliability.

TCP checksums are not sufficient for data streams of more than a few kB.

OK, then we'll just talk about it on its own merits:

* It closes the connection after every request, making poor use of TCP sliding window

* Binary file transfers are finished by the server closing the connection. There's no end-of-file marker or Length header.

* No provisions for caching

* A single ASCII letter identifies all file types

It's just a bad protocol design. HTTP/0.9 had many of the same problems, but that's not where HTTP is anymore. Gopher+ solves the single-letter identifier problem by using MIME types, but none of the other problems above. Not that anybody has ever implemented Gopher+, anyway.

I did a more complete writeup on Gopher's problems here:

http://www.wumpus-cave.net/2013/10/27/why-gopher-is-awful/

Once I did a little research and wrote it all out, Gopher actually came out worse than I thought. Even if it were brought up to Gopher+ specifications (which haven't been implemented by anyone in 20 years), it would still be way behind HTTP/1.1 in terms of fixing design flaws.

As someone who formally got involved in the Gopher Revival, I was going to type up a big response to why Gopher sucks and should continue to be ignored. I decided to leave it for a blog post. See here:

http://www.wumpus-cave.net/2013/10/27/why-gopher-is-awful/

That's not the same thing. In a standard hydroelectric dam, you need an existing river to create electricity.

The goal of pumped storage isn't to create new electricity, but to store large amounts of unused baseload power. This can be done with a standard hydroelectric dam by pumping the water back up into the lake behind the dam, but it can also be an entirely artificial reservoir.

> I remember the pipe and slash symbols 'spinning' while waiting for a large plain text document to complete downloading in the old days. So the "resource lite" argument doesn't fly completely.

There really isn't a significant difference between the two. They both operate over a single TCP channel. HTTP/1.1 has a slightly higher header size, but it's not even half a kilobyte.

The only real difference is that HTTP usually serves up rich HTML, which contains all sorts of graphics and JavaScript toys and other bandwidth-hogging transmissions. If we limited HTTP to using HTML 3.2, no JavaScript, and only the occasional 2kb gif, it'd be resource lite, too.

FYI--I wrote the Apache::GopherHandler Perl module for running a Gopher server under Apache2, which I now consider to be mostly a waste of time. (https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache::GopherHandler)

I think it had some interesting ideas, but HTTP as it exists now is more flexible. On any given app, you'll run into Gopher's limitations long before doing the same for HTTP.