jhdevos

Naming it Cause and Effect is misleading; it makes it seem like bayes rule only applies when there is a causal relation somewhere. It also make the symmetry of the first line seem off. I would write the first line as

P(A and B are both true) = P (A is true) x P (B is also true, given that we know A is already true) = P (B is true) x P (A is also true, given that we know B is already true)

You used the phrase 'to eliminate such frauds.' The suggestion (to me) is that this is a fool proof method that eliminates such frauds. I would contend this is not true; fraud is still relatively easy. The question is how much this promotes a false sense of security.

Stapel's fraud was only detected after many years, and after his results had been widely published. I still hear some of his conclusions quoted now and then as if it were established truth, by people who have not yet realised that it is one of the famous Stapel ones.

But right now, there isn't even a way to get a patent revoked in a court because of obviousness or triviality. Prior art is basically the only way to attack a patent.

It's the entire system that is built around the assumption that 'obviousness' is too difficult to measure objectively, and that protection is vastly more important than anything else, so we should always err on the side of protection when laying the boundary of what should be patentable and what not. In other words, better to have 1000 bad patents than running the risk of having 1 idea that should be patentable being rejected by accident.

No thought is given to the enormous damage this does to our industry.

Then you still have to hope that the program doesn't have any minor resource leaks that become big leaks when the process has run for a hundred hours...

Of course, there are also the RuntimeExceptions that should really have been just Exceptions. These are often thrown by libraries where new features required exceptions to be thrown, but they couldn't be checked exceptions because the interface had to remain backwards compatible...

Or, of course, libraries written by people who just don't like checked exceptions at all.

There are so many free things on Android that it's hard to get myself to try paid for games. The exception is games that I get to know through some other source, like your excellent web page with live demo.

I'd pay for this game on android, but paid level pack would also work for me.

I can't help but feel that this is battling symptoms, not the real problem.

A frivolous lawsuit is a frivolous lawsuit, no matter who brings it. The real problem is that patents give far too much power (injunctions of products heavily invested in), defending costs far too much money, and it is far too easy to get patents on relatively simple things.

This has to be balanced by either:

* Making far fewer inventions patentable (only inventions that take a real investment of time and money should be patentable)

OR

* Drastically reducing the power of patents (no injunctions unless in rare cases, much cheaper process for patent infringement fights)

Preferably, both.

In the original, Linus had already obscured "fucking", but not "dick". Perhaps the automated obscenity filter just didn't pick up the "f*cking".

Or even better:

  # Get my IP address by checking dyndns.org
  curl -s checkip.dyndns.org | grep -Eo '[0-9\.]+'

When reading the script, you want to know what it does, not what each character in it does.

Using long flags actually hinders that by adding clutter; you have to parse a much longer line to know what it does. Adding a functional commend and then using the clean short flags is IMHO a much better way.

Should we now all print documents to those printers with warnings saying that they are publicly accessible?

With the assumption that patents are worth having, that would no longer be a bad thing. The biggest problem with these trolls is that there is hardly any risk or cost in suing, and they can disengage at any point if that starts to change. This places the defendants are at a significant disadvantage.

With that inequality out of the way, patents could be what they are promised to be: a way to ensure you can monetize to recover a significant investment that you wouldn't have made without the promise of that patent.

(I don't subscribe to the idea that patents are a good thing though; especially the kind of patents that seem to make up 99% of the patent pool).

Wow! So, with an infinite stack of Rhino inside JVM inside Rhine ..... you could get infinite performance! Cool....

Did you notice that you keep abreviating their name? DuckDuckGo is just not something you want to type in, and that will stop people going there.

Yes, you can. But you have to think about it, and put a little bit of effort into it, at a moment you really want to do a quick search.

It makes switching a step with some friction, instead of making it possible to 'ease into it' by simply starting to do some search with ddg quickly.

(Heh, notice that many people in this forum write ddg for duckduckgo? I just made two typos typing that in. It's rather unlikely this is not costing them badly).

Ugh. I hate these websites where you have to hover over things to get at any useful information.

My 6 years old daughter often wants to play games on my phone. Some mode which restricts her access (I don't want her looking at Youtube etc. for instance) so I can leave her unattended with it would be very useful.

You are not the only one who does this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQt-h753jHI

I just tried entering a bogus US address, and got as far as the page where you can choose a payment method (which includes PayPal, so presumably you don't need a US credit card). If you get access to the books as a download, I suppose that you actually would be able to buy a book in this manner... Has anyone tried doing this?

Not directly (but of course you were not entirely serious). Look at, for instance, the letter chart. The letters at the bottom are turned into very sharp forms, but not all look like letters, and those that do might not be turned into the correct ones...

For instance, if they used this to "enhance" a picture with a piece of paper in someone's pocket, these letters would be enhanced based on other forms somewhere else in the picture -- so some vague letter shapes might become 'Burger King' just because the photo also contains a Burger King logo somewhere :)

For me, awesome was the first window manager that I liked without having to tweak much. I did eventually tweak little things, but that is a very slow process happening over a long period -- the default config works well enough for me.

>> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.

>I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.

I think that was already clear from the word 'seem'. To me, the same thing seems to be true, actually. That /might/ be caused by the number of software-patent cases I see that fall into this category, or are about trivial inventions, while I simply don't see the cases that do have some merit.

On the other hand, I've never yet seen a software patent related case where I could actually relate to the suing party.

The really weird thing is that "infringing product", in the judges order, is basically equal to "product that only sells because it is ripping off the other's patent". Even though that single aspect of the product (being a rectangle with rounded corners) is obviously only a vanishingly small part of the value of the product.

I simply cannot grasp why this seemed like a good tradeoff to the judge.

European commissioners have two undesirable attributes: * Far too much power * Low public visibility

If they perceive their job as "governing this part of the world without paying much attention to what lesser people are saying", then that is partly because we have defined their job in that way. (And, of course, that will attract the wrong kind of people).

Reform is needed.

That will be solved in part if patents get assigned a value (on which 'damages' etc. are based) that are proportional to the work that went in. For a software product that contains thousands of good ideas, the value of each of those will be only a fraction of the value of the total product.

Then, of, course, the idea of blocking sales of a product because of infringement should also be completely abolished -- some money should be the most you can get.

Affordable, of course, is relative; I've seen a price of $1500 quoted somewhere, which is certainly not something that I can afford right now.

That's ridiculous!

Obviously, use a micro SD card, it's much smaller and easier to stick somewhere.

Come to think of it, would that actually be heat resistant enough to allow the receiver to be able to read it? Hmm, perhaps some more research is necessary after all.

   if (somecondition):
     return
   if (anothercondition):
     return
 
   Now, let's say for a second that I just realized I don't 
   want to return, I want to do some processing, then 
   return. This happens a few times a day for me. I just 
   multi-select both "if"s, hit enter, and add the code.

Not a great example, because this only leads to code duplication.

You make valid points, but make them at the wrong point in the discussion from the point of view of many people here. By seeing many, many examples of this sort, and by our own experiences in the industry, we've already discovered that software patents, in general, hinder 'the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. What you call 'the next logical step in the discussion' is a step we've taken a long time ago.

But, apparently, others who don't share our experience, have not. What would be the best way to explain the situation? Writing comments on hacker news is probably not going to influence any lawmakers....

What if the person had a $100,000 worth of cash in his coat pocket -- would you reimburse that, too?

No, this phone will actually have a 41MP sensor. It will typically produce 5 or 8MP images, though, downsampling the original image, resulting in a lot lower noise than with a normal 5 or 8MP camera-on-a-phone.

It really sounds pretty neat.