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smallblacksun

805 karma · joined November 13, 2009

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smallblacksun··on How Apple avoids paying taxes in CA
Sounds like a money-laundering setup, honestly.
smallblacksun··on No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)
While you are correct that most scholars don't believe that Jesus was born in 1 AD, the reason the change was made was to distance scholarship from Christianity.
smallblacksun··on Officially our best-ever cease and desist
Lawyers on retainer get paid whether they do anything or not.
smallblacksun··on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
John/Jane Doe
smallblacksun··on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince.
smallblacksun··on Do you own or "license" software? - important case tests industry model
"I can even throw a Ferrari logo on it."

Ford couldn't stop you from doing that, but Ferrari could.

smallblacksun··on Pregnant women shouldn't abstain from alcohol?
Risking permanent damage to a baby so you can enjoy a party seems incredibly selfish.
smallblacksun··on 13 Stripes and 51 Stars
My guess would be DC, the 4 unincorporated, organized territories ( Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and US Virgin Islands), and American Samoa (the only substantially inhabited unincorporated, unorganized territory).
smallblacksun··on New York Times Forces Apple to Pull Popular ‘Pulse’ iPad Newsreader
That's not how copyright/licensing works. You can distribute content with legal requirements about what people are allowed to do with that content.
smallblacksun··on Mark Russinovich:The Case of the Random IE Crash
This has nothing to do with windows. Nothing prevents software installed in Linux (or Os X) from installing crap Firefox (or safari, or whatever) extensions.
smallblacksun··on How I almost ignored our single best source for customer feedback.
The problem with that is that you are having engineers who cost the company $75+ an hour spending time doing the job that can be done by someone costing ~$30 an hour. Also, you run the risk of annoying your engineers.
smallblacksun··on Game Theory - Marginal Advantage
Yeah. His examples didn't really show anything other than that experienced players make fewer mistakes.
smallblacksun··on Ask HN: Overcoming engineer/developer bias against SEO
SEO makes it harder for people to find useful information on the web instead of what someone spent time and money to "optimize" for Google. Developers know this, and so generally dislike SEO.
smallblacksun··on Wikileaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor
Which shows a serious flaw with the contest. The only people you would go to these lengths to avoid would be someone from the government or a criminal organization. Those are exactly the two groups who either don't have the law apply to them, or are willing to break the law.
smallblacksun··on PhD Student gets quadrotor helicopter moving aggressively
The US has similar research:

http://www.aaai.org/Pressroom/Releases/release-02-0910.php

smallblacksun··on PhD Student gets quadrotor helicopter moving aggressively
The Japanese have a fairly large and technically advanced military, they just call it a "self-defense force". They can and do carry out military research.
smallblacksun··on Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be
You can be a Republican in a district represented by a Democrat.
smallblacksun··on Not just oil: US hit peak water in 1970 and nobody noticed
The vast majority of water for California farms comes from Sierra Nevada snow-melt runoff, not aquafers.
smallblacksun··on Ejection Seats
You certainly can remove the rockets, it just takes a lot of time and effort so isn't done for routine maintenance. Also, removing the rockets would probably be at least as dangerous as working with them there.
smallblacksun··on Forget Greece: Europe's real problem is Germany
Re: public investment in banks: "That strategy worked in the United States, and there's no reason it can't work in Europe."

Isn't it a bit early to say that the strategy worked in the US?

smallblacksun··on We will be able to live to 1,000
A number of Da Vinci's "inventions" were really just predictions of things that were invented much later (like his helicopter).
smallblacksun··on We will be able to live to 1,000
The problem is that we have no evidence that any planet/moon/etc. that we have discovered can support the level of ecosystem required for humans on that planet to be self-sufficient.
smallblacksun··on We will be able to live to 1,000
Think about how impossible it would be for the young to get a job if they had to compete against people who had been doing a job for 50, 100, 500 years.
smallblacksun··on Word Fails Me - Why doesn’t Microsoft’s writing tool actually help writers?
He is complaining that a business word processing program is not ideal for use by a professional writer writing books/articles. That is a bit like complaining that a minivan is not a sports car.
smallblacksun··on WebM - an open web media project
There is nothing a contract can say that a good enough lawyer can't get out of, but there is no reason to expect that Google would try in this case.
smallblacksun··on Microsoft patent trolls Salesforce
Trademarks have the "enforce it or lose it" clause. This causes companies to be forced to go after all non-commercial use of the trademark, causing hassles for the people they are going after, and money for the company. That doesn't necessarily mean that your idea is a bad one, jut that you have to watch out for unintended consequences.
smallblacksun··on Microsoft patent trolls Salesforce
If they had instead gone after lots of small companies, you would be complaining that they were abusing the little guy who couldn't defend himself.

This is not patent trolling because Microsoft actually uses these patents in their software.

smallblacksun··on LifeLock CEO’s Identity Stolen 13 Times
Legally, you aren't. The issue is the time and expense in proving that you didn't sign anything.
smallblacksun··on LifeLock CEO’s Identity Stolen 13 Times
One of the biggest users of social security numbers for identification is the US military. When my dad was in the army, my mom and I both had his SSN memorized because we had to use it so often on paperwork.
smallblacksun··on Justin.tv Beats YouTube in Time Per Viewer by 2-1 Margin
I suspect that is the vast majority of justin.tv's audience.
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