Hacker News Reader

Bungholioon WikiLeaks: Out of time and money

A sneering, cynical summary, typical of a press which attacks alternative sources for purely selfish reasons. You'd have thought that "the press" would stick together to protect press freedom, freedom of speech and whistle-blowing, but no - they seem more interested in sniping at Wikileaks. Even the U.K. Guardian has joined in, I only hope these institutions aren't one day hoisted on their own petard.

Bungholioon Just the Facts: S&P's $2 Trillion Mistake

Bullet, meet foot. Given that this downgrade was triggered entirely by the poor behavior of U.S. politicians, how can it be in the U.S. interest for the Treasury to come across as whiney and paranoid? If the treasury had also mentioned the perfectly reasonable reasons for a downgrade there may be some balance, but to talk of S&P "making political decisions" puts them in exactly the same bracket as the poorly behaving politicians! Would you do business with this lot?!

Bungholioon When patents attack Android

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art

Prior ... constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality

OK, so you're saying the links above don't have any bearing on the originality or otherwise of iOs multi touch? That's absurd. If what you're getting at is that there's some legalese-technical argument as to why a seemingly obvious prior occurrence of the "invention" then this indicates to me that the system is broken.

Bungholioon When patents attack Android

Prior art for multi touch:

http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/projects/mpx/

http://gizmodo.com/278613/linux-mpx-multi+touch-table-may-be...

fwiw

Bungholioon I am an HFT Programmer

Well then where does the renumeration disparity come from?

Bungholioon I am an HFT Programmer

Compared to what the top traders make, 0.5Mil / year is pretty embarrassing.

Bungholioon Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary

The U.S. market is kinda shrinking (relatively, at least). Do you think the new, rising economies are going to embrace these U.S. rules?

From a purely selfish point of view (European software developer) I say bring it on, saddling U.S. software companies with these ridiculous rules should eventually make my life easier competing against them. I'll quite happily infringe these "patents" and sell my good outside the U.S.

Bungholioon Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary

So if Apple are against software patents (IIRC this is their official stance) then that leaves us having to believe what they say and not what they do.

BTW, why is it Google's responsibility to "spend billions dismantling the patent system"?