gridaphobe

> He noted that during a time of growing litigation in the smartphone industry, "innovation continues at an absolutely breakneck pace. In a system like ours in which innovation is happening faster than people can keep up, it cannot be said that the patent system is broken," he said.

I don't think anyone has been arguing that innovation is no longer happening, but rather that the mess of software patents is making it increasingly difficult for newcomers to enter the industry.

I also like how he completely dodged the question of whether software patents should be allowed at all, from a philosophical perspective..

Money in politics is certainly an issue, but I think it pales in comparison to our lack of proportional representation in Congress. Many communities are now distributed across the country, which can effectively deprive them of representation unless they have a critical mass in at least one place (I assume Silicon Valley is a good example).

> You say that like its a bad thing. If humans like to categorize, why shouldn't our programming languages be designed around this tendency?

I've always had the impression that we (at least as programmers) are incredibly bad at categorizing things into hierarchies.

I think class hierarchies (and module hierarchies for that matter) suffer from a similar problem to that of hierarchical file systems, there is often more than one way of organizing the items and it's unclear which way is right. I'd like to see if one could use a tagging mechanism instead; I guess interfaces/mixins/traits could be thought of as tags for classes though.

> I'm not saying everything needs to be a class, they're a nice tool to have in your toolbox. Use when needed.

That's exactly what he said.

Ahh, a quick bit of googling does seem to suggest that LTE should provide lower latency than HSPA. That certainly is a benefit, much more so IMHO than the bandwidth numbers we see carriers boasting about!

As an iPhone user (4S) that all sounds pretty standard!

On a more serious note, I don't understand all the fuss about LTE. IIRC it's something like 20Mbps in practice, which is faster than most Internet connections in the US.

What is the use case for such bandwidth on a phone? YouTube already plays just fine with HSPA+.

Heh I'd be very hesitant to visit iphone4settlement.com had I not just read the article. Something about that screams malware to me..

But I guess Apple probably knew that when they bought the domain.

I'm really tired of people calling Apple an innovative company. Apple is a company that polishes existing ideas to a point beyond most other companies, and they are damn good at this. Apple is also routinely rewarded for their skills by being the first to introduce a product in category X that is truly enjoyable to use. Is that not good enough?

As I understand it, the patent system was designed to protect individual inventors and researchers from companies like Apple, who excel at mass-production and marketing. Please correct me if I'm wrong though.

Perhaps this is just luck on my part, but I don't think I've ever had a "Sign-in with Twitter" app spam un-authorized tweets on my behalf.

I've been using Rdio for a while now and really like it. I think Spotify's library is a bit larger but, like you, I hate being forced to sign up via Facebook.

I generally assume that all marketing, regardless of who produced it, is a lie.

Apple and the patent system are equally at fault in my opinion. The patent system for creating the circumstances that allowed this lawsuit and others, and Apple (and Samsung, Motorola, etc.) for filing the actual patents and lawsuits.

Tech companies have free will, they could have chosen to fight software patents from the start.

The problem with your argument is that jury nullification is designed to prevent unjust punishment. In this case the jury appears to have deliberately increased Samsung's punishment.

The best possible outcome IMO would be for Facebook to back Zynga and have EA and Zynga/Facebook sue each other into oblivion :D

My impression was that he wasn't actually a member of Mensa. That was his lie, but he didn't try to cover it up.

As is usually the case, both extremes are wrong, or rather half-right. People are fat because they lack self-control AND corporations are lining up to take advantage of said lack.

I see no abdication of individual responsibility in creating a joint retirement fund to balance risk, merely a recognition that humans are impulsive and fallible.

I believe the idea is that future grants would stipulate that some percentage of the grant be used to cover publishing costs, whereas current grants include some money for subscribing to journals. That way the publishers are still guaranteed to get money, but anyone can see the results of the research. Certainly less ideal than circumventing publishers entirely, but hopefully a step forward.

The Writer Monad probably isn't too useful in any impure language, and IMO was a poor choice by the author. If you read the last few paragraphs though, you're introduced to the List Monad (the bit about HTML nodes), which is useful in impure languages.

Another example I would have liked to see is the Maybe Monad, which allows composition of functions that might return a value, or null/undefined.

A simple solution would be to exchange employer-provided benefits for government-provided benefits :-/

Agreed, I've found jogging to be particularly good at clearing my mind. I like going to the gym in the afternoon for that reason: I can work for a while, and then take a break to jog when I inevitably get frustrated by something :)

This a thousand times, and while we're at it please include tax in the advertised price. Growing up in Germany and the US, I find the US system incredibly deceptive and annoying..

I have to say I'm disappointed by this decision. I bought Sparrow a few months ago based on the understanding that Push would be coming in a future update. I don't believe they specifically said it would be free, but since devs cannot charge for updates and Push (or at least a periodic fetch) is a crucial piece of any mail client, I think my assumption that Push would be a free update was reasonable.

I'll continue to use Sparrow since it's by far the best mail client I've tried on my iPhone, but I think the developer needs to reconsider based on the implication that Push would be part of a future content update.

> Vim is verb-first and emacs is noun first :D

I'm not sure I agree with this comment. I think vim and emacs are both verb-first, but they operate on different nouns. Vim focuses on manipulating text, whereas emacs focuses on manipulating code. I think both approaches are valid :)

Copmuter Science is a very broad topic, so I wouldn't be too worried. I'm taking a Graphics course this semester, and I can't stand it. That doesn't bother me though because I'm learning two important things from it: (1) a bit about how computer graphics work and (2) I should not become a graphics programmer.

I don't know what courses specifically you hate, but if you're first year my guess would be it's something related to theory, maybe Discrete Math? Anyway, don't freak out, just learn as much as you can from the course and move on to more interesting areas of CS :-)