What do you think is a reasonable law, in this case?
930 karma · joined May 5, 2011
I'm not sure whether Apple should be able to patent the name "App Store," but it certainly does raise a question of what a brand is. Surely, before the iPhone, people off the street would be confused by the term "App Store". Yet, after the iPhone (iOS >= 2), you could pull someone off the street and they would say something like "oh yeah, that's where you buy apps for the iPhone." So I don't think it's reasonable to dispute that Apple popularized the term "App Store," essentially invented it in the public eye. That said, it is a store to buy applications, which Apple did not invent, even in the public eye.
There are lots of terms / brands which encode the product in the name in a fairly obvious manner. Should American Airlines be allowed to use that as their brand? Or is it too generic, given that there are many airlines based in America? Should a brand like KitchenAid be able to patent their name? Or is it too obvious of a name, given that the company produces aids in the kitchen? Should uniqlo be able to patent the term heattech, or is it obvious given that it's a technology designed to preserve heat? It's a very difficult distinction to make, and I'm not sure which side is right.
I think (hope) that we're on a path to change this in the near future. The main reason for our lack of advancement in travel time is the cost of gasoline. The Concorde demonstrated that supersonic transport was technically possible, but economically impossible. What will change the landscape is electric planes. This is not a fantasy - there are several companies with (somewhat) viable piston planes being engineered right now.
The first company is Beyond Aviation (www.beyond-aviation.com) which is producing an electric varient of the venerable Cessna 172 (most popular plane produced, the default trainer option for pilots). It's not a perfect plane -- only 2 people can ride in it, and it's designed for flight schools, not for cruising around, but it's a big step forward for aviation.
The second company is Pipistrel, which is developing the Panthera (http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/panthera/technical-data). The Panthera Electro is a huge step in the right direction. Although it only seats 2, and cruises at 118 knots, it can go for 215NM. This is just shy of NYC -> DC. Imagine if you could travel between these cities for essentially free (solar power).
On the more viable replace-business-jets route, Elon Musk has stated that he wants to build a VTVL electric jet. From what he's stated, it sounds like his main approach to overcoming the lack of energy density is flying higher. Current jets are limited to efficient operation at ~35k feet because the oxygen density any higher is too low for an ICE to operate. Current li-ion batteries, however, don't need oxygen to operate! So they can go to 50,60,70,80k feet for reduced drag and operate just as efficiently as if they were at 35k feet. Musk has stated that he thinks battery density needs to double before this jet can become a reality (and has shown that battery density doubles once every ~10 years historically).
I'm extremely optimistic about the future of aviation. As soon as we can hook up cheap (nuclear, coal, wind, solar) and efficiently generated (~2x efficiency gains at large plants) power to planes, the cost of flying will take a huge drop.
Sadly, this statement is predominantly false. That's not to say that there aren't interesting ideas being tried out -- there are. It's just that the ways in which Unix is flawed aren't significant enough to warrant switching to a new system. Yeah, the security model of 'sudo' for any permissions at all sucks, but it gets the job done on production systems, and there are (ugly) workarounds to get better security. Yeah, dependency management sucks, but we have VMs to work around versioning issues. There are tons of people proposing solutions to these types of problems in academia, but Unix is entrenched, there's tons of software written for it, and industry is not going to adopt an alternate platform unless it is 10x better than what's out there. Academia is proposing systems that are 10% better, not 10x better, and add complications to the relatively simple process / file model of Unix.
- You'll most likely be working in Houston / San Antonio (probably not where you want to be working)
- They pay well by general, non-tech, new grad standards, but don't expect the "standard" 100K salary + 50K signing bonus + 30K/year stock that's become standard fare in the Valley. That said, the cost of living in Texas is significantly lower than the Valley (plus, no state income tax!), so you might come out ahead here.
- Not a ton of startups in the space, due to the large amount of capital required. You're basically working for the big guys. This means that there isn't much upside. WYSIWYG, you aren't going to become an overnight millionaire.
- Culture is much more corporate than Valley companies. So don't expect free food / drink / laundry / massages / gym memberships / rail passes. And you may have to wear clothing other than jeans + flipflops to work.
Major companies in this space recruiting CS people: Valero, Schlumberger, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66.
All the above said, there are some pretty cool technical challenges that these companies face. Where do you drill? How do you analyze seismic data to figure out on a macro level where to explore? What about when you start drilling and find oil, what's the best way to extract it? These companies have massive quantities of data gathered from sensors as they're drilling / exploring, and they need to crunch through it to minimize waste and maximize the possibility of hitting large amounts of easily extractable oil. The oil/gas space is definitely gratifying from a solving-real-problems-instead-of-social-media-BS perspective.
Anyway, if you really wanted to run Fay in the browser, you could probably get it to work using UHC (http://uu-computerscience.github.com/uhc-js/) pretty easily.
I think it's more a matter of national pride issue: to show the world that China doesn't have to rely on the US for technology. Russia's GLONASS system (briefly referenced in the article) is more or less the same thing. The good news is that this system, like GLONASS, will likely improve positioning speed / reliability, since there will be more navigation satellites in the sky. Already, receivers can tie GLONASS and GPS together; it's only a matter of time before Beidou is integrated as well.
"Accusing Carnegie Mellon of patent trolling is probably not the most effective way to advocate for patent reform."
"Universities have been among the biggest producers of patents for 50+ years now."
"The internet needs more details so we can make an uninformed opinion and collectively decide to be impotently pissed off at the university or not."
However, when a large commercial entity is suing (e.x. Apple v. Samsung [1]), HN bashes the patent system:
"these cases set a chilling precedent for the platform that looks likely to dominate the computing industry for at least the next decade."
"It will hurt innovation because every damn thing is going to have to go through a committee of lawyers before being approved, and it will hurt innovation because the idea that innovation always involves making something brand-new and from whole cloth is fucking retarded."
"Apple's successful use of the broken patent system sends exactly the wrong signal."
Are these entities (Apple and CMU) really all that different? Both spend a lot on R&D, and both want to protect their property. In a sense, there are better reasons to support Apple filing patent lawsuits (forgetting about the specifics of either suit) than CMU. CMU receives a large fraction of funding from taxpayer-funded sources, and produces no real products, just IP. By contrast, Apple receives very little taxpayer money, and uses the patent system to defend its real products.
I'm glad that Google has wised up and is taking a stand against the race to the bottom that has pervaded the hardware industry. With both major platforms having high quality hardware, the pressure will be on for the third-party manufacturers to up their game.
Also, I'm doubtful that this affects the majority of users: on both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS), Google has a push solution with nearly identical functionality to Exchange.
I'm also taken aback by the harsh tone of the comments:
"Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire."
"Fuck everything about this."
"it scares the shit out of me parting with that sort of cash and actually depending on it"
It's a little disappointing to see these hyperbolic comments on a site I normally associate with an educated, smart, logically-thinking group of people.
I'm sure Apple would be happy to refund you. If the Apple store won't help, try shooting an email to tcook@.
FWIW, whenever I've had any trouble with getting support for Apple products, an email to sjobs@apple.com (now tcook@) solved the problem promptly. In my experience, the company does screw up, but if you bring a problem to their attention, they'll make it right.
Second, what evidence to you base your statement "hiring talent at FB has to be getting harder"? If you're talking about market cap / upside, Google has had no problems hiring (well, relative to other tech companies, anyway), despite a market cap 3.5x+ what FB is today.
Lastly, FB is not all PHP. A lot of services are written in C++ or Java, and use Thrift to talk to the frontend [2]. Thrift allows a more gradual movement off PHP, by moving isolated components to other languages individually.
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html [2] http://www.quora.com/Facebook-Engineering/What-is-Facebooks-...
The central idea behind MOOCs is that education is expensive now. It isn't -- just go to the library and pick up a book. Completely free, and if you're disciplined enough, probably pretty close to a university quality education. I'll concede that this doesn't apply to hard science education where you need sophisticated labs, but it does apply to a lot of students' fields of study.
When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections. That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie about and play frisbee. You need a nice gym, a welcoming student center, and a nice dorm area for people to socialize. If you were to build a campus solely around education, it would probably be pretty cheap. Just buy up some cheap office space in a nondescript office buildings, and have professors give lectures there. But this isn't what students want.
Basically, it's really expensive to learn to fly. Think $112/hr for an extremely basic 2 seat plane, and around $65/hr for the instructor, at least in the NY area. Even assuming you do all the bookwork on your own without an instructor, that's around $7-8k for a private license(40-50h). After that, you need to get an instrument rating(40h), for around the same price.
Then, at 250 hours, you can get a commercial rating which lets you fly people around for money (you can't solicit passengers though). At this point, pilots usually go for a CFI rating, which lets them teach students. Most flight schools are happy to have the cheap labor, and the pilots want to get more hours so they can apply to regional airlines. The pay is pretty horrible (maybe $20-$30/h when you start), but it's the only way to build hours for most pilots. After doing this for a while (could be up to 600-700h), pilots either manage to find a gig flying businesspeople around on a corporate jet, an odd job like ferrying cargo around on a small plane, or go to a regional carrier. Regional carriers pay even worse than being a CFI, around $20k-$30k starting, but the tradeoff is that you're building time in a "serious" turboprop/jet plane, which the big airlines require before even hiring you as a first officer.
You have to take on a massive amount of debt to become a pilot, then get paid terrible wages once you start. Even when you hit the top and become a captain at a major airline you're still only making around $100-$110k, and very few pilots achieve this.
Raising the number of hours required to be hired as a pilot will cause less people to become pilots. It means CFIs will be instructors for much longer, making it harder for newly minted CFIs to find a job to pay off their debt.
The fundamental problem is that avgas costs a ton (up to $6-$7 in NY). If it was free, or at least much cheaper, to fly a plane, the hour requirements would not be a problem - pilots could just train for longer. I think the solution is going to be electric trainer planes. I see the most promising company in this area as beyond aviation (http://www.beyond-aviation.com/). They're developing an electric version of the Cessna 172, the most popular plane produced to date(43k+). Their president was the COO at Cessna for 6 years, so I'm really hopeful they can achieve their goal.
An electric plane has three major benefits: no avgas needed, air inlets can be reduced significantly (no oxygen-hogging combustion reactions) for reduced drag, and significantly reduced TBO. Background: on piston engine planes, a mechanic needs to disassemble the engine every ~2k hours of flying, replace bad parts, and reassemble it. This costs around $15k, contributing a nontrivial amount of money to cost of flying. On an electric planes, the engines last much longer (think 20k-30k hours), so this cost all but vanishes.
This suggestion is fundamentally no different than exposing a <canvas> element to a page, and saying "OK, implement your own rendering engine and draw whatever you want in this box." Let's say you wanted to implement a modern browser engine in the canvas, like WebKit. Well, you'd need a huge number of OS specific hooks to get things like the ones I listed above. Do you expose those via an OS API? Well, you just opened a huge number of vectors for an attack. Do you replicate these hooks in your own code? Well, you just created a crappy UX since you're never going to match the OS behavior 100%.