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There's so much cool hardware on the way to sense-o-matic virtual reality and the holodeck that I don't think Nintendo has anything to worry about. They are gaining experience even from the relative failures (still early to call it for 3DS in my opinion) that put it generations ahead of the competition.

Would you advise Apple to drop everything and make software now that the market is mature? Heck no, you would want to see what they're doing to create the next hardware market out of thin air.

Nintendo is similarly specialized and it would be a big mistake to bet the company outside its core competency. The hybrid HD/tablet experience they have for the next generation will probably win again, and sell tons of hardware.

Correct. Sorry if I was obtuse. Neither my father nor I knew about the "shocking event" before reading it. I would call this a spoiler (certainly I would encase it in a spoiler warning before mentioning it online) but I guess you can argue about whether it's really a spoiler if it wasn't actually spoiled for anyone in the story.

For similar reasons I do not hesitate to say "John was walking across the street when he was hit by a car." As it turned out, John was walking to the middle of the street when he was hit by a car, but from his point of view he was engaged in a very different activity.

I have another story on the same lines. About 18 months ago a friend was giving a presentation on a new software module at work. We were waiting for supervisors to arrive and to pass the time, I showed everyone that I had recently seen the entire Star Wars trilogy (IV, V, VI) uploaded to Youtube in ten minute increments.

In the course of this, the friend giving the presentation mentioned he had never seen them. He was from China, but also did university in Canada. He watched a lot of anime but wasn't much into Western media.

Somewhat at a loss, I made him promise to watch them that weekend. He did, but right before he started his talk someone else asked about it and he said, "I am your father."

That, friends, is a real tragedy of spoiling and I defy anyone to defend it.

Postscript, my friend did actually watch all the movies that weekend, but he said they didn't hold up well. He watched an extremely suspect order though, something like 4, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.

My dad was reading Game of Thrones and got to a shocking spoiler at the end of book 1 (you can guess which one). He told me he stopped reading the series right there. He probably wouldn't even have begun reading if he knew beforehand.

He reads a lot in the genre and he just couldn't take what GRR dished out.

I thought it was a brilliant move and I certainly would have been sad to know it was coming. When an author is reversing tropes and dumbfounding your expectations, when you're suspended between possible outcomes and don't know what's going to happen next, that's the golden time in reading.

What metric could you come up with that wouldn't be gamed? Other than say, overachieving profit targets. The CEO has a lot of latitude to screw the company for their benefit.

Android. I wanted physical keyboards and hackable, and strongly disliked (and still dislike) Apple's policies governing iOS development and their dick moves toward Flash, compilers, in-app price matching, etc.

And more nebulously, I felt like Android was onto something and I wanted to go to there.

I put CyanogenMod on my phones. Response and battery life went way up.

Use the original title:

"Study: Android is least open of open source mobile platforms"

Sorry I didn't see this earlier.

I believe there is no meaningful distinction between an algorithm running on general purpose hardware and the same algorithm running on custom hardware. If you'd enforce your patent by claiming that someone else was barred from implementing an algorithm you own, I'd say that "what is novel is not physical". Algorithms are not within the purview of the patent office (or I should say, should not be).

If you'd enforce your patent by saying that someone else was barred from inventing your custom hardware to run this fast algorithm, I guess I'd want to know if the leap from the algorithm to the specific ASIC is "obvious to one skilled in the art".

The context is very important (and not appearing in the email, right). The HTC Dream (G1) came out in late 2008. It was running Dalvik then.

I think what is more likely is this: Tim Lindholm was asked to figure out how to run standard Java programs on Chromebooks and Android tablets without Dalvik or recompilation. They wanted to gain some backwards compatibility but concluded it was impossible without a licensed JVM. Android and Chrome still lack the feature.

The other problem is that it is interchangeable with many other jokes of the same flavor, ie, they were buying Facebook private shares, getting into the LinkedIn IPO, et cetera. This is a tip off that even if it's funny it might not be relevant.

See also the South Park critique of Family Guy.

Saying they were doubling down buying shares in Hilton and Motel 6 would at least have been marginally on topic. But still a bit obvious, right?

You might be able to use Hany Farid's work on doctored photographs to show they've been tampered with. See, eg, this interesting transcript of his Nova appearance.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/hany-farid.html

Steganography/image manipulation is an arms race but you'll keep the low end fake IDs out. At some point in the race master criminals are going to go for higher value targets than random apartments on AirBnB. And... problem solved.

Granted. But surely the prior art on bits being transmitted through a general purpose computing machine, whether mechanical, magnetic, mental, musical, or magical, is now unassailable. What is novel is not physical, what is physical is not novel.

Also, the Live Music Archive.

It was ok on my HTC Desire.

The question Coke's ads answer is not just Pepsi Or Coke, it is To Coke Or Not To Coke. You always have the option of drinking water. Water dominates Coke as a beverage for health, it (perhaps) loses on taste and texture. Hence a lot of advertising stressing Coke's positives. How do you know that when you say it tastes fairly good that they haven't gotten to you too?

That's why we skip ads in my house, they are just too hot to handle.

Don't waste your time. This is a pretty crappy article. It will be old hat for you if you've been following this area in any depth.

Misleading discussions: the proportion of patents that are overturned compared to the number that aren't, what makes a bad patent bad, who files for patents, what is a patent troll, who are the patent trolls.

Missing discussions: the distinction between software patents and non-software patents, the consequences of in re Bilski, the proportion of software patents vs non-software patents, the current misguided "reform" efforts in Congress, the nuclear war in the mobile industry, Google vs. Oracle.

I would not call this impossible. I would just call it ripe for disruption. Why not remove "idiot" resources and give them to "gifted"? Why not make your whole school "gifted", like they are doing in the follow-on study?

The whole point of this is that the teachers were not special teachers. The students were not special students. But the joint exercise they did was new and interesting. It is more about changing teachers' attitudes and skills than about stratifying resources and kids into gifted and not-gifted.

You might be saying that sea changes are impossible due to entrenched interests in education. I do think some reform there is very important. But I also think that as administrations and states see the benefits for teachers and students, they will start gravitating in this direction.

What is bad about giving all kids the "gifted" classroom? It's obviously better than the regular classroom when you look at outcomes, that's what the study says.

I didn't see a word about defining gifted down or watering down the school experience of the "real" gifted students.

I don't think your super stimulative genius level classroom actually exists...

It's because of the ratio of reads to writes. For many applications, especially in social/content, the creation traffic is an order of magnitude or two less than the consumption traffic. So free inbound bandwidth is a bit of a rounding error.

Here's a somewhat old article that captures the rule.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianwee...

Never read Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

In programming, do you have to worry about phonology, slang, or number agreement?

The guy's deeper point is that programming is a language acquisition task and we would do well to take the rich set of lessons from ESL and foreign language learning and apply them to CS learning. Will all of it stick? No. But there is fertile green field to plow here.

For better or worse, comment scores are useful for reading. I know how to ignore flamewars: I look for indentation and skip it. My virgin eyes somehow are not offended.

So I'm much less likely to read threads now unless I'm really interested. I guess that has made me less involved.

revanchist copyright laws on performance of music

I buy the argument that software is math and thus unpatentable. My experience has also been that most software patents (and especially always the most notorious) are trivial applications of an algorithm to some subject area.

But here's a more pragmatic argument.

The current patent system exists to provide financial incentive to bring the number of inventors in an untouched area from 0 to 1.

It is completely broken wherever it brings the number of innovators in an emerging area from 50 to 1.

The first case is probably true in any industry with high startup costs and unproven technology. The second case is true of software and services on the still young, still evolving internet, with low technological barriers to entry and fertile soil as far as the eyes can see.

If we want to see what innovators are really capable of, we'll get rid of software patents and watch them duke it out in the market.

John Lennon: 1940-1980 Mother: Julia Killer: Mark David Chapman

J/k

Point taken.

A mean spirited person would manage to slip a dig at someone's critical thinking skills into an otherwise well-taken comment. Not that this paragraph implies anything about the comment I'm replying to.

(Seriously, wtf)

Using passive voice is also a characteristic error of young bad writers. I would not presume to tell an old good writer how to do their job.

And incidentally, it doesn't take the awesome might of my critical thinking army, arrayed like the crusaders going to war, pennons snapping in the wind, to point out that there are better reasons to avoid the passive voice than 'MS Grammar Check says so'.

Using the passive voice is not recommended by me. A book was read by me that contained the rule against it: The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Also a passage in Stephen King's On Writing that makes the same point was read by me a bit later in my life.

In short, I do not recommend the passive voice. The Elements of Style has a rule against it, and I read the same point later in life in a passage from Stephen King's On Writing.

But you don't have to believe them. You can figure out why they recommend it for yourself.

They were fools to let this out in public. Not because of Facebook users but because of developers.

Trying to win not through technical superiority but through FUD spread by cutouts is emblematic of the worst moves of Microsoft. Yes, short-sighted leadership at the top is responsible for many of their current woes.

But also, when tech companies make moves that lack integrity, the best workers head for the exits. They have the least to lose because they can work anywhere. The threshold is lower to act on the courage of their convictions. And high integrity and great work go together.

Top college hires (perhaps the most idealistic and with the least to lose) hear about this stuff and just don't apply.

Your comment is eating its own tail.

Let's get really practical: public-only financing of elections, plus conflict of interest rules with teeth (no job in the industry you regulated for X years after you left) will make it significantly harder for special interests to exert undue influence on our elected officials. At least, if they sell out to corporations, it will be out of deeply felt corporatist convictions rather than for intellectually bankrupt cash considerations.

New Age?

Unitarian Universalist?

Not trying to be rude, these are merely the most obvious cases that mold themselves to the believer's opinion. Also, observe the syncretism of Buddhism in different regions.

What is the statute of limitations on spoiling? That is a twelve year old book.

Serious question.

From "You and Your Research" by Dick Hamming:

Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians and I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn't learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken McKay and other people, and I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, and a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them!

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research," he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave," and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?"