rsuttongee

I think this is a great idea and that it will prevent pledging companies from engaging in patent abuse, but I wonder how many large companies will bother to sign up for it. I imagine that if Apple/Google/MS all just take a pass that they won't catch much flak for doing so.

I wonder though if we could make the whole thing more effective by also adding an underlying threat to the pledge:

That any company, patent pledging or not, who violates the <25 rule will have their talent actively recruited away by those companies that have pledged.

It's a little weird (to me at least), but upvoting stories in HN is considered 'saving' them. You can view all your saved stories from your profile page under the link 'saved stories'.

You can also just go to: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=jholman

Ha, I like your inversion of the Snowcrash quote, "condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" -- what a great tagline for a social search company.

Well, there may or may not be a pressing business need for capital, but I'm sure a lot of the current shareholders would see an IPO as a good exit.

I suppose it's possible that facebook could still be acquired, but given how large they are, and the huge amount of cash/stock it would require to buy them, that seems unlikely to me.

You're probably right that "app files" they way steve mentioned is does refer to the data of the apps themselves which isn't a lot of data.

I was more curious about data files that are used by an app (I'm assuming we can use the iCloud API to synch those between devices) - how is that paid for? does that count towards the 5GB limit? If so, can you get more space? at what cost?

For example, right now GoodReader uses the dropbox API to allow cloud access to whatever documents you have, and I have several gigs of various .pdfs that I store there. With the iCloud API, can Goodreader abandon dropbox and let apple host them?

I agree that this is really cool, but I'm a little confused about the details. Surely they must charge the app developers for the space they use up in their new fancy (and expensive looking) data center? Steve said that app files didn't count to your personal 5GB storage, so where does apple recoup the costs?

Kind of sad to see several startup products copied in Lion and iOS 5.

For example:

   Dropbox - Air Drop in Lion

   Readability - Safari Reader

   Read it Later / Instapaper - the Safari Reading list

Also interesting to note how blatantly they copied the notification system in Android. Almost as blatantly as android copied almost everything from iOS.

All's fair in love and war, I guess.

Yeah, I had a very similar experience when a friend of mine got mugged in Chicago (next to wicker park). We were able to call the police within a couple of minutes, and within the next 5 minutes a special response unit got to us, took a description, and then drove around my friend to look for the mugger.

We didn't catch him (right then at least), but I was still impressed with the quick response.

I wish this chart did a little more to explain the meaning of the units. A big red dot corresponding to 559 nano-greys / hour (the highest reading when I viewed the chart) probably doesn't mean anything to most people.

That rate is about 2.33 x the world average background radiation level (ignoring quality factors and assuming 1 GY = 1 SV) and listing that alongside the raw units would be helpful.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation

What about Pixar? Couldn't they turn their renderfarm towards bitcoins and crowd everyone else out?

Which totally explains the existence of the NHS.

Either the Eton-conspiracy is less powerful than you think, or they have a bizarre concern for the health of the British people.

I apologize for the snarkiness, but really? Comparing the way that British politicians treat their constituents to the way that Qaddafi is literally gunning down his is pretty absurd.

While I agree with you that it would be great to have a viable third party in the United States, the very structure of the voting system here (the single member district plurality system) has been shown to favor a two party system under various game theory analyses.

Check out Duverger's law for more insight on this:

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

To me, it seems that Valve probably sees this as a great opportunity to try to steal some of the PS3s userbase for their PC/Mac steam platform. Anyone who has played an fps with a mouse/keyboard combo knows how superior it is to console controllers, and once all the regular ps3 gamers start getting thrashed by PC gamers on the cross-platform multiplayer they'll know it too.

Now that they can switch to the PC, install steam, and improve their own game without having to buy another copy, valve has given them a serious incentive to give steam a chance.

The only problem is that, based on what I've seen so far, the portal 2 multiplayer doesn't seem that competitive or that dependent on twitchy control responses. If Valve were to do this with the next Call of Duty (a difficult deal to negotiate to say the least) or perhaps a Counterstrike sequel, they'd probably get a lot more switchers.

Which is actually what the article says:

"Apple can’t stick to its own rules with the gigantic iOS App Store."

and at the end:

"App Store reviewers are not consistent with enforcing the rules, and therefore censorship still seems arbitrary."

Also, there's no allegations of special treatment in the article at all.

Did we even read the same thing?

For any ex-yahoos out there, there's a topic on Quora for startups looking to hire those recently laid off.

http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Recruiting/Which-startups-c...

Good luck out there!

The phone looks great and is everything I want in a smart phone - especially the up-to-date OS that is unencumbered by a custom UI. However, the timing of this announcement is terrible.

If google really wanted to win over people who feel trapped in the walled garden of iOS, they should have made some sort of announcement about this phone back in June/July when millions of people were exiting their 2 year iphone 3g contracts. I know I certainly would have waited for it if I had known, but as it is now I'm stuck with AT&T for another cycle.

Or perhaps, don't launch with a minimal viable product with plans to improve it later unless you have a financial structure that allows you to stay in business for long enough to actually improve it.

Yeah, I know hangul is phonetic, but I've also heard they make use of a variant of chinese characters in some limited fashion (mostly give names, place names, and academic histories).

I could be wrong, but isn't that the case for most everyone on the planet?

Looking at this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system

it seems that with the exception of China, Japan, and Korea (which has very limited use) the whole world uses some form of a phonetic writing system.

Just like Dubai is rising ahead with the world's tallest building?