Viewing profile — frezik

Doesn't matter. If you're the first one to get a patent, it's all yours. There's no provision in the law for independent invention.

Glad I wasn't the only one who picked up on that. Usually I'd go with incompetence due to Hanlon's Razor, but given this is coming from a lawyer from a huge corporation, I'd say it…

Patents are public documents. The intent of the system is that you have a monopoly on something for a set time, but after that, anybody can make it based on those documents alone. …

You might want to embed this inside a larger language. That wouldn't necessarily preclude using a Turing Complete language, but you wouldn't want it to be a complicated one.

Not really. Even RMS only mentions the distinction in passing. The fight has simply gone out of this one for everyone who isn't ESR, probably because the late 90s was the last time…

But a lot of them use GCC, too. Atmel, for example.

Seems like ESR is still fighting the Open Source vs Free Software battle of the late 90s. It hasn't dawned on him yet that everyone else thinks that there's little purpose in canni…

The OP probably needed to clarify. English having a simple alphabet gave the US a leg up on personal computing compared to the KJC countries. It's only one contributing factor, tho…

This story has played out before. Last time, it was Object Oriented databases. What happens each time is that the traditional RDBMS's pick up a few of the features, and then we kee…

There's nothing to contradict it, either; not all the plot points have to be served up on a nice dinner plate. If it fits nicer than the matrix-within-a-matrix theories, then might…

If he actually has telekinetic powers, this scene doesn't make sense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYawJGlEh3k His powers don't work on the flesh-and-blood Bane/Smith. He can't s…

I think what he was actually getting at is the Discount Window. These are often very short term loans, perhaps a matter of minutes, made to cover a short term liquidity drop. If yo…

Neo only uses his powers against machines, shutting down the sentinels at the end of Reloaded, blowing stuff up on the way into the Machine City, and in being able to see Smith's a…

US GDP in 2012 was $15.68 trillion. You're saying the US government gave away more than a year's worth of productive output? You'll excuse me if I say citation fucking needed.

I never liked that particular interpretation. It was too obvious and had been done better elsewhere. I preferred an alternative explanation, where The One actually comes in two par…

I've tended towards criticism from the opposite direction (which can also apply to The Matrix). Its philosophical underpinnings have been done by other works of fiction to greater …

Block ciphers can be easily made quantum-safe by doubling the key size (see "Grover's Algorithm"). We might have to update everyone's browser to support extending AES to 512 bits, …

That's the opposite of a conspiracy nut. One person is not a conspiracy.

Don't speakers/mics tend to have a built-in cutoff? I've played with generating higher and higher frequencies before, and I was able to hear it up to 18kHz. That's probably hitting…

Design by Committee doesn't give you well-thought-out designs. It gives you crap like WEP and USB, where many competing voices try to drive the design in their own way. In fact, be…

MIT has worked on that as well.

Chelyabinsk-type cases are exactly why this is needed. Asteroids big enough to cause mass extinction events are rare, and hardly worth talking about except in the extreme long term…

Because I want to differentiate between JPEG, GIF, and PNG images? The how is going to be different for each one. Without the protocol telling me, I can only make a reasonable gues…

No, these are design flaws that anything over TCP/IP needs to deal with. In particular, closing the connection to indicate the end of a file transfer is really bad (what if somebod…

OK, then we'll just talk about it on its own merits: * It closes the connection after every request, making poor use of TCP sliding window * Binary file transfers are finished by t…