frezik

6 ms·

1.
by frezik 12y ago
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.
2.
by frezik 12y ago
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's deliberate.
3.
by frezik 12y ago
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. So it doesn't matter if it's in the iPhone or not;
4.
by frezik 13y ago
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.
5.
by frezik 13y ago
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 he was relevant.
6.
by frezik 13y ago
But a lot of them use GCC, too. Atmel, for example.
7.
by frezik 13y ago
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 cannibalizing the movement over minor philosophical dif
8.
by frezik 13y ago
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, though.
9.
by frezik 13y ago
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 keep using them until the next contender comes along.
10.
by frezik 13y ago
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 as well go with that.
11.
by frezik 13y ago
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 swipe the knife away fro
12.
by frezik 13y ago
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 you add it all up over a year, it could very well add up to se
13.
by frezik 13y ago
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 alter-ego in the real world. None of that is incompatibl
14.
by frezik 13y ago
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.
15.
by frezik 13y ago
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 parts, a program in the matrix, and a human in the real world w
16.
by frezik 13y ago
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 depth, but those stories tend to be impenetrable for mo
17.
by frezik 13y ago
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, but it's doable. The real problem i
18.
by frezik 13y ago
That's the opposite of a conspiracy nut. One person is not a conspiracy.
19.
by frezik 13y ago
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 the high range of my own hearing, but t
20.
by frezik 13y ago
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, being well-conceived and svelte is evidence that it was j
21.
by frezik 13y ago
MIT has worked on that as well.
22.
by frezik 13y ago
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. However, much smaller asteroids that could potentially des
23.
by frezik 13y ago
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 guess on how to process it.
24.
by frezik 13y ago
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 somebody pulls an ethernet cord?) Fix sliding window? I don&#x
25.
by frezik 13y ago
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 the server closing the connection. There's no end-o
26.
by frezik 13y ago
I did a more complete writeup on Gopher's problems here: http://www.wumpus-cave.net/2013/10/27/why-gopher-is-awful/ Once I did a little research and wrote it all out, Gopher actually came out worse
27.
by frezik 13y ago
As someone who formally got involved in the Gopher Revival, I was going to type up a big response to why Gopher sucks and should continue to be ignored. I decided to leave it for a blog post. See here: http://www.wumpus-cave.net&
28.
by frezik 13y ago
That's not the same thing. In a standard hydroelectric dam, you need an existing river to create electricity. The goal of pumped storage isn't to create new electricity, but to store large amounts of unused baseload power. This ca
29.
by frezik 13y ago
> I remember the pipe and slash symbols 'spinning' while waiting for a large plain text document to complete downloading in the old days. So the "resource lite" argument doesn't fly completely. There really isn&#
30.
by frezik 13y ago
I think it had some interesting ideas, but HTTP as it exists now is more flexible. On any given app, you'll run into Gopher's limitations long before doing the same for HTTP.

More ›