
Crowd-sourced Investigation?
Wasn't that just called a lynch mob in the fine days of yore? Of course, 'crowd-sourced investigation' sounds much more technically savvy and I'm sure will lead to more accurate mob justice.
13 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Mar 2011
After all, who can look a victim of government corruption and abuse of power in the eye and say the police shouldn't have broader monitoring powers over the government? :) Frankly, I'd feel safer knowing what is actually going on with our officials than I would with another email / web snooping bill looking at my neighbors.
Oh please, they showed the world how a touch-screen interface should work on smartphones and then tablets, and now they're rolling out voice control that works better than the joke that has been out there for over a decade.
Sorry, I thought you were talking about Apple. Yeah, shocking to see a company like Google that's all about innovation copy this as well, huh? The amazing bit is that people will still explain how Google already had this, tablets, touch, etc. Riiiiiight.
I don't like the software patents much either (they need much shorter terms, weeding out the obvious, more discoverable, etc.), but Xerox not having patented GUI ideas and showing them to other companies in the hopes that people would implement them isn't really the same case as an unlock gesture being thought up by Apple to prevent capacitive touchscreen devices from going off in your pants.
There are already other things that may be spuriously activated there, so no need for a phone to do the same. In any case, it will be interesting to see how long it takes for the lawsuits to start, and whether it will turn out that Google knowingly implemented unlock gestures despite being aware of this patent having been filed.
So you're turning Samsung in for yet another violation? Because the iPhone came out in 2007, and I'm sure this patent was filed years ago as well and just took this long to be issued.
I'm not a fan of patenting the obvious, but sometimes obvious isn't. I had several touchscreen devices before the iPhone (Sony MagicLink, Palm Pilot, PocketPC) and none of them ever used a gesture to perform the unlock - and I certainly remember people wondering how Apple was going to avoid phones making random calls with a touchscreen in your pocket.
Others can use a keycode to keep the screen locked, use a hardware button or button combination, etc. I suspect the patent is valid and it did do something different and useful. And let me be clear, I loathe the concept of software patents lasting more than 5 years personally, but within this flawed system, Apple probably is in the right.
"The only reason to buy a discrete satnav is because your car doesn't come with one preinstalled ... yet."
That's assuming you want to overpay for a preinstalled system that will cost you many times more to fix if it has trouble down the road. (If there's a fix - good luck finding parts or replacements for an older vehicle with outdated nav electronics...)
No thanks to the stand-alone device either. Smartphones FTW here - they work on foot or in a car, you inherently already are carrying them, they have easier software updates - not to mention you can use different apps if you determine you don't like the one you have and _still_ save money.
Ah well, maybe the satnav people can team up with the iomega click-drive team...
Imagine you were trying to crack the AES encryption and it took you trillions of years. Now imagine you could do that with just 1/4 as many machines in the same trillions of years. Bam! HUGE power savings!
Cracking AES hasn't become more feasible, but it just got much greener, so we should all be applauding these researchers! Woohoo!