Wrong. It's vulnerable to systemic fraud in the counting. If you infiltrate the post office or the election office you can easily alter the results in volume.

When you have a polling location you can verify the box is empty, observe people placing votes into it, and observe the counting. You observe every step in the process to get your poll's final tally, and when the results are posted with a breakdown by polling location you can verify that it was added correctly to the total. All you need is a few trusted people per polling location and you can trust the results.

But in vote-by-mail the only part you observe is casting your own vote. You can't say that a 'household tyrant' didn't vote for others -or- that systemic fraud didn't occur in the post or in the tally. It's better than internet voting could ever be since the unobservable parts (post office, elections office) are harder to corrupt and get away with it, but it's still unacceptable for running fair elections.

"Historically, a device required moving parts to classify as a machine; however, the advent of electronics technology has led to the development of devices without moving parts that many refer to as machines, such as a computer, radio, and television." --The American Heritage Dictionary, 1985

You are living 30 years in the past if you think "machine" has to be some physical device with gears and cogs. You would rather go from straw men to arguing semantics than actually come up with an argument against software patents. Why do you think that is?

Software is a creative work and it is also a machine -- it does something. It transforms scene data into a Pixar movie, or translates a book into another language, or controls other machines to assemble cars, shape metal, or do anything else.

A book or movie is a creative work, but that's all. It doesn't do anything. It isn't a machine.

Being something and doing something are not the same thing. Being something is protected by copyright, doing something is protected by patents. Software does something and should be protected by patents.

Did you ever wonder why you can't come up with a real argument against software patents that doesn't rely on straw men?

I believe what they are talking about is "The Man" in the middle attack not a man-in-the-middle attack.

Basically in a dynamically typed language like JavaScript every property access, function call, or any other thing that can be changed dynamically could be changed at runtime by another thread. So you need locking for every method call, property access, etc to make sure it isn't changed by another thread while it's accessed in another.

There are some generally fast locking algorithms for when locks are used mostly by the same thread... for instance in Java locks can be owned by a thread and that thread never has to lock or unlock at all, but instead it periodically checks if another thread has written a flag saying it wants to become the owner, then there is synchronization to pass off ownership. This works ok for Java, where there are fewer things that can change at runtime and they are explicitly listed out (using 'synchronized'), but in a dynamic language it's usually just too much overhead.

Just for comparison V8 is even more extremely single-threaded, with execution that can only be interrupted at some certain points in the JS code.

You would have a point if Google gave something up, but they still display a massive ad for Chrome on their start page (roughly the same size as the Google logo) and other properties, and a sponsored ad for 'browser', and top results for 'chrome' and 'browser' still have Chrome listed through wikipedia and other second hand sources.

How many people do you think manage to get past the huge logo-sized ad, the banner ads, and the 2nd hand sites without reading about Chrome or being able to download it? If you give up something worthless to you, it shows nothing about your integrity.

It's amazing to me to what extremes people can go to justify their tribes. Here we have college educated people who's job it is to show the differences in the products not being able to recognize their own product. If these people can't tell the difference from a reasonable distance then the general public 10' away in Starbucks sure the hell isn't going to.

It's patently obvious (har har) that Samsung set out to clone iPad, the packaging, the icons, the charger, the IO port, etc. They're going to lose these cloning suits and for good reason.

It's sad that Microsoft is now one of the more morally upstanding corporations (by comparison only) in the industry. At least they create things and with Zune, WP7, etc they do it their own unique way instead of just blindly copying like Google (copying the OS) and Samsung (copying the product).

Some measurements of PC emulator on FF, Chrome on i7.

It depends... comparing nightly to dev channel:

# x=1; while [[ $x -lt 1000]; do x=$((x+1)); done

Chrome: 2 seconds
Firefox: 20 seconds

# time gzip </bin/zcat >/dev/null

Chrome: 206 seconds
Firefox: 102 seconds

# find /

Chrome: 11 seconds
Firefox: 6.5 seconds

# for x in/bin/*; do $x --help; done 2>/dev/null >&2

Chrome: 12 seconds
Firefox: 5.5 seconds

Looks like whatever busybox is doing for the shell is fantastically slow in Firefox, but pretty much everything else I tried was about twice as fast. No wonder Google wants everybody to move to Dart, huh?

Chrome is advertised extensively on all Google properties, but you don't see the ads as a Firefox user because they don't want to tarnish their image with happy Firefox users. Chrome is advertised on TV and the web. Advertising works, that's how Google rakes in the profit.

There's not really any reason to use Chrome over Firefox any more, but many reasons to use Firefox over Chrome (customization, open previous session as it was, better extensions, better rendering, etc).

Interesting. I've been using Firefox nightly for a while now and it seems better than or equal to Chrome in most ways. Plus it's fully open source.

As far as performance goes Javascript in Nightly is on par (+/- a few % on Kracken) with dev channel Chrome, compositing is faster, the garbage collector is better (fewer pauses, less overhead). I don't notice the UI lagging like in older versions. You can have as many tabs open as you want.

As far as features, Nightly has an option to force add-on compatibility and I've yet to have any add-ons fail to work or cause problems. Then you have a noscript that always works, esc to stop animated gifs, view -> style -> no style, customized UI (for minimal UI on netbook), and all those other nice things about Firefox that you can live without but shouldn't have to.

There's no doubt Chrome is winning the popularity contest and at one time it was much faster, but as far as merit goes it just doesn't seem to offer that much anymore.

There is a HUGE amount of noise in the world, yet with an annoy-o-tron in your office it's just a tiny man-made noise that drives you batty.

When I tell you I removed the annoy-o-tron(s) from your office you feel better right away, if you believe me. You also can't tell me reliably if I actually removed them or not (at least not unless they go off again), or how many are hidden in your office and around your home. Maybe they are just in your imagination, unlike that spider in your hair.

I just shot down your argument. Whether these people are actually affected by radio waves or not is a different matter, but you reasoning is not valid.

Since there is a 2.5mm plug clearly people did have this problem before, so you would rephrase it as something simply wrong. Why would one ever use a 2.5mm plug if there was space for a 3.5mm one? It doesn't even need rebutting with counter-examples it's so patently absurd of an idea.

The fact is that this is one of those inventions that takes creativity to come up with, but seems pretty obvious after the fact. A headphone jack that's half the size and is both forward and backward compatible with the existing headphones is freaking awesome. Props to Apple engineers.

And there's your incentive for inventing. Either invent new awesome things (Apple) or get blocked from the market for using other people's inventions (Samsung) or buy other people's work and use that as leverage so you can license the inventions you need (Google).

Invent, pay up, or get out. Patents are a proven solution to furthering progress in the useful arts.

This invention halves the size of the jack, is compatible with all existing devices, and is less likely to break the device (pull on the headphone just pulls it away from the magnet instead of yanking the whole device). And nobody in 96 years thought of this solution.

This is exactly what patents are for. Rewarding the people that spend their dollars on research to improve things. It's a small but innovative idea, and gives Apple a small advantage over competitors. Stop eating the sour grapes and start inventing.

You're celebrating a company that profits from other people's creative works (original content), time and attention (advertising), and inventions. You cheered when google, a company without actual inventions themselves to speak of, complained about the patent system protecting inventors. And you cheered when they essentially bribed the system by buying other people's works; they payed ill-gotten money to make their patent abuse problem go away.

Google is a parasite. Objectively looking at Google's behavior it's one of the more evil, corrosive companies in the tech sector, so why do you celebrate them?