So, NPR just had a segment on how last Sunday night’s premiere of Game of Thrones had broken the record for the most illicitly downloaded episode ever, at over a million BitTorrent downloaders. I don’t know whether that includes other networks like dDonkey or Kaz.
No one could have downloaded it in 1983. Few of us were on the Internet then, and even if we were, we didn’t have the media formats to my recollection. I do remember alt.binaries stuff on USENET that people used really mostly for porn, but I thought that was just stills.
It it the 16-bit magic number expressed as two ASCII bytes that tells the Unix kernel that this executable file is indirectly executed via an interpreter.
For example, all shell scripts begin #!/bin/sh and all Perl programs (tend to) begin #!/usr/bin/perl. The kernel runs that path as the real interpreter and points its stdin to the currently open inode.
@JasperLoy Why? Well, the Muppets did a thing called "Mahna mahna" in the eighties or nineties, but just "Mahna" was too popular. So I threw an x on the end, and voila.
Oh, well, okay.
@tchrist I wrote a lot of (tiny, lame) shell scripts. I want to write more.
Notice how the average of the two of you was extremely close: 289.
I am impressed.
I was thinking there are probably about 1 billion people on FB, each having perhaps between 5 and 50 photos on average, so I would have said 25 billion.
Of course there is no way to know for us except from FB itself.
@Jubobs: I would be inclined to call it elision (or possibly syncope), because the /t/ sound doesn't so much change into something else, as it just disappears: the /n/ sound stays the same, after all. — Cerberus1 min ago
> — Apple finds something about a game based on sweatshops to be unfit for their customers' iDevices, which is an interesting stance for a company that has been accused of making those same devices in sweatshops themselves. Sweatshops: good enough to build your electronics, but not a fit subject for a game to play on them?
> Overall, Intellectual Ventures admits that it has brought in over $2 billion dollars directly from licensing and another $5 billion in "investments" -- some of which came from companies "buying in."
Google and Apple already spend more on patent litigation than on R&D, although of course patent litigation includes fighting companies like Apple, which are normally not called "patent trolls" because they actually produce stuff.
> Google has received 2,700 patents since 2000, according to the patent analysis firm M-CAM. Microsoft has received 21,000. [Apple] has received more than 4,100 patents since 2000, according to M-CAM. source: New York Times
> In a [1991] memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." Mr. Gates worried that "some large company will patent some obvious thing" and use the patent to "take as much of our profits as they want."
> Apple collects more than $1 billion a week in iPhone and related sales. “I am skeptical whether patents are needed in the software industry to provide adequate incentives,” Judge Posner wrote in an e-mail
> “Think of the billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet,” said Ms. Heinen, the former Apple general counsel, who left the company and paid $2.2 million in connection with a federal investigation of stock option backdating. “When patent lawyers become rock stars, it’s a bad sign for where an industry is heading,” she said, adding that she had no issue with the lawyers themselves.
> The application, for a voice- and text-based search engine, was “an obvious variation” on existing ideas, a patent examiner named Raheem Hoffler wrote. Over the next five years, Apple modified and resubmitted the application eight times — and each time it was rejected by the patent office. Until last year. On its 10th attempt, Apple got patent 8,086,604 approved.
One option is judicial activism. This year, Judge Posner, in an Illinois federal court, tossed out patent arguments made by both Apple and Motorola Mobility in a 38-page opinion that dismissed a lawsuit between the two companies. Cleaning up the patent mess, Judge Posner said in an interview, might also require reducing the duration of patents on digital technologies, which can be as long as 20 years. “That would make a big difference,” he said. “After five years, these patents are mainly traps for the unwary.”
> But to really make a difference, such ideas require the participation of large technology companies, and the incentives to cooperate are small.
What is the technical term for the words "a" and "an" as in:
a Banana
an Elephant
and does the rule for using "an" in front of words that begin with a vowel have a name?
in Game of Throne, characters who are going to become naked in front of camera always wear sexy outfits so it is very easy to predict what's going to happen soon
What is the technical term for the words "a" and "an" as in:
a Banana
an Elephant
and does the rule for using "an" in front of words that begin with a vowel have a name?
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…