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.
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; it's still patent infringement.
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 he was relevant.
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 differences.
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.
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.
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.
His powers don't work on the flesh-and-blood Bane/Smith. He can't swipe the knife away from Trinity's neck at a distance. He can't easily beat Bane/Smith in a fistfight. The best he gets is to see Smith's machine form after being blinded.
All of his powers shown in the real world are against machines, never flesh-and-blood humans.
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 several trillions without adding those trillions to the GDP.
It all gets paid back with interest, though. None of this is anything new.
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 incompatible with having a wireless transceiver in his brain.
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 parts, a program in the matrix, and a human in the real world with a direct neuro link to that program. Neo's powers are expressed in the real world because he still has a direct link to the machines.
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 most people, much more so than either Inception or The Matrix were. See Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer, for example. Or even Nolan's own Memento.
Putting it in a more easily-digestible form is a useful thing to do, which tends to blunt this line of criticism. There are some philosophy professors who really appreciate these movies, because they provided nice reference points that their students already know about, making it much easier to teach certain concepts.
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 is public key ciphers that rely on prime number factorization. Eliptic curves are one solution, but the only people who seem to have in-depth knowledge about them are in the NSA.
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 there was an audible pop when the speakers started playing that frequency. The sound card seemed to simply refuse to play that high.
I suppose the malware could be working at a low enough level to override a cutoff in the sound card's firmware. But then wouldn't it have to implement drivers for almost every kind of sound card in existence?
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 just a few very smart people, perhaps just one.