...Qualcomm will offer licenses to 3G and 4G essential patents and will no longer require the bundling of those rights with other patents in its portfolio...
Wow, is that a common tactic? No wonder antitrust was on them.
Not to defend Qualcomm, but patent bundling is very common in telecommunications tech for a very simple reason: what good is 1 licensed patent when you need 5 patents to actually build a product?
And more specifically, 4g phones usually have fallback to 3g or even lower speeds, so if you're going to build a 4g phone, you almost always need to license the tech for 3g and prior. Unbundling the patents in this situation is great theoretically, but in practice it is likely to result in licensees not licensing enough patents, opening themselves up for patent lawsuits.
Interesting. From a microeconomics perspective, bundling is a form of price discrimination which is optimal for situations where the seller has multiple products, but buyers' wants are negatively correlated.
e.g. Roger sells both candy bars and packs of gum, both of which cost him $0 to produce (for simplicity). Al is willing to pay $5 for a candy bar, but $1 for a pack of gum. Jesse willing to pay $1 for a candy bar and $5 for a pack of gum. Roger could sell one candy bar to Al for $5 and one pack of gum to Jesse for $5 for a total profit of $10. More optimally, Roger could sell a bundle consisting of both the candy bar and the pack of gum to both Al and Jesse for $6 for a total profit of $12. Bundling has optimally increased Roger's profits.
Again, telecommunications is a strange beast. To make the one chip to do all of what is called 4g, you need something like a dozen related patents. Ditto for basically every telecommunications product out there.
That's why the auction for the 600 Nortel patents was so important, they all need to cross-license from each other in order to build a product. Yes, having those patents means you've got more weight to swing around in the patent war, but you can't really build a telecommunications product without licensing a bunch of patents.
Again, theoretically this is an awesome idea. But in practice, this is really just government-sponsored theft from Qualcomm, and the only reason that Qualcomm is going with the flow is because China would be a huge market to lose. So they used to make $100 and they now make $65, or maybe even $25 due to reduced patent licensing? Better than $0.
Regarding moving script code off the main thread: I wrote a cooperative FRP engine that multiplexes signal graph update recalculation onto Web Workers. UI updates like virtual DOM would live on the main thread.
For the record, I voted for enum, like in rust-lang ;-)
This was going to be contentious no matter what. For what it's worth, Wikipedia (top Google result) seems to have a compatible story.
Luckily, it's just a conversation change. I think it will be fine, and net more helpful than damaging. The overall goals are intuition and accessibility.
> For the record, I voted for enum, like in rust-lang ;-)
Funny, because there's actually a long, long history of debate around whether Rust should refer to them as unions rather than enums (and change the keyword correspondingly). :) Here's the most recent one that I know of: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/27
Swift seems to have followed Rust's example with its terminology here, so this issue is hardly settled. It may shake out such that `enum` is used for tagged unions where the variants are declared as part of the type (`enum Foo { Bar, Baz}`) (and hence the variants can't be shared between types, at least not without wrapping in a newly-defined variant), whereas `union` is used for tagged unions where the type is composed from multiple existing types (`type Bar; type Baz; union Foo { Bar | Baz }`).
That's pretty cool. I'm a casual user who might go on a hike a few times a year; thought about picking this up but $20 plus IAP (do I need to buy maps?)... is there a trial or lite version?
1) There are no additional map costs, which is one of the big differences between Gaia and a Garmin GPS.
2) No lite/trial version besides the website (but email for a refund anytime). There will probably be a free app along soon though, useful on its own, to help market the paid products.
3) As for Gaia's IAP (GaiaPro), we added that much later, so I would call it "optional."
I'm no lawyer, but to me, that's an interpretation that's more to-the-letter than in-the-spirit. A savvy judge could conceivably consider evidence collection mechanism tampering a special case of evidence tampering.
