air

You can inspect the WhatsApp binary and prevent updates. Having to trust the server is a big deal.

People want to maximize the time they spend together with their team mates, spouses, friends and children. That requires synchronization.

Proprietary codebase does not deprive original project from potential contributors. Gpl'd fork might

Minor nitpick

"The green and blue colors, z-position, and normal vector are all interpolated in the same manner. (Texture coordinates behave slightly differently because there you’d also need to take the perspective into account.)"

Colors (c), z, and texture coordinates (t) should all be interpolated differently because of perspective. You need to interpolate 1/z, c/z, t/z and for every pixel then do division eg. c/z / 1/z = c

The issue here is Software Patents exist.

It's possible to not be asshole with software patents. See Facebook and Google.

Netflix begs to differ.

IMHO the hostile takeover of the ffmpeg project by the libav guys (Fabrice Bellard had to wield trademark to force them to rename the fork) and intense FUD campaign were much bigger issues.

To be fair, Firefox can and does ship their own browser engine on Android, something that is forbidden on IOS.

The point was that those are forbidden in E-prime, (they have "am" in them).

How do you introduce yourself?

http://eprimedictionary.pbworks.com/My+name+is+Sally

Has some suggestions. All seem pretty awkward to me.

Can't you run it under Chromium then?

"The real problem with land [and property taxes] is the fact it tends to flow into the cost of rent and homeownership."

The price of property and rent in popular places will be what the market will bear. So with tax, the rent would stay the same. Price of apartments would go down, because buyers need to pay the tax, so they cannot afford as much.

Apartments in space efficient towers would be grow in value relatively, because they don't need to pay so much tax, so there would be incentive to build more densely.

This means more apartments and cheaper prices.

It's discussed in the article:

Many people believe that the source of this myth was a 1945 Food and Nutrition Board recommendation that said people need about 2.5 liters of water a day. But they ignored the sentence that followed closely behind. It read, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.”

Indeed, from the references of your link:

The Panel has decided that the reference values for total water intake should include water from drinking water, beverages of all kind, and from food moisture.

It's $2B

It's politics. If the default is "don't track", advertisers have a case that the user has not explicitly asked to disable tracking.

But is there evidence that Facebook is willing to use other companies' code under similar grant?

The intent is to prevent man in the middle -attackers from getting access to those features.

To be really fair, out of the four biggest browser vendors (MS, Apple, Mozilla, Google) only Google makes it possible to use the other browser engines on their mobile platform.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

"Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

"And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good."

So good he supports torture http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2014/12/09/ron-conway-bla...

"This past spring, Juliano Rizzo (@julianor) and I came up with a cryptographic attack on Telegram's MTProto "secret" chat communications which can be performed in O(2^64) time."

Using asymptotic notation without an argument (usually "n") makes me cringe. O(2^64) = O(1)

Rendering engines are okay. Its the Javascript execution engine that is not allowed.

No, they must use WebKit:

"Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

It's not a re-implementation, just a port. Dalvik is licensed under Apache License 2.0 which allows proprietary derivatives.

As an end user:

I can combine GPLv2 (eg. linux kernel) and BSD licensed code, and distribute it.

I can combine GPLv3 and BSD licensed code, and distribute it.

I cannot combine GPLv2 and GPLv3 licensed code, and distribute it.

As an end user, I like BSD licensed code more.

Github costs $0 and 0h of admin work for OSS code.

They use the same loophole as with phones. Microsoft distributes Linux VMs through its subsidiary Microsoft Open Technologies, which was created just for this purpose. It does not own the patents so MS doesn't have to license them.

Unfortunatey they created a subsidiary called Microsoft Mobile that sells the phones. The subsidiary does not own the patents, so no patents gets licensed. Qualcomm uses the same loophole.

"Unity 8 uses QML for the shell itself but the applications will still be in GTK."

I think GTK will be just for legacy/3rd party applications and new stuff by Canonical will be Qt based.

They probably also oppose any easing of those restrictions.

Per-capita GDP does not matter in the power contest. There are countries that have GDP/capita twice the size of US's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nom...