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License to Sit
Xunker writes "It's the Next Big Thing(TM) in sitting. Okay, so it's a bit of satire from our own Prof. Steve Mann (of Wearable Computer fame). It's basically a time lock chair -- you must buy a 'seating lisence' to use the chair, and if your lisence expires while you're sitting, spikes pop up to remind you you are no longer allowed to sit there. Oh, yeah, dig the terms and conditions, too."
Remember, you can always take an existing patent, and patent all obvious variants, and probably cover a few pre-existing ones.
Although I doubt it'd be enforceable, I'm sure a company could come along, extend the existing chair patents, slap some businesses with lawsuits, and make some money.
Like it or not, with the patent office in the sorry state that it's in, and the DMCA becoming the law of the land, this sort of ridiculous tripe is becoming a viable business model.
I hope we can still laugh about this sort of thing in a few years, instead of having to buy 20-seat licenses for our chairs...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Technicaly you can continue to use your legacy seating equiptment, however since it is incompatible with the latest seting standards and worse yet dose not come with all these new enhancments to PROTECT *YOU* from legal exposure. Do you realy want to?
My advise is to upgrade to the new technology and avoid being left with this primitive technology. Those chairs are practicaly from the Pree Cristian era. Get real.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
you do realize the reason M$ will never go away...there are too many asses out there and they are breading like rabbits...I'm still waiting for the AOL OS, the OS for the completely mindless. Not only does it install itself it takes care of all your needs and you get the first 600 hours of use for free*.
* After the first 600 hours, which must be used in the first month, there is a $100 per month connection fee and a 10 cents a minute charge for having the pleasure of us wasting all your time downloading all the pretty pictures it displays for your mindless enjoyment.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
The man can so easily talk your ears off,
that it's easy to be intimidated by him
and walk off, which I did. Later I learned
who he was, and soon he was en route to
Toronto. Pity. It's well worth it to have
your ears talked off by him. Glad to
see he hasn't changed a bit.
It's people who pay for a chair once who are abusing the intellectual property rights of seat designers.
No longer will you buy a chair, you will lease it.
And get your feet off of there, young man.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
government groups angered at homeless squatters may want to use the technology, or something akin to it. If something stands still in a certain place for too long, and it's scanned as human, a little jolt and up it moves?
Man, sometimes I even make myself sick.
Hah! When I was in Morocco, in the main bus station in Fes, I paid to use a bathroom. "So what?", you ask...
This bathroom had squat toilets only. It wasn't clean. There was no toilet paper. There was only cold water. There was no soap. While I was squatting, my wallet fell out of my back pocket... into the hole. I had to wonder... what am I paying for, here?
Two weeks travelling in Morocco for cheap is enough to make you appreciate western style plumbing. And I mean North American - your average European bathroom is nowhere near as nice as an average US/Canadian bathroom. (Heh. How's that for flamebait?)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
You obviously did not use any non-Western toilets. Traditional Japanese toilets are squat-over-the-hole types, although they are much, much cleaner (generally) than those the original poster had experiences with. I never used one but I saw a lot of them.
I have to admit, the heated seats are nice! You'd probably only find those in homes and in nicer hotels, however.
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Kinda clever, however, isn't there case law that indicates that "copying to memory" is fair use? I believe software companies tried to use the copying to memory to get copyright law to cover the use of the software and the courts told them to blow off.
/.
I also think that "copying to hard drive" falls under fair use, but less relevant to the satire.
I do think that the cracks about the Government ID card are extremely funny and amusing. This is overall a good satire, thanks
Bloody wonderful satire.
Not that it's far from the truth -- If chairs weren't in the public domain (Older than 1910), I have no doubt that the companies of today would try to license you to use their product for monthly or (slightly cheaper) yearly licenses.
I have to ask myself --- is this an example of how art imitates life?
Since I left Ukraine 8 years ago, I know that they don't have water around the clock now, it comes at certain times. However while I was still in the country (10 years in Ukraine, 6 in Russia, and I travelled in the country a lot) all cities had much better water pressure that I find in Canada. The difference as I see it is in the standard for Canadian water pipes - they are tiny in diameter. In the former USSR republics the water pipes were probably 10 diameters of Canadian pipes, this way if someone flushes their toilet no one notices changes in water temperature in their showers. I find it really disturbing that in Canada (and likely in the US too) the standards are so low for the water transmission. I suppose the difference comes from the fact that here they actually had to cut down on the costs of piping to make as much profit as possible, while in the former USSR it was not one of the requirements.
You can't handle the truth.
This already exists both in paris, and certain parts of Mexico City.
You basically pay a person in order to use the washroom. When I was in Mexico City, you could use the "public" bathroom (gag) or pay 2 pesos to use the one that had toilet paper and a place to wash your hands. This was in one of the bus stops, can't remember which one.
AOL OS wil have to wait for the Microsoft AOL/Time Warner merger, which will probably take place later this year.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The couch components (CCOM) will unfortunately only interface with other M$ CCOM objects, like lamps, end table and ottomans.
Developers will be allow to buy developer kits, M$ Furniture WorkShop 3.0 that will allow you to build middleware ( re-upholster) that will allow you to upgrade your old furniture.
Additionally the MPAA has announced support for CCOM and will be building CCOM interfaces into new DVDs, this allows the use of couch license enforcement to protect Copywrited material.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
It's good to see that the concept of what is happening to our once-inalienable rights is becoming publicly, um, if not understood, at least promulgated. Artists can merge emotion and understanding and use their creativity to get a point across. I wonder how many people will actually 'get' the point? In San Francisco, maybe a majority, but how will (would) this play in Peoria?
Oh, in his list of people who participated in this performance piece, there was this entry:
B BLOCKBUSTER VIACOM
(had to pull out the -'s for the junk filter)
Can you put just any card through the reader, I wonder? I don't know card readers, but it looks like someone used his video rental card...
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Don't forget, any attempt to bypass the inherent funtionality of the chair is piracy, and is prosecutable under the applicable copyright protection laws.
Therefore, the use of, say, a good stiff section of planking, or several layers of heavy cardboard to sit in the chair without swiping the card would be considered theft of services.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I looked at the main site and the utterly appalling companion site but couldn't find out where this installation is. I live in SF and would like to see this. Does anyone have a street address??
sulli
RTFJ.
I'd definitely pay for an extra license to sit in this chair with YOU.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Didn't you hear? These folks were just issued a patent for "a device that allows a bipedal organism to remain in one position without relying on its legs for balance." Initially thought to apply only to chairs, it was later discovered that the patent also covers stools, beds, and floors. Further research indicates it may also cause the surface of the Earth to be in violation, but the patent holders are choosing not to enforce this violation at present because they are unable to determine the Universe's mailing address so that they can serve the appropriate paperwork.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
I had this thought last night involving the travails of bonsaikitten.com should they continue to have problems. Aassemle one of those goldfish-in-a-blender fish tanks so popular on greeting cards and suchlike. underneath it but not touching it in any way would be a touch sensitive monitor displaying a depiction of the blender control panel. This assembely should be placed in a public space, idealy a courthouse or an FBI recruitment waiting room. If anyone touches the screen a webcam would photograph them and email it to PETA for litigation and procecution. the subject should then be informed that as a producer of a depiction of animal cruelty (after all we didn't press the button) he is guilty of an offence precluding him from certain employment such as that of a judge or in the FBI.
-mattm (the REAL mattm all the other mattms are just immitating)
...if you fail to abide by this agreement, we the underwritten can and will remove one (1) testicle of our choice from your body...
Well ladies, it looks like you can pirate all you want!
...
Terms of Cease
You will know that your license is about to be terminated from the moment you will fell a critical need to breath while you start heavily sweeting, your sightseeing turns blurry and dark and you hear a slight whispering. If can't manage to renew your license in less than 10 minutes maximum, then you may consider your license terminated, however such termination will be of less concern for you.
Still nothing new, there.
For generations, parisian parkgoers were greeted by (litterally!) charwomen ("chaisières") that collected from them a pittance whenever they set their butts down on one of the many loose chairs that were provided for the visitors' convenience...
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Here is the same point made in comic form, less the spiky chair.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
my site, as usual. head on over, to check it out. Give it a whirl, and it'll eventually get finished. The terms and conditions are also there.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Scytle
There are pay toilets all over in Europe. Well maybe not all over, but I did see a few. And they looked pretty nice. They cost about 10-15 cents for a max of 15 minutes, and when you get out it goes into a cleaning cycle. It's quite a spectacle.
...is the coming generation of pay toilets - OUCH!
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
"If I wanted your lip, I'd rattle my zipper..."
Would this make ass shaped pieces of metal shielding illegal under UCITA?
No mom, I can't get off my ass and do something, I'm paying to sit here!
What a perfect idea!
The toilets there are something out of Star Trek. First, the seat is heated, so no freezing your butt when you get up late at night to do the #2. They sence when you sit on them, and TALK to you (in both Japanese AND English), giving instructions on their use. When you're done, you have the option of having the toilet wash and blow-dry your ass for you. And when you're done, they flush, clean, and disinfect themselves.
And when I say they clean themselves, I don't mean they have that blue bisciut in the tank that drops some perfumed slurry into the bowl when you flush. Nope, toilets in Japan have built in scrubbers that automatically scrub the bowl for you to keep it in pristine condition.
And that's just the low-end model they have in the hotels for us gaijin to use.
I'm told that some of the higher end models in homes over there have on-board equipment that'll analyse your urine and feces for indications of health problems and automatically email your doctor if they detect anything seroiusly amiss, store a history of results for download, etc...
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Already RAMBUS is claiming that they have a patent on this technology and have planned a lawsuit against the creators of the chair. Likewise Microsoft has also sued stating that they've pioneered giving customers the shaft and any technology that does the same is their intellectual property. :)
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
More proof that shrinkwrap licenses are a pain in the ass....
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
They are both designed to be confortable for the majority of ASSES out there.
Je t'aime Stéphanie