This may be an unpopular thing to stay in a crowd of techies, but the internet would definitely lose a lot if it went back to text. Think about what streaming video has done for The People in terms of communication and loosening the hold of Big Media and the Gov't over news and entertainment. Cellphone cameras are only relevant if there is an internet capable of disseminating the video far and wide.
Honestly this article is a bit of legitimate warning mixed with a lot of scare-mongering. It would be terrible if the U.S. Gov't used the chokepoints of internet traffic to hold control over it, but it's not as if only "approved" packets are being filtered by the gov't. at these backbones and overseas cables. This is not an impossible scenario, but unlikely for the amount of work it would take as well as the popular support it would need to pass.
However, the current usage of ICE to take down domains without due process is very bad and should be fought against.
legislation that would give judges a major role in determining how important a particular patent is to a product, so that infringing minor patents would not lead to huge damages
Okay that sounds good, what's the catch?
patents to the first inventor to file, rather than the first to invent, making the patent application process easier for companies who apply for patents in multiple countries
... and making it much harder for anyone who is not a large company with money to throw at patent applications. Also could someone familiar with patent law explain how changing this one particular law in the U.S. makes it easier for companies to file in other countries?
Schumer's amendment would have allowed companies sued over such patents to ask the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to declare them invalid without resorting to litigation.
"I feel very strongly about this issue," said the Democrat from New York. He could not guarantee he would vote for patent reform once it hit the Senate floor if it was not in the bill.
So 90% of what would have protected smaller innovative companies was removed and what is left is further patent domination for the bureaucratic styled corporations.
Other provisions in this year's 99-page bill aim to prevent bad patents from being issued by allowing third parties to provide information on why an application should be rejected.
Useful, but not nearly as useful as the above proposed amendment.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has asked for the right to set its own fees in order to hire more examiners and upgrade technology so it can chip away at a massive backlog of patent applications.
The bill would give the patent office authority to set fees, but requires that the smallest applicants get relief on application fees.
They'll need it with the flood of "first to file" applications coming in.
What? The GPL specifically allows you to distribute the code. If you package the code as a binary the source must still be available in some form. If you copied the binaries of almost any proprietary code you'd be committing copyright infringement as well.
So to say that Bing is copying (I think 'cheating' might have the what was used, but copying is a lot of people's interpretation), implies they are acquiring Google's association data; conversely if the Bing search comes to the same result coincidentally, then they can't be 'cheating'.
To quote an above comment:
The fact that microsoft technology has advanced to the point of linking
"delhipublicschool40 chdjob"
to a Credit Union website
is simply showing how well they understand their potential customers, and has nothing to do with the fact that Google set them up at all.
They are exactly acquiring association data on Google because there's no way that result would be coincidental. Google is the only thing linking that search result to that term, there's no heuristic that makes sense to link the two other than that. Bing doesn't have Google's heuristics; they simply copy the end result.
Interesting, however it still smells of a solution looking for a problem.
I don't put much stock in the phrase anymore because it's another way of saying "we shouldn't do research for research's sake". Whether or not you think this is a problem that needs solving, some of the best innovations have come about from "solutions that don't have problems yet" like lasers. Once you have the option of using a technology the practical applications will follow as long as the idea itself is practical. Off the top of my head; meat generation for cruise and Navy ships which are at sea for long periods of time is useful. Basically any time stopping for supplies is costly like a manned space missions would this technology become a solution.
And as you said, if they can make it a desirable consumer product either through lower prices or higher quality or both then more efficient and safer prodtion of meat is an excellent bonus.
Also there are some places where overgrazing is already a problem, along the Sahara for example. However, I doubt the infrastructure required for this process would be available in those types of places anyway.
What "weakness in the hackers' security" are you referring to? The one where they gave them their names because they were trying to disclose a vulnerability? I wasn't aware searching for a name on Facebook was considered hacking now. Silly comment.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We are doing an excellent job preparing our children to be the future slaves of China. I just hope I'm dead before I see their economy surpass ours.
The two don't have to be related. Are the people in every country with a smaller GDP than the U.S. "slaves" to us? No. If you want us to match their working and environmental conditions in order to "compete" with them, then I'd say you're correct. China's economy will pass the U.S. one day by virtue of its resources and larger labor force, but in some ways that's just an international dick waving contest. There is potential disaster in the dollar losing its defacto currency status, but it's extremely doubtful the yuan would replace the dollar. Once oil merchants have the ability to diversify currency I don't see them switching to a currency that is directly controlled by political leaders.
What matters is the quality of life and freedoms in this country, and China's rise doesn't have to be our downfall.
It's worrying to someone who is innocent, that they're going to get smeared all over the place with this data that may or may not be relevant to the case which is then going to be on the public record.
You're right though, if you're in court the state has to have fulfilled it's burden of proof to look into your private life. I disagree with calling social networking "public data" unless it's accessible without logging in as that person's "friend".
This isn't an "FSF-style ideological crusade", it's Nature Publishing Group saying "if we can't make money off of this no one else should either". If they had used the FSF Free Document License commercial use would be permitted.
In other words, if I work at a private biotech company, and someone publishes a new and interesting technique relevant to my current research, am I not allowed to download the paper and apply it to my work?
The process the researcher used may or may not be covered under a patent or other license; however, that has nothing to do with the license of the document itself. To quote the most restrictive CC-NC license:
You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.
To translate the legalese slightly:
"You may not [distribute the work] in any manner that is primarily intended for [you to make money]."
IANALIJPOOS(I am not a lawyer I just play one on slashdot.)
What does "can have as much effect on the economy" mean? I'd be interested to see the source just to find out what the study was using quantitatively, and at what stage in life.
I agree that the distribution of wealth has tremendous effects on society as a whole. There are already notable mental ability differences between poor and rich kids in the U.S.by the age of 2.
However in this country any proposal that treats large wealth inequalities as a problem is met with extreme distrust if not outright dismissal.
For a microcosm of the problem look at the inheritance tax that recently lapsed. If The People really want to enforce meritocracy over aristocracy an inheritance tax is a must. Pure capitalism doesn't encourage innovation; it encourages those with advantages to utilize those advantages to their fullest extent, and in this society preexisting wealth is a huge advantage. That's how the robber barons of this country were able to accumulate so much power around the end of the 19th Century.
However, if any politician were to even point this out they would be called a Socialist, ostracized from the Republican party, or minimized in the Democratic Party, and most of The People in this country would consider that truth.
I find it very hard to believe radical Palestinian groups would suddenly stop targeting civilians if they had access to high powered weaponry. That cat is all ready out of the bag and the easier targets are still easier.
A point of optimism and a point of pessimism: the bacteria do not use a biomass feedstock so agricultural land is not needed. However it appears that by "waste CO2" they mean a feedstock of CO2 in higher concentrations than what is already in the atmosphere. It doesn't say what the concentration is so I don't know what the options are for obtaining feed CO2.
The point is it's carbon neutral. All the CO2 that is "pumped into the air" came from the air in the first place and was not previously sequestered underground. It doesn't build us a ladder to climb out of the hole, but it could prevent us from digging deeper as long as it doesn't require more than atmospheric level of concentrations to perform.
Based on the number of mistakes with "then/than", "lose/loose", etc, I see from younger journalists and bloggers, I think spelling in general is getting worse, not better.
Way worse! Especially the last decade, many people don't even know that "then" and "than" are different words, that "ironic" doesn't mean "odd or coincidental", and how about expressions like "for all intensive purposes"? And don't get me started on "orientate"...
TFA is nonsense, written by an uneducated fool.
This comment is a perfect example of why we study things that are "conventional wisdom". The above poster has already made up his mind that kids today are poorer spellers due to this "newfangled communication technology" because of conventional wisdom. However the study referenced in the article showed the exact opposite correlation. Kids that were given cellphones did better than kids in the control group who weren't given cell phones.
If the study had shown that the kids with cellphones did worse I'm sure the above poster and others would have been whining about "Why do we need to test this? Everyone knows it's true already!" It's sad that the above poster can't accept evidence contrary to his world view and that there are enough moderators out there to think this is "+5 Insightful". I suspect I need to get off their lawn.
Because hydrogen as a fuel does not inherently pollute nor is it inherently carbon positive. It has a lower potential energy than most forms of petroleum so the fact that they were able to make a plane that flies 4 hours on a tank of fuel is important.
The only problem with that statement is there is no such thing as "hydrogen fuel".
I said "hydrogen as a fuel" and not "hydrogen fuel" to avoid silly hecklers like you, but it really doesn't matter because "hydrogen fuel" is an accurate statement anyway. Here's the definition of "fuel" since you seem to be confused: Fuel is any material that stores energy that can later be extracted to perform mechanical work in a controlled manner.
Hydrogen is non-polluting only if you ignore all the processing that goes into producing the hydrogen. It's like using a 2-stroke gasoline generator to charge up your electric car, and then declaring it a non-polluting vehicle. The hydrogen has to come from somewhere...and it's not just buried in the ground like petroleum, it has to be produced...and that process is at a net energy loss.
Which is why I used the word "inherently" specifically twice. As you noted later, how much pollution is introduced depends entirely on the method used to create the electricity needed for electrolysis. There's no reason it has to be from a polluting source. A hydroelectric dam, wind farm, solar station, or thermoelectric plant could produce it during off peak hours. There are problems with hydrogen, mostly having to do with the high pressure to store it, but you seem to lack understanding in what the actual limitations are and instead forming circular arguments.
People who are overly excited about the "hydrogen economy" are woefully underinformed on things like the laws of thermodynamics. Hydrogen is never going to be a efficiency gain, it can't be. It can be a practical energy STORAGE medium, but it's going to require a cheap/nearly unlimited energy source to start with...like nuclear power. But of course, once you have cheap plentiful electricity, the hydrogen doesn't make much sense.
You've become absurd in your rant. You correctly call it a storage medium (that's all fuels are really) and then go on to say if we had cheap and "clean" nuclear power we wouldn't need a storage medium anymore. Do you expect planes and cars to have small nuclear power plants in them? This is exactly why hydrogen as a fuel is important. You don't have to go mining for dangerous heavy metals to put in batteries or pollute with fossil fuels to get the required energy density.
And of course it's not "efficient", we don't have a good "efficient" way for producing durable (as in the economic sense) energy yet. That's why this is important research. We can dig fossil fuels out of the ground, but it's not like we can actually produce fossil fuels for an "efficiency gain".
Because hydrogen as a fuel does not inherently pollute nor is it inherently carbon positive. It has a lower potential energy than most forms of petroleum so the fact that they were able to make a plane that flies 4 hours on a tank of fuel is important.
Slashdot Mirror
So this means ISPs will finally fall under Common Carrier laws like telephones right? Right?
Why yes, I am rather interested in purchasing your bridge.
This may be an unpopular thing to stay in a crowd of techies, but the internet would definitely lose a lot if it went back to text. Think about what streaming video has done for The People in terms of communication and loosening the hold of Big Media and the Gov't over news and entertainment. Cellphone cameras are only relevant if there is an internet capable of disseminating the video far and wide.
Honestly this article is a bit of legitimate warning mixed with a lot of scare-mongering. It would be terrible if the U.S. Gov't used the chokepoints of internet traffic to hold control over it, but it's not as if only "approved" packets are being filtered by the gov't. at these backbones and overseas cables. This is not an impossible scenario, but unlikely for the amount of work it would take as well as the popular support it would need to pass.
However, the current usage of ICE to take down domains without due process is very bad and should be fought against.
legislation that would give judges a major role in determining how important a particular patent is to a product, so that infringing minor patents would not lead to huge damages
Okay that sounds good, what's the catch?
patents to the first inventor to file, rather than the first to invent, making the patent application process easier for companies who apply for patents in multiple countries
... and making it much harder for anyone who is not a large company with money to throw at patent applications. Also could someone familiar with patent law explain how changing this one particular law in the U.S. makes it easier for companies to file in other countries?
Schumer's amendment would have allowed companies sued over such patents to ask the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to declare them invalid without resorting to litigation.
"I feel very strongly about this issue," said the Democrat from New York. He could not guarantee he would vote for patent reform once it hit the Senate floor if it was not in the bill.
So 90% of what would have protected smaller innovative companies was removed and what is left is further patent domination for the bureaucratic styled corporations.
Other provisions in this year's 99-page bill aim to prevent bad patents from being issued by allowing third parties to provide information on why an application should be rejected.
Useful, but not nearly as useful as the above proposed amendment.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has asked for the right to set its own fees in order to hire more examiners and upgrade technology so it can chip away at a massive backlog of patent applications.
The bill would give the patent office authority to set fees, but requires that the smallest applicants get relief on application fees.
They'll need it with the flood of "first to file" applications coming in.
can't copy the binaries and send to a friend
What? The GPL specifically allows you to distribute the code. If you package the code as a binary the source must still be available in some form. If you copied the binaries of almost any proprietary code you'd be committing copyright infringement as well.
So to say that Bing is copying (I think 'cheating' might have the what was used, but copying is a lot of people's interpretation), implies they are acquiring Google's association data; conversely if the Bing search comes to the same result coincidentally, then they can't be 'cheating'.
To quote an above comment:
The fact that microsoft technology has advanced to the point of linking
"delhipublicschool40 chdjob" to a Credit Union website
is simply showing how well they understand their potential customers, and has nothing to do with the fact that Google set them up at all.
They are exactly acquiring association data on Google because there's no way that result would be coincidental. Google is the only thing linking that search result to that term, there's no heuristic that makes sense to link the two other than that. Bing doesn't have Google's heuristics; they simply copy the end result.
Interesting, however it still smells of a solution looking for a problem.
I don't put much stock in the phrase anymore because it's another way of saying "we shouldn't do research for research's sake". Whether or not you think this is a problem that needs solving, some of the best innovations have come about from "solutions that don't have problems yet" like lasers. Once you have the option of using a technology the practical applications will follow as long as the idea itself is practical. Off the top of my head; meat generation for cruise and Navy ships which are at sea for long periods of time is useful. Basically any time stopping for supplies is costly like a manned space missions would this technology become a solution.
And as you said, if they can make it a desirable consumer product either through lower prices or higher quality or both then more efficient and safer prodtion of meat is an excellent bonus.
Also there are some places where overgrazing is already a problem, along the Sahara for example. However, I doubt the infrastructure required for this process would be available in those types of places anyway.
What "weakness in the hackers' security" are you referring to? The one where they gave them their names because they were trying to disclose a vulnerability? I wasn't aware searching for a name on Facebook was considered hacking now. Silly comment.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We are doing an excellent job preparing our children to be the future slaves of China. I just hope I'm dead before I see their economy surpass ours.
The two don't have to be related. Are the people in every country with a smaller GDP than the U.S. "slaves" to us? No. If you want us to match their working and environmental conditions in order to "compete" with them, then I'd say you're correct. China's economy will pass the U.S. one day by virtue of its resources and larger labor force, but in some ways that's just an international dick waving contest. There is potential disaster in the dollar losing its defacto currency status, but it's extremely doubtful the yuan would replace the dollar. Once oil merchants have the ability to diversify currency I don't see them switching to a currency that is directly controlled by political leaders.
What matters is the quality of life and freedoms in this country, and China's rise doesn't have to be our downfall.
It's worrying to someone who is innocent, that they're going to get smeared all over the place with this data that may or may not be relevant to the case which is then going to be on the public record.
You're right though, if you're in court the state has to have fulfilled it's burden of proof to look into your private life. I disagree with calling social networking "public data" unless it's accessible without logging in as that person's "friend".
I don't think they can fire Mark Zuckerberg.
In other words, if I work at a private biotech company, and someone publishes a new and interesting technique relevant to my current research, am I not allowed to download the paper and apply it to my work?
The process the researcher used may or may not be covered under a patent or other license; however, that has nothing to do with the license of the document itself. To quote the most restrictive CC-NC license:
You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.
To translate the legalese slightly:
"You may not [distribute the work] in any manner that is primarily intended for [you to make money]."
IANALIJPOOS(I am not a lawyer I just play one on slashdot.)
What does "can have as much effect on the economy" mean? I'd be interested to see the source just to find out what the study was using quantitatively, and at what stage in life.
I agree that the distribution of wealth has tremendous effects on society as a whole. There are already notable mental ability differences between poor and rich kids in the U.S.by the age of 2.
However in this country any proposal that treats large wealth inequalities as a problem is met with extreme distrust if not outright dismissal.
For a microcosm of the problem look at the inheritance tax that recently lapsed. If The People really want to enforce meritocracy over aristocracy an inheritance tax is a must. Pure capitalism doesn't encourage innovation; it encourages those with advantages to utilize those advantages to their fullest extent, and in this society preexisting wealth is a huge advantage. That's how the robber barons of this country were able to accumulate so much power around the end of the 19th Century.
However, if any politician were to even point this out they would be called a Socialist, ostracized from the Republican party, or minimized in the Democratic Party, and most of The People in this country would consider that truth.
I find it very hard to believe radical Palestinian groups would suddenly stop targeting civilians if they had access to high powered weaponry. That cat is all ready out of the bag and the easier targets are still easier.
A point of optimism and a point of pessimism: the bacteria do not use a biomass feedstock so agricultural land is not needed. However it appears that by "waste CO2" they mean a feedstock of CO2 in higher concentrations than what is already in the atmosphere. It doesn't say what the concentration is so I don't know what the options are for obtaining feed CO2.
The point is it's carbon neutral. All the CO2 that is "pumped into the air" came from the air in the first place and was not previously sequestered underground. It doesn't build us a ladder to climb out of the hole, but it could prevent us from digging deeper as long as it doesn't require more than atmospheric level of concentrations to perform.
Putting all your eggs in one basket:
efficient when it works,
disastrous when it doesn't.
My point was not that it is not censorship because it obviously is; I was just responding to the above commenter that said the ESRB is different.
-Billy, how many texts do you send each day?
All of them!
The CCA wasn't created by an outside group it was created by comic book publishers it self censor, just like the organizations mentioned in the TFS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority
Way worse! Especially the last decade, many people don't even know that "then" and "than" are different words, that "ironic" doesn't mean "odd or coincidental", and how about expressions like "for all intensive purposes"? And don't get me started on "orientate"... TFA is nonsense, written by an uneducated fool.
This comment is a perfect example of why we study things that are "conventional wisdom". The above poster has already made up his mind that kids today are poorer spellers due to this "newfangled communication technology" because of conventional wisdom. However the study referenced in the article showed the exact opposite correlation. Kids that were given cellphones did better than kids in the control group who weren't given cell phones.
If the study had shown that the kids with cellphones did worse I'm sure the above poster and others would have been whining about "Why do we need to test this? Everyone knows it's true already!" It's sad that the above poster can't accept evidence contrary to his world view and that there are enough moderators out there to think this is "+5 Insightful". I suspect I need to get off their lawn.
In unrelated news Valve has put out an offer to an unnamed independent team to help work on an upcoming also unnamed SciFi Action MMORPG...
Because hydrogen as a fuel does not inherently pollute nor is it inherently carbon positive. It has a lower potential energy than most forms of petroleum so the fact that they were able to make a plane that flies 4 hours on a tank of fuel is important.
The only problem with that statement is there is no such thing as "hydrogen fuel".
I said "hydrogen as a fuel" and not "hydrogen fuel" to avoid silly hecklers like you, but it really doesn't matter because "hydrogen fuel" is an accurate statement anyway. Here's the definition of "fuel" since you seem to be confused: Fuel is any material that stores energy that can later be extracted to perform mechanical work in a controlled manner.
Hydrogen is non-polluting only if you ignore all the processing that goes into producing the hydrogen. It's like using a 2-stroke gasoline generator to charge up your electric car, and then declaring it a non-polluting vehicle. The hydrogen has to come from somewhere...and it's not just buried in the ground like petroleum, it has to be produced...and that process is at a net energy loss.
Which is why I used the word "inherently" specifically twice. As you noted later, how much pollution is introduced depends entirely on the method used to create the electricity needed for electrolysis. There's no reason it has to be from a polluting source. A hydroelectric dam, wind farm, solar station, or thermoelectric plant could produce it during off peak hours. There are problems with hydrogen, mostly having to do with the high pressure to store it, but you seem to lack understanding in what the actual limitations are and instead forming circular arguments.
People who are overly excited about the "hydrogen economy" are woefully underinformed on things like the laws of thermodynamics. Hydrogen is never going to be a efficiency gain, it can't be. It can be a practical energy STORAGE medium, but it's going to require a cheap/nearly unlimited energy source to start with...like nuclear power. But of course, once you have cheap plentiful electricity, the hydrogen doesn't make much sense.
You've become absurd in your rant. You correctly call it a storage medium (that's all fuels are really) and then go on to say if we had cheap and "clean" nuclear power we wouldn't need a storage medium anymore. Do you expect planes and cars to have small nuclear power plants in them? This is exactly why hydrogen as a fuel is important. You don't have to go mining for dangerous heavy metals to put in batteries or pollute with fossil fuels to get the required energy density.
And of course it's not "efficient", we don't have a good "efficient" way for producing durable (as in the economic sense) energy yet. That's why this is important research. We can dig fossil fuels out of the ground, but it's not like we can actually produce fossil fuels for an "efficiency gain".
Because hydrogen as a fuel does not inherently pollute nor is it inherently carbon positive. It has a lower potential energy than most forms of petroleum so the fact that they were able to make a plane that flies 4 hours on a tank of fuel is important.
He didn't say that true things are hilarious, just that hilarious things are true...