Or you are taking the fact that the atheists are blowing you off as a lack of 'deep thought' on the atheist's part. You are an irrational superstitious nut job and it is up to you to prove your theory of the existence of your God that meets your exact specifications. It is not the atheist's responsibility to disprove your cockamamie theory. And in case you have noticed, the specification of 'God' varies wildly according to who you are asking.
There is a whole slew papers coming out of pundits and academia these days on 'presence' and products for managing 'presence'. Things like knowing and managing the state of remote workers... on the phone, off of the phone, etc. Controling messaging
during meetings is one of the prime examples that is given for a benefit of a 'presence management system'. So this patent of IBM's could be a key patent in this brave new world the pundits are dreaming of.
Yes, there have been a couple of rounds of people doing this with infrared going at least as far back as the early 90s. Who had the commercial product that looked like an agry spider that you put in the corner of your room?
However, none of the old infrared stuff as far as I know used modern cell techniques like TDMA. Maybe that is what this guy has been working on. Or maybe he is a rich clueless tinkerer...
I ran what I call a software sweatshop at Texas A&M University for 3.5 years (federal contracts, graduate student labor). There were many win-wins with this set up. The government got cheap software to solve real problems. Graduate student had jobs that provided real work experience and some pay (good by univerisity standards, horrible by real world standards).
Texas A&M's bureacracy visited several times to make sure we understood their ownership of what we were doing and constantly prodded us to see if there was something that could be 'spun off'. I never really inderstood how things 100% paid for the by federal government (and therefore the taxpayers) could somehow become the private property of The University which it would then gladly exclusively license -- there by converting something publicly created into something privately owned.
It seems that since the founding of this country all we have done is chip away at the concept of 'public ownership'. Soon the Federal government will be selling the national parks to the highest bidder and then the more lucrative departments of the government like the IRS, FDA...
If one looks at the history of copyright and its intentions, then I believe that a failure of the copyright holder to make a work available effectively puts the work in the public domain. Copyright is supposed to provide a balance between the rights of the owner of a work and of society as a whole. Copyright clearly does not give the owner the right to purposefully withhold a protected work from society. Let us not forget that at one time a copyright was obtained through the act of giving one copy to the national library.
Over time our congress has repeatedly eroded society's rights in favor of the copyright holder, but they have not yet revoked the original principles on which copyright was based. With the advent of the internet, I would even go so far as to say if you fail to release an out of print book in at least some electronic form (it doesn't have to be free) then you have relinqished any reasonable claim to copyright protections. You have simply not held up your end of the bargain and your work should be considered to be in the public domain.
Ask her questions about what she would like to do. I had a friend in college who had a 4.0 in biochemistry who really wasn't intrested in being a 'scientist' even though it was easy for her. Her plan all along was to become an M.D. that did medical research in the area of children's diseases. You may think this is splitting hairs on the term scientist, but that really was the way she looked at it. She is now doing exactly what she wants as a tenured professor at Duke Medical School, and she just might find the cure to something like childhood lukemia without thinking of herself as a nerdy scientist.
If you look at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q147706/
You will see that the affected operating systems are old and that Microsoft long ago told people how to configure their systems to avoid this issue.
Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition
Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 3.51
Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Developer Edition
It takes effort and attorney's fees to keep a patent idling for ten years. This is a classic tactic of ne'er do well patent attorneys used to keep 'before their time' ideas in the patent process until they can be used to make money. This has become a patent after 10 years for one of two reasons:
1) They think there is a big fish to extort/sue now
2) They are tired of paying attorneys
Security is bad and doomed to get worse. People who could be fired have been replaced by civil servants who can not be fired. The very idea that the goverment needed to take over airport security was sheer stupidity. We now pay 10x for airport security and have less.
The military does not write software, contractors do. The contractors have to distribute it to the government thereby ruling out any use of GPL'ed source.
There were frats at UT that had plastic keys like this for controled keys in the early 80's. They used these keys to steal tests before they were given. You can also translate these to ground down blank keys for the cheapest locks for more long term reliability. Locksmiths who are unaware of these possibilities are either ignorant of how locks actually work or don't want to admit that they long ago saw through the marketing materials of these locks. For most I'm betting on the latter.
Did you only read the last sentence? The sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted was:
These guys are making it sound hard so that they can justify paying some friend of theirs to come in as a gazillion dollar consultant to change a couple of parameters in the code in one day, cool their heels for 6 months and then laugh all the way to the bank when they declare the project done. I have seen this exact situation several times from government bureaucrat types.
You are obviously extremely naive concerning how the world works. There is always quid-pro-quo. The only reason many people stay in their government jobs is because of the 'side benefits'. It could be free access to a great hunting lease, lots of free expensive dinners, a no-show consulting gig. There are many ways that people who can control budgets benefit from being in that position.
It is a load of crock that it is that hard to modify a COBOL system. The reason it stuck around so long was because it was so easy. I modified a COBOL system when I was a teenager back in the 70's without even knowing I was programming in COBOL. It was monkey-see-monkey-do easy. It wasn't until my wife took a COBOL course 20 years later that I realized that I had been tainted.
The states and feds used to send people who scored high on the civil service exam through a quick training course and make them COBOL programmers. In my highschool in the 70s it was a Vo-Tech course that was mostly taken by smart FFA girls.
These guys are making it sound hard so that they can justify paying some friend of theirs to come in as a gazillion dollar consultant to change a couple of parameters in the code in one day, cool their heels for 6 months and then laugh all the way to the bank when they declare the project done. I have seen this exact situation several times from government bureaucrat types.
I disagree. Graduate students simply do not count for much in academia. While a graduate student at Texas A&M, Dr. Robert Coulson plagiarized a paper that my boss designed and I wrote in 1990. The last half of one of his papers was our paper with no attribution. Coulson had tenure and my boss was trying to get tenure. The University handled this by having Coulson send an errata to the publisher giving my boss a partial authorship credit. My name was not even mentioned. Total cover up. I am convinced this happens all the time.
What this proves is that Diebold either did not test their software sufficiently or covered up bad test results at layer of their company. The state of Ohio was certainly incompetent in not fully testing the product they bought before deploying it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you are taking the fact that the atheists are blowing you off as a lack of 'deep thought' on the atheist's part. You are an irrational superstitious nut job and it is up to you to prove your theory of the existence of your God that meets your exact specifications. It is not the atheist's responsibility to disprove your cockamamie theory. And in case you have noticed, the specification of 'God' varies wildly according to who you are asking.
There is a whole slew papers coming out of pundits and academia these days on 'presence' and products for managing 'presence'. Things like knowing and managing the state of remote workers ... on the phone, off of the phone, etc. Controling messaging
during meetings is one of the prime examples that is given for a benefit of a 'presence management system'. So this patent of IBM's could be a key patent in this brave new world the pundits are dreaming of.
Yes, there have been a couple of rounds of people doing this with infrared going at least as far back as the early 90s. Who had the commercial product that looked like an agry spider that you put in the corner of your room? ...
However, none of the old infrared stuff as far as I know used modern cell techniques like TDMA. Maybe that is what this guy has been working on. Or maybe he is a rich clueless tinkerer
I ran what I call a software sweatshop at Texas A&M University for 3.5 years (federal contracts, graduate student labor). There were many win-wins with this set up. The government got cheap software to solve real problems. Graduate student had jobs that provided real work experience and some pay (good by univerisity standards, horrible by real world standards).
...
Texas A&M's bureacracy visited several times to make sure we understood their ownership of what we were doing and constantly prodded us to see if there was something that could be 'spun off'. I never really inderstood how things 100% paid for the by federal government (and therefore the taxpayers) could somehow become the private property of The University which it would then gladly exclusively license -- there by converting something publicly created into something privately owned.
It seems that since the founding of this country all we have done is chip away at the concept of 'public ownership'. Soon the Federal government will be selling the national parks to the highest bidder and then the more lucrative departments of the government like the IRS, FDA
If one looks at the history of copyright and its intentions, then I believe that a failure of the copyright holder to make a work available effectively puts the work in the public domain. Copyright is supposed to provide a balance between the rights of the owner of a work and of society as a whole. Copyright clearly does not give the owner the right to purposefully withhold a protected work from society. Let us not forget that at one time a copyright was obtained through the act of giving one copy to the national library.
Over time our congress has repeatedly eroded society's rights in favor of the copyright holder, but they have not yet revoked the original principles on which copyright was based. With the advent of the internet, I would even go so far as to say if you fail to release an out of print book in at least some electronic form (it doesn't have to be free) then you have relinqished any reasonable claim to copyright protections. You have simply not held up your end of the bargain and your work should be considered to be in the public domain.
Ask her questions about what she would like to do. I had a friend in college who had a 4.0 in biochemistry who really wasn't intrested in being a 'scientist' even though it was easy for her. Her plan all along was to become an M.D. that did medical research in the area of children's diseases. You may think this is splitting hairs on the term scientist, but that really was the way she looked at it. She is now doing exactly what she wants as a tenured professor at Duke Medical School, and she just might find the cure to something like childhood lukemia without thinking of herself as a nerdy scientist.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q147706/
You will see that the affected operating systems are old and that Microsoft long ago told people how to configure their systems to avoid this issue.
It takes effort and attorney's fees to keep a patent idling for ten years. This is a classic tactic of ne'er do well patent attorneys used to keep 'before their time' ideas in the patent process until they can be used to make money. This has become a patent after 10 years for one of two reasons: 1) They think there is a big fish to extort/sue now 2) They are tired of paying attorneys
Security is bad and doomed to get worse. People who could be fired have been replaced by civil servants who can not be fired. The very idea that the goverment needed to take over airport security was sheer stupidity. We now pay 10x for airport security and have less.
The military does not write software, contractors do. The contractors have to distribute it to the government thereby ruling out any use of GPL'ed source.
There were frats at UT that had plastic keys like this for controled keys in the early 80's. They used these keys to steal tests before they were given. You can also translate these to ground down blank keys for the cheapest locks for more long term reliability. Locksmiths who are unaware of these possibilities are either ignorant of how locks actually work or don't want to admit that they long ago saw through the marketing materials of these locks. For most I'm betting on the latter.
These guys are making it sound hard so that they can justify paying some friend of theirs to come in as a gazillion dollar consultant to change a couple of parameters in the code in one day, cool their heels for 6 months and then laugh all the way to the bank when they declare the project done. I have seen this exact situation several times from government bureaucrat types.
You are obviously extremely naive concerning how the world works. There is always quid-pro-quo. The only reason many people stay in their government jobs is because of the 'side benefits'. It could be free access to a great hunting lease, lots of free expensive dinners, a no-show consulting gig. There are many ways that people who can control budgets benefit from being in that position.
It is a load of crock that it is that hard to modify a COBOL system. The reason it stuck around so long was because it was so easy. I modified a COBOL system when I was a teenager back in the 70's without even knowing I was programming in COBOL. It was monkey-see-monkey-do easy. It wasn't until my wife took a COBOL course 20 years later that I realized that I had been tainted. The states and feds used to send people who scored high on the civil service exam through a quick training course and make them COBOL programmers. In my highschool in the 70s it was a Vo-Tech course that was mostly taken by smart FFA girls. These guys are making it sound hard so that they can justify paying some friend of theirs to come in as a gazillion dollar consultant to change a couple of parameters in the code in one day, cool their heels for 6 months and then laugh all the way to the bank when they declare the project done. I have seen this exact situation several times from government bureaucrat types.
I disagree. Graduate students simply do not count for much in academia. While a graduate student at Texas A&M, Dr. Robert Coulson plagiarized a paper that my boss designed and I wrote in 1990. The last half of one of his papers was our paper with no attribution. Coulson had tenure and my boss was trying to get tenure. The University handled this by having Coulson send an errata to the publisher giving my boss a partial authorship credit. My name was not even mentioned. Total cover up. I am convinced this happens all the time.
What this proves is that Diebold either did not test their software sufficiently or covered up bad test results at layer of their company. The state of Ohio was certainly incompetent in not fully testing the product they bought before deploying it.