It's not a patent violation to experiment with patented things. In fact, it's encouraged. Research is pretty much excluded from patents, unless it's a patent on a process within research.
Of course, if you get anything useful out of it, you're going to have to license the patent to use it.
Atlanta didn't freak out, and Atlanta has actually been bombed repeatedly by a terrorist, namely, Eric Robert Rudolph, who, started with the 1996 Olympics, then proceeded to bomb an abortion clinic and a lesbian nightclub, then moving over to Alabama for the last attack. The Olympic attack was, in fact, 'leave an unattended napsack in public'. I don't know what the others were.
Why even bother with making real bombs? If terrorists actually wanted to disrupt things in this country, calling in fake bomb threats would work pretty damn well, especially if they planted suspicious packages beforehand in hard-to-reach-safely places.
If they were really clever, they'd put something in them that looked like an explosive after it was blown up and a cell phone and wires to make it look like it had a trigger.
It's a lot easier than making a bomb and trying to hurt people with it, and it's nearly impossible to get caught, because you don't actually have to get any explosives. If you were really smart, you could put it together as you installed it so they couldn't ever catch you actually carrying anything.
And the reason you'd make IEDs out of flashing colored lights instead of, say, a garbage can would be?
And, let's just ask ourselves one actual serious question here: How many bombings have there actually been in public like this? The Olympic bomber guy, and, well, that's about it. (And Atlanta, of course, didn't react to the signs at all.)
When I read your post during lunch today, I confused your user name and ID with my user name and ID, and, because I use the same password for my bank, I immediately canceled all my credit cards and reported it, which managed to screw up me closing on my new home at three today because I couldn't make the down payment.
So I'm suing you for forty thousand dollars. You will be served with papers on Monday.
Honestly, I can't believe you'd behave so recklessly, even on the internet.
That is why I see this event as a valuable lesson.
Well, yes, and it's a fine lesson for the city of Boston. Perhaps next time the police will think before causing a panic over a nonsensical terrorist plot they've invented.
Oddly enough, they appear to be charging Turner for their 'lesson'.
I think most of the conspiracys about 9/11 are bunk, but there's one oddity that's always stood out:
The president remaining in a known location during the attacks. It seems like the very first thing that would have happened when the first tower was hit, and certainly when the second tower was hit, would have been to spirit the president out of the school and into Air Force One.
While we've actually got a Congress that's willing to investigate, one of the things they should investigate is 1) whether anyone in his security detail decided to move the president (And if not, where the failure was, because that's a fairly obvious measure they should take.) and 2) who countermanded the order.
On one hand, we might find the president himself did, because he's a moron and/or very brave. The secret service doesn't have the authority to force him to leave.(1)
But if the orders came from somewhere else, that could be veeery interesting.
1) This may be incorrect, I believe in some circumstances the secret service has authority under the law to countermand the president when it comes to his own personal safety, up to and including actions that technically are 'kidnapping'. (And only the actual president, not anyone else they protect.) But let's assume they either don't have the authority, or didn't believe the danger warranted it.
Hell, if someone wanted to blow up a bridge, it's a forty-five second process:
1. Stop car, in or out of traffic, it doesn't matter.
2. Get out.
3. Attach bomb with 30 second timer to pre-identified location.
4a. Get blown up.
4b. Jump off bridge, attempt to blend in with all the people who will end up in the water.
4c. Jump off bridge, be wearing a scuba suit for whole process.
4d. Get back in car, drive off. (You'll want to set the timer for three minutes instead.)
I like the idea that someone would place bombs on a bridge and leave them there long enough for the bomb squad to get there. If someone has enough explosives to harm a bridge, and can physically reach the location that they need to place said explosives without being stopped, then, duh, they can harm the bridge. It's not really something anyone can do anything about, and hence it's not something we need to be trying to prevent, except by trying to stop them from obtaining such explosives or building bridges where it is hard to reach supports.
So if I pack a device with explosives and rusty nails, and put flashing lights on it, I can get people to ignore it until it goes off when the subway platform is sure to be packed.
Hey, if you can pack a bomb and nails into something the size of a piece of cardboard and a D-cell, you go right ahead. That's what this was, it was LEDs stuck to a sheet of plastic and a D-cell taped at the bottom to provide power.
Although I'd have to suggest a better way to hide such a device would be to put in in a fast food cup or even a paperback book, which would let you take out a whole ciy block. Since you've apparently got access to some sort of super-explosives no one else has.
No, I think letting people put these things up without some kind of permit is a bad idea.
Um, duh. It's called littering, and they should be fined for that and charged for the cost of cleanup. Which would be way less than one million, especially considering that people ran off with most of them, at least they did in other cities.
It's also a bad idea to react in this manner to something that clearly isn't a bomb, because that allows attacks without bombs.
I always through we should just stick (sheathed) knifes up with the oxygen masks.
But handing them to all adults as they enter the plane works just as well. Better yet, randomly hand none, one, two, or even three to adults, so they can't be forced to surrender them, because no one knows how many they have.
The smart people in power also don't do stupid things that piss people off.
In fact, sometimes they do exactly the same thing as the stupid people, but manage to keep you from being pissed off nevertheless, because they did it in an intelligent way and you really didn't notice.
It think everybody in this situation was behaving reasonably, based on the information they had at their disposal, up to the point where the authorities decided to call it a "hoax".
No, they stopped behaving reasonably when they shut down traffic for a flashing box.
Seriously, folks, I think we've just demonstrated that terrorists can cripple this nation whenever they want, and they don't even need actual bombs. (We already knew they could cripple airports whenever they wanted without actual bombs, but cities...wow.)
I'd say that proves something about Atlanta, but any city can have a moron that reports something as a bomb.
The question is: Did someone report these in Atlanta, did the police hurry out, laugh, and take one apart just in case, and then do nothing? Like the Boston police should have done?
Yeah, I don't have any problem with the blowing one of them up. Silly, but they were litter and no one can complain how the government chooses to dispose of litter.
But the police themselves started this panic. The fucking government should be looking at jail time for their own handling of this.
Thank you for introducing some reasoning for this.
No one fighting a homemade war, be they terrorist or insurgent, does things the hard way. In fact, the sole attack against the US has been notable because of very small amount of resources that caused a huge amount of damage, and started and ended in a matter of hours.
The idea that someone would construct lit-up bombs and leave them attached to telephone poles is way past stupid and into 'utterly surreal'. (As is the 'leaving them up for a week, but honestly, we don't know the police knew they were up that long.)
Bombs are going to hidden in fast food bags and stuff like that, that would be unnoticed and laying on the ground. And they wouldn't add lights to them. (Yes, all you fools who know nothing about bombs outsides of movies, you have to add flashing lights and a timer readout, they are not an inherent part of a bomb.)
"a national problem: border control"
national solution: ignore problem
I'm one of the people who thinks we should take away one of the rights the US government does have...the ability to control who is in the US legally.
Don't get me wrong, all citizens should be able to go everywhere, and the US government should be able to issue temporary and permanent residencies with the same ability, and no state should be able to override those.
However, I feel that if we're going to have any 'guest worker' programs, the states should be in control of them, with the national government perhaps having the right to deny entry to certain specific people if it wished. (And I do, indeed, want a legal guest worker program.) States could specify the jobs they're allowed to work, the conditions they work under, the pay they're required to get(The last two within the bounds set by the Feds, of course.), the total amount of workers, and it could be adjusted to match the economic needs of the state.
This would take a constitutional amendment to change, though, as the Federal government has near-absolute power over immigration. so probably isn't worth it. The Feds could, however, delegate some of the aspects of the program to the states.
Perhaps "Medieval Fantasy" or "Fantasy RPG" is a better distinction, then, because I doubt most people would say Doom, Street Fighter or Fahrenheit counted as fantasy as most people define it.
DOOM and Fahrenehit both contain a demonic invasion. Street Fighter contains, IIRC, Gods in human form. I don't know what your definition of 'fantasy' is, but maybe that's what is a little screwy here.
Hexen, however, is a bad example anyway, considering that the character class options are Fighter, Cleric and Wizard. Straight out of D&D,
Yes, Hexen and Discworld are both straight out of D&D and Tolkien, which make them inarguably fantasy, yet, as I said, they aren't anything like WoW or Vanguard or any MMORG at all. That was point, that even Tolkien-inspired fantasy games don't have to be anything like WoW.
And The Longest Journey was an adventure game that flipped you back and forth between our world, called 'Stark' in the somewhat near future and a medieval magical world called Arcadia, which is actually the other half of Earth. (I bet you thought we lived on Earth, huh? Nope, we only live on half of it.) Being from Stark, you don't actually know any magic, although you are one of the few people who can move back and forth 'at will'. (Although you won't actually learn how to do it 'at will' in the game.) The Balance between the two worlds is getting screwed up, and you're probably the only person who can fix it.
Dreamfall, the sequel, took on a much more science-fictiony tone because this time most of the problems are in Stark. Dreaming allows people to see the other half of Earth, hence our myths of magic, and in Dreamfall, someone in Stark has figured out a way to expand this process to an incredible extent, where people sleeping in Stark are actually walking around and talking in Arcadia, which isn't a good thing, as traditionally moving back and forth between worlds was very very limited for a good reason.
Reeeaally? What about The Longest Journey? What about Heretic and Hexen or even DOOM? What about Fahrenheit? What about the Discworld games? What about Street Fighter? All those are fantasy by any definition of the word, with demons and magic and other supernatural stuff.
Or do you mean 'fantasy MMORGS'? Because that's a pretty narrow box to be drawing. The fact there is a genre of games that can best be described as 'MMORGs with modified Tolkien characters' doesn't mean that is all fantasy games.
Remember what SCO said: Contracts are things you use against people.
Sadly for SCO, not only did Sun not purchase their rights from SCO, they didn't even purchase them from Novell, the actual current owners of Unix, they purchased them from AT&T. In fact, they were in a joint Unix venture with AT&T way way back when.
HP, OTOH, has two licenses to use the Unix source, one via HP and one via DEC. DEC was part of the joint venture mentioned above, and HP, while not part of the joint venture, also licensed from AT&T.
So we are, indeed, talking about two whole decades here.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a patent violation to experiment with patented things. In fact, it's encouraged. Research is pretty much excluded from patents, unless it's a patent on a process within research.
Of course, if you get anything useful out of it, you're going to have to license the patent to use it.
That's a rather misleading statistic.
Two of them switched back, and a third probably would have but had a heart attack.
And the fourth guy worked at Sun.
Pffft, it's not just the Pacific Northwest.
Atlanta didn't freak out, and Atlanta has actually been bombed repeatedly by a terrorist, namely, Eric Robert Rudolph, who, started with the 1996 Olympics, then proceeded to bomb an abortion clinic and a lesbian nightclub, then moving over to Alabama for the last attack. The Olympic attack was, in fact, 'leave an unattended napsack in public'. I don't know what the others were.
Why even bother with making real bombs? If terrorists actually wanted to disrupt things in this country, calling in fake bomb threats would work pretty damn well, especially if they planted suspicious packages beforehand in hard-to-reach-safely places.
If they were really clever, they'd put something in them that looked like an explosive after it was blown up and a cell phone and wires to make it look like it had a trigger.
It's a lot easier than making a bomb and trying to hurt people with it, and it's nearly impossible to get caught, because you don't actually have to get any explosives. If you were really smart, you could put it together as you installed it so they couldn't ever catch you actually carrying anything.
And the reason you'd make IEDs out of flashing colored lights instead of, say, a garbage can would be?
And, let's just ask ourselves one actual serious question here: How many bombings have there actually been in public like this? The Olympic bomber guy, and, well, that's about it. (And Atlanta, of course, didn't react to the signs at all.)
When I read your post during lunch today, I confused your user name and ID with my user name and ID, and, because I use the same password for my bank, I immediately canceled all my credit cards and reported it, which managed to screw up me closing on my new home at three today because I couldn't make the down payment.
So I'm suing you for forty thousand dollars. You will be served with papers on Monday.
Honestly, I can't believe you'd behave so recklessly, even on the internet.
That is why I see this event as a valuable lesson.
Well, yes, and it's a fine lesson for the city of Boston. Perhaps next time the police will think before causing a panic over a nonsensical terrorist plot they've invented.
Oddly enough, they appear to be charging Turner for their 'lesson'.
I think most of the conspiracys about 9/11 are bunk, but there's one oddity that's always stood out:
The president remaining in a known location during the attacks. It seems like the very first thing that would have happened when the first tower was hit, and certainly when the second tower was hit, would have been to spirit the president out of the school and into Air Force One.
While we've actually got a Congress that's willing to investigate, one of the things they should investigate is 1) whether anyone in his security detail decided to move the president (And if not, where the failure was, because that's a fairly obvious measure they should take.) and 2) who countermanded the order.
On one hand, we might find the president himself did, because he's a moron and/or very brave. The secret service doesn't have the authority to force him to leave.(1)
But if the orders came from somewhere else, that could be veeery interesting.
1) This may be incorrect, I believe in some circumstances the secret service has authority under the law to countermand the president when it comes to his own personal safety, up to and including actions that technically are 'kidnapping'. (And only the actual president, not anyone else they protect.) But let's assume they either don't have the authority, or didn't believe the danger warranted it.
Hell, if someone wanted to blow up a bridge, it's a forty-five second process:
1. Stop car, in or out of traffic, it doesn't matter.
2. Get out.
3. Attach bomb with 30 second timer to pre-identified location.
4a. Get blown up.
4b. Jump off bridge, attempt to blend in with all the people who will end up in the water.
4c. Jump off bridge, be wearing a scuba suit for whole process.
4d. Get back in car, drive off. (You'll want to set the timer for three minutes instead.)
I like the idea that someone would place bombs on a bridge and leave them there long enough for the bomb squad to get there. If someone has enough explosives to harm a bridge, and can physically reach the location that they need to place said explosives without being stopped, then, duh, they can harm the bridge. It's not really something anyone can do anything about, and hence it's not something we need to be trying to prevent, except by trying to stop them from obtaining such explosives or building bridges where it is hard to reach supports.
So if I pack a device with explosives and rusty nails, and put flashing lights on it, I can get people to ignore it until it goes off when the subway platform is sure to be packed.
Hey, if you can pack a bomb and nails into something the size of a piece of cardboard and a D-cell, you go right ahead. That's what this was, it was LEDs stuck to a sheet of plastic and a D-cell taped at the bottom to provide power.
Although I'd have to suggest a better way to hide such a device would be to put in in a fast food cup or even a paperback book, which would let you take out a whole ciy block. Since you've apparently got access to some sort of super-explosives no one else has.
No, I think letting people put these things up without some kind of permit is a bad idea.
Um, duh. It's called littering, and they should be fined for that and charged for the cost of cleanup. Which would be way less than one million, especially considering that people ran off with most of them, at least they did in other cities.
It's also a bad idea to react in this manner to something that clearly isn't a bomb, because that allows attacks without bombs.
I always through we should just stick (sheathed) knifes up with the oxygen masks.
But handing them to all adults as they enter the plane works just as well. Better yet, randomly hand none, one, two, or even three to adults, so they can't be forced to surrender them, because no one knows how many they have.
I see one flaw in this plan.
Paint thinner.
The smart people in power also don't do stupid things that piss people off.
In fact, sometimes they do exactly the same thing as the stupid people, but manage to keep you from being pissed off nevertheless, because they did it in an intelligent way and you really didn't notice.
It think everybody in this situation was behaving reasonably, based on the information they had at their disposal, up to the point where the authorities decided to call it a "hoax".
No, they stopped behaving reasonably when they shut down traffic for a flashing box.
Seriously, folks, I think we've just demonstrated that terrorists can cripple this nation whenever they want, and they don't even need actual bombs. (We already knew they could cripple airports whenever they wanted without actual bombs, but cities...wow.)
I'd say that proves something about Atlanta, but any city can have a moron that reports something as a bomb.
The question is: Did someone report these in Atlanta, did the police hurry out, laugh, and take one apart just in case, and then do nothing? Like the Boston police should have done?
Yeah, I don't have any problem with the blowing one of them up. Silly, but they were litter and no one can complain how the government chooses to dispose of litter.
But the police themselves started this panic. The fucking government should be looking at jail time for their own handling of this.
Thank you for introducing some reasoning for this.
No one fighting a homemade war, be they terrorist or insurgent, does things the hard way. In fact, the sole attack against the US has been notable because of very small amount of resources that caused a huge amount of damage, and started and ended in a matter of hours.
The idea that someone would construct lit-up bombs and leave them attached to telephone poles is way past stupid and into 'utterly surreal'. (As is the 'leaving them up for a week, but honestly, we don't know the police knew they were up that long.)
Bombs are going to hidden in fast food bags and stuff like that, that would be unnoticed and laying on the ground. And they wouldn't add lights to them. (Yes, all you fools who know nothing about bombs outsides of movies, you have to add flashing lights and a timer readout, they are not an inherent part of a bomb.)
"a national problem: border control"
national solution: ignore problem
I'm one of the people who thinks we should take away one of the rights the US government does have...the ability to control who is in the US legally.
Don't get me wrong, all citizens should be able to go everywhere, and the US government should be able to issue temporary and permanent residencies with the same ability, and no state should be able to override those.
However, I feel that if we're going to have any 'guest worker' programs, the states should be in control of them, with the national government perhaps having the right to deny entry to certain specific people if it wished. (And I do, indeed, want a legal guest worker program.) States could specify the jobs they're allowed to work, the conditions they work under, the pay they're required to get(The last two within the bounds set by the Feds, of course.), the total amount of workers, and it could be adjusted to match the economic needs of the state.
This would take a constitutional amendment to change, though, as the Federal government has near-absolute power over immigration. so probably isn't worth it. The Feds could, however, delegate some of the aspects of the program to the states.
I think you're halfway there, but I don't think it has anything to do with car driving games to any extend.
I think it has to do with reflexes.
And people who volunteer for the military, of course, are immune from death and thus deserve less respect than those who are drafted.
I'm reminded of the Clerks cartoon, which in one episode asserted asserted it was drawn by a live studio audience.
Perhaps "Medieval Fantasy" or "Fantasy RPG" is a better distinction, then, because I doubt most people would say Doom, Street Fighter or Fahrenheit counted as fantasy as most people define it.
DOOM and Fahrenehit both contain a demonic invasion. Street Fighter contains, IIRC, Gods in human form. I don't know what your definition of 'fantasy' is, but maybe that's what is a little screwy here.
Hexen, however, is a bad example anyway, considering that the character class options are Fighter, Cleric and Wizard. Straight out of D&D,
Yes, Hexen and Discworld are both straight out of D&D and Tolkien, which make them inarguably fantasy, yet, as I said, they aren't anything like WoW or Vanguard or any MMORG at all. That was point, that even Tolkien-inspired fantasy games don't have to be anything like WoW.
And The Longest Journey was an adventure game that flipped you back and forth between our world, called 'Stark' in the somewhat near future and a medieval magical world called Arcadia, which is actually the other half of Earth. (I bet you thought we lived on Earth, huh? Nope, we only live on half of it.) Being from Stark, you don't actually know any magic, although you are one of the few people who can move back and forth 'at will'. (Although you won't actually learn how to do it 'at will' in the game.) The Balance between the two worlds is getting screwed up, and you're probably the only person who can fix it.
Dreamfall, the sequel, took on a much more science-fictiony tone because this time most of the problems are in Stark. Dreaming allows people to see the other half of Earth, hence our myths of magic, and in Dreamfall, someone in Stark has figured out a way to expand this process to an incredible extent, where people sleeping in Stark are actually walking around and talking in Arcadia, which isn't a good thing, as traditionally moving back and forth between worlds was very very limited for a good reason.
All fantasy games are the same fantasy game.
Reeeaally? What about The Longest Journey? What about Heretic and Hexen or even DOOM? What about Fahrenheit? What about the Discworld games? What about Street Fighter? All those are fantasy by any definition of the word, with demons and magic and other supernatural stuff.
Or do you mean 'fantasy MMORGS'? Because that's a pretty narrow box to be drawing. The fact there is a genre of games that can best be described as 'MMORGs with modified Tolkien characters' doesn't mean that is all fantasy games.
HP and Solaris don't pay license fees. They outright purchased the right to use Unix code decades ago. (HP did it twice, thanks to DEC.)
Remember what SCO said: Contracts are things you use against people.
Sadly for SCO, not only did Sun not purchase their rights from SCO, they didn't even purchase them from Novell, the actual current owners of Unix, they purchased them from AT&T. In fact, they were in a joint Unix venture with AT&T way way back when.
HP, OTOH, has two licenses to use the Unix source, one via HP and one via DEC. DEC was part of the joint venture mentioned above, and HP, while not part of the joint venture, also licensed from AT&T.
So we are, indeed, talking about two whole decades here.