Not a problem. Minimum prices do not apply to auctions (such as eBay).
Items on the shelves or web site of a discount store (oops, I meant auctioneer, of course) would be marked with two prices: the alleged minimum price would be a fictional "buy now" price and the real/discount price would be the "opening bid" level.
A discount vendor (oops, auctioneer) could simply hold a quick 1-customer auction for the contents of the customer's shopping trolley at the checkout. The checkout would just tally up the opening bid prices, and accept the customer's bid at or above that level. Auction ends and sale completed, because only one bid was received.
Some linux versions use readahead while booting for a specific set of files which will be needed during the boot. The set of files is stored in a boot profile. After upgrading your system or changing the services started at boot, you should re-profile the boot, so that the readahead files are the ones actually needed. It can make a remarkable difference to boot speed.
Note that the profiling boot takes longer, but subsequent boots should be faster, since most files needed for booting will already be loaded before they are required.
And then there are words derived from Greek which people think are from Latin. One example is "hippopotamus", whose plural is "hippopotamuses" because it's an English word.
If anyone ever says "hippopotami", just laugh loudly at them and inform them that the correct quasi-Greek plural is either "hippopotamoi" (spoonfuls-type plural) or "hippoipotamus" (spoonsful-type plural).
...like a line printer from days of yore (old fogey alert: yore = IBM 360 era). Line printers using a spinning drum and array of hammers could bash out several pages per second. The faster the drum was spinning over the array of hammers, the faster it could print. Ear protection was advisable in the vicinity, and paper jams could be spectacular. Mind you, graphics were limited to ASCII art (or more accurately, EBCDIC art).
The primary goal of filing patents which you don't exploit in your own products is to deny those methods to your competitors. Your R&D team may have come up with several viable technical approaches to some market need. For economic reasons, you typically adopt only one in your products. However, some of the alternatives may be almost as attractive, and you certainly want to block those methods from your competitors.
A secondary goal of filing patents you don't directly exploit is to build a portfolio for cross-licensing trade-offs. It's common for a product from one company to infringe on patents of another. The usual solution is that they cross-licence each other's technology in specific areas. The bigger the pile of patents you have, the better your bargaining position is, and the less you have to pay for the cross-licensing. Maybe the other company even infringes one of your unused patents, so the cross-licensing could be free.
A third goal is that of the "patent troll", which does not exploit any patents in its own products (it typically does not have products). It simply builds a portfolio of patents in the hope that one or more becomes essential to a whole class of products, or becomes widely infringed in some other way.
In all three cases, "donating" the patent would be irrational and clearly against the interests of the company. Only those whose patent piles are truly huge (e.g. IBM) can afford to donate patents without risking economic losses.
> Think about it: would the typical manager/executive sign off on the budget to offload properties that don't cost anything to keep laying around?
But they do cost something. European patents remain in force only if fees are paid annually. US patents require payment of renewal fees every 4 years during their lifetime (max 20 years), but the amount increases dramatically as the patent ages.
The type of the data is irrelevant, only the quantity counts.
Linux CD ISOs are typically 500-700MB, but many distributions are larger than one CD. They may involve several such CD ISOs or a 3-4GB DVD ISO. So one Linux distribution may be a larger download than a high quality movie.
Most (but not all) color laser printers put several copies of a pattern of small yellow dots onto every page they print. The pattern is a fingerprint which identifies the printer model and serial number. The alleged justification for this "feature" is for finding counterfeiters. In practice, it makes any printout from such a printer (and sufficiently high resolution copies of the printout) traceable back to a unique printer. AFAIK, it does not apply to monochrome laser printers, and probably not to inkjets - or not yet, anyway. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,118664-page,1/ar ticle.html
Actually, most of the imagery used by Google Earth is satellite images from Landsat, topography from SRTM, and aerial images from USGS - all viewable in 3-D using NASA's educational WorldWind program.
WorldWind was available before Google Earth was born, but it was not marketed into news headlines. WorldWind does not limit your local cache size the way Google Earth does, so you can download the whole multi-terabyte Landsat and SRTM datasets if you are so inclined. It is also extendable by user add-ons, of which many exist. WorldWind links to cartographic and placename databases, and also provided alternate planets before Google Earth, and now includes the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter (via NASA mission data), as well as the night sky (via SDSS imagery).
Google Earth adds commercial non-US aerial images to the freely-available data used by WorldWind, and links to various commercial directories and maps, but is otherwise a follower of WorldWind rather than a leader.
The US actually adopted the metric system by an act of Congress in 1866, which included the text:
"It shall be lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system; and no contract or dealing, or pleading in any court, shall be deemed invalid or liable to objection because the weights or measures expressed or referred to therein are weights or measures of the metric system."
What Congress did not do, was penalize or discourage other systems of measurement. Consequently, there was little incentive for metric units to be adopted outside science and engineering, so traditional quirky units persisted in common use, despite their problems (the standard yard was shrinking, for instance). However, even these were redefined by the Bureau of Weights and Measurements in 1893 to be based on the metric units, so that 1 inch is exactly 0.0254 meters, for instance.
Perhaps as a result of the lack of use of the metric system in the US in the century since it was officially adopted, Congress passed another act in 1988, which mandates "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce." All government business is supposed to be in metric units...
Slashdot Mirror
...oh drat! I forgot to patent that idea as a business method....
Not a problem. Minimum prices do not apply to auctions (such as eBay).
Items on the shelves or web site of a discount store (oops, I meant auctioneer, of course) would be marked with two prices: the alleged minimum price would be a fictional "buy now" price and the real/discount price would be the "opening bid" level.
A discount vendor (oops, auctioneer) could simply hold a quick 1-customer auction for the contents of the customer's shopping trolley at the checkout. The checkout would just tally up the opening bid prices, and accept the customer's bid at or above that level. Auction ends and sale completed, because only one bid was received.
Some linux versions use readahead while booting for a specific set of files which will be needed during the boot. The set of files is stored in a boot profile. After upgrading your system or changing the services started at boot, you should re-profile the boot, so that the readahead files are the ones actually needed. It can make a remarkable difference to boot speed.
6 3&highlight=grub+profile+speed+boot
Instructions at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2542
Note that the profiling boot takes longer, but subsequent boots should be faster, since most files needed for booting will already be loaded before they are required.
"The subject who is truly loyal to the chief magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures" - Junius.
'nuff said.
And then there are words derived from Greek which people think are from Latin. One example is "hippopotamus", whose plural is "hippopotamuses" because it's an English word.
If anyone ever says "hippopotami", just laugh loudly at them and inform them that the correct quasi-Greek plural is either "hippopotamoi" (spoonfuls-type plural) or "hippoipotamus" (spoonsful-type plural).
...like a line printer from days of yore (old fogey alert: yore = IBM 360 era). Line printers using a spinning drum and array of hammers could bash out several pages per second. The faster the drum was spinning over the array of hammers, the faster it could print. Ear protection was advisable in the vicinity, and paper jams could be spectacular. Mind you, graphics were limited to ASCII art (or more accurately, EBCDIC art).
The primary goal of filing patents which you don't exploit in your own products is to deny those methods to your competitors. Your R&D team may have come up with several viable technical approaches to some market need. For economic reasons, you typically adopt only one in your products. However, some of the alternatives may be almost as attractive, and you certainly want to block those methods from your competitors.
A secondary goal of filing patents you don't directly exploit is to build a portfolio for cross-licensing trade-offs. It's common for a product from one company to infringe on patents of another. The usual solution is that they cross-licence each other's technology in specific areas. The bigger the pile of patents you have, the better your bargaining position is, and the less you have to pay for the cross-licensing. Maybe the other company even infringes one of your unused patents, so the cross-licensing could be free.
A third goal is that of the "patent troll", which does not exploit any patents in its own products (it typically does not have products). It simply builds a portfolio of patents in the hope that one or more becomes essential to a whole class of products, or becomes widely infringed in some other way.
In all three cases, "donating" the patent would be irrational and clearly against the interests of the company. Only those whose patent piles are truly huge (e.g. IBM) can afford to donate patents without risking economic losses.
> Think about it: would the typical manager/executive sign off on the budget to offload properties that don't cost anything to keep laying around?
But they do cost something. European patents remain in force only if fees are paid annually. US patents require payment of renewal fees every 4 years during their lifetime (max 20 years), but the amount increases dramatically as the patent ages.
Or, also in Finland, services starting from 37.70 per month with 1000 minutes and 100 messages per month.a _palvelut/gsm/hinnat_dna_urho.shtml
a _palvelut/gsm/hinnat_dna_onni.shtml
http://www.dnafinland.fi/yksityisille/liittymat_j
Or, also in Finland, services which cost 0.66 per month [not a typo] with less than 0.07 per minute/message for calls.
http://www.dnafinland.fi/yksityisille/liittymat_j
Cellular customers are really ripped off in the US.
The type of the data is irrelevant, only the quantity counts.
Linux CD ISOs are typically 500-700MB, but many distributions are larger than one CD. They may involve several such CD ISOs or a 3-4GB DVD ISO. So one Linux distribution may be a larger download than a high quality movie.
... but that Pi day was more than 4 centuries ago: 31.4.1593
Most (but not all) color laser printers put several copies of a pattern of small yellow dots onto every page they print. The pattern is a fingerprint which identifies the printer model and serial number. The alleged justification for this "feature" is for finding counterfeiters. In practice, it makes any printout from such a printer (and sufficiently high resolution copies of the printout) traceable back to a unique printer. AFAIK, it does not apply to monochrome laser printers, and probably not to inkjets - or not yet, anyway.r ticle.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,118664-page,1/a
Actually, most of the imagery used by Google Earth is satellite images from Landsat, topography from SRTM, and aerial images from USGS - all viewable in 3-D using NASA's educational WorldWind program.
Program: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
Community: http://www.worldwindcentral.com/
WorldWind was available before Google Earth was born, but it was not marketed into news headlines. WorldWind does not limit your local cache size the way Google Earth does, so you can download the whole multi-terabyte Landsat and SRTM datasets if you are so inclined. It is also extendable by user add-ons, of which many exist. WorldWind links to cartographic and placename databases, and also provided alternate planets before Google Earth, and now includes the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter (via NASA mission data), as well as the night sky (via SDSS imagery).
Google Earth adds commercial non-US aerial images to the freely-available data used by WorldWind, and links to various commercial directories and maps, but is otherwise a follower of WorldWind rather than a leader.
The US actually adopted the metric system by an act of Congress in 1866, which included the text:
"It shall be lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system; and no contract or dealing, or pleading in any court, shall be deemed invalid or liable to objection because the weights or measures expressed or referred to therein are weights or measures of the metric system."
What Congress did not do, was penalize or discourage other systems of measurement. Consequently, there was little incentive for metric units to be adopted outside science and engineering, so traditional quirky units persisted in common use, despite their problems (the standard yard was shrinking, for instance). However, even these were redefined by the Bureau of Weights and Measurements in 1893 to be based on the metric units, so that 1 inch is exactly 0.0254 meters, for instance.
Perhaps as a result of the lack of use of the metric system in the US in the century since it was officially adopted, Congress passed another act in 1988, which mandates "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce." All government business is supposed to be in metric units...