Do me a favor and call me when someone posts a home-made movie on YouTube that is, I dunno, let's say 10% as well-made, written, and acted as Star Trek.
Here you go: Star Wreck - In the Pirkinning. Free, made by five students in Finland in their spare time in a two-room apartment, and not far off the quality of Star Trek movies. It's originally in Finnish, but subtitled and dubbed versions are available. Some of the humour may not be apparent to those unfamiliar with modern Finnish culture, and many puns are lost in translation. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+wreck+in+the+pirkinning&search_type=&aq=0&oq=star+wreck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wreck:_In_the_Pirkinning
The high resolution version is now distributed by Universal on DVD. But you can still download the low resolution version from http://www.starwreck.com/ Or you can watch it on Youtube - it's uploaded in several parts due to its length...
UK£40 is about 46euro or US$66. Maybe that's the rate for XP these days.
In Finland, the rebate for Vista Home Premium seems to be about 100euro, which is UK£86-ish or US$140-ish at current rates. That was the in-store price reduction I got for each of the two PCs I bought this year (in January and June from different local small system builders).
We teach our employees to cut any corner in the pursuit of profit, and that's how it should be! You can't just leave valuable Intellectual Property out in the open, that's not how its done.
Nice try. Now tell that to the RIAA or MPAA, so they can go hide their intellectual property where we can't see/hear it.
First, just suppose his telescope and camera setup could gather light from about 1 arc minute of sky. (Crap, I'm lousy at this math, so I'll post it anyway and let someone correct me.)
Most astronomical telescopes have a light-gathering cone covering about a degree of sky (so-called widefield scopes manage a few degrees). The amount visible through an eyepiece is less than this, by a factor which depending on many parameters. The amount captured in focal plane photography is also less, then the whole field, but typically not greatly less.
Meteors are common enough - you'll see several per hour in a dark site with clear skies. Fireball meteors are rare, however; I've only seen two, and I'm an amateur astronomer. One was in the mid 1980s and was visible in broad daylight and took several seconds to cross about a quarter of the sky (probably burned out at high altitude). The other was at night in the late 1990s and was truly spectacular - it crossed the entire sky in little more than a second, with a flaming trail covering at least 20 degrees.
While I usually cringe when thinking of responding to patent related topics here, the fact that this got modded up to "4, Informative" made me cringe more.. 35 USC 101 is the key to what can and cannot be patented in the US, and it starts: "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful..." so, yeah "discoveries" can be patented. If you "discover" a new rock mineral that cures cancer, you are entitled to a patent on the mineral itself (given you can prove it's "usefulness", i.e. actually curing cancer).
You should relax and cringe a bit less, because you're wrong. Check what "discover" means for patenting in the US. Discovery of a new material - which did not occur readily in nature - might qualify, and would presumably be the end result of an inventive process (lab experiments). If you discover a material by tripping up over it, it's not patentable. In fact, it's not new either, is it?
A US patent requires: novelty, usefulness, non-obviousness, and an inventive step. If the subject of a patent application is missing even one of these attributes, it's rejected as being unpatentable under 35USC.
I understand the need for patents, but I don't feel discoveries should be patented.
A discovery cannot be patented by itself. To be patentable, there is an explicit requirement under US law for an "inventive step" to be taken. A discovery might cover the requirement for non-obviousness, and perhaps the requirement for usefulness, but a discovery is not an invention.
In the case of the cited patents (6,355,623 and 6,680,302), I think the non-obviousness part is severely lacking. Rephrased, their independent claims are for the combination of (i) treating condition X with drug Y, in which (ii) the dose of drug Y is adjusted based on the inferred level of drug Y in the bloodstream. Given that treating condition X with drug Y was already known, the step of adjusting the dose would be obvious to one of ordinary skill in that art (gastro-intestinal medicine). The method of inference is the "discovery" in question.
Both patents suck, but for other reasons.
From your post, I'd guess that you might describe yourself as "deist", if you were familiar with the term. It is distinct from "theist", and somewhat overlaps "atheist", in that it is a rejection of all of the theisms. In fact, deism is condemned as vehemently as atheism by the major theist doctrines. However, it is a definite intellectual position, unlike the confused non-stance of the agnostic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deist
Unfortunately the folks obsessed with "disproving" the Moon landings are doing on the premise that NASA faked the whole thing. So any evidence in support coming from NASA would of course be expected.
As some NASA bigwig said: "In 1969, we didn't have the technology to fake it."
We're still trending towards a bloated, centralized government run amok, trampling your individual liberties and micromanaging every aspect of your life from what kind of car you're allowed to drive, to how much electricity you're allowed to use, even to how much money you're allowed to make.
Good luck with the trolling. Oh, and you forgot to mention how the government is threatening the purity of your bodily fluids...
Pick one good password, don't let it get cracked, and you'll be fine, and your users/co-workeres will be much happier
That's the way we run our network at home.
Unfortunately, at work it's different. There are several authentication empires large and small, each with differing password complexity requirements and with differing policies on password expiry and minimum difference from previous several passwords. There's the Oracle empire and the Siebel empire and the Notes empire, and two mutually-hostile LDAP empires. There are also a few minor authentication empires specific to other tools. There are probably other authentication empires/ghettoes for tools I don't interact with.
The longest password validity is 90 days, for some systems it's 60 days. The shortest password acceptable to any system is 8 characters. All require upper and lower case, some require number and/or punctuation as well. Some don't count an upper case character if it's the first character in the password. Others don't count a number or punctuation if it's the last character in the password. So upper case, number, and punctuation have to be in the middle. One system requires that at least two characters in the password change type in each update (e.g. number becomes letter). Another system does not ever allow re-use of old passwords, claiming unlimited memory of previous passwords.
The result? A few of the passwords are used regularly enough that they can be remembered, even with the updates every two or three months. Those used intermittently cannot be effectively commited to memory. So passwords are recorded on sticky notes under keyboards, scrawled on margins of wall calenders, on notepads in desk drawers, etc. Some keep them in plain-text files on their laptops. Our systems at home are more secure.
From the article: Morgan Stanley points out that Robson's assessment of the media landscape doesn't have the statistical rigour of its regular reports.
The next regular report will, no doubt, assert with full statistical rigour that "Twitter is for twits". It's been manifestly evident to many of us since its very inception.
People don't "tweet", they mostly be-twit themselves - sometimes quite impressively in only 140 characters. Others merely follow the twaddle produced by their twit-idols (a motley collection of vacuous celebrities, sports stars, self-serving shills, and the like). Still, pumping the hype on the way up was good for fleecing investors. Presumably Morgan Stanley can now fleece them again on the way down.
The Pew Research Center has little to do with reality.
How they choose to define "scientist" is relevant. That is, the population being sampled is one of the factors in what the results are. I'm guessing they oversampled university employees and people who receive government grants, who tend to be democrats, and undersampled people who use scientific method in their work, such as farmers.
According to the linked study, they used a sample of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and excluded those who resided outside the USA or whose membership was based on being primary or secondary level educators. Roughly half were in biological or medical fields, with the remainder in physical or earth sciences.
http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1554
Bots and other malware that do no appreciable harm to their hosts have made users complacent about keeping their systems clean (or preferably secure). In the meantime, the collateral damage of spamfloods, spyware, and DDOS attacks has been inflicted on the whole community. An exemplary episode in which the infected machines actually suffer may wake users up again. Windows users are, as usual, the witless accomplices/culprits in this case, but Macs can be just as easily penetrated (demonstrated in the hackfests each year), and poorly administered Linux/BSD/Solaris systems can also be vulnerable.
Let the vendors of protective measures celebrate! Sales of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, firewalls, and so forth may benefit. The publicity may even cause some security holes to be patched, and better practices to become default. Maybe the rest of us will benefit...
Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products
Using MS products with a computer should be considered reckless and ipso facto inculpatory, justifying maximum punishment. Using MS products in other ways (landfill, bonfires, etc.) might even be laudable..
Anyway, I think "original" art would be unique hand made objects like paintings, sculptures; not mass-produced copies of such.
One-off or limited-quantity works. They don't have to be hand-made, just associated with a particular artisan. The droite-de-suite royalties are non-assignable except to heirs, unlike copyright/patent royalties.
If you're referring to, "There's a sucker born every minute and two to take him," you're attributing it to the wrong person, although Bill Fields (as his friends called him) would have agreed with the sentiment. The man you're thinking of was P.T. Barnum.
Slashdot Mirror
Do me a favor and call me when someone posts a home-made movie on YouTube that is, I dunno, let's say 10% as well-made, written, and acted as Star Trek.
Here you go: Star Wreck - In the Pirkinning. Free, made by five students in Finland in their spare time in a two-room apartment, and not far off the quality of Star Trek movies. It's originally in Finnish, but subtitled and dubbed versions are available. Some of the humour may not be apparent to those unfamiliar with modern Finnish culture, and many puns are lost in translation.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+wreck+in+the+pirkinning&search_type=&aq=0&oq=star+wreck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wreck:_In_the_Pirkinning
The high resolution version is now distributed by Universal on DVD. But you can still download the low resolution version from http://www.starwreck.com/ Or you can watch it on Youtube - it's uploaded in several parts due to its length...
The whole thing is ridiculous in the first place, now you're going to measure the fucking icons?
They'll all be the same size, of course. But the icons for Chromium, Firefox, Opera, etc. might have rather high transparency.
UK£40 is about 46euro or US$66. Maybe that's the rate for XP these days.
In Finland, the rebate for Vista Home Premium seems to be about 100euro, which is UK£86-ish or US$140-ish at current rates. That was the in-store price reduction I got for each of the two PCs I bought this year (in January and June from different local small system builders).
We teach our employees to cut any corner in the pursuit of profit, and that's how it should be! You can't just leave valuable Intellectual Property out in the open, that's not how its done.
Nice try. Now tell that to the RIAA or MPAA, so they can go hide their intellectual property where we can't see/hear it.
Wasn't this just another pyramid scheme?
It's a Sierpinski gasket which just looks like a pyramid, but requires less actual material...
First, just suppose his telescope and camera setup could gather light from about 1 arc minute of sky. (Crap, I'm lousy at this math, so I'll post it anyway and let someone correct me.)
Most astronomical telescopes have a light-gathering cone covering about a degree of sky (so-called widefield scopes manage a few degrees). The amount visible through an eyepiece is less than this, by a factor which depending on many parameters. The amount captured in focal plane photography is also less, then the whole field, but typically not greatly less.
Meteors are common enough - you'll see several per hour in a dark site with clear skies. Fireball meteors are rare, however; I've only seen two, and I'm an amateur astronomer. One was in the mid 1980s and was visible in broad daylight and took several seconds to cross about a quarter of the sky (probably burned out at high altitude). The other was at night in the late 1990s and was truly spectacular - it crossed the entire sky in little more than a second, with a flaming trail covering at least 20 degrees.
I've got several Linux systems, and not one of them has a lib/etc/opt/local/share directory!
While I usually cringe when thinking of responding to patent related topics here, the fact that this got modded up to "4, Informative" made me cringe more.. 35 USC 101 is the key to what can and cannot be patented in the US, and it starts: "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful..." so, yeah "discoveries" can be patented. If you "discover" a new rock mineral that cures cancer, you are entitled to a patent on the mineral itself (given you can prove it's "usefulness", i.e. actually curing cancer).
You should relax and cringe a bit less, because you're wrong. Check what "discover" means for patenting in the US. Discovery of a new material - which did not occur readily in nature - might qualify, and would presumably be the end result of an inventive process (lab experiments). If you discover a material by tripping up over it, it's not patentable. In fact, it's not new either, is it?
A US patent requires: novelty, usefulness, non-obviousness, and an inventive step. If the subject of a patent application is missing even one of these attributes, it's rejected as being unpatentable under 35USC.
I understand the need for patents, but I don't feel discoveries should be patented.
A discovery cannot be patented by itself. To be patentable, there is an explicit requirement under US law for an "inventive step" to be taken. A discovery might cover the requirement for non-obviousness, and perhaps the requirement for usefulness, but a discovery is not an invention.
In the case of the cited patents (6,355,623 and 6,680,302), I think the non-obviousness part is severely lacking. Rephrased, their independent claims are for the combination of (i) treating condition X with drug Y, in which (ii) the dose of drug Y is adjusted based on the inferred level of drug Y in the bloodstream. Given that treating condition X with drug Y was already known, the step of adjusting the dose would be obvious to one of ordinary skill in that art (gastro-intestinal medicine). The method of inference is the "discovery" in question.
Both patents suck, but for other reasons.
From your post, I'd guess that you might describe yourself as "deist", if you were familiar with the term. It is distinct from "theist", and somewhat overlaps "atheist", in that it is a rejection of all of the theisms. In fact, deism is condemned as vehemently as atheism by the major theist doctrines. However, it is a definite intellectual position, unlike the confused non-stance of the agnostic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deist
Unfortunately the folks obsessed with "disproving" the Moon landings are doing on the premise that NASA faked the whole thing. So any evidence in support coming from NASA would of course be expected.
As some NASA bigwig said: "In 1969, we didn't have the technology to fake it."
Video of British police breaking up a party due to excessive music. The incident occurs at around the 55 second mark.
When will they start breaking up vehicles because of excessive music? Stereo up with windows down should trigger immediate destruction.
So, you're punctual, thieving, drunk, lazy, simple minded, and British.
So, just like the Irish then, you mean?
The Irish don't like being called "punctual", you insensitive clod!
(And they really hate being called "British")
We're still trending towards a bloated, centralized government run amok, trampling your individual liberties and micromanaging every aspect of your life from what kind of car you're allowed to drive, to how much electricity you're allowed to use, even to how much money you're allowed to make.
Good luck with the trolling. Oh, and you forgot to mention how the government is threatening the purity of your bodily fluids...
Pick one good password, don't let it get cracked, and you'll be fine, and your users/co-workeres will be much happier
That's the way we run our network at home.
Unfortunately, at work it's different. There are several authentication empires large and small, each with differing password complexity requirements and with differing policies on password expiry and minimum difference from previous several passwords. There's the Oracle empire and the Siebel empire and the Notes empire, and two mutually-hostile LDAP empires. There are also a few minor authentication empires specific to other tools. There are probably other authentication empires/ghettoes for tools I don't interact with.
The longest password validity is 90 days, for some systems it's 60 days. The shortest password acceptable to any system is 8 characters. All require upper and lower case, some require number and/or punctuation as well. Some don't count an upper case character if it's the first character in the password. Others don't count a number or punctuation if it's the last character in the password. So upper case, number, and punctuation have to be in the middle. One system requires that at least two characters in the password change type in each update (e.g. number becomes letter). Another system does not ever allow re-use of old passwords, claiming unlimited memory of previous passwords.
The result? A few of the passwords are used regularly enough that they can be remembered, even with the updates every two or three months. Those used intermittently cannot be effectively commited to memory. So passwords are recorded on sticky notes under keyboards, scrawled on margins of wall calenders, on notepads in desk drawers, etc. Some keep them in plain-text files on their laptops. Our systems at home are more secure.
Do not ask me if I have ever tried to explain something to a secretary. I double-dare you.
So, have you ever tried to explain something to a secretary?
[I was double-dog-dared to ask]
From the article: Morgan Stanley points out that Robson's assessment of the media landscape doesn't have the statistical rigour of its regular reports.
The next regular report will, no doubt, assert with full statistical rigour that "Twitter is for twits". It's been manifestly evident to many of us since its very inception.
People don't "tweet", they mostly be-twit themselves - sometimes quite impressively in only 140 characters. Others merely follow the twaddle produced by their twit-idols (a motley collection of vacuous celebrities, sports stars, self-serving shills, and the like). Still, pumping the hype on the way up was good for fleecing investors. Presumably Morgan Stanley can now fleece them again on the way down.
The Pew Research Center has little to do with reality.
How they choose to define "scientist" is relevant. That is, the population being sampled is one of the factors in what the results are. I'm guessing they oversampled university employees and people who receive government grants, who tend to be democrats, and undersampled people who use scientific method in their work, such as farmers.
According to the linked study, they used a sample of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and excluded those who resided outside the USA or whose membership was based on being primary or secondary level educators. Roughly half were in biological or medical fields, with the remainder in physical or earth sciences. http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1554
Bots and other malware that do no appreciable harm to their hosts have made users complacent about keeping their systems clean (or preferably secure). In the meantime, the collateral damage of spamfloods, spyware, and DDOS attacks has been inflicted on the whole community. An exemplary episode in which the infected machines actually suffer may wake users up again. Windows users are, as usual, the witless accomplices/culprits in this case, but Macs can be just as easily penetrated (demonstrated in the hackfests each year), and poorly administered Linux/BSD/Solaris systems can also be vulnerable.
Let the vendors of protective measures celebrate! Sales of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, firewalls, and so forth may benefit. The publicity may even cause some security holes to be patched, and better practices to become default. Maybe the rest of us will benefit...
PhDs aren't granted for common sense.
But there should be a way to take them back if the holder demonstrates remarkable stupidity.
People are revolting
The media executives agree whole-heartedly, and are sticking it to those revolting scum with revolting ads.
Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products
Using MS products with a computer should be considered reckless and ipso facto inculpatory, justifying maximum punishment. Using MS products in other ways (landfill, bonfires, etc.) might even be laudable..
Not a bad idea - dragging the conspiracy nuts to the moon...
Better: send them to the landing site for the first manned mission to the sun (but don't tell them they'll be the first ones to land there).
While I agree with you in concept; there is precedent in laws in some countries that give artists a cut of subsequent resale of original art.
Really? More detail -- which countries for a start?
All the countries of the EU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resale_Rights_Directive. The UK had an opt-out, which was eliminated in 2006.
Anyway, I think "original" art would be unique hand made objects like paintings, sculptures; not mass-produced copies of such.
One-off or limited-quantity works. They don't have to be hand-made, just associated with a particular artisan. The droite-de-suite royalties are non-assignable except to heirs, unlike copyright/patent royalties.
If you're referring to, "There's a sucker born every minute and two to take him," you're attributing it to the wrong person, although Bill Fields (as his friends called him) would have agreed with the sentiment. The man you're thinking of was P.T. Barnum.
Actually, it was probably David Hannum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_minute Both Hannum and Barnum had [faked] exhibits of a 3 meter human fossil, and traded insults and accusations.