It sounds like you're assuming that Halliburton will indiscriminately go after anyone who violates their patent, thus making patent trolls everywhere tremble in fear. I don't think it will work out that way. What seems more likely is that they'll hold onto it, using it only against their competitors when it's to their advantage and having little effect on the world of patent trolling as a whole -- and meanwhile, setting yet another precedent for the granting of truly horrible patents. The best thing is for this and every other business method patent (and software patent, and patent on a naturally occurring gene, etc.) to be denied until people get the message that patents are intended to cover physical inventions, and nothing else.
Though as long as it's not illegal, and it meets all the 102 requirements and is not obvious, it will probably be granted.
It may or may not be legal; the patent office and the courts have (finally) started to take a dim view of "business method" and other types of patents that circumvent the original intent of the patent system.
It is obvious, and there exists substantial prior art -- if not, people wouldn't have immediately had a ready-made phrase ("patent troll") to describe what the patent covers.
No doubt buried in the requirements is something that Halliburton hopes will make this bullshit business method patent different from all the other bullshit business method patents, but I'm actually hopeful that they'll get the smackdown they deserve.
Given the time scales involved, that's kind of like saying "Alexander preceded Napoleon" -- I mean, it's true, but it leaves out a whole lot that happened in between.
Oh, never mind. The past is telescoped. There's old stuff (things that happened before my parents were born) older stuff (George Washington and other guys in funny clothes) very old stuff (King Arthur and Robin Hood) extremely old stuff (cavemen and dinosaurs) and, apparently, incredibly old stuff (before cavemen and dinosaurs -- who knew?) No point in asking people to maintain a sense of persepective.
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY.
I love how people tend to forget that the Colonial militias were getting their asses kicked by the redcoats until a bunch of Germans and -- yes -- Frenchmen came over and taught us how to fight as an actual army.
Except that in this case, GGPP and GPP are both wrong; the right to an attorney is explicit in the 6th Amendment. It would be really great if people making Constitutional arguments would read the thing first.
If we have right to "lawyers" (nowhere in the Constitution) then why aren't we supporting giving arms to everyone who can't afford them?
6th Amendment:
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." (emphasis mine)
I will never understand why people who are so concerned about the 2nd Amendment tend to be so contemptuous of the other nine in the Bill of Rights, and vice versa. It's all of a piece, folks. If you support all of them, you support freedom. If you pick and choose, then you support freedom only for people who think exactly like you do, which of course is no freedom at all.
Most of the north didn't want to get rid of slavery either. Nor did most of the soldiers fighting for the north.
[citation needed]
Where do you think they put the black people who fought with them? The front lines.. in front of all the white people.. so they died first.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. Right up until the end of the war (and again in the World Wars) black US soldiers had to fight their own command structure to be allowed to fight on the front lines. Of course, this was still deeply racist, but it was racism of a very different kind than the Confederacy's.
If you understand that climate is not the same thing as weather, why did you make an argument that deliberately conflates the two?
Also, can you point out to me where in any of my posts on this thread I mentioned proposed solutions to global warming, or the economic consequences thereof? The original poster made a false claim, and based his entire argument on that claim. Rather than defending the claim, both you and he respond by trying to change the subject.
Heck, "experts" can't get next weeks weather right but they expect me to believe them on the 100 year forecast?
Your insurance company cannot predict whether you will get in an accident this year. They can, however, predict with striking accuracy how many of their customers who are in your demographic (age, sex, marital status, prior driving history, etc.) will get in accidents this year. If you don't understand this, and how it applies to the distinction between "weather" and "climate," you really don't have the understanding to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion.
The point I was making is that scientific beliefs (yes that's the correct word) change from generation-to-generation.
You "made" your "point" with a claim* which is not only demonstrably false, but has been shown to be false many times, by many people, for quite some time. This pretty much invalidates any argument you base on that claim. Garbage in, garbage out.
The assertion you just made is mostly true ("belief" is certainly not the right word, but that's a whole 'nother argument) but you show no understanding of the way in which the accepted body of scientific knowledge changes. Hint: it's not through mocking people for something they said -- or didn't say -- thirty years ago.
Ever heard the phrase "paradigm shift"?
Uh, yeah, about a million times; it's one of the most overused phrases on the net. If you think you're doing something original by bringing it up, sorry, at this point it's essentially noise.
*In case you've forgotten what you wrote: "In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling." Your words, and clearly, demonstrably, completely wrong.
In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling.
You must be using some new definition of "virtually all" to mean less than a quarter.
I remember sitting in elementary school while the teacher made us read a scary article about "the darkening of the earth" due to increased clouds.
So... your elementary school teacher was a climatologist?
Listen up, bunky: if you want to argue about actual science -- about the accuracy of historical temperature readings, about surface vs. air vs. satellite measurements, about the chemistry of greenhouse gases -- go right ahead. Contrary to what global warming denialists like to believe, science is a big tent; bring on your evidence (you do know what the word "evidence" means, right?) and it will be considered along with everyone else's. But the "global cooling craze" claim has been debunked over and over again, and yet you people never learn. Are you just pathologically unable to admit when you're wrong, or is it just this particular issue? I mean, if you said, "Lincoln was assassinated in 1864" and someone else said, "No, it was 1865," would you then go around telling everyone you met that Lincoln was assassinated in 1864 every time any subject bearing even vaguely on American history came up? If you wrote a C program in which all the statements were terminated by commas, and Asked Slashdot why your program wouldn't compile, and a bunch of people helpfully pointed out that you really ought to be using semicolons, would you stubbornly keep programming with commas and insisting that the/. folks (and your compiler) must be wrong because of something you heard on Fox News? I mean, I'm really trying to understand this behavior. Help me out here.
The problem with your "supporting arguments" is that there is simply no evidence in the article of the claim you assert they're making. If they had made such a claim, then of course it would be post hoc unless they presented additional evidence of causation. But they didn't. The logic of your argument is irrelevant, because it's factually incorrect.
By being a "big picture thinker... [who] connect[s] disparate facts" you are, I suspect, actually increasing the chances of making fallacious assumptions yourself. There's nothing wrong with trying to make connections, of course, but it's important to remember that sometimes (often, in fact) two widely separated trees are in fact nothing but that, with no forest in between them.
If you decide not to debate them, I'll accept that as a nod from you, in support of them.
If "silence equals assent" isn't on the list of classic fallacies, it should be.
Ah, good point. I hadn't thought of that interpretation.
Okay, in that sense no one can really quantify the worth of anything, because everything has some emotional value. (Kids are right at the top of the list, obviously, but for many people businesses are pretty high up there too.) But we do quantify the value of things all the time, every time we buy or sell, so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with trying to do so in this case. It's just much tougher than it would be with a proprietary OS.
This is therefore an example of Post hoc ergo propter hoc
This is an example of someone not understanding what a particular logical fallacy actually is, and throwing it against the wall hoping it will stick.
Seriously. These online lists of classic fallacies are useful resources, and I think they've done a lot of good by helping people learn to recognize arguments that fail in certain predictable ways, but I'm getting really tired of people just grabbing their favorite and applying it to whatever argument is at hand without pausing to make sure that it actually applies in any meaningful way.
It's a little more complex than that because an individual business does have a quantifiable worth: in the case of a publicly traded company, it's their stock valuation; in the case of a privately held company, it's how much they'd get if they went public. (Note that I'm not saying this is an accurate measure, but it is at least something you can put a number on.) You could, if you wanted to and you had enough money, buy any corporation for a precisely tabulated amount. With Linux, there's nothing to buy out -- you could buy all the companies that make money distributing it (Red Hat etc.) and you still wouldn't own it.
From the market-value-is-everything POV, this means Linux has infinite value, which clearly isn't true. But it does make it a lot harder to count up than, say, the value of Windows or Mac OS.
Puritanism in the general sense -- "the desperate fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time" -- seems to be a trait that pops up in just about every type of authoritarian system. Authoritarians of the right, authoritarians of the left, and authoritarians with no discernable political philosophy other than maintaining their own power all seem to put an inordinate amount of effort into "protecting the morals" of the societies they control. A good measure of a government's attitude toward freedom in general is its attitude toward sex and other pleasures of the body.
Honestly, I think it's a bit of a stretch to blame American small-p puritanism on those grim old pilgrims. The Mayflower landed almost four hundred years ago; a lot has changed since then, and the descendents of the Puritans are now held up as models of licentiousness and decadence by the descendants of Cavaliers... Australia has a history almost as long and just as tangled. Whatever a country's origins, the people who live there now constitute their own society, and history informs but in no way determines how that society works.
I would put forth most people who own a business are conservative
And you base this opinion on what, exactly?
I've known three people well who have started their own successful businesses. One is my fiancee, one is my Mom, and one is the guy who started the company where I was employed for seven years, during which time we grew from a three-person company with under a million in annual sales to a twenty-person company with fifty million in sales and offices in three countries. And all three of these people are liberal Democrats (my former boss, in fact, is so left-wing he makes me look like a moderate in comparison, which isn't easy to do.)
I'm sure you can respond with similar anecdotes about conservative business owners you've known. But "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'"; unless there's actually been a well-conducted study of the political leanings of the people who start and own businesses, any statements about the topic can be nothing more than speculation.
I think you misread the study. They're not saying that those traits are characteristic of the political philosophies themselves; they're saying that people who have those traits tend to adhere to certain political philosophies.
There is often a large disconnect between people's politics, religion, etc., and the way they act in their everyday lives.
i am trying not to troll here but why would i want to use a language with no strict typing on the server to generate html+js text when i can use lots of great languages with typing that can do that very well and are not scripting languages?
If you write code like you write English, maybe you need "strict typing" (by which you presumably mean static typing) to keep you from making obvious mistakes. Those of us who write more carefully don't need that kind of handholding.
There is already in place a perfectly good system imposing term limits on all politician. It's called "regular elections."
If voters really want to throw the bums out, they get the chance to do so every two, four, or six years, depending on which set of bums we're talking about. The fact that the voters generally choose not to do so is not going to be remedied by term limits; it just guarantees a new set of bums just as bad as the old. People who will vote for corrupt, incompetent incumbents will also vote for corrupt, incompetent newcomers.
Yeah, exactly. "Anti-war terrorist" is as meaningful a phrase as "Slashdot terrorist" or "cheddar-cheese-eating terrorist" or "terrorist with size eleven shoes."
The fact that the "terrorism-anti-war protesters" category even exists should be a gigantic red flag that something is seriously wrong with whoever set up the system in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you're assuming that Halliburton will indiscriminately go after anyone who violates their patent, thus making patent trolls everywhere tremble in fear. I don't think it will work out that way. What seems more likely is that they'll hold onto it, using it only against their competitors when it's to their advantage and having little effect on the world of patent trolling as a whole -- and meanwhile, setting yet another precedent for the granting of truly horrible patents. The best thing is for this and every other business method patent (and software patent, and patent on a naturally occurring gene, etc.) to be denied until people get the message that patents are intended to cover physical inventions, and nothing else.
Though as long as it's not illegal, and it meets all the 102 requirements and is not obvious, it will probably be granted.
It may or may not be legal; the patent office and the courts have (finally) started to take a dim view of "business method" and other types of patents that circumvent the original intent of the patent system.
It is obvious, and there exists substantial prior art -- if not, people wouldn't have immediately had a ready-made phrase ("patent troll") to describe what the patent covers.
No doubt buried in the requirements is something that Halliburton hopes will make this bullshit business method patent different from all the other bullshit business method patents, but I'm actually hopeful that they'll get the smackdown they deserve.
Given the time scales involved, that's kind of like saying "Alexander preceded Napoleon" -- I mean, it's true, but it leaves out a whole lot that happened in between.
Oh, never mind. The past is telescoped. There's old stuff (things that happened before my parents were born) older stuff (George Washington and other guys in funny clothes) very old stuff (King Arthur and Robin Hood) extremely old stuff (cavemen and dinosaurs) and, apparently, incredibly old stuff (before cavemen and dinosaurs -- who knew?) No point in asking people to maintain a sense of persepective.
Two words for you: "von" and "Steuben".
I get my history from, well, reading history. You apparently get yours from Hollywood. Good luck with that.
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY.
I love how people tend to forget that the Colonial militias were getting their asses kicked by the redcoats until a bunch of Germans and -- yes -- Frenchmen came over and taught us how to fight as an actual army.
Except that in this case, GGPP and GPP are both wrong; the right to an attorney is explicit in the 6th Amendment. It would be really great if people making Constitutional arguments would read the thing first.
If we have right to "lawyers" (nowhere in the Constitution) then why aren't we supporting giving arms to everyone who can't afford them?
6th Amendment:
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." (emphasis mine)
I will never understand why people who are so concerned about the 2nd Amendment tend to be so contemptuous of the other nine in the Bill of Rights, and vice versa. It's all of a piece, folks. If you support all of them, you support freedom. If you pick and choose, then you support freedom only for people who think exactly like you do, which of course is no freedom at all.
Most of the north didn't want to get rid of slavery either. Nor did most of the soldiers fighting for the north.
[citation needed]
Where do you think they put the black people who fought with them? The front lines.. in front of all the white people.. so they died first.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. Right up until the end of the war (and again in the World Wars) black US soldiers had to fight their own command structure to be allowed to fight on the front lines. Of course, this was still deeply racist, but it was racism of a very different kind than the Confederacy's.
If you understand that climate is not the same thing as weather, why did you make an argument that deliberately conflates the two?
Also, can you point out to me where in any of my posts on this thread I mentioned proposed solutions to global warming, or the economic consequences thereof? The original poster made a false claim, and based his entire argument on that claim. Rather than defending the claim, both you and he respond by trying to change the subject.
Heck, "experts" can't get next weeks weather right but they expect me to believe them on the 100 year forecast?
Your insurance company cannot predict whether you will get in an accident this year. They can, however, predict with striking accuracy how many of their customers who are in your demographic (age, sex, marital status, prior driving history, etc.) will get in accidents this year. If you don't understand this, and how it applies to the distinction between "weather" and "climate," you really don't have the understanding to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion.
The point I was making is that scientific beliefs (yes that's the correct word) change from generation-to-generation.
You "made" your "point" with a claim* which is not only demonstrably false, but has been shown to be false many times, by many people, for quite some time. This pretty much invalidates any argument you base on that claim. Garbage in, garbage out.
The assertion you just made is mostly true ("belief" is certainly not the right word, but that's a whole 'nother argument) but you show no understanding of the way in which the accepted body of scientific knowledge changes. Hint: it's not through mocking people for something they said -- or didn't say -- thirty years ago.
Ever heard the phrase "paradigm shift"?
Uh, yeah, about a million times; it's one of the most overused phrases on the net. If you think you're doing something original by bringing it up, sorry, at this point it's essentially noise.
*In case you've forgotten what you wrote: "In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling." Your words, and clearly, demonstrably, completely wrong.
In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling.
You must be using some new definition of "virtually all" to mean less than a quarter.
I remember sitting in elementary school while the teacher made us read a scary article about "the darkening of the earth" due to increased clouds.
So ... your elementary school teacher was a climatologist?
Listen up, bunky: if you want to argue about actual science -- about the accuracy of historical temperature readings, about surface vs. air vs. satellite measurements, about the chemistry of greenhouse gases -- go right ahead. Contrary to what global warming denialists like to believe, science is a big tent; bring on your evidence (you do know what the word "evidence" means, right?) and it will be considered along with everyone else's. But the "global cooling craze" claim has been debunked over and over again, and yet you people never learn. Are you just pathologically unable to admit when you're wrong, or is it just this particular issue? I mean, if you said, "Lincoln was assassinated in 1864" and someone else said, "No, it was 1865," would you then go around telling everyone you met that Lincoln was assassinated in 1864 every time any subject bearing even vaguely on American history came up? If you wrote a C program in which all the statements were terminated by commas, and Asked Slashdot why your program wouldn't compile, and a bunch of people helpfully pointed out that you really ought to be using semicolons, would you stubbornly keep programming with commas and insisting that the /. folks (and your compiler) must be wrong because of something you heard on Fox News? I mean, I'm really trying to understand this behavior. Help me out here.
The problem with your "supporting arguments" is that there is simply no evidence in the article of the claim you assert they're making. If they had made such a claim, then of course it would be post hoc unless they presented additional evidence of causation. But they didn't. The logic of your argument is irrelevant, because it's factually incorrect.
By being a "big picture thinker ... [who] connect[s] disparate facts" you are, I suspect, actually increasing the chances of making fallacious assumptions yourself. There's nothing wrong with trying to make connections, of course, but it's important to remember that sometimes (often, in fact) two widely separated trees are in fact nothing but that, with no forest in between them.
If you decide not to debate them, I'll accept that as a nod from you, in support of them.
If "silence equals assent" isn't on the list of classic fallacies, it should be.
10 PRINT "25 BILLION"
20 GOTO 10
Ah, good point. I hadn't thought of that interpretation.
Okay, in that sense no one can really quantify the worth of anything, because everything has some emotional value. (Kids are right at the top of the list, obviously, but for many people businesses are pretty high up there too.) But we do quantify the value of things all the time, every time we buy or sell, so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with trying to do so in this case. It's just much tougher than it would be with a proprietary OS.
This is therefore an example of Post hoc ergo propter hoc
This is an example of someone not understanding what a particular logical fallacy actually is, and throwing it against the wall hoping it will stick.
Seriously. These online lists of classic fallacies are useful resources, and I think they've done a lot of good by helping people learn to recognize arguments that fail in certain predictable ways, but I'm getting really tired of people just grabbing their favorite and applying it to whatever argument is at hand without pausing to make sure that it actually applies in any meaningful way.
It's a little more complex than that because an individual business does have a quantifiable worth: in the case of a publicly traded company, it's their stock valuation; in the case of a privately held company, it's how much they'd get if they went public. (Note that I'm not saying this is an accurate measure, but it is at least something you can put a number on.) You could, if you wanted to and you had enough money, buy any corporation for a precisely tabulated amount. With Linux, there's nothing to buy out -- you could buy all the companies that make money distributing it (Red Hat etc.) and you still wouldn't own it.
From the market-value-is-everything POV, this means Linux has infinite value, which clearly isn't true. But it does make it a lot harder to count up than, say, the value of Windows or Mac OS.
Broadcasters can be, and have been fined thousands of dollars PER EVENT, through violations of FCC rules.
That would be an example of ... wait a minute ... the word's on the tip of my tongue here ... oh right! ... censorship.
Puritanism in the general sense -- "the desperate fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time" -- seems to be a trait that pops up in just about every type of authoritarian system. Authoritarians of the right, authoritarians of the left, and authoritarians with no discernable political philosophy other than maintaining their own power all seem to put an inordinate amount of effort into "protecting the morals" of the societies they control. A good measure of a government's attitude toward freedom in general is its attitude toward sex and other pleasures of the body.
Honestly, I think it's a bit of a stretch to blame American small-p puritanism on those grim old pilgrims. The Mayflower landed almost four hundred years ago; a lot has changed since then, and the descendents of the Puritans are now held up as models of licentiousness and decadence by the descendants of Cavaliers ... Australia has a history almost as long and just as tangled. Whatever a country's origins, the people who live there now constitute their own society, and history informs but in no way determines how that society works.
I would put forth most people who own a business are conservative
And you base this opinion on what, exactly?
I've known three people well who have started their own successful businesses. One is my fiancee, one is my Mom, and one is the guy who started the company where I was employed for seven years, during which time we grew from a three-person company with under a million in annual sales to a twenty-person company with fifty million in sales and offices in three countries. And all three of these people are liberal Democrats (my former boss, in fact, is so left-wing he makes me look like a moderate in comparison, which isn't easy to do.)
I'm sure you can respond with similar anecdotes about conservative business owners you've known. But "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'"; unless there's actually been a well-conducted study of the political leanings of the people who start and own businesses, any statements about the topic can be nothing more than speculation.
I think you misread the study. They're not saying that those traits are characteristic of the political philosophies themselves; they're saying that people who have those traits tend to adhere to certain political philosophies.
There is often a large disconnect between people's politics, religion, etc., and the way they act in their everyday lives.
i am trying not to troll here but why would i want to use a language with no strict typing on the server to generate html+js text when i can use lots of great languages with typing that can do that very well and are not scripting languages?
If you write code like you write English, maybe you need "strict typing" (by which you presumably mean static typing) to keep you from making obvious mistakes. Those of us who write more carefully don't need that kind of handholding.
There is already in place a perfectly good system imposing term limits on all politician. It's called "regular elections."
If voters really want to throw the bums out, they get the chance to do so every two, four, or six years, depending on which set of bums we're talking about. The fact that the voters generally choose not to do so is not going to be remedied by term limits; it just guarantees a new set of bums just as bad as the old. People who will vote for corrupt, incompetent incumbents will also vote for corrupt, incompetent newcomers.
Yeah, exactly. "Anti-war terrorist" is as meaningful a phrase as "Slashdot terrorist" or "cheddar-cheese-eating terrorist" or "terrorist with size eleven shoes."
The fact that the "terrorism-anti-war protesters" category even exists should be a gigantic red flag that something is seriously wrong with whoever set up the system in the first place.