These days, the leeches at the very top have learned to set things up so that they don't have any interest in the company's success: if the company does well, they get huge bonuses, and if it does poorly, they get "fired" with equally huge golden parachutes. The whole synergy idea is beloved of management theorists (i.e. people who have a special talent for stringing buzzwords together) but it bears a steadily decreasing relationship to how things happen in the real world.
Quite seriously, I suspect most of the squatters aren't in it for the money... at least not yet. IIRC, it was a few years before people realized what a gold mine domain name squatting could be. Instead, I suspect most of the app name squatters are people who registered the name with the intention of making a real app, maybe registered similar names to prevent confusion, and then abandoned the project. (So, okay, they were in it for the money, but it was the money they hoped to make by selling the app, not by getting someone else to pay them for the name.) Similar things happened a lot in the early days of the web -- remember when there was a better than 50% chance that clicking on any random link would take you to an "under construction" banner? -- and to some degree they still happen on Sourceforge, although the system there is set up a little better to prevent the worst such stupidity.
It's the new methods of manipulating and studying them. I don't really see the problem.
The problem is the word "methods." Methods, of any kind -- business methods, software methods, scientific methods, etc. -- should never be patentable. Ever.
They want to build a specific machine that implements these methods, and patent that? Fine. But here's what they're claiming:
1. A method of growing a crystal of a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui comprising: (a) isolating a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui; (b) precipitating the 50S ribosomal subunit; (c) back-extracting or resuspending the precipitated 50S ribosomal subunit to obtain a solution; (d) seeding the back-extracted or resuspended solution of step (c); (e) growing a crystal of the 50S ribosomal subunit from the seeded solution of step (d) by vapor diffusion at room temperature; (f) harvesting the crystal from step (e); (g) stabilizing the harvested crystal by gradual transfer of said crystal into a series of solution containing high salt concentration of from about 1.2 M to 1.7 M; and (h) maintaining the crystal under high salt concentration, wherein the crystal (i) is untwinned, (ii) has an average thickness greater than about 15.mu.m, and (iii) diffracts X-rays to a resolution of at least 2.7.ANG..
2. The method of claim 1 further comprising: (i) flash freezing the crystal of step (h).
In short, they're patenting experimental protocols. This kind of patent is a blow at the fundamental processes of science.
The Majors are required by law to care only about shareholder profits.
All corporations, public and private are required to make only those profits they can make by, you know, following the law. Filing a fraudulent claim of copyright is illegal. Warner is committing fraud, and MySpace is acting as an accessory. Why is this so difficult for corporate apologists to understand?
MySpace is breaking the law, or at least acting as an accessory to Warner's fraudulent claim of copyright. They are also failing to provide a service which they claim to provide. It's not "whining" to bring this to public attention.
Anyone who pays attention to how science Nobels are awarded knows that they're generally given for older work which has shown to be important over time. So anyone who thinks the story is calling it a new discovery, and criticizes it on that basis, is pretty much making an ass of himself.
The key point here is that in order to be hired as a cyber-security expert in the private sector, you probably need to be an actual cyber-security expert.
That's as silly as saying that trucking companies are dependent on government because they don't build their own roads.
Except it's not silly at all to say that; it's a simple observation of the truth. And that basic truth -- that every major form of transportation we have is dependent on government -- should be remembered in discussions on building transportation infrastructure, instead of pretending that one form of transportation is Honest God-Fearing American Capitalism Hard At Work while another is Evil European Pinko Socialist Government Interference In The Free Market. Which is pretty much what the conversation seems to degenerate into every time rail is mentioned.
In 2006, which appears to be the most recent year for which figures are readily available, total government expenditures (federal, state, and local) on highways were almost $100 billion, while rail expenditures were a little over $1.5 billon. Please, please try to tell me that this doesn't constitute a massive subsidy -- a hell of a lot bigger than anything Amtrak gets, or ever will get -- to trucking and other industries that depend on highways for their existence.
Oh yeah -- air travel? A little under $42 billion. Again, this is a massive subsidy, and so far beyond anything that rail gets that there's really no comparison. So go ahead, bitch about Amtrak... but remember where your tax dollars are really going.
Well, the easy answer is that a joke that's funny the first time, or the tenth, isn't necessarily the funny the hudredth, or thousandth.
But there's more to it than that. If this specific project is a boondoggle, fine, make fun of it any way you want. The problem is with people who assume, in all seriousness, that because a fictional rail project in a sixteen-year-old cartoon was a risible boondoggle, a real rail project will be too. In short, people who can't distinguish between fiction and reality.
Cue the jackasses who actually think The Simpsons is a meaningful guide to transportation development.
(Closely akin to, and often the same as, the jackasses who think Jurassic Park is a guide to paleontology, or Gattaca is a guide to genetics.)
The Simpsons is a cartoon. It's fiction. It's a satire. It's a joke. Marge, Homer, Bart, and the rest are not real people. Springfield is not a real town. Reality does not work the same as animation. Does this help clear things up AT ALL?
I think it would operate a lot like amtrak... the us govt will sink tons of money into it and it will never come close to breaking even.
Kind of like airports and highways, yep.
Oh, but those are somehow magically different!
[sigh]
Actually, there is a difference. The federal government sinks tons of money into air and road travel, but it doesn't demand the kind of insane restrictions it imposes on rail (freight trains always get right-of-way over passenger trains, that kind of thing.) IOW, those systems aren't set up to fail the way Amtrak is. It's pretty impressive how well Amtrak manages to keep its major lines going when it has to deal with a system that is specifically designed not to work by anti-rail ideologues.
You know, you might have missed this key fact, but the Simpsons monorail episode is a sixteen-year-old CARTOON. When the hell are the anti-rail twits going to stop treating it like a serious guide to transportation issues?
Oh, right, we still have people who think Frankenstein was a guide to science. Never mind. Carry on, then.
Whereas airlines do everything all by their lonesome, right? No government assistance at all. Bold entrepeneurs, living the American dream, unlike those commie railroads.
GMAFB. Every major type of transportation -- air, road, rail, and water -- is dependent on public funds, in the US and everywhere else. Anti-rail zealots like to pretend that rail is inherently socialist and that air and road are inherently capitalist (water doesn't seem to enter into their thinking at all.) There's a deep irony here: the 19th-c. "rail barons" also liked to present themselves as bold, individualistic risk-takers, meanwhile sucking at the government teat.
When an airline builds and runs its own airport and ATC system, give me a call.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the Post and the News managed to maintain their separate identities under the Joint Operating Agreement, actually. There really was a loss when the latter shut down. No question, they dug their own graves, but it's still a shame.
Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.
Leaving aside the absurdity of the "liberal media" mantra in general... the Rocky Mountain News was known as Denver's conservative newspaper. And the more they tried to chase the Fox News crowd, the more their fortunes declined. Take that FWIW.
Oh, for God's sake. The undeniable corruption in the relationship between the medical manufacturing industry (drugs and devices) and the medical industry proper (physicians and other health care providers) is absurd, no one's denying that. Yes, there are serious problems. Yes, enormous amounts of money go to people who neither create new medical technologies nor provide them to patients. Yes, a lot of doctors are easily influenced by hot pharmacy reps in low-cut blouses. Yes, this leads to all sorts of injustice.
But at the end of the day, advances in medical technology still help people. Next time you get sick or injured, if you want to restrict yourself to the level of medical care that was available in, say, 1850, out some abstract sense of justice... go ahead. Nobody will stop you. But just during my nine years in patient care, from 1989 to 1998, I saw new devices and drugs that helped our patients get better come on the market at a dizzying pace. You'd better believe we were glad to have them, and our patients were too. Now I work on the research side of things, and while I know that there are a lot of parasites between "bench and bedside," in the long run I really don't care that much. What I care about is that something I do might, possibly, help patients recover who otherwise couldn't.
Also, I broke my leg rather badly four years ago, and I was lucky enough to get the absolute best orthopedic technology out there. I still have a chunk of titanium where bone ought to be, and it will still be there when they put me in the ground -- but before such technology was invented, I'd probably have been on crutches or at least a cane for the rest of my life. Guess which one I prefer? I don't know if my orthopod chose the brand of "nail" he did because he genuinely thought it was the best out there, or because some sweet young thing fluttered her eyelashes at him. What I do know is that it's very very good, substantially better than similar constructs I saw put into patients just a decade before my injury. And I'm not a member of "only the wealthiest" by any stretch of the imagination. Too bad dissolvable bone implants weren't on the market when it happened... if future patients with the same type of injury are luckier, then this is a good thing.
In medicine, as distinct from biology, "in situ" has long been used to mean "where it already is inside the patient's body," whether "it" is something that occurred internally (e.g. a tumor) or something that was introduced from outside (e.g. orthopedic equipment.) "Dissolvable in situ" is a phrase used to describe dissolving internal sutures, which is probably the precedent here. Sometimes it refers to things that definitely don't dissolve; as a military medic, I often ran across the usage "bullet left in situ" in older patient records... and that sure as hell constitutes "tampering," I think you'll agree. (This is much, much rarer in modern military medicine; most such records were those of retirees from the Korean War and WW2 eras, although it still does happen even today.) You may not like the usage, but it's standard enough now that calling it a "misuse" is a mistake.
I think the hostility against Red Hat comes from a couple of sources. First of all, they pretty much present themselves as a proprietary software company. Go to redhat.com and see how long it takes you to get to a place where you can download their software for free, or indeed, to get any information to the effect that their products are in fact F/OSS. Now, this is turning out to be a pretty sensible approach market-wise -- AFAIK they're really the only organization in the Linux world that's making a healthy profit off just selling Linux -- but it's not surprising that it pisses off the idealists. The fact that Fedora and CentOS exist doesn't affect this much, because there's no obvious connection. And anyone who's been following things for a while remembers that Red Hat wasn't always like this; there was a pretty abrupt change at the time of the Red Hat Linux --> RHEL / Fedora split.
Second, RPM just sucks compared to apt. The insane amount of time people have had to spend dealing with RPM's weirdnesses has led to a lot of hostility toward the company that created it.
Effectively, an EEC was already coming into existence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Trade restrictions were being eased or abolished, movement across borders was routine, and in general a sense of "European-ness," both economic and social, was developing to a degree not seen since the fall of Rome.
All of which did absolutely nothing to keep the major European powers from banding together to commit four years of mass suicide.
Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.
Feel free not to have the treatment if you get ALS. You know, For The Children and all.
Except that's not what will happen and you damn well know it. If you're diagnosed with a horrible and deadly disease, you will personally knock a million lunches out of a million hungry, adorable, big-eyed schoolkids' hands, and laugh at them while they cry, if that's what it takes to get you a cure.
Slashdot Mirror
These days, the leeches at the very top have learned to set things up so that they don't have any interest in the company's success: if the company does well, they get huge bonuses, and if it does poorly, they get "fired" with equally huge golden parachutes. The whole synergy idea is beloved of management theorists (i.e. people who have a special talent for stringing buzzwords together) but it bears a steadily decreasing relationship to how things happen in the real world.
Quite seriously, I suspect most of the squatters aren't in it for the money ... at least not yet. IIRC, it was a few years before people realized what a gold mine domain name squatting could be. Instead, I suspect most of the app name squatters are people who registered the name with the intention of making a real app, maybe registered similar names to prevent confusion, and then abandoned the project. (So, okay, they were in it for the money, but it was the money they hoped to make by selling the app, not by getting someone else to pay them for the name.) Similar things happened a lot in the early days of the web -- remember when there was a better than 50% chance that clicking on any random link would take you to an "under construction" banner? -- and to some degree they still happen on Sourceforge, although the system there is set up a little better to prevent the worst such stupidity.
Actual, physical devices. And that's it.
It's the new methods of manipulating and studying them. I don't really see the problem.
The problem is the word "methods." Methods, of any kind -- business methods, software methods, scientific methods, etc. -- should never be patentable. Ever.
They want to build a specific machine that implements these methods, and patent that? Fine. But here's what they're claiming:
1. A method of growing a crystal of a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui comprising: (a) isolating a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui; (b) precipitating the 50S ribosomal subunit; (c) back-extracting or resuspending the precipitated 50S ribosomal subunit to obtain a solution; (d) seeding the back-extracted or resuspended solution of step (c); (e) growing a crystal of the 50S ribosomal subunit from the seeded solution of step (d) by vapor diffusion at room temperature; (f) harvesting the crystal from step (e); (g) stabilizing the harvested crystal by gradual transfer of said crystal into a series of solution containing high salt concentration of from about 1.2 M to 1.7 M; and (h) maintaining the crystal under high salt concentration, wherein the crystal (i) is untwinned, (ii) has an average thickness greater than about 15 .mu.m, and (iii) diffracts X-rays to a resolution of at least 2.7 .ANG..
2. The method of claim 1 further comprising: (i) flash freezing the crystal of step (h).
In short, they're patenting experimental protocols. This kind of patent is a blow at the fundamental processes of science.
Kind of spoils the importance of the discovery, guys.
The importance of the discovery was spoiled when something that should never have been patentable was patented.
And yes, I understand the patents too.
The Majors are required by law to care only about shareholder profits.
All corporations, public and private are required to make only those profits they can make by, you know, following the law. Filing a fraudulent claim of copyright is illegal. Warner is committing fraud, and MySpace is acting as an accessory. Why is this so difficult for corporate apologists to understand?
whining about MySpace's policies
MySpace is breaking the law, or at least acting as an accessory to Warner's fraudulent claim of copyright. They are also failing to provide a service which they claim to provide. It's not "whining" to bring this to public attention.
At least in private enterprise, this is somewhat moderated by the need for more profit.
Wow, you genuinely believe that, don't you?
Anyone who pays attention to how science Nobels are awarded knows that they're generally given for older work which has shown to be important over time. So anyone who thinks the story is calling it a new discovery, and criticizes it on that basis, is pretty much making an ass of himself.
Let us know when the exact number of available IPv4 addresses is in dispute. A comparison to oil in this context is absurd.
The key point here is that in order to be hired as a cyber-security expert in the private sector, you probably need to be an actual cyber-security expert.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
That's as silly as saying that trucking companies are dependent on government because they don't build their own roads.
Except it's not silly at all to say that; it's a simple observation of the truth. And that basic truth -- that every major form of transportation we have is dependent on government -- should be remembered in discussions on building transportation infrastructure, instead of pretending that one form of transportation is Honest God-Fearing American Capitalism Hard At Work while another is Evil European Pinko Socialist Government Interference In The Free Market. Which is pretty much what the conversation seems to degenerate into every time rail is mentioned.
In 2006, which appears to be the most recent year for which figures are readily available, total government expenditures (federal, state, and local) on highways were almost $100 billion, while rail expenditures were a little over $1.5 billon. Please, please try to tell me that this doesn't constitute a massive subsidy -- a hell of a lot bigger than anything Amtrak gets, or ever will get -- to trucking and other industries that depend on highways for their existence.
Oh yeah -- air travel? A little under $42 billion. Again, this is a massive subsidy, and so far beyond anything that rail gets that there's really no comparison. So go ahead, bitch about Amtrak ... but remember where your tax dollars are really going.
Well, the easy answer is that a joke that's funny the first time, or the tenth, isn't necessarily the funny the hudredth, or thousandth.
But there's more to it than that. If this specific project is a boondoggle, fine, make fun of it any way you want. The problem is with people who assume, in all seriousness, that because a fictional rail project in a sixteen-year-old cartoon was a risible boondoggle, a real rail project will be too. In short, people who can't distinguish between fiction and reality.
Cue the Simpson's Monorail song!
Cue the jackasses who actually think The Simpsons is a meaningful guide to transportation development.
(Closely akin to, and often the same as, the jackasses who think Jurassic Park is a guide to paleontology, or Gattaca is a guide to genetics.)
The Simpsons is a cartoon. It's fiction. It's a satire. It's a joke. Marge, Homer, Bart, and the rest are not real people. Springfield is not a real town. Reality does not work the same as animation. Does this help clear things up AT ALL?
I think it would operate a lot like amtrak... the us govt will sink tons of money into it and it will never come close to breaking even.
Kind of like airports and highways, yep.
Oh, but those are somehow magically different!
[sigh]
Actually, there is a difference. The federal government sinks tons of money into air and road travel, but it doesn't demand the kind of insane restrictions it imposes on rail (freight trains always get right-of-way over passenger trains, that kind of thing.) IOW, those systems aren't set up to fail the way Amtrak is. It's pretty impressive how well Amtrak manages to keep its major lines going when it has to deal with a system that is specifically designed not to work by anti-rail ideologues.
You know, you might have missed this key fact, but the Simpsons monorail episode is a sixteen-year-old CARTOON. When the hell are the anti-rail twits going to stop treating it like a serious guide to transportation issues?
Oh, right, we still have people who think Frankenstein was a guide to science. Never mind. Carry on, then.
Whereas airlines do everything all by their lonesome, right? No government assistance at all. Bold entrepeneurs, living the American dream, unlike those commie railroads.
GMAFB. Every major type of transportation -- air, road, rail, and water -- is dependent on public funds, in the US and everywhere else. Anti-rail zealots like to pretend that rail is inherently socialist and that air and road are inherently capitalist (water doesn't seem to enter into their thinking at all.) There's a deep irony here: the 19th-c. "rail barons" also liked to present themselves as bold, individualistic risk-takers, meanwhile sucking at the government teat.
When an airline builds and runs its own airport and ATC system, give me a call.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the Post and the News managed to maintain their separate identities under the Joint Operating Agreement, actually. There really was a loss when the latter shut down. No question, they dug their own graves, but it's still a shame.
Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.
Leaving aside the absurdity of the "liberal media" mantra in general ... the Rocky Mountain News was known as Denver's conservative newspaper. And the more they tried to chase the Fox News crowd, the more their fortunes declined. Take that FWIW.
Oh, for God's sake. The undeniable corruption in the relationship between the medical manufacturing industry (drugs and devices) and the medical industry proper (physicians and other health care providers) is absurd, no one's denying that. Yes, there are serious problems. Yes, enormous amounts of money go to people who neither create new medical technologies nor provide them to patients. Yes, a lot of doctors are easily influenced by hot pharmacy reps in low-cut blouses. Yes, this leads to all sorts of injustice.
But at the end of the day, advances in medical technology still help people. Next time you get sick or injured, if you want to restrict yourself to the level of medical care that was available in, say, 1850, out some abstract sense of justice ... go ahead. Nobody will stop you. But just during my nine years in patient care, from 1989 to 1998, I saw new devices and drugs that helped our patients get better come on the market at a dizzying pace. You'd better believe we were glad to have them, and our patients were too. Now I work on the research side of things, and while I know that there are a lot of parasites between "bench and bedside," in the long run I really don't care that much. What I care about is that something I do might, possibly, help patients recover who otherwise couldn't.
Also, I broke my leg rather badly four years ago, and I was lucky enough to get the absolute best orthopedic technology out there. I still have a chunk of titanium where bone ought to be, and it will still be there when they put me in the ground -- but before such technology was invented, I'd probably have been on crutches or at least a cane for the rest of my life. Guess which one I prefer? I don't know if my orthopod chose the brand of "nail" he did because he genuinely thought it was the best out there, or because some sweet young thing fluttered her eyelashes at him. What I do know is that it's very very good, substantially better than similar constructs I saw put into patients just a decade before my injury. And I'm not a member of "only the wealthiest" by any stretch of the imagination. Too bad dissolvable bone implants weren't on the market when it happened ... if future patients with the same type of injury are luckier, then this is a good thing.
In medicine, as distinct from biology, "in situ" has long been used to mean "where it already is inside the patient's body," whether "it" is something that occurred internally (e.g. a tumor) or something that was introduced from outside (e.g. orthopedic equipment.) "Dissolvable in situ" is a phrase used to describe dissolving internal sutures, which is probably the precedent here. Sometimes it refers to things that definitely don't dissolve; as a military medic, I often ran across the usage "bullet left in situ" in older patient records ... and that sure as hell constitutes "tampering," I think you'll agree. (This is much, much rarer in modern military medicine; most such records were those of retirees from the Korean War and WW2 eras, although it still does happen even today.) You may not like the usage, but it's standard enough now that calling it a "misuse" is a mistake.
I think the hostility against Red Hat comes from a couple of sources. First of all, they pretty much present themselves as a proprietary software company. Go to redhat.com and see how long it takes you to get to a place where you can download their software for free, or indeed, to get any information to the effect that their products are in fact F/OSS. Now, this is turning out to be a pretty sensible approach market-wise -- AFAIK they're really the only organization in the Linux world that's making a healthy profit off just selling Linux -- but it's not surprising that it pisses off the idealists. The fact that Fedora and CentOS exist doesn't affect this much, because there's no obvious connection. And anyone who's been following things for a while remembers that Red Hat wasn't always like this; there was a pretty abrupt change at the time of the Red Hat Linux --> RHEL / Fedora split.
Second, RPM just sucks compared to apt. The insane amount of time people have had to spend dealing with RPM's weirdnesses has led to a lot of hostility toward the company that created it.
And when she moves super-fast with her cyborg powers, she has to make a "nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh" sound. Otherwise it's not real.
Effectively, an EEC was already coming into existence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Trade restrictions were being eased or abolished, movement across borders was routine, and in general a sense of "European-ness," both economic and social, was developing to a degree not seen since the fall of Rome.
All of which did absolutely nothing to keep the major European powers from banding together to commit four years of mass suicide.
Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.
Feel free not to have the treatment if you get ALS. You know, For The Children and all.
Except that's not what will happen and you damn well know it. If you're diagnosed with a horrible and deadly disease, you will personally knock a million lunches out of a million hungry, adorable, big-eyed schoolkids' hands, and laugh at them while they cry, if that's what it takes to get you a cure.