I bought a HP Pavilion dv6 15.4" widescreen laptop about a year ago. It has a full sized keyboard with numpad, 1080p screen, core i5, 6gb ram... The build quality is amazing; I don't think anyone makes a higher quality laptop than this. You should be able to pick one up for less $1000.
I'm not following the discussion but I saw your comment about "Gran Turismo" meets "The Fast and the Furious". This is "Need For Speed: Underground" which was a blast to play.
Medicare and Social Security are funded separately from the rest of the budget and still have a hefty surplus of funds on paper but the federal government kept borrowing money from it until there wasn't any left. The payroll tax cuts are directly cutting funding from those two programs as well. How is the budget cut to NASA at all related to SS and M? Maybe you think they should have had MORE money available for the federal government to borrow to pay for other stuff like the NASA mission.
or a penchant for misleading the public into believing falsehoods that promote his own personal desires. Even if they manage to collect accurate data I could definitely see Rupert manipulating the data or how it's interpreted to tell the public his own narrative of what needs to be changed in education.
Blaming HAARP for weird weather isn't brainless. That's how the program was sold to the US military, unless you want to admit that the Pentagon was brainless. The reality seems to be that the scientists wanted funding and knew that the military is gullible.
I thought he was covertly bashing US foreign policy until he mentioned Russia in the second paragraph:). As far as I know, even the Russian generals liked us. The cold war was a superpower rivalry if anything else. Who can get into space first? Who can build a nuclear bomb first? Who can invade Japan first? Who can collapse their economy first!
Please please anonymously submit a complaint to your congressman about this issue. I'm absolutely sick of seeing the government write horrible contracts. How the hell do they manage to do this with so many lawyers working for them?
You are aware that Bush was increasing the debt during an economic boom and Obama is increasing it during a recession, right? Tax revenue is the main difference between those two situations.
Also, debt only became an "important" issue to congress once Obama took office even though Bush's policies are responsible for a majority of the debt growth during Obama's term in office. If one wants to see an accurate accounting of who raised the debt and who lowered it they need to take into account the economic conditions and policy decisions made by each president as some decisions have longer lasting effects and longer delays before they impact the economy. A simple but rough accounting would be to look at the budget office's 10 year forecast during a president's term in office as those at least try to deal with the long term implications of policy decisions.
Why does the prisoner need a new 360. The first 3 years of production had no built-in wireless. Also, the 360 has no web browser and in fact all forms of Internet connectivity goes through xbox live so MS would just have to ban the console and that would be end of story for anyone but a firmware engineer or seasoned hacker.
"non-gm plants" is not rice exclusive meaning any crop nearby has a.04-.8% chance of acquiring genes from the rice which make it almost certain that the genes will flow to another crop considering the scale of production required to make this gm-rice useful to hospitals. They would have to isolate this rice in order to ensure that the genetic modification didn't flow to another crop. Unless of course we don't care if that happens but that would require lots of trials to determine.
Immediate feedback only encourages trial and error if the feedback is a pass/fail. I used a program in college for learning chemistry and if you got the answer wrong it told you why you were wrong, explained the underlying concept and then asked you a different question that tested the same principles as the first one. This type of feedback is impossible without a computer or a personal tutor and far superior to anything a teacher can provide for a class with more than a couple students.
OMSI in Portland Oregon in the USA has a public and free solar charging station for any electronic devices (lockers keep the devices safe), cars and even electric bicycles. It's owned by OMSI though so maybe that's why they think the Belgrade station is the "first" public charging station.
1. Do you know of any specific cases that I could look up where the EU court invalidated the patent? I know of at least one in the U.S. but they had very good reason to invalidate the patent so I'm not sure if the examples you're thinking of actually support your case for eliminating software patents but rather eliminating bad ones.
2. The Europe wide law mentioned in that wikipedia article was enacted in the 1970's btw. The countries it applies to still have to obey it even if the EU has failed to adopt a new patent system.
3. Yes I have actually worked on business/industry software and first and foremost, although the software is tailored for each customer it relies heavily on a repository of code built up over the years. And yes, it is extremely expensive to create custom tailored software even it it's mostly built from reusable code. All the testing has do be done again. All the pieces have to be reconfigured to work together in the new system. Whenever possible companies avoid customizing their software, even when their customer is willing to pay extra; profit margins are the prime motivator, always.
4? I think you're missing the key point here. The law isn't enforced in another country, it's enforced in the country that made the law. Where's the diplomatic issues? Where's the jurisdictional issues?
I really don't see how any of those things are rewarded by software patents any more than any other type of patent. Maybe if slashdot covered stuff that had no relation to software then we'd know more about other types of patent trolling. I do specifically remember one patent "troll" suing basically every game controller designer under the sun for violating some patent that just specified a device held in the hand consisting of multiple buttons to control a game apparatus, maybe you remember that one as well so I don't have to dig it up.
I suggest reading about software patents as there is a section explaining the important differences between patents and copyright as it makes perfect sense to let both cover software as they don't actually overlap. Also you might notice the section on European Patent laws upholding software patents.
As far as my cluelessness goes, I can tell you aren't actually a programmer, at least not one who's worked on a large project. It is infeasible to create a complex piece of software with multiple implementations to serve different markets. The amount of work needed to branch the code just to allow patent violations would cost more than it's worth in a majority of cases. Also, I'm not sure on the finer details of patent law but I know of laws in at least China and the US which ban companies from doing business in these countries if they don't adhere to the requirements of those laws, regardless of where they are head-quartered or violate the law. I just assumed such a thing applied to I.P. laws but maybe I was mistaken.
You're arguing about the level of detail in the patent, not the existence of the patent. If a software patent is written poorly or overly ambiguously it should be rejected by the patent office so I agree with you there. Now if a software patent is written in just the right amount of clarity to reveal a truly innovative software concept then the patent should be granted, is this where we disagree?
As far as your globalization argument goes. Yes, there's a serious issue with countries that don't respect patent/copyright laws which our politicians are currently trying to solve. Software patents and copyrights are infringed upon all the time in foreign markets, even where there is enforcement of US patent/copyright laws. Most or maybe even all large corporations are located or do business in countries that respect these laws however, so they are required to obey intellectual property laws.
Normal patents don't work like that. If I invented a stool made of wood and patented the design of the stool but then someone used my same design but made it out of metal, they would still be infringing on my patent unless I was dumb enough to specify wood in my patent. The exact implementation is the only thing that's copyrightable whereas patents are designed specifically to protect innovative ideas which can and do occur in software.
If we abolished software patents big companies would just constantly copy the ideas of smaller companies but using their branding, huge marketing and R&D budgets, crush the smaller companies in the market preventing anyone else from ever being successful.
Software patents aren't the problem, just our implementation of them.
The PS3 has 7 cores and game developers are making good use of them. The 360 has 3 and the game developers are making even better use of them. I have a quad core and even Portal 2 makes use of all of my cores. What you say was true back in 2007 when the first quad-core came out and the Cell was just starting to get used but multi-threaded applications are the norm now, at least in the computation and gaming markets.
Also, hz is not all that matters when it comes to CPU's. Heck, it's barely relevant unless comparing within the exact same production run of CPU's but this is all pretty obvious by looking at game benchmarks for PC. Check out this one for Farcry 2 which was released what, 3 years ago?.
I don't know where you're getting these performance percentages but as far as I know there hasn't been any slowdown in performance improvements when measured against time.
The Kindle reading application officially runs on MacOSX, WIndows, Android and iOS but it also works fine on linux running in Wine. I've got it installed right now in Ubuntu 10.10. And yes, it automatically syncs your reading across all OS's/devices.
The only downside is that it doesn't support Adobe's DRM which is what Overdrive uses. If you haven't heard of Overdrive, it's what most public libraries use for serving eBooks.
First sentence of this article from wired: "...an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1,000 times...".
I guess you said "much serious abuse of the law" which is full of qualifiers, making it hard to tell what kind of abuse would be excessive for you.
What's sad yet amusing is that the ACLU's report on the abuses talks about many instances of the FBI going beyond what the patriot act allows. At least the ACLU got them to slacken their use of gag orders though.
Hopefully at least some of my reps will vote it down once it hits the floor for a vote.
Thanks for posting this on Slashdot. I don't think it's being covered in any mainstream news media outlet.
In a related note, has anyone noticed how obnoxious it has become to contact congress? I had to fill out a different web form for each congressman and the one for the house asked me for my full 10 digit zip, twice! It still only took about 15 minutes which is fully worth it for this issue.
The law of gravity should not be confused with the force of gravity. The article writer made a horrendous assertion that they were the same and that somehow a scientific law was wrong "some of the time". Journalists shouldn't write about what they don't understand as it can be quite damaging to the public at large. I wish he had made that assertion in the first paragraph rather than the last so that I could have saved myself from reading 5 pages of supposition.
Yep, it's possible it might get out but I think you're over estimating the benefit the CC company would have from divulging a phone-call about a perfectly legal tactic used by our government. I also doubt anyone low in the company like an intern would have a clue as to why service was blocked to a company.
Isn't it odd that the CC companies have been dead silent on why they terminated their contracts with Wikileak's financial holding company? If it was purely a legal matter they would probably have said so by now.
My whole point here is that we're all just speculating until something gets leaked to wikileaks:).
Your last few paragraphs are very convincing. The potential ramifications, however unlikely they are to occur, make it way too risky for the CC companies to not cut ties with Wikileaks. Thank you for the explanation.
Something to note is the fact that if the government wanted to force the CC companies to break ties with Wikileaks, they would threaten to use some vaguely written law like RICO. I'm not saying that's the case but it's how someone in our government would go about pressuring companies to do something for them since it's up to our government to prosecute criminal cases.
Actually, I meant citing:). I'm surprised that accusations are enough to make someone liable under RICO. I'm also wondering what credible accusations have been made against wikileaks; so far Assange has been accused of breaking the law but Wikileaks has not, at least not by someone credible.
Speculating that the CC companies are speculating that they might at least have some legal issues due to RICO doesn't seem that much more credible to me than the government going after Wikileaks in any way they can after they've made it abundantly clear that they don't like what Wikileaks did/does. I really can't see why one would be certain of the reasons for what the CC companies did.
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I bought a HP Pavilion dv6 15.4" widescreen laptop about a year ago. It has a full sized keyboard with numpad, 1080p screen, core i5, 6gb ram... The build quality is amazing; I don't think anyone makes a higher quality laptop than this. You should be able to pick one up for less $1000.
I'm not following the discussion but I saw your comment about "Gran Turismo" meets "The Fast and the Furious". This is "Need For Speed: Underground" which was a blast to play.
Medicare and Social Security are funded separately from the rest of the budget and still have a hefty surplus of funds on paper but the federal government kept borrowing money from it until there wasn't any left. The payroll tax cuts are directly cutting funding from those two programs as well. How is the budget cut to NASA at all related to SS and M? Maybe you think they should have had MORE money available for the federal government to borrow to pay for other stuff like the NASA mission.
or a penchant for misleading the public into believing falsehoods that promote his own personal desires. Even if they manage to collect accurate data I could definitely see Rupert manipulating the data or how it's interpreted to tell the public his own narrative of what needs to be changed in education.
Blaming HAARP for weird weather isn't brainless. That's how the program was sold to the US military, unless you want to admit that the Pentagon was brainless. The reality seems to be that the scientists wanted funding and knew that the military is gullible.
I thought he was covertly bashing US foreign policy until he mentioned Russia in the second paragraph :). As far as I know, even the Russian generals liked us. The cold war was a superpower rivalry if anything else. Who can get into space first? Who can build a nuclear bomb first? Who can invade Japan first? Who can collapse their economy first!
Thanks for actually pointing out something tangible that is wrong with the video.
Please please anonymously submit a complaint to your congressman about this issue. I'm absolutely sick of seeing the government write horrible contracts. How the hell do they manage to do this with so many lawyers working for them?
You are aware that Bush was increasing the debt during an economic boom and Obama is increasing it during a recession, right? Tax revenue is the main difference between those two situations.
Also, debt only became an "important" issue to congress once Obama took office even though Bush's policies are responsible for a majority of the debt growth during Obama's term in office. If one wants to see an accurate accounting of who raised the debt and who lowered it they need to take into account the economic conditions and policy decisions made by each president as some decisions have longer lasting effects and longer delays before they impact the economy. A simple but rough accounting would be to look at the budget office's 10 year forecast during a president's term in office as those at least try to deal with the long term implications of policy decisions.
Why does the prisoner need a new 360. The first 3 years of production had no built-in wireless. Also, the 360 has no web browser and in fact all forms of Internet connectivity goes through xbox live so MS would just have to ban the console and that would be end of story for anyone but a firmware engineer or seasoned hacker.
"non-gm plants" is not rice exclusive meaning any crop nearby has a .04-.8% chance of acquiring genes from the rice which make it almost certain that the genes will flow to another crop considering the scale of production required to make this gm-rice useful to hospitals. They would have to isolate this rice in order to ensure that the genetic modification didn't flow to another crop. Unless of course we don't care if that happens but that would require lots of trials to determine.
Immediate feedback only encourages trial and error if the feedback is a pass/fail. I used a program in college for learning chemistry and if you got the answer wrong it told you why you were wrong, explained the underlying concept and then asked you a different question that tested the same principles as the first one. This type of feedback is impossible without a computer or a personal tutor and far superior to anything a teacher can provide for a class with more than a couple students.
OMSI in Portland Oregon in the USA has a public and free solar charging station for any electronic devices (lockers keep the devices safe), cars and even electric bicycles. It's owned by OMSI though so maybe that's why they think the Belgrade station is the "first" public charging station.
1. Do you know of any specific cases that I could look up where the EU court invalidated the patent? I know of at least one in the U.S. but they had very good reason to invalidate the patent so I'm not sure if the examples you're thinking of actually support your case for eliminating software patents but rather eliminating bad ones.
2. The Europe wide law mentioned in that wikipedia article was enacted in the 1970's btw. The countries it applies to still have to obey it even if the EU has failed to adopt a new patent system.
3. Yes I have actually worked on business/industry software and first and foremost, although the software is tailored for each customer it relies heavily on a repository of code built up over the years. And yes, it is extremely expensive to create custom tailored software even it it's mostly built from reusable code. All the testing has do be done again. All the pieces have to be reconfigured to work together in the new system. Whenever possible companies avoid customizing their software, even when their customer is willing to pay extra; profit margins are the prime motivator, always.
4? I think you're missing the key point here. The law isn't enforced in another country, it's enforced in the country that made the law. Where's the diplomatic issues? Where's the jurisdictional issues?
I really don't see how any of those things are rewarded by software patents any more than any other type of patent. Maybe if slashdot covered stuff that had no relation to software then we'd know more about other types of patent trolling. I do specifically remember one patent "troll" suing basically every game controller designer under the sun for violating some patent that just specified a device held in the hand consisting of multiple buttons to control a game apparatus, maybe you remember that one as well so I don't have to dig it up.
I suggest reading about software patents as there is a section explaining the important differences between patents and copyright as it makes perfect sense to let both cover software as they don't actually overlap. Also you might notice the section on European Patent laws upholding software patents.
As far as my cluelessness goes, I can tell you aren't actually a programmer, at least not one who's worked on a large project. It is infeasible to create a complex piece of software with multiple implementations to serve different markets. The amount of work needed to branch the code just to allow patent violations would cost more than it's worth in a majority of cases. Also, I'm not sure on the finer details of patent law but I know of laws in at least China and the US which ban companies from doing business in these countries if they don't adhere to the requirements of those laws, regardless of where they are head-quartered or violate the law. I just assumed such a thing applied to I.P. laws but maybe I was mistaken.
You're arguing about the level of detail in the patent, not the existence of the patent. If a software patent is written poorly or overly ambiguously it should be rejected by the patent office so I agree with you there. Now if a software patent is written in just the right amount of clarity to reveal a truly innovative software concept then the patent should be granted, is this where we disagree?
As far as your globalization argument goes. Yes, there's a serious issue with countries that don't respect patent/copyright laws which our politicians are currently trying to solve. Software patents and copyrights are infringed upon all the time in foreign markets, even where there is enforcement of US patent/copyright laws. Most or maybe even all large corporations are located or do business in countries that respect these laws however, so they are required to obey intellectual property laws.
Normal patents don't work like that. If I invented a stool made of wood and patented the design of the stool but then someone used my same design but made it out of metal, they would still be infringing on my patent unless I was dumb enough to specify wood in my patent. The exact implementation is the only thing that's copyrightable whereas patents are designed specifically to protect innovative ideas which can and do occur in software.
If we abolished software patents big companies would just constantly copy the ideas of smaller companies but using their branding, huge marketing and R&D budgets, crush the smaller companies in the market preventing anyone else from ever being successful.
Software patents aren't the problem, just our implementation of them.
The PS3 has 7 cores and game developers are making good use of them. The 360 has 3 and the game developers are making even better use of them. I have a quad core and even Portal 2 makes use of all of my cores. What you say was true back in 2007 when the first quad-core came out and the Cell was just starting to get used but multi-threaded applications are the norm now, at least in the computation and gaming markets.
Also, hz is not all that matters when it comes to CPU's. Heck, it's barely relevant unless comparing within the exact same production run of CPU's but this is all pretty obvious by looking at game benchmarks for PC. Check out this one for Farcry 2 which was released what, 3 years ago?.
I don't know where you're getting these performance percentages but as far as I know there hasn't been any slowdown in performance improvements when measured against time.
The Kindle reading application officially runs on MacOSX, WIndows, Android and iOS but it also works fine on linux running in Wine. I've got it installed right now in Ubuntu 10.10. And yes, it automatically syncs your reading across all OS's/devices. The only downside is that it doesn't support Adobe's DRM which is what Overdrive uses. If you haven't heard of Overdrive, it's what most public libraries use for serving eBooks.
First sentence of this article from wired: "...an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1,000 times...".
I guess you said "much serious abuse of the law" which is full of qualifiers, making it hard to tell what kind of abuse would be excessive for you.
What's sad yet amusing is that the ACLU's report on the abuses talks about many instances of the FBI going beyond what the patriot act allows. At least the ACLU got them to slacken their use of gag orders though.
Hopefully at least some of my reps will vote it down once it hits the floor for a vote.
Thanks for posting this on Slashdot. I don't think it's being covered in any mainstream news media outlet.
In a related note, has anyone noticed how obnoxious it has become to contact congress? I had to fill out a different web form for each congressman and the one for the house asked me for my full 10 digit zip, twice! It still only took about 15 minutes which is fully worth it for this issue.
The law of gravity should not be confused with the force of gravity. The article writer made a horrendous assertion that they were the same and that somehow a scientific law was wrong "some of the time". Journalists shouldn't write about what they don't understand as it can be quite damaging to the public at large. I wish he had made that assertion in the first paragraph rather than the last so that I could have saved myself from reading 5 pages of supposition.
Yep, it's possible it might get out but I think you're over estimating the benefit the CC company would have from divulging a phone-call about a perfectly legal tactic used by our government. I also doubt anyone low in the company like an intern would have a clue as to why service was blocked to a company.
:).
Isn't it odd that the CC companies have been dead silent on why they terminated their contracts with Wikileak's financial holding company? If it was purely a legal matter they would probably have said so by now.
My whole point here is that we're all just speculating until something gets leaked to wikileaks
Your last few paragraphs are very convincing. The potential ramifications, however unlikely they are to occur, make it way too risky for the CC companies to not cut ties with Wikileaks. Thank you for the explanation.
Something to note is the fact that if the government wanted to force the CC companies to break ties with Wikileaks, they would threaten to use some vaguely written law like RICO. I'm not saying that's the case but it's how someone in our government would go about pressuring companies to do something for them since it's up to our government to prosecute criminal cases.
Actually, I meant citing :). I'm surprised that accusations are enough to make someone liable under RICO. I'm also wondering what credible accusations have been made against wikileaks; so far Assange has been accused of breaking the law but Wikileaks has not, at least not by someone credible.
Speculating that the CC companies are speculating that they might at least have some legal issues due to RICO doesn't seem that much more credible to me than the government going after Wikileaks in any way they can after they've made it abundantly clear that they don't like what Wikileaks did/does. I really can't see why one would be certain of the reasons for what the CC companies did.