I think of 4chan because it reminds me that, on a large scale, people who do not care about consequences will do whatever they see as fun.
Any fee becomes a barrier to entry that's effective against someone who stumbles across a piece of prior art, but likely won't stop anyone intent on disrupting the system. $10 to send 4000 goatse links to patent examiners is a worthwhile expense to some folks. These are the same folks who wouldn't care about a reputation system, because they don't care about having a good reputation with the USPTO. That reputation system itself would become a problem, as claims of corruption and fraud arise, and the cost of maintaining the system goes up.
But even Google combining multiple search types doesn't make them covered by the patent, as the patent claims specifically require that results be grouped based on having similar metadata. That's the key innovation that makes this patent reasonable. Google could meet the patent if its results list came back saying "We have this set of results about European trains, this set about model trains, this set about wedding dress trains, and this set about Thomas the Tank Engine porn."
Unfortunately, 99.9% of that "prior art" wouldn't actually fit the patent claims, and would be more along the lines of "art that does a similar job differently, and probably happened before the patent". The remaining 0.1% would be mostly things already included in the patent as prior art, but the submitter didn't bother to check that.
Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.
Software people are happy to use more resources to do the same work.
I suggest you look into demoscene. Given some particularly small limit (such as 64kB persistent storage), they make real-time rendered videos. Efficient use of resources means more detail in the final video, and that's a major goal.
I certainly can't deny that there are some programmers who will happily waste resources on bad algorithms. Such cases are well-documented and laughed at by those who aim to be better.
Object-oriented programming, when done correctly, makes finding fast algorithms easier. Object-oriented programs, when compiled correctly, are just as efficient as imperative programs, because the instructions relating to objects (such as extra jumps for simple accessors) have been optimized away by the compiler.
Of course, this is only when applied by competent programmers. OOP makes finding algorithms easier because it's more intuitive, but that also means that less skilled programmers can find inefficient algorithms more easily, as well. Then management approves those bad algorithms, and users get saddled with slow programs again.
...using a random generator like Mersenne twister wouldn't work...
Now, for the mathematicians in the room: What is the probability that the particular string of length 11621 that corresponds to a particular work of Shakespeare is one of the ~2^20000 possible sequences from the Mersenne twister?
As a programmer of several "stupid computer tricks" myself (like a filesystem driver for mounting IRC!), I am very appreciative for the fast computers that let us simulate very complex systems very quickly. I understand that it is my responsibility, as a software engineer, to use that speed and memory efficiently to optimize the results of the simulation.
This project has generated better illustrative proof than ever before that randomness will eventually produce everything. This is often a difficult concept for non-mathematical people to accept, so a nice example is always welcome among those who seek to educate. It is also worth noting that this project is running on Hadoop, which is not yet considered stable. While monkeys type Shakespeare, they also find bugs, stress-test releases, and educate at least one programmer. After such a test, Hadoop is much more favorable as a platform for more "real computing work" projects, like processing medical records looking for previously-unknown medication side effects.
While on the subject of "real computing work", please note that all nontrivial computation is done by software, and that all software can run on a Turing machine as designed in 1937. Those hardware engineers are doing real electrical engineering work, making circuits run with less power and smaller size. Those chemical engineers are doing real chemistry work, making semiconductors that can switch faster and at lower voltage. The software engineers are doing real computing work, finding fast algorithms and optimizing processes.
So we're to believe that eating sterile food means we'll become sterile after only three generations of inbreeding? Well, gee... good thing we haven't had seedless fruits for very long, and thank goodness we haven't been breeding food to be grotesquely large, or anything like that!
What you didn't read is the chance that that hazard will actually manifest, and the comparison between that chance and the chance of getting whatever the disease is preventing. Then there's the severity of side effects to consider... The worst likely side effect of most vaccines is discomfort for up to a few days. The worst likely side effect of many vaccine-preventable diseases is death.
Alex Jones is just as bad as Fox News. He presents only facts that support his particular crazy theory, and ignores every bit of information that doesn't. That one of his bits of almost-credible information has some superficial similarity to actual science doesn't change anything.
But this is Slashdot! Everything's the government's fault, or Microsoft's, or Apple's! If you apply the slightest bit of common sense and it affects somebody's perception of some imaginary human right (like the right to have everything you do remain private, regardless of where you do it, or whether you did anything to keep such actions private at the time), then you're part of the problem, too!
Being far too lazy to look up the actual codes, it's something like a combination of rhabdomyolysis + self-inflicted + religion. I think there's an E code for religion...
"On the date in question I was on vacation, on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic. My cat was being fed by <someone else>".
Investigators don't magically know the end of the evidence trail. Show reasonable evidence that you're not the one at fault, and they won't likely even try to build a case against you. Conversely, of course, if you show hostility toward investigators they're going to assume you have something to hide, and that may or may not be related to their case, so they'll try harder to find it.
If I were being questioned, I'd make a basic attempt to cooperate, being fully aware that whatever I say may be used to screw me over. There may be an easy explanation that satisfies the investigators. If they did start asking questions where my answer could, in whole or in part, incriminate me, I'd say I'd like to have a lawyer to help me explain the situation properly.
Police aren't machines. They're people. Be calm, courteous, and reasonably helpful, and they'll treat you well in return. That's how society usually works.
Why does a high-school kid need to earn $30/hour again?
Because with the public schools, PBS, and most community services on the verge of shutting down from lack of funding, he already has to start saving up for his kid's private education.
Not more than two days ago, my wife (a librarian) saw a color e-reader (using a backlit LCD), and mentioned that it'd be great for children's books. I said that e-ink was probably a better option, because the reader could use less power when a distracted kid leaves it turned on. Now, there's hope for the benefits of both!
Reading the actual MagSafe patent and the fryer patent, I find that it's not so much anything that didn't exist before, but rather the removal of an unnecessary feature (a heat-conducting probe) that separates the two inventions. Note that the fryer patent is the third item of prior art in the MagSafe patent.
He wouldn't be licensing a patented invention. He'd be licensing a "patent pending" invention, with the license likely continuing once the patent is granted.
You can if the original patents specifically exclude the new material. If the original inventor thought that the material was important enough that no other material would do, the original material would be included in the patent claims. Going off the shoehorn example, the original patent would have to include some requirement that the shoehorn be made from, for example, polished wood, to meet some need for flexibility and friction. A flexible plastic shoehorn won't meet the requirements of such a claim, so it could be patented.
Since patents are public sources and assumed to be visible to everyone, it is likely to affect the test for obviousness, of course, so it's not very likely that you will get a patent on "X made from Y", but you can.
You're either trolling terribly or just terribly ignorant. In the hopes of the latter:
The Apache Foundation maintains many open-source software projects, one of which is a popular web server. Another is Hadoop, which is a distributed file system for storing huge amounts of data on a cluster of individual computers, based on Google's Google File System and other similar technologies.. To facilitate access to that data, there are other projects that function as databases, with the actual information stored in Hadoop. One existing project is HBase, which is an implementation of a system (called BigTable) described by Google. Now, the NSA has donated the source code for their own such database (also based on BigTable) to the Apache Foundation.
Now, there are a lot of Apache Foundation projects, and never enough time or people to maintain them all completely. The best projects are considered "mature", and the ones that aren't up to the normal Apache levels of quality and support and considered to be in "incubation". Someday, if enough people like Accumulo and help with it, it will mature.
But other companies and individuals that produce works do get copyright. While they may give the government (and even the NSA) a license to use their works, the government can't just donate those works off to Apache without clearing it first. That means any code the NSA didn't write themselves needs to be removed, replaced, or also donated by the owner.
I'm going to type this post without using the backspace or delete keys at all. In fact, no editing as I type whatsoever, which is pretty rare for me.
You see,/I taught myself to more or less touch type, though I do keep my eyes fixed on the "t" and "ty" keys, as a point of spacial reference. Thinking about what I'm doing, I do drift over to 'f' occasionally. I reach about 60 to 65 wpm, including fixing mistakes as I know I've made them. That slash in the third word of this paragraph is driving me nuts. Fortunately, I am a programmer, and 65 wpm is fast enough for me to type what's going through my head, including all necessary revisions and punctuation for any given line of code. As I take a break, I notice that my "home keys" are also A-W-E-F for my left, and J-I-O-; for my right. An artifavct of programming, I guess.
For clarity, I'm going to break my earlier promise not to edit, and add "spacial" and "of code" above. Sorry about that.
Sadly, the only way around this... is compulsory licensing.
Coming soon: Officially-licensed porn of every Disney character!
Compulsory licensing eliminates any control over how a work is used or presented. If you're forced to license your content you can't object to situations that devalue the work you've produced. If a major cinematic element of a movie is its detailed scenery, would it really be fair to run it through a streaming service that cuts out 75% of the detail? Or what about one that surrounds a dark suspenseful movie with flashing ads? Content owners would lose the basic ability to say "no".
Compulsory licensing is also unlikely to actually improve competition. The arbitrator (or whatever entity decides what's "fair") adds yet another layer of bureaucracy, easily swayed by overstatements (and understatements) of value. Think of the value, according to the RIAA, of a pirated song. Contract negotiations would be even longer and more expensive, because the owner couldn't back out, so they have to continue investing time and people to dealing with the negotiations.
Compulsory licensing assumes that everyone has a price at which they'll abandon any attempt at art, and that said price can be determined by some third party.
alternate data streams to block execution of any executable code downloaded from the internet
Now, I haven't done any Windows-specific development for a long time, but as I understand it, the responsibility for setting that flag falls on the application. Web browsers will of course follow the rules, but what about an IM client, or a web server, or any other of myriad things that get data from a network connection, and at some point dump that data into a file? Or, $deity forbid, any program ported from a non-Microsoft OS?
The ADS flag is effectively a blacklist, and Unix permissions are a whitelist.
Slashdot Mirror
I think of 4chan because it reminds me that, on a large scale, people who do not care about consequences will do whatever they see as fun.
Any fee becomes a barrier to entry that's effective against someone who stumbles across a piece of prior art, but likely won't stop anyone intent on disrupting the system. $10 to send 4000 goatse links to patent examiners is a worthwhile expense to some folks. These are the same folks who wouldn't care about a reputation system, because they don't care about having a good reputation with the USPTO. That reputation system itself would become a problem, as claims of corruption and fraud arise, and the cost of maintaining the system goes up.
But even Google combining multiple search types doesn't make them covered by the patent, as the patent claims specifically require that results be grouped based on having similar metadata. That's the key innovation that makes this patent reasonable. Google could meet the patent if its results list came back saying "We have this set of results about European trains, this set about model trains, this set about wedding dress trains, and this set about Thomas the Tank Engine porn."
Unfortunately, 99.9% of that "prior art" wouldn't actually fit the patent claims, and would be more along the lines of "art that does a similar job differently, and probably happened before the patent". The remaining 0.1% would be mostly things already included in the patent as prior art, but the submitter didn't bother to check that.
Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.
Software people are happy to use more resources to do the same work.
I suggest you look into demoscene. Given some particularly small limit (such as 64kB persistent storage), they make real-time rendered videos. Efficient use of resources means more detail in the final video, and that's a major goal.
I certainly can't deny that there are some programmers who will happily waste resources on bad algorithms. Such cases are well-documented and laughed at by those who aim to be better.
Object-oriented programming, when done correctly, makes finding fast algorithms easier. Object-oriented programs, when compiled correctly, are just as efficient as imperative programs, because the instructions relating to objects (such as extra jumps for simple accessors) have been optimized away by the compiler.
Of course, this is only when applied by competent programmers. OOP makes finding algorithms easier because it's more intuitive, but that also means that less skilled programmers can find inefficient algorithms more easily, as well. Then management approves those bad algorithms, and users get saddled with slow programs again.
...using a random generator like Mersenne twister wouldn't work...
Now, for the mathematicians in the room: What is the probability that the particular string of length 11621 that corresponds to a particular work of Shakespeare is one of the ~2^20000 possible sequences from the Mersenne twister?
As a programmer of several "stupid computer tricks" myself (like a filesystem driver for mounting IRC!), I am very appreciative for the fast computers that let us simulate very complex systems very quickly. I understand that it is my responsibility, as a software engineer, to use that speed and memory efficiently to optimize the results of the simulation.
This project has generated better illustrative proof than ever before that randomness will eventually produce everything. This is often a difficult concept for non-mathematical people to accept, so a nice example is always welcome among those who seek to educate. It is also worth noting that this project is running on Hadoop, which is not yet considered stable. While monkeys type Shakespeare, they also find bugs, stress-test releases, and educate at least one programmer. After such a test, Hadoop is much more favorable as a platform for more "real computing work" projects, like processing medical records looking for previously-unknown medication side effects.
While on the subject of "real computing work", please note that all nontrivial computation is done by software, and that all software can run on a Turing machine as designed in 1937. Those hardware engineers are doing real electrical engineering work, making circuits run with less power and smaller size. Those chemical engineers are doing real chemistry work, making semiconductors that can switch faster and at lower voltage. The software engineers are doing real computing work, finding fast algorithms and optimizing processes.
[citation needed]
So we're to believe that eating sterile food means we'll become sterile after only three generations of inbreeding? Well, gee... good thing we haven't had seedless fruits for very long, and thank goodness we haven't been breeding food to be grotesquely large, or anything like that!
What you didn't read is the chance that that hazard will actually manifest, and the comparison between that chance and the chance of getting whatever the disease is preventing. Then there's the severity of side effects to consider... The worst likely side effect of most vaccines is discomfort for up to a few days. The worst likely side effect of many vaccine-preventable diseases is death.
Alex Jones is just as bad as Fox News. He presents only facts that support his particular crazy theory, and ignores every bit of information that doesn't. That one of his bits of almost-credible information has some superficial similarity to actual science doesn't change anything.
But this is Slashdot! Everything's the government's fault, or Microsoft's, or Apple's! If you apply the slightest bit of common sense and it affects somebody's perception of some imaginary human right (like the right to have everything you do remain private, regardless of where you do it, or whether you did anything to keep such actions private at the time), then you're part of the problem, too!
So who are you working for?
In case you, without thinking, change the page and lose your whole post before it's finished. External editors can use auto-save.
What's the code for liver demons?
Being far too lazy to look up the actual codes, it's something like a combination of rhabdomyolysis + self-inflicted + religion. I think there's an E code for religion...
"On the date in question I was on vacation, on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic. My cat was being fed by <someone else>".
Investigators don't magically know the end of the evidence trail. Show reasonable evidence that you're not the one at fault, and they won't likely even try to build a case against you. Conversely, of course, if you show hostility toward investigators they're going to assume you have something to hide, and that may or may not be related to their case, so they'll try harder to find it.
If I were being questioned, I'd make a basic attempt to cooperate, being fully aware that whatever I say may be used to screw me over. There may be an easy explanation that satisfies the investigators. If they did start asking questions where my answer could, in whole or in part, incriminate me, I'd say I'd like to have a lawyer to help me explain the situation properly.
Police aren't machines. They're people. Be calm, courteous, and reasonably helpful, and they'll treat you well in return. That's how society usually works.
Why does a high-school kid need to earn $30/hour again?
Because with the public schools, PBS, and most community services on the verge of shutting down from lack of funding, he already has to start saving up for his kid's private education.
For children's books, that's likely a significant problem... but cardboard books don't have video, either.
Not more than two days ago, my wife (a librarian) saw a color e-reader (using a backlit LCD), and mentioned that it'd be great for children's books. I said that e-ink was probably a better option, because the reader could use less power when a distracted kid leaves it turned on. Now, there's hope for the benefits of both!
Reading the actual MagSafe patent and the fryer patent, I find that it's not so much anything that didn't exist before, but rather the removal of an unnecessary feature (a heat-conducting probe) that separates the two inventions. Note that the fryer patent is the third item of prior art in the MagSafe patent.
He wouldn't be licensing a patented invention. He'd be licensing a "patent pending" invention, with the license likely continuing once the patent is granted.
You can if the original patents specifically exclude the new material. If the original inventor thought that the material was important enough that no other material would do, the original material would be included in the patent claims. Going off the shoehorn example, the original patent would have to include some requirement that the shoehorn be made from, for example, polished wood, to meet some need for flexibility and friction. A flexible plastic shoehorn won't meet the requirements of such a claim, so it could be patented.
Since patents are public sources and assumed to be visible to everyone, it is likely to affect the test for obviousness, of course, so it's not very likely that you will get a patent on "X made from Y", but you can.
Picture of the UPS hack
It's DNS, so not much actual harm done to the targeted servers.
You're either trolling terribly or just terribly ignorant. In the hopes of the latter:
The Apache Foundation maintains many open-source software projects, one of which is a popular web server. Another is Hadoop, which is a distributed file system for storing huge amounts of data on a cluster of individual computers, based on Google's Google File System and other similar technologies.. To facilitate access to that data, there are other projects that function as databases, with the actual information stored in Hadoop. One existing project is HBase, which is an implementation of a system (called BigTable) described by Google. Now, the NSA has donated the source code for their own such database (also based on BigTable) to the Apache Foundation.
Now, there are a lot of Apache Foundation projects, and never enough time or people to maintain them all completely. The best projects are considered "mature", and the ones that aren't up to the normal Apache levels of quality and support and considered to be in "incubation". Someday, if enough people like Accumulo and help with it, it will mature.
But other companies and individuals that produce works do get copyright. While they may give the government (and even the NSA) a license to use their works, the government can't just donate those works off to Apache without clearing it first. That means any code the NSA didn't write themselves needs to be removed, replaced, or also donated by the owner.
I'm going to type this post without using the backspace or delete keys at all. In fact, no editing as I type whatsoever, which is pretty rare for me.
You see, /I taught myself to more or less touch type, though I do keep my eyes fixed on the "t" and "ty" keys, as a point of spacial reference. Thinking about what I'm doing, I do drift over to 'f' occasionally. I reach about 60 to 65 wpm, including fixing mistakes as I know I've made them. That slash in the third word of this paragraph is driving me nuts. Fortunately, I am a programmer, and 65 wpm is fast enough for me to type what's going through my head, including all necessary revisions and punctuation for any given line of code. As I take a break, I notice that my "home keys" are also A-W-E-F for my left, and J-I-O-; for my right. An artifavct of programming, I guess.
For clarity, I'm going to break my earlier promise not to edit, and add "spacial" and "of code" above. Sorry about that.
Sadly, the only way around this ... is compulsory licensing.
Coming soon: Officially-licensed porn of every Disney character!
Compulsory licensing eliminates any control over how a work is used or presented. If you're forced to license your content you can't object to situations that devalue the work you've produced. If a major cinematic element of a movie is its detailed scenery, would it really be fair to run it through a streaming service that cuts out 75% of the detail? Or what about one that surrounds a dark suspenseful movie with flashing ads? Content owners would lose the basic ability to say "no".
Compulsory licensing is also unlikely to actually improve competition. The arbitrator (or whatever entity decides what's "fair") adds yet another layer of bureaucracy, easily swayed by overstatements (and understatements) of value. Think of the value, according to the RIAA, of a pirated song. Contract negotiations would be even longer and more expensive, because the owner couldn't back out, so they have to continue investing time and people to dealing with the negotiations.
Compulsory licensing assumes that everyone has a price at which they'll abandon any attempt at art, and that said price can be determined by some third party.
alternate data streams to block execution of any executable code downloaded from the internet
Now, I haven't done any Windows-specific development for a long time, but as I understand it, the responsibility for setting that flag falls on the application. Web browsers will of course follow the rules, but what about an IM client, or a web server, or any other of myriad things that get data from a network connection, and at some point dump that data into a file? Or, $deity forbid, any program ported from a non-Microsoft OS?
The ADS flag is effectively a blacklist, and Unix permissions are a whitelist.