Actually, someone posted this in our office last week, and we have 5 non-english speakers (out of the 14 who work here), and all of them could read it just fine.
Ya that and gasoline is avital part of our economy.
Exactly, it is a vital part of the economy hence why it won't be targeted. However, an individual is not a vital part of the economy so they can be targed selectively. The collective group of all of us are vital, but a few people here and there are not.
I personally think gasoline is not a valid argument either, since it's not designed to cause death or serious injury. Cigarettes on the other hand are, just over a prolonged period of time, but of course they also have a special tax on them so they won't be targed by the government either.
The government get taxes from the sales of gasoline, so if they did that, they would kill of one of their revenue sources. Needless to say, it's not likely to happen.
After all their definition of a chemical weapon of mass destruction is:
Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic chemicals.
So why don't they go after the tobacco companies since they're manufacturing substances that meet these criteria? Oh wait, the government gets taxes from the sales of these products, nevermind.
I can't say for certain, but my guess would be that it's because these are always perpendicular to the sun, it can get the maximum energy from it, as opposed to panels on houses which are fixed and will probably average 10% since they can't move with the sun.
Granted the price is a little high for a mouse, but since this is an above-average mouse, it's worth it. As for availablity, I've seen it at Best Buy, in fact that's where I got mine.
My favorite mouse is also my current mouse, a Logitech Optical Wheel mouse
Any real geek could have a Dual Optical Mouse. Also available at Thinkgeek. That is definately my favorite mouse.
Re:Don't forget "{" and "}"...
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 1
Probably millions of them, hence all the millions of lines of code that Linux illegally copied from SCO. It's all the {'s and }'s, now their entire case becomes clear.
Congress later realized fighting it was stupid and a waste of time and repealed it.
Yes, but that was back when Congress had a clue and wasn't in bed with multibillion dollar companies to enact these laws. Also, Congress and the Justice Department aren't the ones fighting these cases, it's the independant corporations that are handling all the litigation on their own, they just needed Congress to pass the laws to make it illegal.
Why would any company pay their license fees to SCO right now? They haven't proven anything yet, so it would stand to reason that _after_ SCO proves its case in court then companies can begin paying SCO license fees. As long as the issue is disputed, I see no reason any company would decide to pay a license fee to a company that just claims to own some IP without actually proving it.
Re:It's commonly assumed that people are base-10..
on
Beyond Binary Computing?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We have 10 fingers, 10 toes, etc. We can handle base-10 math easily, but not base-2 math.
Maybe you only use your 10 fingers to count to 10, but any self-respecting geek will use those 10 fingers to count, in binary, up to 1023 by using both states of their fingers to represent a one or zero (up or down). A base-1 system on your fingers is just a waste of states. With some practice you can even handle the unusual states like 21 and 27 easily (I use my thumb as 2^0).
How about just not reading the comments if you don't feel theres anything worthwhile to say?
That's what I do. I'm reading this one just because I figured it would provoke interesting discussion on the accountability of corporations with regard to the products they produce.
But I would say I probably only click through to the comments on about 40% of the Slashdot articles, the news alone is enough for me.
Hire some qualified practicioners in each field (under strict NDAs). Give them a statement of the problem being solved. If they come up with the same solution within a few days, it's so blatantly obvious that the "inventor" is really trying to patent the problem instead of a solution.
That's a great idea! In fact, they could probably have something similar to the way TopCoder handles the architecture review boards. Basically they have lots of small component designs come in and need people to review them. These people to do the review are choosen at random from a pool of probably 30-40+ people. This could work in a similiar fashion by having a group of qualified people in each field and every day/week etc the USPTO office assigns one or two people a problem and see their solution in a few days. At TopCoder the people on the board are paid per-project so I imagine that this could be done the same way.
So, instead of necessarily hiring and paying full salaries to these people, they could just pay them on a per-project basis from a pool of qualified people that essentially do this in their spare time for extra cash. What a great idea, I think you should patent it!
If Company X is being real lax (eg: promoting spam), write a revoke key and put it on a few OTHER machines. Thien it'll propigate throught the mail-net to disallow all connections from that MAIL server.
Just curious, how is this different from a blacklist? It sounds like the same concept, just different technology.
If this company holds patents on DRM, what does this mean for DRM in Linux?
I did enjoy reading the article. My favorite quotes are: an Oakland judge resolved 33 of 33 disputed issues against Microsoft and rebuked the company's lawyers for wasting her time by promising proof that never materialized--legal vaporware, in essence -- ouch!!
InterTrust claims that its inventions cover technologies that Microsoft has been weaving into its Windows XP operating system, Office XP Suite, Windows Media Player, Xbox videogame console, and.NET networked computing platform, to name just a few. If settlement talks fail and InterTrust prevails in court, it would be entitled to a court order halting sales of all those products. InterTrust CEO Talal Shamoon asks rhetorically, "How much would that be worth to Microsoft?"
Not that Microsoft would ever allow that to happen and could probably keep this in courts until either 1) The patents expire or 2) XP is no longer supported or sold anyways.
Hard drives are _not_ a backup technology. The whole point of tapes/cds/dvds/etc is to decouple the data storage from the reader. Thus the data is often stored in a solid state medium making it less succeptable to failure while the reader often contains lots of moving parts making it more prone to fail. So, if the two are decoupled, when the reader breaks, I just get a new one and my data is safe. But if we 'backup' on a hard drive, and the hard drive crashes or the internal hard drive reader crashes, we can't simply get a new reader, the data is just gone.
A RAID array could be considered a backup tech if the array was treated as a backup device like a cd/dvd/tape and not just a RAID of the main 'live' system. You could still run into the problem of a drive in the array failing, but since the data is replicated, you're safe, just replace the drive, re-sync and continue on your way.
only consumes about 2 amps of electrical power (about as much as your taillights use)
Only 2 amps of power for my taillights? It's been a few years since had my EE classes, but from what I recall that's a helluva lot of current, so I sure hope my taillights use a lot less than 2 amps.
2000000/24 hours a day = 83333 days/365days a year = 228 years? I don't know of any companies that have been around that long. Unless, as a proper manager he counts each persons time separatly, so maybe they have 1000 employees and they've been accident free for 90 days. How bizarre.
However, the book does sound like it would be a fun read, so I might pick it up at some point.
Actually a better question would be if it gets at least 30fps in DoomIII, after all, my 1GHz will probably _run_ it, but it would look like a slide show.
Slashdot Mirror
and computer source code.
The other thing you've got to teach them is that if you pour coffee down the keyboard, it runs down the wires and into the network, attracting spam.
I'd love to tell some people that, but I don't think I could keep a straight face.
In Soviet Russia I telenet to port 80
You seem to be mistaken, in Soviet Russia, port 80 telnets on to you. Sorry for the confusion.
They both allow you to do the same thing in almost exactly the same way
In a non-monopolistic market, we call that 'competition'.
Actually, someone posted this in our office last week, and we have 5 non-english speakers (out of the 14 who work here), and all of them could read it just fine.
Ya that and gasoline is avital part of our economy.
Exactly, it is a vital part of the economy hence why it won't be targeted. However, an individual is not a vital part of the economy so they can be targed selectively. The collective group of all of us are vital, but a few people here and there are not.
I personally think gasoline is not a valid argument either, since it's not designed to cause death or serious injury. Cigarettes on the other hand are, just over a prolonged period of time, but of course they also have a special tax on them so they won't be targed by the government either.
The government get taxes from the sales of gasoline, so if they did that, they would kill of one of their revenue sources. Needless to say, it's not likely to happen.
After all their definition of a chemical weapon of mass destruction is:
Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic chemicals.
So why don't they go after the tobacco companies since they're manufacturing substances that meet these criteria? Oh wait, the government gets taxes from the sales of these products, nevermind.
I can't say for certain, but my guess would be that it's because these are always perpendicular to the sun, it can get the maximum energy from it, as opposed to panels on houses which are fixed and will probably average 10% since they can't move with the sun.
Granted the price is a little high for a mouse, but since this is an above-average mouse, it's worth it. As for availablity, I've seen it at Best Buy, in fact that's where I got mine.
My favorite mouse is also my current mouse, a Logitech Optical Wheel mouse
Any real geek could have a Dual Optical Mouse. Also available at Thinkgeek. That is definately my favorite mouse.
Probably millions of them, hence all the millions of lines of code that Linux illegally copied from SCO. It's all the {'s and }'s, now their entire case becomes clear.
Congress later realized fighting it was stupid and a waste of time and repealed it.
Yes, but that was back when Congress had a clue and wasn't in bed with multibillion dollar companies to enact these laws. Also, Congress and the Justice Department aren't the ones fighting these cases, it's the independant corporations that are handling all the litigation on their own, they just needed Congress to pass the laws to make it illegal.
Why would any company pay their license fees to SCO right now? They haven't proven anything yet, so it would stand to reason that _after_ SCO proves its case in court then companies can begin paying SCO license fees. As long as the issue is disputed, I see no reason any company would decide to pay a license fee to a company that just claims to own some IP without actually proving it.
We have 10 fingers, 10 toes, etc. We can handle base-10 math easily, but not base-2 math.
Maybe you only use your 10 fingers to count to 10, but any self-respecting geek will use those 10 fingers to count, in binary, up to 1023 by using both states of their fingers to represent a one or zero (up or down). A base-1 system on your fingers is just a waste of states. With some practice you can even handle the unusual states like 21 and 27 easily (I use my thumb as 2^0).
Which college has the most bandwidth?
ZDnet will rate the most 'wired' colleges. However, I can't find it on their site anymore.
http://www.connect-dots.com/Poofs/chewbacca.html
How about just not reading the comments if you don't feel theres anything worthwhile to say?
That's what I do. I'm reading this one just because I figured it would provoke interesting discussion on the accountability of corporations with regard to the products they produce.
But I would say I probably only click through to the comments on about 40% of the Slashdot articles, the news alone is enough for me.
Hire some qualified practicioners in each field (under strict NDAs). Give them a statement of the problem being solved. If they come up with the same solution within a few days, it's so blatantly obvious that the "inventor" is really trying to patent the problem instead of a solution.
That's a great idea! In fact, they could probably have something similar to the way TopCoder handles the architecture review boards. Basically they have lots of small component designs come in and need people to review them. These people to do the review are choosen at random from a pool of probably 30-40+ people. This could work in a similiar fashion by having a group of qualified people in each field and every day/week etc the USPTO office assigns one or two people a problem and see their solution in a few days. At TopCoder the people on the board are paid per-project so I imagine that this could be done the same way.
So, instead of necessarily hiring and paying full salaries to these people, they could just pay them on a per-project basis from a pool of qualified people that essentially do this in their spare time for extra cash. What a great idea, I think you should patent it!
If Company X is being real lax (eg: promoting spam), write a revoke key and put it on a few OTHER machines. Thien it'll propigate throught the mail-net to disallow all connections from that MAIL server.
Just curious, how is this different from a blacklist? It sounds like the same concept, just different technology.
If this company holds patents on DRM, what does this mean for DRM in Linux?
.NET networked computing platform, to name just a few. If settlement talks fail and InterTrust prevails in court, it would be entitled to a court order halting sales of all those products. InterTrust CEO Talal Shamoon asks rhetorically, "How much would that be worth to Microsoft?"
I did enjoy reading the article. My favorite quotes are:
an Oakland judge resolved 33 of 33 disputed issues against Microsoft and rebuked the company's lawyers for wasting her time by promising proof that never materialized--legal vaporware, in essence -- ouch!!
InterTrust claims that its inventions cover technologies that Microsoft has been weaving into its Windows XP operating system, Office XP Suite, Windows Media Player, Xbox videogame console, and
Not that Microsoft would ever allow that to happen and could probably keep this in courts until either 1) The patents expire or 2) XP is no longer supported or sold anyways.
Hard drives are _not_ a backup technology. The whole point of tapes/cds/dvds/etc is to decouple the data storage from the reader. Thus the data is often stored in a solid state medium making it less succeptable to failure while the reader often contains lots of moving parts making it more prone to fail. So, if the two are decoupled, when the reader breaks, I just get a new one and my data is safe. But if we 'backup' on a hard drive, and the hard drive crashes or the internal hard drive reader crashes, we can't simply get a new reader, the data is just gone.
A RAID array could be considered a backup tech if the array was treated as a backup device like a cd/dvd/tape and not just a RAID of the main 'live' system. You could still run into the problem of a drive in the array failing, but since the data is replicated, you're safe, just replace the drive, re-sync and continue on your way.
only consumes about 2 amps of electrical power (about as much as your taillights use)
Only 2 amps of power for my taillights? It's been a few years since had my EE classes, but from what I recall that's a helluva lot of current, so I sure hope my taillights use a lot less than 2 amps.
2000000/24 hours a day = 83333 days/365days a year = 228 years? I don't know of any companies that have been around that long. Unless, as a proper manager he counts each persons time separatly, so maybe they have 1000 employees and they've been accident free for 90 days. How bizarre.
However, the book does sound like it would be a fun read, so I might pick it up at some point.
Actually a better question would be if it gets at least 30fps in DoomIII, after all, my 1GHz will probably _run_ it, but it would look like a slide show.