To imply this has anything to do with survival is absolutely absurd. There are plenty of ways to survive, even in Alaska, without hunting the Earth's whales (or any animal for that matter).
Nothing proves that man is who rules the Earth like taking animals that are 130 years old, killing them, and then hacking them up with a chainsaw. Keep showin' them animals who's boss, oh brave hunters.
I had a friend who once worked at an AOL call center in the Mac division. Real transcript:
AOL: "What type of Mac do you have?"
Caller: "Uh...tangerine?"
Maybe the callers think the service is so shitty because they don't know that the problem is fixed or because they can't provide good enough information to the agent to get it fixed.
I've had 10 times the problems with cable company call centers than I have with any other, including PC manufacturers.
Look, that is not competition (, son). It is as if your city told you that you could only shop for groceries at Trader Joe's or Albertson's and not a single other competitor could open up shop. Competition allows for as many organizations as the market can bear and certainly, with the paltry lineup most of the wired telecommunications services we all are offered and the high cost, the market could certainly handle it.
The majority of the urban centers in the US have only two options for high-speed Internet: the cable company or the DSL company. Period. If they were forced to compete with, say, two more cable companies and one more phone company, prices would dip and service would go up.
If AT&T is going to start watching every single thing its users does and the users have no recourse whatsoever, I say it is time to end the monopoly that cable and wired ISPs and phone companies have in most areas and let competition reign. If I had the choice between a company that is going to spy on me and give anything they think is suspicious to the RIAA/MPAA or paying a few extra bucks to a company that will truly honor my privacy, the choice would be extremely easy.
Instead, I'm stuck with one cable company and one DSL company servicing my area. Thanks, local government.
I read this as they can also mess with the game's mechanics on the fly. I find that a lot of MMO players don't like it when their game changes. You spend 500 hours building up a mage that gets NERFed all of a sudden.
So, now, with this technology, they can tinker with mathematics and algorithms without even telling users that changes were made or while the player is in the middle of playing. I can see as much use in this feature from BioWare as the abuse it attempts to prevent.
But that involves private property. The police officer is a public official and the recording took place on public land. Does that mean that I couldn't take my camera to the park to film a picnic family reunion because there might be other people at the park and their audio might be picked up by my recorder?
This law seems so broad that I'm surprised it holds up.
2) Even if your CS degree is not accredited, you can still sit for the bar provided you have taken 8 hours of chem or physics (like normal general education), and you have taken certain (typical) CS courses.
While correct, that completely misses the point. Many non-accredited CS programs don't require the science requirements the patent bar requires. When a CS department is inside a college of science or paired closely with mathematics (rather than being tied to the college of engineering), it typically will not have the strict physics or intensive science requirements.
(Further, the requirement is insane from a logistical standpoint. A person who takes all 8 hours of his physics requirement in his junior year passes the requirement. A person who takes 4 hours in his freshman year and 4 hours in his senior year does not. This completely illogical requirement further indicates that the guidelines are simply wrong.)
So when a highly-qualified person with a CS degree from one of these great universities applies, they are forced to take extra undergraduate courses. Considering lawyers are at least 3 years removed from their undergraduate degree (and many are in the workforce 3-5 years before starting law school), it's easy to see why this requirement is absolutely debilitating.
Never mind that a quick look at the recent software patents show no need for any physics knowledge whatsoever. Highly qualified scientists are kept out of the USPTO bar because of outdated requirements. The USPTO essentially requires that any computer scientist know that he wants to be a patent attorney/agent by the time he is registering for his sophomore year in college (or go to St. Cloud State).
Considering the massive amount of software and information technology patents that are given out these days (and as indicated by the main story), I'd say their requirements are sorely in need of an update.
People are not "smart" 100% of the time. Hell, look at the other drivers on the roads? I'm sure the bozo on his cell phone who almost side-swipes me isn't "dumb" all the time. Most people KNOW they shouldn't click on EVERYTHING... but you've got pretty "things" blinking around your web page and you are going to get quite a FEW who think "just one little click" wont hurt.
The difference in your analogy is that you are saying that it would be appropriate for the guy to blame the cell phone if he crashes his car. He should blame himself, not the tool he used for self-destruction.
I know there are some cybercrimes which the victim couldn't have done much to prevent (or could prove too costly to implement defenses), but (from the third article)...
As the sophistication of the attacks continues to improve, the percentage of consumers who click where they shouldn't has risen from 18.6 percent in 2004 to 24.9 percent last year, according to Gartner. 25%?!? That's insane. If computer users were more intelligent, more computer savvy, we wouldn't have all these problems. It's like going to a party and getting so drunk you don't know where you'll be in the morning...or who will be able to have their way with you in the evening.
If the USPTO wants to start dealing with software more, they are going to need to change their bizarre rules for who can sit the patent bar.
Currently, the USPTO only allows attorneys with certain undergraduate degrees to sit the bar. Many are engineering degrees: electrical engineering, civil engineering, ceramic engineering, etc. Some are more general: biology, general chemistry, food technology, etc.
Computer science is also one of the degrees listed, but there is an asterisk next to it. CS is the only degree which the USPTO requires accreditation on. Why is this significant?
Because most of the best CS schools in the country don't even have accredited CS programs. I ran down this list one time. Out of the top four CS schools only two, MIT and Berkeley, were accredited. Only 3 out of the top 10 were accredited and 6 out of the top 20. Most CS departments feel that accreditation is absolutely worthless. Employers don't care, the accreditation process doesn't focus on CS education as much as other non-majored courses students must take, it is expensive, and it is not valuable to the student.
Consider this: a lawyer with a CS degree from Pacific Lutheran or St. Cloud State (ranked sub-100 in computer science) can sit the patent bar, a lawyer with a CS degree from Stanford or Carnegie-Mellon (top 4 schools) cannot.
Come on, it was plenty easy to get a Megalopolis in SimCity SNES. Then, with your towering Mario statue in the center of the map, you then let the city fall into poverty and force them to worship the statue by threatening Bowser attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
My Wiimote rumbles on.
The ratings board just made it so every kid in England will want to play Manhunt 2.
And Manhunt 2 would probably be a pretty crappy game.
Yay for free publicity.
I wonder if anyone ever demanded that Newton talk about his political leanings while publishing the laws of motion.
To imply this has anything to do with survival is absolutely absurd. There are plenty of ways to survive, even in Alaska, without hunting the Earth's whales (or any animal for that matter).
Also,
We're both guilty.No, we're not.
Nothing proves that man is who rules the Earth like taking animals that are 130 years old, killing them, and then hacking them up with a chainsaw. Keep showin' them animals who's boss, oh brave hunters.
YOU'RE NEXT, TURTLES
Wireless flea and tick control? Sweet.
I had a friend who once worked at an AOL call center in the Mac division. Real transcript: AOL: "What type of Mac do you have?" Caller: "Uh...tangerine?" Maybe the callers think the service is so shitty because they don't know that the problem is fixed or because they can't provide good enough information to the agent to get it fixed. I've had 10 times the problems with cable company call centers than I have with any other, including PC manufacturers.
Yeah, satellite for Internet, you go first.
Look, that is not competition (, son). It is as if your city told you that you could only shop for groceries at Trader Joe's or Albertson's and not a single other competitor could open up shop. Competition allows for as many organizations as the market can bear and certainly, with the paltry lineup most of the wired telecommunications services we all are offered and the high cost, the market could certainly handle it.
The majority of the urban centers in the US have only two options for high-speed Internet: the cable company or the DSL company. Period. If they were forced to compete with, say, two more cable companies and one more phone company, prices would dip and service would go up.
If AT&T is going to start watching every single thing its users does and the users have no recourse whatsoever, I say it is time to end the monopoly that cable and wired ISPs and phone companies have in most areas and let competition reign. If I had the choice between a company that is going to spy on me and give anything they think is suspicious to the RIAA/MPAA or paying a few extra bucks to a company that will truly honor my privacy, the choice would be extremely easy.
Instead, I'm stuck with one cable company and one DSL company servicing my area. Thanks, local government.
I read this as they can also mess with the game's mechanics on the fly. I find that a lot of MMO players don't like it when their game changes. You spend 500 hours building up a mage that gets NERFed all of a sudden.
So, now, with this technology, they can tinker with mathematics and algorithms without even telling users that changes were made or while the player is in the middle of playing. I can see as much use in this feature from BioWare as the abuse it attempts to prevent.
But that involves private property. The police officer is a public official and the recording took place on public land. Does that mean that I couldn't take my camera to the park to film a picnic family reunion because there might be other people at the park and their audio might be picked up by my recorder? This law seems so broad that I'm surprised it holds up.
While correct, that completely misses the point. Many non-accredited CS programs don't require the science requirements the patent bar requires. When a CS department is inside a college of science or paired closely with mathematics (rather than being tied to the college of engineering), it typically will not have the strict physics or intensive science requirements.
(Further, the requirement is insane from a logistical standpoint. A person who takes all 8 hours of his physics requirement in his junior year passes the requirement. A person who takes 4 hours in his freshman year and 4 hours in his senior year does not. This completely illogical requirement further indicates that the guidelines are simply wrong.)
So when a highly-qualified person with a CS degree from one of these great universities applies, they are forced to take extra undergraduate courses. Considering lawyers are at least 3 years removed from their undergraduate degree (and many are in the workforce 3-5 years before starting law school), it's easy to see why this requirement is absolutely debilitating.
Never mind that a quick look at the recent software patents show no need for any physics knowledge whatsoever. Highly qualified scientists are kept out of the USPTO bar because of outdated requirements. The USPTO essentially requires that any computer scientist know that he wants to be a patent attorney/agent by the time he is registering for his sophomore year in college (or go to St. Cloud State).
Considering the massive amount of software and information technology patents that are given out these days (and as indicated by the main story), I'd say their requirements are sorely in need of an update.
We know how terribly the iPod did without custom apps.
The difference in your analogy is that you are saying that it would be appropriate for the guy to blame the cell phone if he crashes his car. He should blame himself, not the tool he used for self-destruction.
They sure pay well. I know a girl who put herself through college by designing a porn site. It's like stripping for the 21st century.
If the USPTO wants to start dealing with software more, they are going to need to change their bizarre rules for who can sit the patent bar.
Currently, the USPTO only allows attorneys with certain undergraduate degrees to sit the bar. Many are engineering degrees: electrical engineering, civil engineering, ceramic engineering, etc. Some are more general: biology, general chemistry, food technology, etc.
Computer science is also one of the degrees listed, but there is an asterisk next to it. CS is the only degree which the USPTO requires accreditation on. Why is this significant?
Because most of the best CS schools in the country don't even have accredited CS programs. I ran down this list one time. Out of the top four CS schools only two, MIT and Berkeley, were accredited. Only 3 out of the top 10 were accredited and 6 out of the top 20. Most CS departments feel that accreditation is absolutely worthless. Employers don't care, the accreditation process doesn't focus on CS education as much as other non-majored courses students must take, it is expensive, and it is not valuable to the student.
Consider this: a lawyer with a CS degree from Pacific Lutheran or St. Cloud State (ranked sub-100 in computer science) can sit the patent bar, a lawyer with a CS degree from Stanford or Carnegie-Mellon (top 4 schools) cannot.
Come on, it was plenty easy to get a Megalopolis in SimCity SNES. Then, with your towering Mario statue in the center of the map, you then let the city fall into poverty and force them to worship the statue by threatening Bowser attacks.