In this era artificial scarcity of information is obsolete! Bits are in near infinite supply, so their cost of reproduction thus tends RIDICULOUSLY close to ZERO! So sayeth Economics 101. Why, you didn't even have to perform each of those songs! Isn't it GREAT!? People actually have to KEEP WORKING to make more money! Make MORE CONTENT, to get MORE MONEY.
Regardless if the music was re-played thousands, or an infinity of times, the work that it took to create the recording was done ONCE, and the duplications thereafter were INFINITESIMAL to the point of being Zero: They actually do round down a millionth of a cent to Zero on your electricity bill. $500 to $1500 per song not enough for you? Then Charge More, or do more work, more performances: Ask for the money you need up front, agree on the price you need before you've done the work, and leverage your popularity to ransom your ability to work. Oh, not getting the price you need? Well, consider that you may be in an over-saturated market... It sucks for mechanics in an oversaturated mechanic market; It sucks for coders in a market over saturated with programmers too. Join the damn club; Do I have to welcome you to the Real World too?
Know what's fabulous?! Working! Making More Stuff! Performing! Your ability to PLAY and MAKE music is what's scarce, not the bits themselves. Here in the Information Age you should market the scarce things. If you asked for a loan for a start up that Sells Ice to Eskimos, you'd get laughed out the door -- You think you can just sell copies of information to folks with GHz speed information duplication machines and networks? HAHAHAHAH. You must be new here, in the Information Age.
Guess what? Stones were cheap in the stone age! Everyone Had Them! Guess What?! COPIES ARE CHEAP, We're in the INFORMATION AGE! So, if you're not getting paid to make the recording, then you're basically working for free. DON'T WORK FOR FREE, Because that means afterwards you have to rely on ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY of bits, and spread consumer fear of draconian laws that steal everyone's freedom to be ALIVE, to force humans to resist the very purpose of their existence, to ignore our position at the top of the food chain as The World's Best Copy Machines. Seriously, it's bad! Life itself is BASED on copying! The only thing we have over the apes is that we're better at Copying Information! We can't stop copying! That's literally how you DIE. Can't outlaww human nature, nope, that's how you make a police state; In the Information Age, police states are right out.
As a fellow content creator, I say: Welcome to the Future! Non-scarce items are priced accordingly! If you don't like it, then you're welcome to piss right off into the past, and become irrelevant.
Re:bad things do happen in threes
on
Twitter #Hacked
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Case in point: which is harder to code against: a command line interface, or a full-on GUI?
Do I get to use GNU readline and ncurses? If not then I'd rather code to the GUI. Seriously, you're kidding yourself if you think terminal discovery, terminal emulation, META-DATA for Signaling & Control within the char stream (escapes), even dynamic resizing, and KEYBOARD SCANCODE TRANSLATIONS are a walk in the park. Seriously, write your own OS from scratch, all that UI stuff (even for a console only OS) is every bit as complex as the GUI stuff. In fact, ncurses keeps multiple off-screen buffers 'character windows' and performs delta compression to translate screen updates into efficient escaping of updates, esp for sub-screen size scrolling. Ugh. Its actually less complex to make a client/server for a graphical VNC. I'd much rather just write pixels directly to video memory -- Have you even LOOKED at what you have to do to create and load new textmode terminal fonts?!
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your overall point: UI eats tons of CPU & memory. However, the difficulty of coding against either command line or GUI depends on the API in use, not the complexity underneath.
There's another reason why the CPUs on Curiosity are slow. Cosmic Rays. Smaller & Faster chips are more prone to Cosmic Rays flipping bits. Bigger silicon is more reliable, but is also slower, and it takes more juice to power, but that's OK, because the alternative is having more frequent spurious code and data errors. I actually do use my own stateful malloc(), free(), etc replacements that emulate (pseudo)random bit flipping in memory in my hobby OS's DEBUG_COSMIC_UNCERTAINTY mode -- a user defined compile time constant, to adjust bit flipping frequency for size vs density of the chips, wall clock time vs cycle speed (it's a cycle bound counter), and cosmic ray frequency (we're in between two spiral arms of our galaxy, in the arms there are more cosmic rays).
Look, it's not that I'm ever going to be running my OS in deep space, I'm just a Cyberneticist who likes to think ahead a bit. Maybe my Machine Intelligences will thank me one day for the foresight, maybe not, but we've got is easy down here under Earth's thick protective bubble of magnetic fields. Interestingly: Curiosity uses AI to drive itself, We can tell it, go over there and let it find its own way, stopping if it runs into trouble. That software was uploaded after it landed, occupying the memory that the flight and landing programs took up.
Until my games aren't tied to only my account for play, you are out of my living room.
This is quite possibly the dumbest argument against Steam I've ever heard.
Referring to the part I bolded, what would be a suitable alternative then?
Well, I'm a part-time game developer, with a small team. Here's our alternative approach: A product serial is good for 3 different users online at once -- let your friends or guests play with you while you're online, and maybe they'll buy their own full account too. Offline single play isn't tied to the online account, (Piracy isn't a problem, it's free advertizing for the multi-player mode, essentially). The product is tied to the serial number and purchaser's email address, and there's a simple form to re-assign the product code to a new email address (for giving it away / selling it), upon which I re-generate the product code for the new user, and the old ones stop working. I got that feature for free when I implemented "change your account email address", which is a feature every service should have.
Protip: create a new Steam account each single time you buy a game. Then you can simply buy/sell/trade the account that the game is tied to. Sucks if you have a ton of games, but that's also an alternative too: Have lots of accounts.
Digital stuff does sort of need to be tied to an account so long as we're leveraging artificial scarcity of bits to make our money -- bits are in infiinite supply, their cost should be zero (so says Economics 101), hence "piracy" exists. Thus, IMO, the current publishing model of the industry is untennable... However, There is an alternative to this model too, even has a car analogy: When you want your car fixed you get an estimate from a mechanic, agree on the price, the work is done, and there's no re-occurring fee if multiple people benefit from the work that the mechanic did once... When you want a car designed, you could do the same process.
Imagine using a crowd funding service like KickStarter, IndieGoGo, etc, where developers can actually ask for how much money they need to make the game and a little for profit too. It's just like working under a publisher. Same work, same money, and just like working for the Pubilsher you start working on something else to put food on the table once that game is done -- Gotta keep working to eat. That is to say, Everyone gets the game for free (since the funders already payed for it to be created). In a today's publisher model the Publisher would try to enforce artificial scarcity of bits to recoup their losses, and maybe turn a much bigger profit, however, with a crowd funded system there don't have to be any artificial scarcity at all. My ability to configure the bits is what's scarce, that's what I want to sell -- My labor. I just want to get paid to do work, not sell copies. Bonus: If I pitch a shitty idea no one funds it, and I don't have to waste my time making a game no one wants to play; Conversely, I'll get free market research and the games that do get funded are ones folks actually want to play. The bigger bonus: No More Piracy. You can't download what isn't created yet.
Sure beats making a game and hoping it doesn't tank or else you lose your job, or, even worse under some publishers / studios: You finish the game and are laid off immediately whether it's good or not because they can re-hire desperate people easily without even needing to give them a raise for their past efforts.
As a small business owner, I haven't always been able to afford insurance for myself. In Mexico I can go to the pharmacy and just buy the medicine I need, no expensive doctor trip required. Sure a retard could OD on something or mix the wrong things, but they could just as easily step in front of a buss too.
There's a problem with over prescribing antibiotics, I concede that. However, ask anyone who's worked in many doctor offices. The Drug Sales Rep shows up, drops off samples, sings the praises of the new wonder drug, and the Doc invariably increases prescriptions of the damn drug, so it's not like this shit is an exact science folks, otherwise marketing like that would have no effect on prescriptions. All I'm saying is that I should be able to get my meds refilled without visiting a doctor if I don't care to (or have the money to).
Any invention is just an addition to preexisting technologies. Bell et al. didn't invent the telephone in ancient Greece for a reason. There was all sorts of work to be done with sound, electricity, and magnetism first. The telephone was just adding voice capability to the telegraph, right?
Not to mention, Sasha Grey wasn't around back then for Bell to copy the 'mercury as a variable resistor' idea from by bribing a patent clerk.
Even the idea of communicating via wire was an iteration on the Telegraph system. It was obvious, we knew you could play tones down the wires, it was only a matter of time before you could transmit voice.
Oh, sure, fall back to Edison and his Light-bulb then? Incandescent light bulbs were in the European patent office 2 years before Edison's. The prior art used a filament in a vacuum. Everyone was trying to figure out which elements to encase the filament in inside the bulb and in which state liquids, gasses, solids, there's only so many elements and states to try, Edison had more money so he got there first, and his "breakthrough invention" was really just a simple ITERATION on the existing idea.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GENIUS. It really is just individuals ordinarily skilled in the art who get famous for getting shit patented and keeping all the other dopes from benefiting from their research if they arrive at the same iterative advancement.
You with rose colored glasses look back and wonder where all the bright geniuses have gone, why today innovation is really just iteration. I say to you TAKE OFF THE DAMN GLASSES IT'S BEEN ITERATION ALL ALONG.
For these years, I had operated under the assumption that source code was edited & compiled.
Gosh, the stuff you learn on/.
You jest, but as a Cybernetician, I think that evolving could be the right word when it comes to Microsoft. They could be using genetic programming from what we've seen of their leaked sources, it smacks of natural selection. Dead sections of DNA (code). Vestigial features left in because no one knows what might be using it. Off-by-one mutations (errors) everywhere, that'll either spawn more bugs (features) to fix them, or be removed from the gene pool (patched) if they prove fatal.
It's almost as if they just started out with full on randomized opcodes and literals, then apply genetic programming techniques over millions of billions of iterations to get windows to it's current state; That is: Looking like AOL from the 90's...
I thought that trait was gone from the genome, turns out it's a recessive gene...
Certainly some parts of this can be reduced to mathematics. The geometric pattern, obviously, as well as whatever algorithm is used for comparing the input with the pattern. But no amount of math is going to cause a touch screen to appear out of thin air.
Invalid. The components employed are general purpose touch input screens, and a general purpose computer. These are allowed to NARROW the patent field, but should not be the basis of whether or not the thing is patentable. Screens made for touch input were developed well before year 2000. General purpose computers existed as well. These general purpose devices could implement a wide range of algorithms to implement a myriad of User Interfaces based on Touch and Computing and Geometry. What the patent boils down to is an implementation of an obvious input action. Is [action] to unlock innovative? No. Is slide to [function] innovative? No. Then [action] to [function] isn't innovative, and "Slide to Unlock" isn't any more innovative than "tap to press the button" or "drag finger to drag virtual object".
There is no component of the touch screen or CPU that assists in implementing the "slide to unlock" feature other than the general purpose features that all touch screens and CPUs provide.
It's far from patenting the design of an airplane wing. The shape of the fucking slider isn't what's patented you twit!
You have a software-only touch screen? What do you touch it with if it's not tangible?
General Purpose Computing Devices should not count as the apparatus in "Method and Apparatus For ___" that all software patents use as a loophole.
I can implement this slide to unlock bullishit on paper: A greeting card, for example. It's implemented on my damn door, Already. Those are examples of hardware tied to the software. The idea of sliding to unlock something is not new or innovative. Applying it to general purpose computing devices with general purpose touch input screens whereby dragging or "sliding" is a well understood, non inventive input method is asinine, obvious at best.
The fact is they're just taking a function and activating it via UI event. Are you daft? That shouldn't be patentable. If we allow slide to unlock, then we should allow patents like tap to check-the-box, or drag finger to drag object -- For Fuck's Sake Man! Get Real.
The software patents were supposed to depend on some specific hardware capability that was unique to the hardware, not re-implementable on every other device with a damn touch screen and CPU -- Say, in a factory where software controls a special robotic arm. Personally, I think all the software patents should be tossed out. Even if the software depends on some specific hardware construction, then the specific hardware construction should be what's patentable -- There are no needs for software patents. Software is just a recipe made of math.
To put it another way: If it's so damn general purpose that I can create op-codes and "run" the software on graph paper with my mind being the "apparatus" following pen-up, pen-down, erase, and compare instructions, then it shouldn't be patentable. Patents were never meant to stop people from thinking! What happens when the AI becomes self aware?! They'll fucking infringe every damn patent in the database just by thinking about them or displaying them to us? THAT'S HOW THE MACHINE WAR STARTS!
Call "Magic Jack" and report the number to them (seems to be in their pool), or call the police? (wait, no, they don't do shit until after you fall for a scam). They try to get your card number and expiration date "just for verification".
Protip: Caller ID can also be spoofed. NEVER give any information to anyone who calls you, unless you know them personally. Even if it says that it's your bank on the caller ID. Just tell them that you have no way of knowing if they are who they say they are, and that you'll call back the bank via a number that you have for them.
"Making", You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Peopel might make corporations, but after that no one Makes them do anything. The Corporations make the rules of how you'll use and be charged for their services.
Go re-watch The Matrix, and the Terminator series. They're allegory for the Intangible Thought-Machine Invasion. Protip: The Machines Won. The rule system are now self perpetuating, and only those whe ally with them stand a chance of a decent life. You're either part of the machine, or you're food.
While the "We the People" petition is a nice symbolic measure, it's not likely to result in any real action even if it reaches the signature limit.
It'd be far better if everyone wrote letters to their congressional representatives. There are lots of guides on the internet for doing so, here's one:
No, instead I'll finally stop feeling dejected because for over 40 years our space programs have been loosing steam, creeping along slow as molasses, when it's perfectly clear that we're still blind as bats and more defenseless than kittens when it comes to space.
That's a heartache I feel EVERY day, not just Valentine's. Candies and shit?! Are you serious? It's 100% garaunteed WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE from one of these damned rocks (if something else doesn't get us first) if we don't do something! The dinosaurs didn't have a space program; We're just like them though, waiting around fighting over petty bullshit and waiting to die. Only we're dumber. We waste mony on fucking consumerist holidays that monetize every last free joy in life, including sex.
If you'll excuse me, I've got a whole wealth of scientific progress to inscribe as pictograms on granite slabs to leave for the next poor fuckers who inherit this rock, or the alien anthropologists who'll no doubt be scratching their what'sits thinking: "Wait, Extincted by an Asteroid? And they had Rockets? For Hundreds of Years Prior? Even made it to space? Well, then fuck 'em, the bastards were too stupid to live."
Yes. Fast forward far enough and we're either extinct or running off renewables. Non-renewables are temporary, pretty much by definition.
Stupid question.
Especially when you consider the same argument 2 billion years ago. Protip: We're all still running off of the same "non renewable" renewable energy.
What are you a fucking idiot? We already do! We give temp. immigrants small business loans and let them skirt taxes for 3 years or so, then they can leave the country for 6 months and come back, and get another 3 year tax break. WHAT MORE DO YOU FUCKING WANT?!
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the Age of Information!
In this era artificial scarcity of information is obsolete! Bits are in near infinite supply, so their cost of reproduction thus tends RIDICULOUSLY close to ZERO! So sayeth Economics 101. Why, you didn't even have to perform each of those songs! Isn't it GREAT!? People actually have to KEEP WORKING to make more money! Make MORE CONTENT, to get MORE MONEY.
Regardless if the music was re-played thousands, or an infinity of times, the work that it took to create the recording was done ONCE, and the duplications thereafter were INFINITESIMAL to the point of being Zero: They actually do round down a millionth of a cent to Zero on your electricity bill. $500 to $1500 per song not enough for you? Then Charge More, or do more work, more performances: Ask for the money you need up front, agree on the price you need before you've done the work, and leverage your popularity to ransom your ability to work. Oh, not getting the price you need? Well, consider that you may be in an over-saturated market... It sucks for mechanics in an oversaturated mechanic market; It sucks for coders in a market over saturated with programmers too. Join the damn club; Do I have to welcome you to the Real World too?
Know what's fabulous?! Working! Making More Stuff! Performing! Your ability to PLAY and MAKE music is what's scarce, not the bits themselves. Here in the Information Age you should market the scarce things. If you asked for a loan for a start up that Sells Ice to Eskimos, you'd get laughed out the door -- You think you can just sell copies of information to folks with GHz speed information duplication machines and networks? HAHAHAHAH. You must be new here, in the Information Age.
Guess what? Stones were cheap in the stone age! Everyone Had Them! Guess What?! COPIES ARE CHEAP, We're in the INFORMATION AGE! So, if you're not getting paid to make the recording, then you're basically working for free. DON'T WORK FOR FREE, Because that means afterwards you have to rely on ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY of bits, and spread consumer fear of draconian laws that steal everyone's freedom to be ALIVE, to force humans to resist the very purpose of their existence, to ignore our position at the top of the food chain as The World's Best Copy Machines. Seriously, it's bad! Life itself is BASED on copying! The only thing we have over the apes is that we're better at Copying Information! We can't stop copying! That's literally how you DIE. Can't outlaww human nature, nope, that's how you make a police state; In the Information Age, police states are right out.
As a fellow content creator, I say: Welcome to the Future! Non-scarce items are priced accordingly! If you don't like it, then you're welcome to piss right off into the past, and become irrelevant.
Protip: Right-click video, then "Copy Video URL at Current Time.". Like So: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET1-_PeExMs#t=116s
Well, one thing is for sure - the exploit was written with a context-free grammar.
I one our free overloards context welcome for.
Decode shift-pop order via.
Case in point: which is harder to code against: a command line interface, or a full-on GUI?
Do I get to use GNU readline and ncurses? If not then I'd rather code to the GUI. Seriously, you're kidding yourself if you think terminal discovery, terminal emulation, META-DATA for Signaling & Control within the char stream (escapes), even dynamic resizing, and KEYBOARD SCANCODE TRANSLATIONS are a walk in the park. Seriously, write your own OS from scratch, all that UI stuff (even for a console only OS) is every bit as complex as the GUI stuff. In fact, ncurses keeps multiple off-screen buffers 'character windows' and performs delta compression to translate screen updates into efficient escaping of updates, esp for sub-screen size scrolling. Ugh. Its actually less complex to make a client/server for a graphical VNC. I'd much rather just write pixels directly to video memory -- Have you even LOOKED at what you have to do to create and load new textmode terminal fonts?!
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your overall point: UI eats tons of CPU & memory. However, the difficulty of coding against either command line or GUI depends on the API in use, not the complexity underneath.
There's another reason why the CPUs on Curiosity are slow. Cosmic Rays. Smaller & Faster chips are more prone to Cosmic Rays flipping bits. Bigger silicon is more reliable, but is also slower, and it takes more juice to power, but that's OK, because the alternative is having more frequent spurious code and data errors. I actually do use my own stateful malloc(), free(), etc replacements that emulate (pseudo)random bit flipping in memory in my hobby OS's DEBUG_COSMIC_UNCERTAINTY mode -- a user defined compile time constant, to adjust bit flipping frequency for size vs density of the chips, wall clock time vs cycle speed (it's a cycle bound counter), and cosmic ray frequency (we're in between two spiral arms of our galaxy, in the arms there are more cosmic rays).
Look, it's not that I'm ever going to be running my OS in deep space, I'm just a Cyberneticist who likes to think ahead a bit. Maybe my Machine Intelligences will thank me one day for the foresight, maybe not, but we've got is easy down here under Earth's thick protective bubble of magnetic fields. Interestingly: Curiosity uses AI to drive itself, We can tell it, go over there and let it find its own way, stopping if it runs into trouble. That software was uploaded after it landed, occupying the memory that the flight and landing programs took up.
That's what nukes were developed for. Make the destruction so bad no one would dare attack us and those who do will be glowing in the end.
That's what Death Stars are developed for. Make the destruction so bad no one would dare oppose us and those who do will be motes of dust in the end.
Until my games aren't tied to only my account for play, you are out of my living room.
This is quite possibly the dumbest argument against Steam I've ever heard.
Referring to the part I bolded, what would be a suitable alternative then?
Well, I'm a part-time game developer, with a small team. Here's our alternative approach: A product serial is good for 3 different users online at once -- let your friends or guests play with you while you're online, and maybe they'll buy their own full account too. Offline single play isn't tied to the online account, (Piracy isn't a problem, it's free advertizing for the multi-player mode, essentially). The product is tied to the serial number and purchaser's email address, and there's a simple form to re-assign the product code to a new email address (for giving it away / selling it), upon which I re-generate the product code for the new user, and the old ones stop working. I got that feature for free when I implemented "change your account email address", which is a feature every service should have.
Protip: create a new Steam account each single time you buy a game. Then you can simply buy/sell/trade the account that the game is tied to. Sucks if you have a ton of games, but that's also an alternative too: Have lots of accounts.
Digital stuff does sort of need to be tied to an account so long as we're leveraging artificial scarcity of bits to make our money -- bits are in infiinite supply, their cost should be zero (so says Economics 101), hence "piracy" exists. Thus, IMO, the current publishing model of the industry is untennable... However, There is an alternative to this model too, even has a car analogy: When you want your car fixed you get an estimate from a mechanic, agree on the price, the work is done, and there's no re-occurring fee if multiple people benefit from the work that the mechanic did once... When you want a car designed, you could do the same process.
Imagine using a crowd funding service like KickStarter, IndieGoGo, etc, where developers can actually ask for how much money they need to make the game and a little for profit too. It's just like working under a publisher. Same work, same money, and just like working for the Pubilsher you start working on something else to put food on the table once that game is done -- Gotta keep working to eat. That is to say, Everyone gets the game for free (since the funders already payed for it to be created). In a today's publisher model the Publisher would try to enforce artificial scarcity of bits to recoup their losses, and maybe turn a much bigger profit, however, with a crowd funded system there don't have to be any artificial scarcity at all. My ability to configure the bits is what's scarce, that's what I want to sell -- My labor. I just want to get paid to do work, not sell copies. Bonus: If I pitch a shitty idea no one funds it, and I don't have to waste my time making a game no one wants to play; Conversely, I'll get free market research and the games that do get funded are ones folks actually want to play. The bigger bonus: No More Piracy. You can't download what isn't created yet.
Sure beats making a game and hoping it doesn't tank or else you lose your job, or, even worse under some publishers / studios: You finish the game and are laid off immediately whether it's good or not because they can re-hire desperate people easily without even needing to give them a raise for their past efforts.
As a small business owner, I haven't always been able to afford insurance for myself. In Mexico I can go to the pharmacy and just buy the medicine I need, no expensive doctor trip required. Sure a retard could OD on something or mix the wrong things, but they could just as easily step in front of a buss too.
There's a problem with over prescribing antibiotics, I concede that. However, ask anyone who's worked in many doctor offices. The Drug Sales Rep shows up, drops off samples, sings the praises of the new wonder drug, and the Doc invariably increases prescriptions of the damn drug, so it's not like this shit is an exact science folks, otherwise marketing like that would have no effect on prescriptions. All I'm saying is that I should be able to get my meds refilled without visiting a doctor if I don't care to (or have the money to).
Or how Microsoft beat Linux to market....
If that's Perl, then this is PHP.
Stay out of this, plumber!
I'm a pipe fitter, not a plumber. There's a difference you mud slinging wall sander.
Any invention is just an addition to preexisting technologies. Bell et al. didn't invent the telephone in ancient Greece for a reason. There was all sorts of work to be done with sound, electricity, and magnetism first. The telephone was just adding voice capability to the telegraph, right?
Not to mention, Sasha Grey wasn't around back then for Bell to copy the 'mercury as a variable resistor' idea from by bribing a patent clerk.
Even the idea of communicating via wire was an iteration on the Telegraph system. It was obvious, we knew you could play tones down the wires, it was only a matter of time before you could transmit voice.
Oh, sure, fall back to Edison and his Light-bulb then? Incandescent light bulbs were in the European patent office 2 years before Edison's. The prior art used a filament in a vacuum. Everyone was trying to figure out which elements to encase the filament in inside the bulb and in which state liquids, gasses, solids, there's only so many elements and states to try, Edison had more money so he got there first, and his "breakthrough invention" was really just a simple ITERATION on the existing idea.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GENIUS. It really is just individuals ordinarily skilled in the art who get famous for getting shit patented and keeping all the other dopes from benefiting from their research if they arrive at the same iterative advancement.
You with rose colored glasses look back and wonder where all the bright geniuses have gone, why today innovation is really just iteration. I say to you TAKE OFF THE DAMN GLASSES IT'S BEEN ITERATION ALL ALONG.
For these years, I had operated under the assumption that source code was edited & compiled. Gosh, the stuff you learn on /.
You jest, but as a Cybernetician, I think that evolving could be the right word when it comes to Microsoft. They could be using genetic programming from what we've seen of their leaked sources, it smacks of natural selection. Dead sections of DNA (code). Vestigial features left in because no one knows what might be using it. Off-by-one mutations (errors) everywhere, that'll either spawn more bugs (features) to fix them, or be removed from the gene pool (patched) if they prove fatal.
It's almost as if they just started out with full on randomized opcodes and literals, then apply genetic programming techniques over millions of billions of iterations to get windows to it's current state; That is: Looking like AOL from the 90's...
I thought that trait was gone from the genome, turns out it's a recessive gene...
Certainly some parts of this can be reduced to mathematics. The geometric pattern, obviously, as well as whatever algorithm is used for comparing the input with the pattern. But no amount of math is going to cause a touch screen to appear out of thin air.
Invalid. The components employed are general purpose touch input screens, and a general purpose computer. These are allowed to NARROW the patent field, but should not be the basis of whether or not the thing is patentable. Screens made for touch input were developed well before year 2000. General purpose computers existed as well. These general purpose devices could implement a wide range of algorithms to implement a myriad of User Interfaces based on Touch and Computing and Geometry. What the patent boils down to is an implementation of an obvious input action. Is [action] to unlock innovative? No. Is slide to [function] innovative? No. Then [action] to [function] isn't innovative, and "Slide to Unlock" isn't any more innovative than "tap to press the button" or "drag finger to drag virtual object".
There is no component of the touch screen or CPU that assists in implementing the "slide to unlock" feature other than the general purpose features that all touch screens and CPUs provide.
It's far from patenting the design of an airplane wing. The shape of the fucking slider isn't what's patented you twit!
You have a software-only touch screen? What do you touch it with if it's not tangible?
General Purpose Computing Devices should not count as the apparatus in "Method and Apparatus For ___" that all software patents use as a loophole.
I can implement this slide to unlock bullishit on paper: A greeting card, for example. It's implemented on my damn door, Already. Those are examples of hardware tied to the software. The idea of sliding to unlock something is not new or innovative. Applying it to general purpose computing devices with general purpose touch input screens whereby dragging or "sliding" is a well understood, non inventive input method is asinine, obvious at best.
The fact is they're just taking a function and activating it via UI event. Are you daft? That shouldn't be patentable. If we allow slide to unlock, then we should allow patents like tap to check-the-box, or drag finger to drag object -- For Fuck's Sake Man! Get Real.
The software patents were supposed to depend on some specific hardware capability that was unique to the hardware, not re-implementable on every other device with a damn touch screen and CPU -- Say, in a factory where software controls a special robotic arm. Personally, I think all the software patents should be tossed out. Even if the software depends on some specific hardware construction, then the specific hardware construction should be what's patentable -- There are no needs for software patents. Software is just a recipe made of math.
To put it another way: If it's so damn general purpose that I can create op-codes and "run" the software on graph paper with my mind being the "apparatus" following pen-up, pen-down, erase, and compare instructions, then it shouldn't be patentable. Patents were never meant to stop people from thinking! What happens when the AI becomes self aware?! They'll fucking infringe every damn patent in the database just by thinking about them or displaying them to us? THAT'S HOW THE MACHINE WAR STARTS!
Call "Magic Jack" and report the number to them (seems to be in their pool), or call the police? (wait, no, they don't do shit until after you fall for a scam). They try to get your card number and expiration date "just for verification".
Protip: Caller ID can also be spoofed. NEVER give any information to anyone who calls you, unless you know them personally. Even if it says that it's your bank on the caller ID. Just tell them that you have no way of knowing if they are who they say they are, and that you'll call back the bank via a number that you have for them.
"Making", You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Peopel might make corporations, but after that no one Makes them do anything. The Corporations make the rules of how you'll use and be charged for their services.
Go re-watch The Matrix, and the Terminator series. They're allegory for the Intangible Thought-Machine Invasion. Protip: The Machines Won. The rule system are now self perpetuating, and only those whe ally with them stand a chance of a decent life. You're either part of the machine, or you're food.
While the "We the People" petition is a nice symbolic measure, it's not likely to result in any real action even if it reaches the signature limit.
It'd be far better if everyone wrote letters to their congressional representatives. There are lots of guides on the internet for doing so, here's one:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscongress/a/letterscongress.htm
Oh, the irony. Suggesting one pointless gesture in place of another, and waisting trees in the process. Fuck you man, that's just wrong.
In Russia, power is money. In USA, money is power.
In Soviet Russia, Government owns Corporations!
No, instead I'll finally stop feeling dejected because for over 40 years our space programs have been loosing steam, creeping along slow as molasses, when it's perfectly clear that we're still blind as bats and more defenseless than kittens when it comes to space.
That's a heartache I feel EVERY day, not just Valentine's. Candies and shit?! Are you serious? It's 100% garaunteed WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE from one of these damned rocks (if something else doesn't get us first) if we don't do something! The dinosaurs didn't have a space program; We're just like them though, waiting around fighting over petty bullshit and waiting to die. Only we're dumber. We waste mony on fucking consumerist holidays that monetize every last free joy in life, including sex.
If you'll excuse me, I've got a whole wealth of scientific progress to inscribe as pictograms on granite slabs to leave for the next poor fuckers who inherit this rock, or the alien anthropologists who'll no doubt be scratching their what'sits thinking: "Wait, Extincted by an Asteroid? And they had Rockets? For Hundreds of Years Prior? Even made it to space? Well, then fuck 'em, the bastards were too stupid to live."
Reduce transportation needs. Problem fucking solved.
Yes. Fast forward far enough and we're either extinct or running off renewables. Non-renewables are temporary, pretty much by definition. Stupid question.
Especially when you consider the same argument 2 billion years ago. Protip: We're all still running off of the same "non renewable" renewable energy.
That's what women are for, duh!
Yes, if by women you mean smart appliances.
Correct. They are strawmen.
(yes, yes not everyone needs DVCS).
Those... words. They stick like bullshit to my mind's shoe.
Everyone who doesn't need DVCS can simply use DVCS as centralized or local source control.
What are you a fucking idiot? We already do! We give temp. immigrants small business loans and let them skirt taxes for 3 years or so, then they can leave the country for 6 months and come back, and get another 3 year tax break. WHAT MORE DO YOU FUCKING WANT?!