The states are an anachronism referring to the colonies to begin with - if you got rid of the states and devolved power to (fewer, consolidated) councils, would it really be that bad? Councils looking after local issues, the Commonwealth looking after national ones.
There's very few issues that affect an individual state as a whole but not the neighbouring state - on the other hand, with sufficiently large councils, you would definitely have things which affect a single council but not the next. This would necessitate something like a Greater Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane Council, along the lines of the Greater London Authority.
(not that that's an argument for the political & managerial abilities of councils, a number of which have been genuine duds.)
In this case, you can actually blame the newly elected conservatives in the NSW government, possibly trying to appease Rev. Fred Nile & his Christian Democrats in the NSW upper house.
That aside, the issue here in Australia is that games are judged to a different scale to movies, due to their interactive nature apparently, as well as the unsaid "child-focused" nature of gaming (I kid you not). Games which fail to meet the Office of Film & Literature Classification board's standards for the "Mature Adults Only (15+)" band - are therefore refused classification (RC), and refused classification means it won't be allowed to be imported into the country, let alone sold. Any explicit sexual content and extreme violence seems to get you over the line here. A rating certificate can also be revoked if later updates provide material which violates standards.
This has resulted in certain games, like the latest Mortal Kombat, or the initial version of GTA 3 (iirc... some big game in any case), being RC'd. I think GTA was revised at the last minute for the Australian version, allowing sale, but Mortal Kombat's producers refused to change and the game wasn't allowed for sale. No huge loss, some might say, but the adults of Australia are asking for the discretion to judge it for themselves. There's also a somebody-think-of-the-children argument in that some games with significant violence are shoe-horned into the MA15+ category when they more properly belong in an R18+ category.
It bugs me though that if the OFLC is at the Federal level, and this should be harmonised across all states, why is the legislative power not also at the federal level? arrgh!
It seems to me that everyone comes on here and bitches every couple of weeks when another patent trolling case lights up the collective ire of Geeks United, complaining that the USPTO is incompetent, couldn't tell Prior Art if it was stuck in their prosteriors, and generally how much these things suck.
Has anyone done anything about it? Has anyone called to apply for a job at the USPTO, as unglamorous as that is? Do you not want to work for "the man"? Do we have anyone here who works for the patent office?
Seems to me you could get very far very quickly as a patent reviewer if you could go in and show that these things are dumb, have been done before and are solely for the purposes of legal action by those who have no claim to be exploiting the patent. I am of course assuming that there's someone with a bit of principle still left at the patent office, if only they could get help in reviewing - or is the patent office just out to make a buck these days?
(I recognise the irony in saying this rather than doing it myself, but as I'm not a US citizen nor do I reside in the US, it'd be difficult at best for me to follow through.)
1) people fooling around with code make new, cool things that are useful 2) someone notices and suggests to these people that these useful things would be useful to other people, and they could probably sell it for something 3) the inventor sells it and starts to make some money, thinking how wonderful it is that this useful thing could be useful to someone else while making some money for him/her. 4) someone with a bit of legalese and a knowledge of the patent system notices something new and useful being sold 5) they take the concept and boil it down to an abstract of the process, without any need to specify implementation detail. They dress it up in abstract diagrams and file it with the patent office 6) ??? 7) Patent office approves without checking any of the criteria originally required of them to check ("innovative", "original", "not a mathematical process/formula") 8) patent filer (henceforth known as the "patent troll") sues inventor, and anyone who made anything similar enough as a competing product 9) Profit! 10) There is no step 10.
Alternatively, Patent Troll sells Patent portfolio to Big Company who goes from step 8 onwards.
People are "trolling" because comments like "pssh easy I could do it for half the cost" are pure flamebait. All we'd say is build it for that much and get back to us.
A grenade you can control the flight path of from outside the building your target is hiding in? sounds pretty damn useful to me, even with an 8 minute battery!
Your point is valid, but to be generous, I think the point of this post is that with appropriate cabling & server setup, a machine from 30 years ago that understood Ethernet could talk to one today. CPUs, memory etc on the other hand didn't survive the years intact - the concept might remain, but the technology behind it is not compatible.
Because a specialist device doesn't need to and shouldn't compete with more generalist devices?
You can stick to the philosophy of "Do one thing, do it well" and still endure. Attempting to be a jack of all trades chasing competitors for ancillary features shouldn't be important if you know what you're selling should sell on its own merits.
I use my Kindle for reading, and my iPhone for music - I charge my Kindle once a month, my iPhone daily. Two separate but complimentary devices.
That's why we RTFA. It's not about hosting companies collecting sales taxes from their customers at all; the question is whether having hosting in Texas amounts to a physical presence.
The result of the physical presence in Texas, prior to the clarification, would be any commerce conducted on that server would be subject to Texas sales and/or use tax - meaning even if the company does its main operations in a different state and their customer is in a third state, they could have been liable for Texas tax, as though the operation was being handled through a Texas store-front.
What this bill clarifies is that simply having hosting is not the same as the physical presence. Rackspace et al were worried that if this was not the case, customers of theirs (the Googles etc) would go elsewhere to avoid slugging their customers the Texas tax.
The analogy that would apply is more like Company A is a trucking company based in Texas, company B is in Alabama and customer C is in California. Customer C calls Company B to order a product, which Company B ships to the customer through Company A. Just to nail down the analogy, the truck travels through Texas in the process of delivering the good.
The law clarifies that Company B has no obligation to charge Texas sales and/or use tax to Customer C because they happened to use Company A based in Texas.
I'm pretty sure JPM did no such thing. Wikipedia suggests this was a Drexel Burnham thing in 1987 - Drexel did a lot of stuff in the bond market in the 80s, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it came out of there.
(1) that has nothing to do with transparency or information asymmetry.
(2) I wasn't talking about the post-crash cleanup, but rather the lead-up not being the result of a lack of transparency, but rather a lack of intelligence & understanding.
Yeah, people live off that difference and less. There are kids starving in Africa. Doesn't mean I shouldn't eat more than what I can share around.
I'm not one to roll out the "commie" accusation on a regular basis, but that's just a tad communist ain't it? Who are you to argue that I shouldn't sell my services for the highest available price offered?
Having worked in a similar company, I can say that while "all" might be a bit broad, it's not hard to find different flavours of *nix around the place. We used Red Hat for the servers, debian for the dev boxes - other teams used Solaris for the servers, SuSE for dev - the servers were eventually all pushed to a unified platform (Solaris), but no-one really cared which flavour you had on your dev box.
The result of this will be that they'll get a number summing up their credit risk in 5 minutes instead of 8 hours. If there's anything way out of whack, they'll be able to react during the day, rather than having to react effectively 24 hours later.
Human stupidity, greed and arrogance resulted in the housing bubble & subsequent crash. Banks such as Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank who had clever people that saw the whole thing coming got out while the going was good and made money on the way down - powered by intelligence, greed and arrogance. Transparency had nothing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The states are an anachronism referring to the colonies to begin with - if you got rid of the states and devolved power to (fewer, consolidated) councils, would it really be that bad? Councils looking after local issues, the Commonwealth looking after national ones.
There's very few issues that affect an individual state as a whole but not the neighbouring state - on the other hand, with sufficiently large councils, you would definitely have things which affect a single council but not the next. This would necessitate something like a Greater Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane Council, along the lines of the Greater London Authority.
(not that that's an argument for the political & managerial abilities of councils, a number of which have been genuine duds.)
Doesn't Google already have a patent on that for Chrome?
In this case, you can actually blame the newly elected conservatives in the NSW government, possibly trying to appease Rev. Fred Nile & his Christian Democrats in the NSW upper house.
Did people forget about the PC all of a sudden?
That aside, the issue here in Australia is that games are judged to a different scale to movies, due to their interactive nature apparently, as well as the unsaid "child-focused" nature of gaming (I kid you not). Games which fail to meet the Office of Film & Literature Classification board's standards for the "Mature Adults Only (15+)" band - are therefore refused classification (RC), and refused classification means it won't be allowed to be imported into the country, let alone sold. Any explicit sexual content and extreme violence seems to get you over the line here. A rating certificate can also be revoked if later updates provide material which violates standards.
This has resulted in certain games, like the latest Mortal Kombat, or the initial version of GTA 3 (iirc... some big game in any case), being RC'd. I think GTA was revised at the last minute for the Australian version, allowing sale, but Mortal Kombat's producers refused to change and the game wasn't allowed for sale. No huge loss, some might say, but the adults of Australia are asking for the discretion to judge it for themselves. There's also a somebody-think-of-the-children argument in that some games with significant violence are shoe-horned into the MA15+ category when they more properly belong in an R18+ category.
+1 Informative
It bugs me though that if the OFLC is at the Federal level, and this should be harmonised across all states, why is the legislative power not also at the federal level? arrgh!
Well, at least it'll save us from having to address the Y2K38 problem.
Huh. Reuters might have been slow to the party as a mainstream news source, but then what does that say about Slashdot these days?
It seems to me that everyone comes on here and bitches every couple of weeks when another patent trolling case lights up the collective ire of Geeks United, complaining that the USPTO is incompetent, couldn't tell Prior Art if it was stuck in their prosteriors, and generally how much these things suck.
Has anyone done anything about it? Has anyone called to apply for a job at the USPTO, as unglamorous as that is? Do you not want to work for "the man"? Do we have anyone here who works for the patent office?
Seems to me you could get very far very quickly as a patent reviewer if you could go in and show that these things are dumb, have been done before and are solely for the purposes of legal action by those who have no claim to be exploiting the patent. I am of course assuming that there's someone with a bit of principle still left at the patent office, if only they could get help in reviewing - or is the patent office just out to make a buck these days?
(I recognise the irony in saying this rather than doing it myself, but as I'm not a US citizen nor do I reside in the US, it'd be difficult at best for me to follow through.)
Patent trolling in 10 easy steps:
1) people fooling around with code make new, cool things that are useful
2) someone notices and suggests to these people that these useful things would be useful to other people, and they could probably sell it for something
3) the inventor sells it and starts to make some money, thinking how wonderful it is that this useful thing could be useful to someone else while making some money for him/her.
4) someone with a bit of legalese and a knowledge of the patent system notices something new and useful being sold
5) they take the concept and boil it down to an abstract of the process, without any need to specify implementation detail. They dress it up in abstract diagrams and file it with the patent office
6) ???
7) Patent office approves without checking any of the criteria originally required of them to check ("innovative", "original", "not a mathematical process/formula")
8) patent filer (henceforth known as the "patent troll") sues inventor, and anyone who made anything similar enough as a competing product
9) Profit!
10) There is no step 10.
Alternatively, Patent Troll sells Patent portfolio to Big Company who goes from step 8 onwards.
Given it was built by a guy in the Japanese Military of Defence, you can bet they'll be weaponising it as we speak.
People are "trolling" because comments like "pssh easy I could do it for half the cost" are pure flamebait. All we'd say is build it for that much and get back to us.
A grenade you can control the flight path of from outside the building your target is hiding in? sounds pretty damn useful to me, even with an 8 minute battery!
Your point is valid, but to be generous, I think the point of this post is that with appropriate cabling & server setup, a machine from 30 years ago that understood Ethernet could talk to one today. CPUs, memory etc on the other hand didn't survive the years intact - the concept might remain, but the technology behind it is not compatible.
Ok. I guess the point is that the confusion has been cleared up.
Because a specialist device doesn't need to and shouldn't compete with more generalist devices?
You can stick to the philosophy of "Do one thing, do it well" and still endure. Attempting to be a jack of all trades chasing competitors for ancillary features shouldn't be important if you know what you're selling should sell on its own merits.
I use my Kindle for reading, and my iPhone for music - I charge my Kindle once a month, my iPhone daily. Two separate but complimentary devices.
The meme you're looking for is "yo dawg", as in "yo dawg, I heard you like IBM Ads..."
Depends on the licence.
That's why we RTFA. It's not about hosting companies collecting sales taxes from their customers at all; the question is whether having hosting in Texas amounts to a physical presence.
The result of the physical presence in Texas, prior to the clarification, would be any commerce conducted on that server would be subject to Texas sales and/or use tax - meaning even if the company does its main operations in a different state and their customer is in a third state, they could have been liable for Texas tax, as though the operation was being handled through a Texas store-front.
What this bill clarifies is that simply having hosting is not the same as the physical presence. Rackspace et al were worried that if this was not the case, customers of theirs (the Googles etc) would go elsewhere to avoid slugging their customers the Texas tax.
The analogy that would apply is more like Company A is a trucking company based in Texas, company B is in Alabama and customer C is in California. Customer C calls Company B to order a product, which Company B ships to the customer through Company A. Just to nail down the analogy, the truck travels through Texas in the process of delivering the good.
The law clarifies that Company B has no obligation to charge Texas sales and/or use tax to Customer C because they happened to use Company A based in Texas.
[citation needed]
I'm pretty sure JPM did no such thing. Wikipedia suggests this was a Drexel Burnham thing in 1987 - Drexel did a lot of stuff in the bond market in the 80s, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it came out of there.
(1) that has nothing to do with transparency or information asymmetry.
(2) I wasn't talking about the post-crash cleanup, but rather the lead-up not being the result of a lack of transparency, but rather a lack of intelligence & understanding.
Yeah, people live off that difference and less. There are kids starving in Africa. Doesn't mean I shouldn't eat more than what I can share around.
I'm not one to roll out the "commie" accusation on a regular basis, but that's just a tad communist ain't it? Who are you to argue that I shouldn't sell my services for the highest available price offered?
Having worked in a similar company, I can say that while "all" might be a bit broad, it's not hard to find different flavours of *nix around the place. We used Red Hat for the servers, debian for the dev boxes - other teams used Solaris for the servers, SuSE for dev - the servers were eventually all pushed to a unified platform (Solaris), but no-one really cared which flavour you had on your dev box.
The result of this will be that they'll get a number summing up their credit risk in 5 minutes instead of 8 hours. If there's anything way out of whack, they'll be able to react during the day, rather than having to react effectively 24 hours later.
Human stupidity, greed and arrogance resulted in the housing bubble & subsequent crash. Banks such as Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank who had clever people that saw the whole thing coming got out while the going was good and made money on the way down - powered by intelligence, greed and arrogance. Transparency had nothing to do with it.