Unfortunately this idea, if properly written up, would probably get granted a patent. The level of examination now seems to be absolutely zero.
A few days ago I was handed a copy of a patent that was recently granted (to a large airplane company based in the NW USA) it contains a long list of reference documents, reading of which should be sufficient to show the examiner that it contained nothing much original.
A guy I know had a patent granted which contained the wording (from memory) "This method represents a digital implementation of a standard analogue approach" . These guys know they are trying it on, and are being fairly honest about it.(they are engineers, don't like this system anymore than we do, but do what the boss says)
Yeah, I'm fairly sure that when you build a road, they sell it as "55MPH capable", and everyone can safely drive 55mph."
Great car-based analogy, when you drive on a road your car has to be an approved type (safety inspections, weight limits, seat belts, not too many passengers, not too polluting etc) and if its stolen the police will pull you over. Plus if too many people try and use the road at once everything slows to a crawl. it may be 55mph capable, but not when everyone is driving a truck full of logs....
But where do you draw the line? Should Amazon US collect VAT if they sell to a European, GST to a New Zealander or Australian? Because that's effectively what you're saying, that Amazon should have to keep abreast of tax laws, and collect for, every single piddling country on the face of the planet.
They don't have to all: these Countries have incoming customs requirement that handle this. sometimes stuff gets through free, sometimes it gets overcharged (I paid £15 pound tax on a $50 book from Amazon US once - The tax rate for books in the UK is zero...) . either way there is a process. In contrast there is no customs agency or equivalent checking what comes into a state. The only sane way to handle it would be for each state to define a simple incoming goods tax rate and require businesses doing over a certain size to collect it. Anything else unfairly discriminates against physical businesses trying to operate in that state.
Of course people should pay the use tax, but since Americans mostly seem to consider cheating on their taxes to be almost virtuous that is never going to work.
The entire UK (Is it any different elsewhere?) Mobile Phone industry works on ethical standard that would shame organised crime, among the many abuses I've come across :
* Deceptive tariffs, resulting in unexpectedly large bills, especially the roaming data ( I used to handle the phone admin for a medium sized company, we had a user come back from overseas trips with bills up over a thousand pounds when the free roaming data the salesman told us we'd bought turned out to have a fair use limit of 10MB...)
* The reverse billing text message scam - some of the companies operating this make tens of millions, and have been fined hundreds of thousands for repeated abuses - they are still in business.
* your bank details get passed on and you are billed for insurance you never asked for
* BUYING the stolen data
Think of these guys as a bit like Chris in the Sopranos, They got impatient and wanted a piece of the action for themselves. They may get a slap on the wrist, but the business is full of worse criminals.
I am using Outlook 2007 (on XP), with over 12,000 emails in my inbox (don't ask...) and it is using 40 MB of virtual memory..
for another data point. 28000 in the inbox (you thought you were bad...), Windows 7, exchange and a POP account 66MB used. I don't think that is too bad.
In the old days we had a dedicated small business team in Ireland. We would phone up a lady called Ines, she would sort out what was needed. give us a good price and everyone was happy, we had a company full of Dell PC's.
Then they shifted the SALES TEAM to India. This works really well, you get totally pissed off BEFORE you've spent any money, buy an HP and everythings still fine.
And then the Monty Python gang got together (I think this is right chronologically, but I'm happy to be corrected)..
Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie etc got going in the early 1980's, (i.e. around 15 AP)
Other things in the chronology you should check out are
Oscar Wilde (Esp. Importance of being Earnest - A hundred years old and still hilarious) PG Wodehouse ITMA, (war time, led to the Goons) Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, TW3, (David Frost et al, he became a total Dick later on but in the 60's he was good) - The 60's satire movement in general, At Last the 1948 show (pre-python) The Goodies Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy (avoid the horrible remake) Ben Elton (see comments on David Frost) - BlackAdder (which starred Fry and Laurie) is probably on a level with Python The Young Ones.
and lots of other stuff. obviously there are huge interconnections between everything.
Wkipedia and Youtube should keep you going for a while
when tea drinking was at its peak we managed to hold together a worldwide empire, hampered very little by tea-related injuries.
Yes but we drank it out of proper cups, in sensible quantities, and didn't try to drive at the same time.
I actually get quite irritated when people hold up the McDonalds Coffe incident as a dumb lawsuit, Having spilt 1980's McDo coffee on myself once I was fully in sympathy with the suit. That stuff was lethal. It was 20-30 degrees hotter than everyone elses, handing it out at drive-ins was just stupid.
perhaps even more than the soviets, there were a whole host of amateur radio enthusiasts monitoring the lunar transmissions, so at the very least the Americans were relaying the pictures from the New Mexico desert via a transponder on the moon.
People had a lot to lose at the time of the Revolution. Their lives, their families, and their property. This wasn't Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or China, this was just Britain..
Dodgy analogy: If Tesco were selling soooo many packets of Corn Flakes that they were running out of space in their warehouses, then using the BT-School-of-Business route, they'd want to charge the customer the same for the Corn Flakes and *also* charge Kelogs for the privileged of Tesco selling them! Whereas obviously, they need to make enough money by selling products to invest in building the infrastructure to deliver it all.:D
If they cut down on my all you can use cornflakes supply, I may have to seriously consider using something else for fuel...
If we paid per megabyte for data it would be easy to provide infinite capacity, I'm not sure i want that. Generally I've been quite happy for my heavy internet consumption to be subsidised by the masses who just do a bit of web browsing and E-mails. The problem with things like iplayer is that all of a sudden everyone becomes a high bandwidth user. and the traditional business model doesn't work any more.
Delivering even 2 MB/s to everyone at once, 24/7 Is very very expensive. If we want it SOMEONE will have to pay.
I'm unconvinced that the iplayer model is the most efficient way to deliver video on demand.to millions of users.
Just curious what, if any, influence the FAA has on Air France...
Air France flies into a number of American airports, If they did not maintain their aircraft as mandated they would not be allowed to. Most countries authorities are every bit as picky as the FAA. maintenance schedules/procedures come from the manufacturer so Air maintenance standards are pretty much global. aside from anything else if your aircraft has not been maintained by the book it has zero resale value,
So the only aircraft that are not maintained to proper standards will be end of life ones flying domestically within disreputable third world countries, not many of those left now.
I've worked with aircraft maintenance companies for 25 years, of course you hear the odd horror story - normally honest errors, and the system works well to catch them. The only airline I've come across that frequently falsified records was Eastern, and they did get caught.
I just gave away my old component stereo, which has been working fine since the late 70's when I bought it.(except for the CD player which was 1986) I haven't had any problems except for rubber belts perishing on the turntable and cassette.
But it was pretty ordinary performance for the day and still cost more in actual cash terms than the BOSE system (i know...) that i replaced it with, so figure maybe 4-5 times as much allowing for inflation.
Modern stuff is cheap, It's value engineered to the max, and built to be thrown away after a few years, not least because most of it is impossible to fix.
the patented idea needs to be in software produced by the company within 3 months of the patent being filed. If not then the patent is automatically voided.
Sounds nice, But this just consolidates the position of patents as a tool of large corporations to squash competition.
A big company can do this. A little guy typically gets an idea, plays with it a bit, files the patent and then has some protection while he looks for finance/support to launch it.
BTW I work in the hardware side, I don't think patents are any less broken there, I've come across a couple of situations recently in my area of work where patents have been granted to a large American company describing ideas that in one case was commercially available years before the filing date, and in another was previously shown to said company by a much smaller one . No they probably wouldn't stand up in court, but the existence of such a patent can totally screw up a business plan, and its pretty much impossible to challenge these things without significant resources.
I don't really like this being modified as flamebait, I'm trying to make a fairly serious point here, Obviously I'm not a fan of the woman, but as the years of power went on she did get increasingly irrational and prone to distrust all outside opinion. This contributed significantly to the manner of her eventual downfall. I think more sleep might have made quite a difference.
Margaret Thatcher was born in '25, and was PM between '79 and '90, i.e., between roughly 54 and 65 years old. Admittedly still a bit young for 4 hours a night, but less spectacular than if someone half that age pulled that stunt anyway.
And of course if she wasn't a completely delusional paranoid fucking maniac.
I've found that the last few builds of Firefox seem less stable - And IE is definitely not as crap as it once was, so If I have one more crash in the middle of a large non-resumable download I might seriously consider switching back to IE after many years...
I hope its just me, although a few of my colleagues seem to be finding the same.
It's foolish to assume it's stolen. People sell laptops every day.
Is this true?
I my experience people keep laptops until they fail (Usually mechanically) and are uneconomic to repair. I know a lot more people who have had laptop stolen or lost than who have sold them...
Who has ever heard about Apple Corps, a 'company' that'll remain a footnote in history as "the company that wrestled with Apple, Inc. to use the Apple trademark". Nothing more. I never heard of them until they renewed their suit in 2003.
Even in early 1980s Apple Computer was more famous than Apple Corps.
I think we can agree who is less famous and who should change the name. Trademarks serve well with companies of equal size and with directly overlapping businesses, and obviously not so well with tiny companies fighting large companies...
*sigh*
FYI Apple Corp = Beatles
we remember that
Beatles > God
You assert that
Apple > Beatles > God
and of course Apple (plucky little niches company, always ethical)
Is much smaller than (can't remember enough HTML to make that symbolic) Microsoft (Evil Big bad monopolist, need to bring them in, this is Slashdot)
So Therefore
Microsoft >> > > God
at last a mathematical explanation of Bill Gate's ego
Never understood how Apple got anywhere with that one. The whole basis of the agreement was Apple Corps wouldn't sell computers and Apple wouldn't sell music.
But we all know that the trademark system is almost as broken as patents and copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
If only this was a troll!
Unfortunately this idea, if properly written up, would probably get granted a patent. The level of examination now seems to be absolutely zero.
A few days ago I was handed a copy of a patent that was recently granted (to a large airplane company based in the NW USA) it contains a long list of reference documents, reading of which should be sufficient to show the examiner that it contained nothing much original.
A guy I know had a patent granted which contained the wording (from memory) "This method represents a digital implementation of a standard analogue approach" . These guys know they are trying it on, and are being fairly honest about it.(they are engineers, don't like this system anymore than we do, but do what the boss says)
None of this seems to stop patents being granted.
Yeah, I'm fairly sure that when you build a road, they sell it as "55MPH capable", and everyone can safely drive 55mph."
Great car-based analogy, when you drive on a road your car has to be an approved type (safety inspections, weight limits, seat belts, not too many passengers, not too polluting etc) and if its stolen the police will pull you over. Plus if too many people try and use the road at once everything slows to a crawl. it may be 55mph capable, but not when everyone is driving a truck full of logs....
But where do you draw the line? Should Amazon US collect VAT if they sell to a European, GST to a New Zealander or Australian? Because that's effectively what you're saying, that Amazon should have to keep abreast of tax laws, and collect for, every single piddling country on the face of the planet.
They don't have to all: these Countries have incoming customs requirement that handle this. sometimes stuff gets through free, sometimes it gets overcharged (I paid £15 pound tax on a $50 book from Amazon US once - The tax rate for books in the UK is zero ...) . either way there is a process. In contrast there is no customs agency or equivalent checking what comes into a state. The only sane way to handle it would be for each state to define a simple incoming goods tax rate and require businesses doing over a certain size to collect it. Anything else unfairly discriminates against physical businesses trying to operate in that state.
Of course people should pay the use tax, but since Americans mostly seem to consider cheating on their taxes to be almost virtuous that is never going to work.
The entire UK (Is it any different elsewhere?) Mobile Phone industry works on ethical standard that would shame organised crime, among the many abuses I've come across :
* Deceptive tariffs, resulting in unexpectedly large bills, especially the roaming data ( I used to handle the phone admin for a medium sized company, we had a user come back from overseas trips with bills up over a thousand pounds when the free roaming data the salesman told us we'd bought turned out to have a fair use limit of 10MB...)
* The reverse billing text message scam - some of the companies operating this make tens of millions, and have been fined hundreds of thousands for repeated abuses - they are still in business.
* your bank details get passed on and you are billed for insurance you never asked for
* BUYING the stolen data
Think of these guys as a bit like Chris in the Sopranos, They got impatient and wanted a piece of the action for themselves. They may get a slap on the wrist, but the business is full of worse criminals.
I am using Outlook 2007 (on XP), with over 12,000 emails in my inbox (don't ask...) and it is using 40 MB of virtual memory. .
for another data point.
28000 in the inbox (you thought you were bad...), Windows 7, exchange and a POP account 66MB used.
I don't think that is too bad.
Poor Africa... no one cares about you.
No-one has noticed, but most of Africa is rapidly becoing part of China...
So far I'm quite impressed with Windows 7
I never used Vista, so have probably had a steeper learning curve than some, but the RTM version seems pretty solid.
On the other hand the Technical preview version of Office 2010 is a long way off being something I'd want on my desktop yet.
maybe Dell has been using a special build?
Dell handled it much better in the UK,
In the old days we had a dedicated small business team in Ireland. We would phone up a lady called Ines, she would sort out what was needed. give us a good price and everyone was happy, we had a company full of Dell PC's.
Then they shifted the SALES TEAM to India. This works really well, you get totally pissed off BEFORE you've spent any money, buy an HP and everythings still fine.
And then the Monty Python gang got together (I think this is right chronologically, but I'm happy to be corrected). .
Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie etc got going in the early 1980's, (i.e. around 15 AP)
Other things in the chronology you should check out are
Oscar Wilde (Esp. Importance of being Earnest - A hundred years old and still hilarious)
PG Wodehouse
ITMA, (war time, led to the Goons)
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore,
TW3, (David Frost et al, he became a total Dick later on but in the 60's he was good) - The 60's satire movement in general,
At Last the 1948 show (pre-python)
The Goodies
Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy (avoid the horrible remake)
Ben Elton (see comments on David Frost) - BlackAdder (which starred Fry and Laurie) is probably on a level with Python
The Young Ones.
and lots of other stuff. obviously there are huge interconnections between everything.
Wkipedia and Youtube should keep you going for a while
when tea drinking was at its peak we managed to hold together a worldwide empire, hampered very little by tea-related injuries.
Yes but we drank it out of proper cups, in sensible quantities, and didn't try to drive at the same time.
I actually get quite irritated when people hold up the McDonalds Coffe incident as a dumb lawsuit, Having spilt 1980's McDo coffee on myself once I was fully in sympathy with the suit. That stuff was lethal. It was 20-30 degrees hotter than everyone elses, handing it out at drive-ins was just stupid.
perhaps even more than the soviets, there were a whole host of amateur radio enthusiasts monitoring the lunar transmissions, so at the very least the Americans were relaying the pictures from the New Mexico desert via a transponder on the moon.
People had a lot to lose at the time of the Revolution. Their lives, their families, and their property. This wasn't Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or China, this was just Britain..
You never saw that Mel Gibson movie then?
Dodgy analogy: If Tesco were selling soooo many packets of Corn Flakes that they were running out of space in their warehouses, then using the BT-School-of-Business route, they'd want to charge the customer the same for the Corn Flakes and *also* charge Kelogs for the privileged of Tesco selling them! Whereas obviously, they need to make enough money by selling products to invest in building the infrastructure to deliver it all. :D
If they cut down on my all you can use cornflakes supply, I may have to seriously consider using something else for fuel...
If we paid per megabyte for data it would be easy to provide infinite capacity, I'm not sure i want that. Generally I've been quite happy for my heavy internet consumption to be subsidised by the masses who just do a bit of web browsing and E-mails. The problem with things like iplayer is that all of a sudden everyone becomes a high bandwidth user. and the traditional business model doesn't work any more.
Delivering even 2 MB/s to everyone at once, 24/7 Is very very expensive. If we want it SOMEONE will have to pay.
I'm unconvinced that the iplayer model is the most efficient way to deliver video on demand.to millions of users.
Just curious what, if any, influence the FAA has on Air France...
Air France flies into a number of American airports, If they did not maintain their aircraft as mandated they would not be allowed to.
Most countries authorities are every bit as picky as the FAA. maintenance schedules/procedures come from the manufacturer so Air maintenance standards are pretty much global. aside from anything else if your aircraft has not been maintained by the book it has zero resale value,
So the only aircraft that are not maintained to proper standards will be end of life ones flying domestically within disreputable third world countries, not many of those left now.
I've worked with aircraft maintenance companies for 25 years, of course you hear the odd horror story - normally honest errors, and the system works well to catch them. The only airline I've come across that frequently falsified records was Eastern, and they did get caught.
No one seems to have posted the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUkCJDkG3fg
I just gave away my old component stereo, which has been working fine since the late 70's when I bought it.(except for the CD player which was 1986) I haven't had any problems except for rubber belts perishing on the turntable and cassette.
But it was pretty ordinary performance for the day and still cost more in actual cash terms than the BOSE system (i know...) that i replaced it with, so figure maybe 4-5 times as much allowing for inflation.
Modern stuff is cheap, It's value engineered to the max, and built to be thrown away after a few years, not least because most of it is impossible to fix.
On balance I think we get a better deal now.
size/weight is definitely an issue in things like automotive use.
cost/recharge performance etc is too early to predict
and tending to catch fire / explode should be on your list.
the patented idea needs to be in software produced by the company within 3 months of the patent being filed. If not then the patent is automatically voided.
Sounds nice, But this just consolidates the position of patents as a tool of large corporations to squash competition.
A big company can do this. A little guy typically gets an idea, plays with it a bit, files the patent and then has some protection while he looks for finance/support to launch it.
BTW I work in the hardware side, I don't think patents are any less broken there, I've come across a couple of situations recently in my area of work where patents have been granted to a large American company describing ideas that in one case was commercially available years before the filing date, and in another was previously shown to said company by a much smaller one . No they probably wouldn't stand up in court, but the existence of such a patent can totally screw up a business plan, and its pretty much impossible to challenge these things without significant resources.
I don't really like this being modified as flamebait, I'm trying to make a fairly serious point here, Obviously I'm not a fan of the woman, but as the years of power went on she did get increasingly irrational and prone to distrust all outside opinion. This contributed significantly to the manner of her eventual downfall. I think more sleep might have made quite a difference.
Margaret Thatcher was born in '25, and was PM between '79 and '90, i.e., between roughly 54 and 65 years old. Admittedly still a bit young for 4 hours a night, but less spectacular than if someone half that age pulled that stunt anyway.
And of course if she wasn't a completely delusional paranoid fucking maniac.
Ultimately people just want something that works.
I've found that the last few builds of Firefox seem less stable - And IE is definitely not as crap as it once was, so If I have one more crash in the middle of a large non-resumable download I might seriously consider switching back to IE after many years...
I hope its just me, although a few of my colleagues seem to be finding the same.
What business is it of theirs if he bought it or stole it?
Because any obligation they have is to the guy who BOUGHT it from them.
I've had a dell laptop stolen. I would certainly expect them to try and check anything that they support is legit.
Since this guy says the serial number has been removed I would suggest that the probability it was stolen is close to 100%
It's foolish to assume it's stolen. People sell laptops every day.
Is this true?
I my experience people keep laptops until they fail (Usually mechanically) and are uneconomic to repair. I know a lot more people who have had laptop stolen or lost than who have sold them...
Who has ever heard about Apple Corps, a 'company' that'll remain a footnote in history as "the company that wrestled with Apple, Inc. to use the Apple trademark". Nothing more. I never heard of them until they renewed their suit in 2003.
Even in early 1980s Apple Computer was more famous than Apple Corps.
I think we can agree who is less famous and who should change the name. Trademarks serve well with companies of equal size and with directly overlapping businesses, and obviously not so well with tiny companies fighting large companies...
*sigh*
FYI
Apple Corp = Beatles
we remember that
Beatles > God
You assert that
Apple > Beatles > God
and of course Apple (plucky little niches company, always ethical)
Is much smaller than (can't remember enough HTML to make that symbolic)
Microsoft (Evil Big bad monopolist, need to bring them in, this is Slashdot)
So Therefore
Microsoft >> > > God
at last a mathematical explanation of Bill Gate's ego
Never understood how Apple got anywhere with that one. The whole basis of the agreement was Apple Corps wouldn't sell computers and Apple wouldn't sell music.
But we all know that the trademark system is almost as broken as patents and copyright.