Just get patents on the key algorithms of your application...
Algorithms cannot be patented. It's the novel ideas that utilize the algorithms that can be patented. For example, if someone too the MP3 patent and swapped out the key algorithms, they'd be infringing the patent. Conversely, you can take the compression algorithm out of MP3 and use it in something else without violating the patent.
It's the novel parts of the design that are patentable. Not anything else - though it does still fall under copyright. That always seemed strange to me, that something can be covered by both copyright and patents. I think it should be either-or, not both, and frankly I'd much prefer software patents to software copyright.
Why would JVC invest billions of dollars developing the VHS VCR, if they couldn't get a cut of each sale?
They'd still invent it, what they wouldn't do is share it. It would be a trade secret, and so only JVC would manufacture VHS players, and anybody who wanted to compete would have to reverse engineer it. Doing so takes a lot of effort, so they obviously wouldn't share the knowledge with others. That means every competitor would have to RE the technology, and they would probably put their own twist on the result so as to not inter-operate with the others (unless they are trying to steal the market out from under their competitor). In truth, we wouldn't even be close to the technology necessary to allow JVC to create VHS VCR in the first place if not for patents.
Welcome to the middle ages. Not exactly the poster child of innovation. It took them a thousand years to develop sheet steel and plate armor, for Christ's sake! And don't give me any lip about "oh it takes time to figure this stuff out". Bullshit. It takes time if only 50 people in the world understand the technology the previous step was built on. We've had matallurgy for thousands, and thousands of years. All we needed were a bunch of people trying to mix various metals and other compounds and sheet steel would have been invented from its iron roots in 100 years or less. Yet the secret of smelting iron was exactly that - a secret, which severely stunted progress.
Imagine if Da Vinci's ideas had been in a public patent system! He had the basic concepts for things like helicopters, tanks, and automata 500 years ago! Yet his knowledge was effectively lost, stuffed away in private collections where they did nobody any good. Many of his works are still lost.
Maybe these companies wouldn't have. Does this mean that these technologies would not have been invented anyway ? I don't think so.
The problem is not the current invention, it's the next one. Before patents, the only option was to keep your invention as secret as possible. Someone would eventually reverse engineer it, but when they did they would not share it with the world, they would keep it secret too and create a competing product. This was the situation in the Middle Ages, and progress ground to a halt. In a thousand years they had no truly revolutionary technologies, simply improvements on the same old design.
The formed guilds and pooled resources to protect themselves to try to prevent the loss of knowledge (this is how the Free Masons started). However, any new idea that the guild didn't have the resources to pursue would almost certainly be lost.
This was not a theoretical problem, it was a real problem. It's why the middle ages lasted 1000 years. We've seen revolutionary new technology after revolutionary new technology in the last 200 years, yet in the middle ages progress was plodding along at an incredibly slow pace. In the dark ages we actually lost a lot of knowledge.
That is what patents eliminated - the secrecy of technology. Even if you choose not to license a patent, others can still build upon it to create the next great invention. It also really helps get the technology out to the people - if an individual does not have the resources to produce his invention, he can license it to someone who can. The inventor, manufacturer, and the public all benefit by this.
As you may notice, there is a balance here that makes it all work. For example, if patents are too strict, and anything even remotely similar to a patented item infringes on the patent, it will stifle invention. That's why our current setup is supposed to be novel and non-obvious. You can make the "next step" in a technology without having to license the tech, so long as the "next step" is a novel and non-obvious advancement. If it were much more strict than that nobody would be able to use that knowledge to build new things. If it were not strict enough, then inventors would simply revert back to secrecy and our advancement would slow to a crawl again.
Without patents we'd probably still be shooting black powder muskets, the only planes would likely be two-seater toys of the super-rich. That's assuming internal combustion engine technology was able to advance at the plodding pace it would have been moving at to allow it to supplant steam power. Those are just a few things, in truth our whole world would be completely different without the innovation patents allow.
Patents have proven their worth in the last couple hundred years. They absolutely do drive innovation, and it's why they've been messed with relatively little. Copyrights have a goal of culture, and so there is really nothing to advance, simply to spread. They've also been messed with a lot, and I don't think it is currently accomplishing its intended goal.
But even if I agree with your statement it still doesn't matter. Double the bitrate and you have the same quality. Bitrate in audio is a trivial issue nowadays.
That said, I like listening radio in AAC+/64kbps but won't matter to me if my favorite station switches to 128kpbs MP3 only.
You didn't bother to read the second half of the post, did you? Because that was exactly his point. He thinks it will be MP3 and loss-less formats that will still be around in 10 years.
The point of patents is not to allow the public to use the actual patent. It's to prevent the knowledge in the patent from being lost. This was common during the middle ages, when guilds kept all their technology secret. By keeping everything so secret, any good idea that the guild was not in a position to take advantage of was effectively lost forever. Progress was extremely slow. We've advanced more technologically in 100 years than Europe advanced in 1000, and it's largely because of patents. It's one of the reasons we're constantly astounded by what the ancient Egyptians or the Mayans or other ancient civilizations were able to accomplish - we didn't think such knowledge existed, yet in truth it had simply been lost over time.
Patents get the ideas out in the open. The limited monopoly protects the inventors and allows them to capitalize on their invention about the same as (sometimes even more than) if they had kept it secret and developed and produced it themselves. With the ideas out in the open, however, everybody knows about it, and anybody capable can license the ability to produce it from the inventor. Furthermore, new inventors can use that patent as a stepping stone to the next great invention (because it requires an actual description of the process).
This is why we've come so far so fast technologically - because we've shifted the advantage from keeping technology secret to getting technology out in the open.
Copyright is similar, but the idea there actually was more directly about getting culture to the public. Without copyright, the only effective means to encourage writing and art is government or private patronage, and those are not good solutions (it severely limits what will be produced).
Any time you tweak patents or copyright, you skew the balance. Copyright used to be sane, now it goes far, far beyond encouraging production of culture. As someone else once put it, it's like letting a private land owner put a gate and toll on a public highway, then backing that toll with the force of law. The idea is ludicrous, yet that is exactly what our current copyright law does.
The key is whether they are too similar on the specific claims. Everything surrounding the claims section (which is a small fraction of the patent) is just fluff or description that has no bearing on the legality of it.
For example, MP3, if taking a broad view, is very similar to H.264. They do the same thing (compress media), and share most of the same concepts. In fact they are both rather similar to ZIP files. Yet on the very specifics of MP3's patent claims and H.264, they are quite different.
The same can be true of VP8, it's not the generalities that matter, it's the specific. They can be 99% identical, but if that 1% is all the specific claims of the patent, then it doesn't infringe.
This also bites a lot of people the other way - two technologies can be extremely different, yet if the patent's specific claims apply, then it doesn't matter it's still infringing.
We may be worse on Patents, slightly, but others - for example the French, are absolutely insane when it comes to copyright. Everything that we rail about which may happen, the French already have, and it's disgusting.
Our patent and copyright system was actually pretty sane until we decided we needed to pool together with Europe to make everything nice. That's when everything went down-hill. I think it was a net win at the time for the US, because of how much we were sending outside and the lack of protection our IP had over there, but now I think the domestic losses offset the international gains, especially considering the recent (last couple decades) absurd changes to copyrights we've seen.
Are you saying that the court would hold that if MPEG-LA wants to go after users of WebM, they have to go after H264 users in a similar manner?
The case could be made that end users of H.264 violate the same patent, as they are unlicensed, and MPEG-LA well knew who and where they were, yet they did not defend their patent until a new player came on the scene.
If they were unwilling to defend against H.264 for all these years, it could be evidence of abandonment. I'm not sure how successful it would be, since they are actively licensing H.264 to manufacturers, but it's definitely a good try that could potentially work. I'm not sure how it works if they are ignoring a whole class of infringement until a new group of infringers they don't like come on the scene.
More likely they'd go after the content producers and creators of WebM, not the users. The content producers have no defense in this case, assuming VP8 and Vorbis both actually do violate the patent, of course. That's their only defense here.
You do realize that licensing and disclaimers couldn't be more different, right?
A disclaimer is a feeble attempt to protect yourself from litigation. The only time it has any force of law is when the law says something like "blah blah blah without notifying the other party blah blah blah". That's when disclaimers work, and that's it. It also shows that the potentially injured party was well aware of the risks involved, and can mitigate, and occasionally completely eliminate, someone's liability.
A license is entirely different. It's a contract. All contracts - even verbal contracts - have the force of law. Period. The only time they don't is when a provision in a contract is countermanded by a state or federal law. For example, a manufacturer cannot create a contract with a buyer that sets a limited warranty for 10 days when the state or federal law says all manufactured goods must have a limited warranty of at least 2 years. The law wins, and that provision is unenforceable.
However, if you agree to paint someone's house blue in 10 days for a peppercorn, you'll lose your ass in court if you paint it red in 12 days and demand ten thousand dollars. That contract has the force of law, and you have to abide by the provisions or face legal consequences. There are usually only damages related to the value of the work done, or not finished, but if you essentially vandalize the place instead of paint it as agreed (in the case of our painting example), you could potentially face punitive damages as well.
Patent and Copyright license is the exact same thing, except it's a contract that allows you to use an idea (patent) or creative work (copyright) under certain conditions.
Open source licenses like BSD or GPL are just as enforceable as any closed source royalty based contract. In fact, I'd imagine almost all closed source licenses have inverse restrictions, mirrors to what open source licenses have - like not being able to share and the like.
a cellphone left on continuously could represent as much as an oil tanker worth of energy usage.
Wow. Just wow.
Do you have any idea how much energy is in an oil tanker? A gallon of refined oil (i.e. gasoline, which is far less energy dense than the crude oil in tankers) can move a 2700 pound vehicle forty miles. Do you understand that that is millions of times the energy your cell phone uses in a day?
The average annual power use of a cell phone is eight kilowatts. That's assuming a three hour nightly charge and five hours plugged in but not charging - a charger's most power hungry state (there is a strong push to move to chargers that consume less than three microwatts in this state). A single barrel of crude oil contains 6.1 billion watts of energy, or enough to power a cell phone for 762,500 years. Or, it could cover 762 phones for a thousand years, or 76 phones for a hundred. Hell, that single gallon of gas has you covered for 16,250 years!
Now, a tanker holds 4.1 million barrels of crude oil. That's about twenty five petawatts of power, or enough power to run every cell phone on the planet (4.6 billion) for 679 years.
In other words, no, a cell phone doesn't come close to using the same amount of energy as a tanker of oil. In fact, if you were to use the average cell phone for an average lifetime (70'ish years), you would consume about half an ounce of crude oil.
You seriously have no concept of the reality of energy consumption. Cell phones are nothing. A single individual's driving habits for a year can easily exceed the annual cellphone power consumption of most cities in the world. It's good to cut down cell phone energy uses, but that's not something you should focus on. Some server farms could conceivably approach tanker-level energy usage in a year or two, and adding just a few percentage points of efficiency can make a huge difference.
Don't sweat the small stuff man, sweat the stuff that actually makes a difference.
If you want the latin, it's from dia "across" and legein "speak". A literal translation would be "speak across", and mean a conversation between two or more people.
Demiaudire is what you want. It means "hear half", which easily fits into "hear half a dialogue". It's better to use the latin instead of the Greek, because you'll end up with demiaudio, which is already used when referring to audio equipment. Demiaudire is completely open though.
My favorite way to pronounce paradigm is par-a-dig-m. It's fun. It's inspiring and ignorant all at once.
Also, Kuhn didn't invent the word paradigm, it simply means an example to be replicated or followed. There is no scientific connotation to it, and reading Kuhns book or learning Kuhnian framework won't help you learn to use the word paradigm correctly.
There are technological paradigms, there are driving safety paradigms, there are paradigms in the history of science (if you subscribe to Khun's view of the history of science). There are many things that are paradigmatic. It's a word, nothing more. Don't get so attached to a specific use. Anywhere the word fits it's a perfectly fine and very descriptive word to use.
Blame the people who use it as a buzzword.
I prefer to blame the people who don't know what the word means. You seem to be one.
Did you even bother to read the summary of this story before posting?
Hearing half a conversation is far more distracting than hearing the whole conversation.
Thus, two people can hold a conversation politely, for a person on a cell phone it is much harder. Particularly if they are completely oblivious to those around them.
The article linked by a slashdot story a few days ago which was based on first-hand experience of Jobs's Reality Distortion Field was a real eye-opener.
The bubble need never reflect reality. When the disparity between reality and fantasy becomes too great, the fantasy simply changes. It includes a back-history in the fantasy that makes it seem like the fantasy never changed at all.
Can somebody explain to me why buying 10 fully loaded iPads with my gold Amex prevents me from selling them on the black market afterwards but paying for one in cash doesn't?
Sure, I'll 'splain it to you.
You can't buy 10 fully loaded iPads with your gold Amex, you can only buy 2.
Does that help? Or do I need to explain it further. I could explain to you how 2 is not 10, and how any attempt to turn 2 into 10 would leave you with 2 broken into 5 pieces.
Slashdot Mirror
Just get patents on the key algorithms of your application...
Algorithms cannot be patented. It's the novel ideas that utilize the algorithms that can be patented. For example, if someone too the MP3 patent and swapped out the key algorithms, they'd be infringing the patent. Conversely, you can take the compression algorithm out of MP3 and use it in something else without violating the patent.
It's the novel parts of the design that are patentable. Not anything else - though it does still fall under copyright. That always seemed strange to me, that something can be covered by both copyright and patents. I think it should be either-or, not both, and frankly I'd much prefer software patents to software copyright.
Why would JVC invest billions of dollars developing the VHS VCR, if they couldn't get a cut of each sale?
They'd still invent it, what they wouldn't do is share it. It would be a trade secret, and so only JVC would manufacture VHS players, and anybody who wanted to compete would have to reverse engineer it. Doing so takes a lot of effort, so they obviously wouldn't share the knowledge with others. That means every competitor would have to RE the technology, and they would probably put their own twist on the result so as to not inter-operate with the others (unless they are trying to steal the market out from under their competitor). In truth, we wouldn't even be close to the technology necessary to allow JVC to create VHS VCR in the first place if not for patents.
Welcome to the middle ages. Not exactly the poster child of innovation. It took them a thousand years to develop sheet steel and plate armor, for Christ's sake! And don't give me any lip about "oh it takes time to figure this stuff out". Bullshit. It takes time if only 50 people in the world understand the technology the previous step was built on. We've had matallurgy for thousands, and thousands of years. All we needed were a bunch of people trying to mix various metals and other compounds and sheet steel would have been invented from its iron roots in 100 years or less. Yet the secret of smelting iron was exactly that - a secret, which severely stunted progress.
Imagine if Da Vinci's ideas had been in a public patent system! He had the basic concepts for things like helicopters, tanks, and automata 500 years ago! Yet his knowledge was effectively lost, stuffed away in private collections where they did nobody any good. Many of his works are still lost.
Maybe these companies wouldn't have. Does this mean that these technologies would not have been invented anyway ? I don't think so.
The problem is not the current invention, it's the next one. Before patents, the only option was to keep your invention as secret as possible. Someone would eventually reverse engineer it, but when they did they would not share it with the world, they would keep it secret too and create a competing product. This was the situation in the Middle Ages, and progress ground to a halt. In a thousand years they had no truly revolutionary technologies, simply improvements on the same old design.
The formed guilds and pooled resources to protect themselves to try to prevent the loss of knowledge (this is how the Free Masons started). However, any new idea that the guild didn't have the resources to pursue would almost certainly be lost.
This was not a theoretical problem, it was a real problem. It's why the middle ages lasted 1000 years. We've seen revolutionary new technology after revolutionary new technology in the last 200 years, yet in the middle ages progress was plodding along at an incredibly slow pace. In the dark ages we actually lost a lot of knowledge.
That is what patents eliminated - the secrecy of technology. Even if you choose not to license a patent, others can still build upon it to create the next great invention. It also really helps get the technology out to the people - if an individual does not have the resources to produce his invention, he can license it to someone who can. The inventor, manufacturer, and the public all benefit by this.
As you may notice, there is a balance here that makes it all work. For example, if patents are too strict, and anything even remotely similar to a patented item infringes on the patent, it will stifle invention. That's why our current setup is supposed to be novel and non-obvious. You can make the "next step" in a technology without having to license the tech, so long as the "next step" is a novel and non-obvious advancement. If it were much more strict than that nobody would be able to use that knowledge to build new things. If it were not strict enough, then inventors would simply revert back to secrecy and our advancement would slow to a crawl again.
Without patents we'd probably still be shooting black powder muskets, the only planes would likely be two-seater toys of the super-rich. That's assuming internal combustion engine technology was able to advance at the plodding pace it would have been moving at to allow it to supplant steam power. Those are just a few things, in truth our whole world would be completely different without the innovation patents allow.
Patents have proven their worth in the last couple hundred years. They absolutely do drive innovation, and it's why they've been messed with relatively little. Copyrights have a goal of culture, and so there is really nothing to advance, simply to spread. They've also been messed with a lot, and I don't think it is currently accomplishing its intended goal.
But even if I agree with your statement it still doesn't matter. Double the bitrate and you have the same quality. Bitrate in audio is a trivial issue nowadays.
That said, I like listening radio in AAC+/64kbps but won't matter to me if my favorite station switches to 128kpbs MP3 only.
You didn't bother to read the second half of the post, did you? Because that was exactly his point. He thinks it will be MP3 and loss-less formats that will still be around in 10 years.
The point of patents is not to allow the public to use the actual patent. It's to prevent the knowledge in the patent from being lost. This was common during the middle ages, when guilds kept all their technology secret. By keeping everything so secret, any good idea that the guild was not in a position to take advantage of was effectively lost forever. Progress was extremely slow. We've advanced more technologically in 100 years than Europe advanced in 1000, and it's largely because of patents. It's one of the reasons we're constantly astounded by what the ancient Egyptians or the Mayans or other ancient civilizations were able to accomplish - we didn't think such knowledge existed, yet in truth it had simply been lost over time.
Patents get the ideas out in the open. The limited monopoly protects the inventors and allows them to capitalize on their invention about the same as (sometimes even more than) if they had kept it secret and developed and produced it themselves. With the ideas out in the open, however, everybody knows about it, and anybody capable can license the ability to produce it from the inventor. Furthermore, new inventors can use that patent as a stepping stone to the next great invention (because it requires an actual description of the process).
This is why we've come so far so fast technologically - because we've shifted the advantage from keeping technology secret to getting technology out in the open.
Copyright is similar, but the idea there actually was more directly about getting culture to the public. Without copyright, the only effective means to encourage writing and art is government or private patronage, and those are not good solutions (it severely limits what will be produced).
Any time you tweak patents or copyright, you skew the balance. Copyright used to be sane, now it goes far, far beyond encouraging production of culture. As someone else once put it, it's like letting a private land owner put a gate and toll on a public highway, then backing that toll with the force of law. The idea is ludicrous, yet that is exactly what our current copyright law does.
28 years actually. Patents aren't too bad in that regard.
The "70 years after death" provision of copyright is just insanity.
The key is whether they are too similar on the specific claims. Everything surrounding the claims section (which is a small fraction of the patent) is just fluff or description that has no bearing on the legality of it.
For example, MP3, if taking a broad view, is very similar to H.264. They do the same thing (compress media), and share most of the same concepts. In fact they are both rather similar to ZIP files. Yet on the very specifics of MP3's patent claims and H.264, they are quite different.
The same can be true of VP8, it's not the generalities that matter, it's the specific. They can be 99% identical, but if that 1% is all the specific claims of the patent, then it doesn't infringe.
This also bites a lot of people the other way - two technologies can be extremely different, yet if the patent's specific claims apply, then it doesn't matter it's still infringing.
We may be worse on Patents, slightly, but others - for example the French, are absolutely insane when it comes to copyright. Everything that we rail about which may happen, the French already have, and it's disgusting.
Our patent and copyright system was actually pretty sane until we decided we needed to pool together with Europe to make everything nice. That's when everything went down-hill. I think it was a net win at the time for the US, because of how much we were sending outside and the lack of protection our IP had over there, but now I think the domestic losses offset the international gains, especially considering the recent (last couple decades) absurd changes to copyrights we've seen.
Are you saying that the court would hold that if MPEG-LA wants to go after users of WebM, they have to go after H264 users in a similar manner?
The case could be made that end users of H.264 violate the same patent, as they are unlicensed, and MPEG-LA well knew who and where they were, yet they did not defend their patent until a new player came on the scene.
If they were unwilling to defend against H.264 for all these years, it could be evidence of abandonment. I'm not sure how successful it would be, since they are actively licensing H.264 to manufacturers, but it's definitely a good try that could potentially work. I'm not sure how it works if they are ignoring a whole class of infringement until a new group of infringers they don't like come on the scene.
More likely they'd go after the content producers and creators of WebM, not the users. The content producers have no defense in this case, assuming VP8 and Vorbis both actually do violate the patent, of course. That's their only defense here.
You do realize that licensing and disclaimers couldn't be more different, right?
A disclaimer is a feeble attempt to protect yourself from litigation. The only time it has any force of law is when the law says something like "blah blah blah without notifying the other party blah blah blah". That's when disclaimers work, and that's it. It also shows that the potentially injured party was well aware of the risks involved, and can mitigate, and occasionally completely eliminate, someone's liability.
A license is entirely different. It's a contract. All contracts - even verbal contracts - have the force of law. Period. The only time they don't is when a provision in a contract is countermanded by a state or federal law. For example, a manufacturer cannot create a contract with a buyer that sets a limited warranty for 10 days when the state or federal law says all manufactured goods must have a limited warranty of at least 2 years. The law wins, and that provision is unenforceable.
However, if you agree to paint someone's house blue in 10 days for a peppercorn, you'll lose your ass in court if you paint it red in 12 days and demand ten thousand dollars. That contract has the force of law, and you have to abide by the provisions or face legal consequences. There are usually only damages related to the value of the work done, or not finished, but if you essentially vandalize the place instead of paint it as agreed (in the case of our painting example), you could potentially face punitive damages as well.
Patent and Copyright license is the exact same thing, except it's a contract that allows you to use an idea (patent) or creative work (copyright) under certain conditions.
Open source licenses like BSD or GPL are just as enforceable as any closed source royalty based contract. In fact, I'd imagine almost all closed source licenses have inverse restrictions, mirrors to what open source licenses have - like not being able to share and the like.
I prefer demiaudire, since you aren't participating in the conversation, just hearing it.
One cell phone equals about one half ounce of crude in a 70 year lifetime. A single tanker has the covered for most of the millennium.
a cellphone left on continuously could represent as much as an oil tanker worth of energy usage.
Wow. Just wow.
Do you have any idea how much energy is in an oil tanker? A gallon of refined oil (i.e. gasoline, which is far less energy dense than the crude oil in tankers) can move a 2700 pound vehicle forty miles. Do you understand that that is millions of times the energy your cell phone uses in a day?
The average annual power use of a cell phone is eight kilowatts. That's assuming a three hour nightly charge and five hours plugged in but not charging - a charger's most power hungry state (there is a strong push to move to chargers that consume less than three microwatts in this state). A single barrel of crude oil contains 6.1 billion watts of energy, or enough to power a cell phone for 762,500 years. Or, it could cover 762 phones for a thousand years, or 76 phones for a hundred. Hell, that single gallon of gas has you covered for 16,250 years!
Now, a tanker holds 4.1 million barrels of crude oil. That's about twenty five petawatts of power, or enough power to run every cell phone on the planet (4.6 billion) for 679 years.
In other words, no, a cell phone doesn't come close to using the same amount of energy as a tanker of oil. In fact, if you were to use the average cell phone for an average lifetime (70'ish years), you would consume about half an ounce of crude oil.
You seriously have no concept of the reality of energy consumption. Cell phones are nothing. A single individual's driving habits for a year can easily exceed the annual cellphone power consumption of most cities in the world. It's good to cut down cell phone energy uses, but that's not something you should focus on. Some server farms could conceivably approach tanker-level energy usage in a year or two, and adding just a few percentage points of efficiency can make a huge difference.
Don't sweat the small stuff man, sweat the stuff that actually makes a difference.
If you want the latin, it's from dia "across" and legein "speak". A literal translation would be "speak across", and mean a conversation between two or more people.
Demiaudire is what you want. It means "hear half", which easily fits into "hear half a dialogue". It's better to use the latin instead of the Greek, because you'll end up with demiaudio, which is already used when referring to audio equipment. Demiaudire is completely open though.
My favorite way to pronounce paradigm is par-a-dig-m. It's fun. It's inspiring and ignorant all at once.
Also, Kuhn didn't invent the word paradigm, it simply means an example to be replicated or followed. There is no scientific connotation to it, and reading Kuhns book or learning Kuhnian framework won't help you learn to use the word paradigm correctly.
There are technological paradigms, there are driving safety paradigms, there are paradigms in the history of science (if you subscribe to Khun's view of the history of science). There are many things that are paradigmatic. It's a word, nothing more. Don't get so attached to a specific use. Anywhere the word fits it's a perfectly fine and very descriptive word to use.
Blame the people who use it as a buzzword.
I prefer to blame the people who don't know what the word means. You seem to be one.
Yes, that is what the GP is saying.
Did you even bother to read the summary of this story before posting?
Hearing half a conversation is far more distracting than hearing the whole conversation.
Thus, two people can hold a conversation politely, for a person on a cell phone it is much harder. Particularly if they are completely oblivious to those around them.
Maybe he sits next to a guy who's always on a conference call?
Not really, it's called reading.
No, this is not enough to have science.
Yes, it is. Look up "Science" if you want to know more.
The article linked by a slashdot story a few days ago which was based on first-hand experience of Jobs's Reality Distortion Field was a real eye-opener.
The bubble need never reflect reality. When the disparity between reality and fantasy becomes too great, the fantasy simply changes. It includes a back-history in the fantasy that makes it seem like the fantasy never changed at all.
Sorry, only the squeaky wheel gets the grease. You're SOL, and it's too late to squeak.
Can somebody explain to me why buying 10 fully loaded iPads with my gold Amex prevents me from selling them on the black market afterwards but paying for one in cash doesn't?
Sure, I'll 'splain it to you.
You can't buy 10 fully loaded iPads with your gold Amex, you can only buy 2.
Does that help? Or do I need to explain it further. I could explain to you how 2 is not 10, and how any attempt to turn 2 into 10 would leave you with 2 broken into 5 pieces.
Do you think that might have anything to do with the fact that the iPad isn't international yet?
Of course selling it to someplace that can't get it yet is going jack prices up. Those situations don't really count.
In places where it is being sold, the "No Cash" policy was nothing but a marketing ploy, which is evidenced by a quick look at eBay.
And cash is always accepted.