It seems obvious to me that instead of struggling with who has priority, the patent office should simply look at two similar patents being filed at about the same time as a failure of the obviousness test because, clearly, two different practitioners of the art came up with similar solutions to a problem.
Not really arguing, but if we used this definition outside of patents, both calculus and evolution would be considered "obvious" by this standard, which strikes me as a little funny.
Cash is also handy in other cases, like power outages, or if your card is lost or stolen or being replaced. Or the heuristic on the card system trips and starts denying all charges because it thinks there's fraud going on even when there isn't.
Ouch, that hurts. I've had to move myself every time. So, no stealing from myself, but that only increases the burden faced by an avid book collector and chronic mover.
Right now, these books can already be pirated, but they couldn't be legally purchased before. Putting them up for sale will increase revenue from zero. That's a win for everyone.
Well, as long as the profits made from sales are higher than the cost of scanning the books and setting up the store to sell them. In theory the vendor *could* lose if they spend more than they make back. Not that I really think it'll be an issue in this case.
I've still got physical copies of the core books from both first and second edition. Plus a big handful of companion books. The monsters in my Monster Manuals are even colored in. Who's going to have that in a PDF?
Though considering I've moved those books about 17 times over the years, maybe a PDF form factor would be slightly more convenient.
I'm in the US, so can't say what they're like to the outside. Other than this badly failed attempt to deal with them on a business level, I do really like them. I live in a rural area and buy things from them weekly, and use Prime both for the fast free shipping and video streaming. As a customer I like them (and can't find any nearly adequate substitute). But I won't try to run a business with anything they offer in that respect.
I ran a business using PayPal almost exclusively for 4 years without any real problem. I tried to branch out to other options, but most weren't worth the time, and the only other likely alternative, Amazon, turned out to be as uncommunicative and belligerent as PayPal is rumored to be. They didn't lock any funds at least, just disabled the account, but they were a real pain about it.
I've posted some suggestions elsewhere about actual games to play, but wanted to respond to the situation as you describe it here, too. There's a lot of evenings when our 18-month-old goes to bed, my wife watches some TV, and I sit next to her messing with the laptop, doing my own thing in parallel. Sometimes games, sometimes an online class, sometimes Slashdot. Often with headphones in, if I want to tune out the TV, but we're close enough we can both pause now and then if we have something to talk about, and that works pretty well for us when we aren't in the mood to watch or play the same thing.
That sounds about right. Besides the general approach, I've found a few niche areas where my wife will play computer games. One of them is Rock Band style games, because it's a lot closer to music than "being a computer game" in her eyes. She spent a lot of time outfitting and decorating her characters, too.
We found another by latching on to a real-world interest: she likes Mustang cars, so I found a racing game which had the model she likes. Even then it wouldn't have worked as a traditional race, so to compensate I spent a lot of time trying to crash into her or make spectacular jumps, rather than trying to actually finish the race quickly. We could both enjoy the madcap clips of spectacular car crashes and slapstick driving errors. This may not be for everyone, as it's definitely more slapstick than traditional gaming.
We also got a few hours out of Little Big Planet. She liked the cutesy characters and the customization, and the early levels were forgiving enough that we could play cooperative multiplayer and get along okay. Probably a third of the way through the game things got tricky enough she got frustrated and that was the end of that game.
Okay, that I get: if there's a lag between income and expenditures it can make for funny taxes in the short term. In the long term (barring some weird edge cases) it will mostly even out. While I can see how that might be annoying, that's an order of magnitude less significant than what you first seemed to be claiming. Over a big enough picture, if you're paying taxes on $250k, it's still because that's what you brought home.
I'm pretty sure this is factually untrue, but I see it claimed so many times I'm starting to become confused about it myself. I've never had an employee to find out for myself, but as a small business owner I'm VERY sure that if I earn $1000 and have $500 in expenses, I'm only taxed on the remaining $500 in profits. I'm 99% sure an employee is also an expense, but maybe there's some exception I've overlooked because I've never had to deal with it.
Would you feel differently if you knew that person paying taxes on $250k had actually pocketed every one of those dollars? Because I think in reality if a small business is taxed on $250k, that means they did a million in business, had $500k in salaries, and $250k in other expenses, and they're only being taxed on the $250k they actually took home.
You're getting flak for the way you structured your comparison, but that's one of my most frequent tripping points, accidentally using assignment instead. If it works reliably for you, I think that's more important than someone else's sense of style. I do most of my programming in PHP, so changing the compiler wasn't exactly an option.
Nobody bought Elements anyway - it comes free with scanners and decent cameras
Wish I'd known that two years ago when I bought Elements, but my camera wasn't that fancy and I didn't have a scanner. I was replacing my desktop computer and bought it as an add-on from Dell as part of the package. I was pretty furious when it arrived and I discovered Dell was selling me a copy that was two versions old for the same retail price as the new version. Never doing that again.
I'm downloading it right now precisely to replace my copy of Elements. Ages ago I 'borrowed' CS2 from work, and loved it. When I got a new desktop I decided to go legit and buy a copy of Elements. It's got all the functionality I want, but I absolutely loathe nearly every single other non-functional change between the programs. Mostly interface, which is so dark it's damn near illegible, carries a ton of other space-filling boxes I don't want and either can't make go away or which come back sporadically so that it's a losing battle, and other little things here and there that seem to make the new version an obstacle every time.
I'm so excited to be able to go back to proper Photoshop, I can't even tell you.
Sort of a tangent, but have you read Pirsig's 'Lila'? It's the sequel to 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' and includes discussion of societal trends, starting with the Victorian era and working up at least through the hippie movement, perhaps beyond (been a few years, memory is fuzzy).
Eh, sometimes. There's a lot of overuse of the startle effect by pushing things directly in front of the camera. You can get away with it in movies because there's no sense of peripheral vision, and the camera perspective generally jumps 180 degrees, rather than the normal turn that would allow a real person to see something coming. Same with selective audio editing, nothing ever makes sound when it's off camera, where in the real world you'd hear footsteps from whatever's walking up behind you. I feel like it's a cheap trick - a lot of times it's used to startle, without any real sense of suspense involved.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems obvious to me that instead of struggling with who has priority, the patent office should simply look at two similar patents being filed at about the same time as a failure of the obviousness test because, clearly, two different practitioners of the art came up with similar solutions to a problem.
Not really arguing, but if we used this definition outside of patents, both calculus and evolution would be considered "obvious" by this standard, which strikes me as a little funny.
incompetance
I see what you did there ...
Cash is also handy in other cases, like power outages, or if your card is lost or stolen or being replaced. Or the heuristic on the card system trips and starts denying all charges because it thinks there's fraud going on even when there isn't.
Or a reprint of such horror classics as Frankenstein or Dracula? I believe both were written as a collection or journals.
Ouch, that hurts. I've had to move myself every time. So, no stealing from myself, but that only increases the burden faced by an avid book collector and chronic mover.
Right now, these books can already be pirated, but they couldn't be legally purchased before. Putting them up for sale will increase revenue from zero. That's a win for everyone.
Well, as long as the profits made from sales are higher than the cost of scanning the books and setting up the store to sell them. In theory the vendor *could* lose if they spend more than they make back. Not that I really think it'll be an issue in this case.
I've still got physical copies of the core books from both first and second edition. Plus a big handful of companion books. The monsters in my Monster Manuals are even colored in. Who's going to have that in a PDF?
Though considering I've moved those books about 17 times over the years, maybe a PDF form factor would be slightly more convenient.
Whose phone dies at 11 a.m.? And again at 3, and then at 7 p.m? A smartphone that can't even last a full day isn't worth carrying around.
I'm in the US, so can't say what they're like to the outside. Other than this badly failed attempt to deal with them on a business level, I do really like them. I live in a rural area and buy things from them weekly, and use Prime both for the fast free shipping and video streaming. As a customer I like them (and can't find any nearly adequate substitute). But I won't try to run a business with anything they offer in that respect.
I ran a business using PayPal almost exclusively for 4 years without any real problem. I tried to branch out to other options, but most weren't worth the time, and the only other likely alternative, Amazon, turned out to be as uncommunicative and belligerent as PayPal is rumored to be. They didn't lock any funds at least, just disabled the account, but they were a real pain about it.
I've posted some suggestions elsewhere about actual games to play, but wanted to respond to the situation as you describe it here, too. There's a lot of evenings when our 18-month-old goes to bed, my wife watches some TV, and I sit next to her messing with the laptop, doing my own thing in parallel. Sometimes games, sometimes an online class, sometimes Slashdot. Often with headphones in, if I want to tune out the TV, but we're close enough we can both pause now and then if we have something to talk about, and that works pretty well for us when we aren't in the mood to watch or play the same thing.
That sounds about right. Besides the general approach, I've found a few niche areas where my wife will play computer games. One of them is Rock Band style games, because it's a lot closer to music than "being a computer game" in her eyes. She spent a lot of time outfitting and decorating her characters, too.
We found another by latching on to a real-world interest: she likes Mustang cars, so I found a racing game which had the model she likes. Even then it wouldn't have worked as a traditional race, so to compensate I spent a lot of time trying to crash into her or make spectacular jumps, rather than trying to actually finish the race quickly. We could both enjoy the madcap clips of spectacular car crashes and slapstick driving errors. This may not be for everyone, as it's definitely more slapstick than traditional gaming.
We also got a few hours out of Little Big Planet. She liked the cutesy characters and the customization, and the early levels were forgiving enough that we could play cooperative multiplayer and get along okay. Probably a third of the way through the game things got tricky enough she got frustrated and that was the end of that game.
Okay, that I get: if there's a lag between income and expenditures it can make for funny taxes in the short term. In the long term (barring some weird edge cases) it will mostly even out. While I can see how that might be annoying, that's an order of magnitude less significant than what you first seemed to be claiming. Over a big enough picture, if you're paying taxes on $250k, it's still because that's what you brought home.
I'm pretty sure this is factually untrue, but I see it claimed so many times I'm starting to become confused about it myself. I've never had an employee to find out for myself, but as a small business owner I'm VERY sure that if I earn $1000 and have $500 in expenses, I'm only taxed on the remaining $500 in profits. I'm 99% sure an employee is also an expense, but maybe there's some exception I've overlooked because I've never had to deal with it.
Would you feel differently if you knew that person paying taxes on $250k had actually pocketed every one of those dollars? Because I think in reality if a small business is taxed on $250k, that means they did a million in business, had $500k in salaries, and $250k in other expenses, and they're only being taxed on the $250k they actually took home.
Only do it when there aren't other cars nearby?
Don't worry, I have a degree in physics. I'll sponsor your theory.
I'm curious how you managed to find time to walk four hours per day? An hour or two I could see, but four is a really big chunk of time.
How does this not have any mod points? This is the most reasonable explanation of copyright I've seen on Slashdot.
You're getting flak for the way you structured your comparison, but that's one of my most frequent tripping points, accidentally using assignment instead. If it works reliably for you, I think that's more important than someone else's sense of style. I do most of my programming in PHP, so changing the compiler wasn't exactly an option.
Nobody bought Elements anyway - it comes free with scanners and decent cameras
Wish I'd known that two years ago when I bought Elements, but my camera wasn't that fancy and I didn't have a scanner. I was replacing my desktop computer and bought it as an add-on from Dell as part of the package. I was pretty furious when it arrived and I discovered Dell was selling me a copy that was two versions old for the same retail price as the new version. Never doing that again.
Thanks for the recommendations. I'll check them out.
I'm downloading it right now precisely to replace my copy of Elements. Ages ago I 'borrowed' CS2 from work, and loved it. When I got a new desktop I decided to go legit and buy a copy of Elements. It's got all the functionality I want, but I absolutely loathe nearly every single other non-functional change between the programs. Mostly interface, which is so dark it's damn near illegible, carries a ton of other space-filling boxes I don't want and either can't make go away or which come back sporadically so that it's a losing battle, and other little things here and there that seem to make the new version an obstacle every time.
I'm so excited to be able to go back to proper Photoshop, I can't even tell you.
Sort of a tangent, but have you read Pirsig's 'Lila'? It's the sequel to 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' and includes discussion of societal trends, starting with the Victorian era and working up at least through the hippie movement, perhaps beyond (been a few years, memory is fuzzy).
Tthis was interesting, thanks.
Eh, sometimes. There's a lot of overuse of the startle effect by pushing things directly in front of the camera. You can get away with it in movies because there's no sense of peripheral vision, and the camera perspective generally jumps 180 degrees, rather than the normal turn that would allow a real person to see something coming. Same with selective audio editing, nothing ever makes sound when it's off camera, where in the real world you'd hear footsteps from whatever's walking up behind you. I feel like it's a cheap trick - a lot of times it's used to startle, without any real sense of suspense involved.