Why stop with just hidden compartments that drug runners use? I happen to know (meaning I've seen it on TV) that drug dealers keep drugs in safes, so we should outlaw those too. And safety deposit boxes too. And don't even get me started on those tricky boxes that stage magicians have, they might be used to conceal something.
Also, everybody knows that only terrorists use encryption.
Unfortunately (?), "vagrancy" does not usually land one in prison. Just the county jail, usually for the night. Prisons are generally only for felonies.That's why they're profitable for private contractors. The tenants are locked into long-term contracts. (And more than usual, this isn't legal advice.)
My only issue is how would you license patents from a defunct company.
You license them from the bankruptcy creditor who ended up with them. This isn't that complicated. Patents are property, just like the chairs and desks. When a company goes belly up, the bankruptcy court sells what anybody is willing to buy. Assets don't just disappear into the aether.
No, there wasn't. But there was this one time when some 13-year-old kids somehow convinced Matt Smith to stand in front of their camera for a few minutes, and then they used MS Paint to put some dinosaurs in the frame and somehow convinced people it was an episode of Doctor Who. (It's a well-known phenomenon, actually, called the "Star Trek V Effect.")
It's really more of an inverse "no true Scotsman." There are plenty of people who claim "No true Christian believes X, because Christianity is defined [by me] as people who believe Y." But the GP's thesis was that "Different flavors of Christianity believe everything from A to Z." If you define "Christianity" broadly as "people who believe in the New Testament," you will find a great deal of variance.
> an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical
You mean LaTeX, or its modern descendant tetex, I think. Or the original Postscript standard, which has been effectively replaced by the open source tool ghostscript in most environments due to some outrageous licensing fees from Adobe.
One reason to use PDF is that it is a de factor standard, not becuase it actually renders more consistently than those older standards. Another is that it is possible to get commercial support for it, and a third is that it supports some useful "fill-in-blanks" formats. But consistent document formatting is not a reason to prefer PDF over LaTeX. Another is its very tight integration with most powerful web browsers, which does tend to make things faster than loading up the separate view application.
You're comparing apples and oranges. PDF and LaTeX are not competitors; they are complementary. LaTeX is just a text processing language. Your.tex file will not display anything correctly. It's a plain text file. The default output for LaTeX is PostScript, which is not really intended for display (it's just printer commands). So you will need a program capable of rendering.ps files to view it. Hence, ghostscript, which is not a competing format to postscript, but rather a suite of tools for working with postscript, including rendering it on screen. And most.tex files will just as happily crank out a PDF with pdflatex, and you can view that with any number of viewers.
The only real competitor I've seen for PDF is Microsoft's XPS, and I'm not aware of how or why it's inherently better. But in any case, the format is not the problem. The reader is the problem. Hence, Google's move.
False analogy. This case is not controlled by copyright law. This is a fourth amendment case. Those two bodies of law have almost nothing to do with each other substantively (yes, there may be fourth amendment implications to how police investigate copyrights, but that's separate from the substance of copyright law). The question here is whether the defendants had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data, not what they subjectively hoped people would do with it. If you grow weed in an open field, with a sign that says, "Cops don't look!" it doesn't matter that you subjectively intended to exclude police from seeing what was in the field. Your expectation of privacy, if you had any, was not reasonable.
and a supreme court acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of our corporate masters
I'm really with you, except on this point. Federal judges, and especially Supreme Court justices, are notorious for being wild cards. In retrospect, some of the most notoriously liberal judges have been appointed by Republicans (think Brennan and Blackmun), and some (though fewer) of the most notoriously conservative have been appointed by Democrats (think Hugo Black). Once they're in office, they are essentially little dictators. They don't have to run for reelection. They can't be fired without being impeached. Their salary can't be decreased. They can't lose an election. And they are appointed for life.
This was by design, to assure an independent judiciary. They are not bought and paid for because they answer to no one. Their only political pressure is whatever judicial legacy they want to craft (this is why we have Obamacare---Roberts didn't want to be known as the arch-conservative who shot down the law). If there is any legitimate complaint about federal judges, it is that they are too independent. But again, that's by design.
Or you could, I dunno, provide competent and effective _oversight_ to ensure the nuclear plants are being operated safely? I know - that's just crazy talk.
I like that this is modded "Funny." The funny part being that there's such a thing as "competent and effective oversight." In reality, government regulators are usually very cozy in bed with those they are supposedly regulating. Sometimes literally.
Indeed nuclear plants are best left into the hands of Government which has nothing to gain not respecting the letter of the law rules regulations and contracts where private interests will ALWAYS try to shortchange , use sub spec materials , cut here and there till the stations are nothing but ticking time bombs.Nuclear in private hands is nothing but trouble worldwide.
In which we learn that herbertrich has never actually seen a government contract up close.
"Too many data" is perfectly grammatical. "Datum" is a single piece of information. "Data" are several pieces of information. "Data" is also often used as a mass noun in common usage. Both uses are considered valid by ever grammar source I've seen. I very frequently write sentences like "The data received by the processor are written to memory" in my patent applications.
I have internet cable, but no cable TV. It's not that hard. You're right that I "miss out" on Monday Night Football, but I also "missed out" on the Spanish Inquisition, and I miss both of those things approximately equally.
Because "The People" means a lot of different things throughout the course of the constitution
Well, it does if you're playing word games to try to justify doing something the Constitution expressly says you can't do. Otherwise, it very consistently means the "people."
And that's the problem. As long as we keep playing word games with what the Constitution says, it doesn't matter how explicit the guarantee is. Somebody will find a way around it. It's been happening for more than 200 years. How much more explicit can you be than, for example, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preamble that points out the reason: the people should be able to raise militias for the security of a free state. But that doesn't remotely limit the language that follows it. If anything, that makes "assault weapons" bans even more unconstitutional.
You seem to have had trouble separating the "comedy" part of my post from the "real evidence" part of my post. The "comedy" part is a link to a funny sketch from a funny British sketch comedy that pokes fun at moon conspiracies by pointing out a circumstantial fallacy in their argument. While it is kind of a good point, you are correct that it is not definitive proof.
The "real evidence" part of my post, which you conveniently ignored, was the reference to the mirrors that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong left on the moon right before hopping back in their mocked-up lunar module for their historic special-effects flight from the Lunar surface. (Also, have you seen special effects from 1969? If these are are special effects, it's a bigger accomplishment than a moon landing would have been.)
Those mirrors are used by astronomers (not just NASA ones) to gauge the distance to the moon with extreme accuracy. If the moon landing was a hoax, I'm curious how you think they got there.
and either way I will never have any proof one way or the other.
Except for the mirrors they left there that astronomers shoot lasers off of to precisely gauge the distance to the moon. But other than that, everybody knows where they faked the footage for the moon landing.
It's kind of sad how Slashdotters think they're immune to the uninformed groupthink of the masses, and then post tirades like this that prove nothing better than their own ignorance. For future reference, there is a right way and a wrong way to analyze a patent and offer an informed opinion that it should not have been issued in light of prior art. This is the wrong way. I'm also curious which part of my post gave you the mistaken impression I was defending that particular patent in the first place.
I don't get the impression the USPTO has any incentive to do their job thoroughly and competently -- but that this is what they've been told to do by the government.
Just keep cranking out patents and let the courts decide seems to be how they operate.
While that kind of platitude is great for an easy +5 on Slashdot, anybody who actually practices in patents is all too aware that it's not true. In about 99% of patent applications, the examiner's first office action is a rejection. Under Dudas, a Bush appointee (who was not even statutorily qualified to run the patent office), the "Reject, Reject, Reject" culture was so bad that his most onerous round of patent rules spawned litigation that got the rules overturned. Things got a little better under Kappos, but I still see ridiculous rejections.
Basically, patent examiners get credit for a first office action (a rejection), and then get extra credit for disposing of the case on the second action. The easiest way for them to dispose of it is to reject it a second time. (A "final" rejection). After the "final" rejection, the applicant has to pay a fee and file a "Request for Continued Examination," which resets the count for the examiner like it's a new case. So examiners have every reason to reject applications. And I have seen some truly ridiculous rejections. Things like an examiner saying that my claim was anticipated because she found a controller and said it was the same thing as a sensor, or telling me that a single disk was "multi-layer" because it had two sides. Seriously, try applying for a patent sometime and then tell me that the patent office just rubber stamps applications.
Your wife leaves for a few days, and the best thing you can think to do with that time is spend it all watching television? Dude, don't you have hobbies? You know that cool stuff you never get to do enough of because your wife thinks you should be paying attention to her? A few days ought to be enough to at least build a prototype of a cool robot.
Slashdot Mirror
Why stop with just hidden compartments that drug runners use? I happen to know (meaning I've seen it on TV) that drug dealers keep drugs in safes, so we should outlaw those too. And safety deposit boxes too. And don't even get me started on those tricky boxes that stage magicians have, they might be used to conceal something.
Also, everybody knows that only terrorists use encryption.
Unfortunately (?), "vagrancy" does not usually land one in prison. Just the county jail, usually for the night. Prisons are generally only for felonies.That's why they're profitable for private contractors. The tenants are locked into long-term contracts. (And more than usual, this isn't legal advice.)
My only issue is how would you license patents from a defunct company.
You license them from the bankruptcy creditor who ended up with them. This isn't that complicated. Patents are property, just like the chairs and desks. When a company goes belly up, the bankruptcy court sells what anybody is willing to buy. Assets don't just disappear into the aether.
Imagine chess replacing actual war.
You mean like this?
No, there wasn't. But there was this one time when some 13-year-old kids somehow convinced Matt Smith to stand in front of their camera for a few minutes, and then they used MS Paint to put some dinosaurs in the frame and somehow convinced people it was an episode of Doctor Who. (It's a well-known phenomenon, actually, called the "Star Trek V Effect.")
It's really more of an inverse "no true Scotsman." There are plenty of people who claim "No true Christian believes X, because Christianity is defined [by me] as people who believe Y." But the GP's thesis was that "Different flavors of Christianity believe everything from A to Z." If you define "Christianity" broadly as "people who believe in the New Testament," you will find a great deal of variance.
> an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical
You mean LaTeX, or its modern descendant tetex, I think. Or the original Postscript standard, which has been effectively replaced by the open source tool ghostscript in most environments due to some outrageous licensing fees from Adobe.
One reason to use PDF is that it is a de factor standard, not becuase it actually renders more consistently than those older standards. Another is that it is possible to get commercial support for it, and a third is that it supports some useful "fill-in-blanks" formats. But consistent document formatting is not a reason to prefer PDF over LaTeX. Another is its very tight integration with most powerful web browsers, which does tend to make things faster than loading up the separate view application.
You're comparing apples and oranges. PDF and LaTeX are not competitors; they are complementary. LaTeX is just a text processing language. Your .tex file will not display anything correctly. It's a plain text file. The default output for LaTeX is PostScript, which is not really intended for display (it's just printer commands). So you will need a program capable of rendering .ps files to view it. Hence, ghostscript, which is not a competing format to postscript, but rather a suite of tools for working with postscript, including rendering it on screen. And most .tex files will just as happily crank out a PDF with pdflatex, and you can view that with any number of viewers.
The only real competitor I've seen for PDF is Microsoft's XPS, and I'm not aware of how or why it's inherently better. But in any case, the format is not the problem. The reader is the problem. Hence, Google's move.
(By the way, I'm referring to copyright law in terms of your "make available" argument, not weev.)
False analogy. This case is not controlled by copyright law. This is a fourth amendment case. Those two bodies of law have almost nothing to do with each other substantively (yes, there may be fourth amendment implications to how police investigate copyrights, but that's separate from the substance of copyright law). The question here is whether the defendants had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data, not what they subjectively hoped people would do with it. If you grow weed in an open field, with a sign that says, "Cops don't look!" it doesn't matter that you subjectively intended to exclude police from seeing what was in the field. Your expectation of privacy, if you had any, was not reasonable.
Hey, don't knock the phone sanitizers. You never know when a worldwide telephone-borne epidemic might strike.
and a supreme court acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of our corporate masters
I'm really with you, except on this point. Federal judges, and especially Supreme Court justices, are notorious for being wild cards. In retrospect, some of the most notoriously liberal judges have been appointed by Republicans (think Brennan and Blackmun), and some (though fewer) of the most notoriously conservative have been appointed by Democrats (think Hugo Black). Once they're in office, they are essentially little dictators. They don't have to run for reelection. They can't be fired without being impeached. Their salary can't be decreased. They can't lose an election. And they are appointed for life.
This was by design, to assure an independent judiciary. They are not bought and paid for because they answer to no one. Their only political pressure is whatever judicial legacy they want to craft (this is why we have Obamacare---Roberts didn't want to be known as the arch-conservative who shot down the law). If there is any legitimate complaint about federal judges, it is that they are too independent. But again, that's by design.
Or you could, I dunno, provide competent and effective _oversight_ to ensure the nuclear plants are being operated safely? I know - that's just crazy talk.
I like that this is modded "Funny." The funny part being that there's such a thing as "competent and effective oversight." In reality, government regulators are usually very cozy in bed with those they are supposedly regulating. Sometimes literally.
Indeed nuclear plants are best left into the hands of Government which has nothing to gain not respecting the letter of the law rules regulations and contracts where private interests will ALWAYS try to shortchange , use sub spec materials , cut here and there till the stations are nothing but ticking time bombs.Nuclear in private hands is nothing but trouble worldwide.
In which we learn that herbertrich has never actually seen a government contract up close.
"Too many data" is perfectly grammatical. "Datum" is a single piece of information. "Data" are several pieces of information. "Data" is also often used as a mass noun in common usage. Both uses are considered valid by ever grammar source I've seen. I very frequently write sentences like "The data received by the processor are written to memory" in my patent applications.
Dangit! s/counsel/council
Good for those 9/11 terrorists blowing up the building!
This message brought to you by the Counsel for Accuracy and Fairness in Political Discourse.
My pistols aren't registered, either. I think that's only in a few zany states, like New York and Illinois.
I have internet cable, but no cable TV. It's not that hard. You're right that I "miss out" on Monday Night Football, but I also "missed out" on the Spanish Inquisition, and I miss both of those things approximately equally.
Because "The People" means a lot of different things throughout the course of the constitution
Well, it does if you're playing word games to try to justify doing something the Constitution expressly says you can't do. Otherwise, it very consistently means the "people."
And that's the problem. As long as we keep playing word games with what the Constitution says, it doesn't matter how explicit the guarantee is. Somebody will find a way around it. It's been happening for more than 200 years. How much more explicit can you be than, for example, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preamble that points out the reason: the people should be able to raise militias for the security of a free state. But that doesn't remotely limit the language that follows it. If anything, that makes "assault weapons" bans even more unconstitutional.
You seem to have had trouble separating the "comedy" part of my post from the "real evidence" part of my post. The "comedy" part is a link to a funny sketch from a funny British sketch comedy that pokes fun at moon conspiracies by pointing out a circumstantial fallacy in their argument. While it is kind of a good point, you are correct that it is not definitive proof.
The "real evidence" part of my post, which you conveniently ignored, was the reference to the mirrors that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong left on the moon right before hopping back in their mocked-up lunar module for their historic special-effects flight from the Lunar surface. (Also, have you seen special effects from 1969? If these are are special effects, it's a bigger accomplishment than a moon landing would have been.)
Those mirrors are used by astronomers (not just NASA ones) to gauge the distance to the moon with extreme accuracy. If the moon landing was a hoax, I'm curious how you think they got there.
and either way I will never have any proof one way or the other.
Except for the mirrors they left there that astronomers shoot lasers off of to precisely gauge the distance to the moon. But other than that, everybody knows where they faked the footage for the moon landing.
It's kind of sad how Slashdotters think they're immune to the uninformed groupthink of the masses, and then post tirades like this that prove nothing better than their own ignorance. For future reference, there is a right way and a wrong way to analyze a patent and offer an informed opinion that it should not have been issued in light of prior art. This is the wrong way. I'm also curious which part of my post gave you the mistaken impression I was defending that particular patent in the first place.
I don't get the impression the USPTO has any incentive to do their job thoroughly and competently -- but that this is what they've been told to do by the government.
Just keep cranking out patents and let the courts decide seems to be how they operate.
While that kind of platitude is great for an easy +5 on Slashdot, anybody who actually practices in patents is all too aware that it's not true. In about 99% of patent applications, the examiner's first office action is a rejection. Under Dudas, a Bush appointee (who was not even statutorily qualified to run the patent office), the "Reject, Reject, Reject" culture was so bad that his most onerous round of patent rules spawned litigation that got the rules overturned. Things got a little better under Kappos, but I still see ridiculous rejections.
Basically, patent examiners get credit for a first office action (a rejection), and then get extra credit for disposing of the case on the second action. The easiest way for them to dispose of it is to reject it a second time. (A "final" rejection). After the "final" rejection, the applicant has to pay a fee and file a "Request for Continued Examination," which resets the count for the examiner like it's a new case. So examiners have every reason to reject applications. And I have seen some truly ridiculous rejections. Things like an examiner saying that my claim was anticipated because she found a controller and said it was the same thing as a sensor, or telling me that a single disk was "multi-layer" because it had two sides. Seriously, try applying for a patent sometime and then tell me that the patent office just rubber stamps applications.
Your wife leaves for a few days, and the best thing you can think to do with that time is spend it all watching television? Dude, don't you have hobbies? You know that cool stuff you never get to do enough of because your wife thinks you should be paying attention to her? A few days ought to be enough to at least build a prototype of a cool robot.