Actually, the ammo situation is much better than it was a few months ago. I can usually find 9mm without calling ahead now, and they've started stocking it on the shelf again instead of behind the counter. You should be good...
Really? I don't remember any good choices during primary season in 2012. And believe me, I was paying attention, because I've been in search of a candidate I like for most of my adult life.
I'm not trying to incite a God vs. Science battle. I accept both, so I have no dog in the fight. And the fact that we could possibly test cosmological models with godlike powers and immortality does not contribute anything to our current scientific understanding. One could just as easily say, "I can prove that God exists by standing in His presence." Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't investigate evolution or cosmology. My point is that we should avoid the type of hubris that leads some fundamentalist Christians to believe the value of pi is exactly three because the Bible describes a city wall as having a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, therefore God has decreed the exact value of pi. Instead, let's be realistic about what we do and do not know and not pretend that some god of science has decreed the absolute truth of our current evolutionary model from the top of a mountain.
I am a registered patent attorney. I live and breathe patents every day. I know what the duty of disclosure is. You do not. You sound like a twelve-year-old telling Richard Stallman that he doesn't know what the Free Software Foundation is all about because he heard the term "free software" and thought it was about warez. It's nice that you have the Google skills to find a link to the MPEP, but perhaps you should also try reading your own links. And while you're at it, read chapter 700 of the MPEP. Or at least read this page (the one that instructs the examiner to perform a search). Then try reading some patent file wrappers, and look at the examiner's search strategy that he puts in the record before every office action. And while we're at it, your misdirected ad hominem attack and your misuse of prima facie make you look all the more foolish (and yes, I'm aware that you pulled that phrase from s. 2001, but you don't understand what it means).
In short, you are clueless about how patents work, as are most people on Slashdot, who think that patent prosecution is merely a ministerial act of rubber stamping an application. Patent prosecution is arduous and expensive. While there are occasional cases where examiners allow questionable claims, I have also had many, many opportunities to personally deal with examiners rejected claims on sorely strained arguments. Under W's appointee Jon Dudas (who was not even statutorily qualified for the post), the "Reject Everything" culture got so bad that the patent bar was practically in open revolt. You really have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm not saying its the patent offices job to search for prior art,
Yes it is. That is exactly their job.
Since we are now on a first to file basis, the idea of imposing a 1 year public comment period commencing just after the Patent office published an intent-to-award notice would seem a reasonable extension to the patent process. It would put the community or others in the field on notice of which patents need attention.
That is a non-sequiter. What does first-to-file have to do with anything? That only comes into play if Samsung for example filed a patent application, and then Apple filed one later and wanted to prove that they had invented first. What's more, this is a bad idea regardless. Your patent term is calculated from your earliest priority date, which means that we arbitrarily deprive patentees of one year of term, or we tack a year on to every patent term, which doesn't seem like it would jive with the Slashdot anti-IP philosophy. And as a practical matter, when do you decide that prior art is significant enough to warrant reopening prosecution after it has been closed because somebody sent it some prior art? Who decides, for that matter? Are you going to make the patent examiner dig through a pile of crap every time, after prosecution has closed?
There is already an opposition period after a patent publishes, while it is still in prosecution. That's the time for you to muster your prior art and submit it to the examiner so he can look at it when it makes sense. After it's allowed is the worst time to do this.
You mean like evolution (beyond minor intraspecies variations), or all of cosmology and astronomy, or climate theories? The best we can do for any of these is back into a theory based on the scraps of evidence we can gather, and then "test" the theory with computer models, which is not the same thing as testing. We just don't live long enough to observe them on any kind of useful scale, and in many cases, we don't have the means to do any kind of controlled experiment (unless the U.S. government has a top-secret stellar nursery lying around somewhere). That doesn't mean that we should stop trying to understand our universe as best we can. But it does mean that we should take some things we think we know with a grain of salt.
If memories can be implanted from outside, then education can be delivered this way, and the services of unionized teachers will no longer be necessary...watch for them to oppose this research and make several ad-hominem attacks on it.
Unionized teachers, no. But there will always be room for real teachers who do something more than raw data transfer.
While there've been a few developments recently, there still doesn't seem to be a single, comprehensive reference solution which will handle all of the (idiosyncratic) Bluebook style rules.
William
(who always just uses \frenchspacing in his.tex documents)
I did take a gander at a "bluebook.sty" file where I could do something like \case{} with some parameters or keys, but it was never very useful because it ended up making me type more than just formatting the reference manually. Someday when I'm really ambitious, I may do one that links in to some external program that automatically inserts all the extra information and also creates a link to Westlaw or something (and KeyCites it, while I'm dreaming big). But I'm nowhere near that right now. And since I don't litigate anymore, I've stopped caring much.
1. It creates distracting rivers of white space. That's a non-arbitrary argument.
2. Manually inserting two consecutive whitespace characters of any kind is hackish. It is using content to approximate form. That's another non-arbitrary argument.
The fact that you remain unconvinced (presumably because you prefer two spaces) does not mean they are not arguments. Perhaps you could share with me your non-arbitrary argument on the benefit of two spaces.
LaTeX to generate documents is pretty resourceful. How do you manage drafts that need to be exchanged with a client or opposing counsel when they ask for a "track changes" version? What font(s) do you use?
Hence the "when I can get away with it." I have some clients that are okay marking up a PDF, and I actually have some clients who are university professors who are okay with just editing a.tex file. One of the things I really like is the way I can keep track of dependent claims in a patent as the claims change. I can do it in Word (kind of), but it's kind of kludgy, and I have to remember to hit "Print Preview" before I send out a document so the numbers auto-update.
There is no non-arbitrary reason to use a single space.
Nonsense. Butterick has a very convincing argument. And now that you've seen his graphic, I challenge you to ever look at a document with two spaces without cringing. What's more, manually inserting two of any kind of white space character is ugly and hackish.
Now that I'm semi-solo, I have a Git repository for all my client files. I wrote a bunch of LaTeX class and style files to make beautiful patents, pleadings, and contracts. I write patents in vi (well, Vim) when I can get away with it. But when I was at a big firm, I spent fruitless years trying to convince lawyers that there is a better way than using kludged, recycled Word files, or at least trying to convince them to use Word's style functionality instead of manually reformatting the same flipping document EVERY SINGLE TIME. All in vain. Heck, I'd be happy if I could finally convince other lawyers that underlining is not a legitimate typesetting operation and is an embarrassing holdover from the days of typewriters (along with two spaces after a period).
One thing I've learned about lawyers it that most old lawyers learned how to do something back in 1978 or so, and believe it is the One Right Way. Those lawyers learned the One Right Way from other lawyers who learned it in the 30s. If I were king of the world, I would force every lawyer in America to get a copy of Butterick's book Typography for Lawyers and Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage, read them cover to cover, and treat them as though they were the inviolable word of God, handed down in stone from the peak of Mt. Carmel. I am so sick of looking at ugly legal documents.
So the death they gave to George Kirk in the 2009 movie.:-9
As long as it's not something epically lame like Kirk falling from a poorly-secured railing while a rocket running on a solid rocket booster goes from an earth-like planet to its sun in a matter of seconds. Just to pick a potential scenario at random. That would be truly unforgiveable.
I've had the same experience with the Star Wars prequels. I showed the original (theatrical version) trilogy to my 5-year-old son, and he fell in love with them so much (indeed, he became obsessed with them) that I finally relented and ordered the prequels off of Amazon, just so he could see the rest of the story. And when I re-watched them with him, I thought, "These aren't nearly as disappointing as I remember them being." They're not as epic as the originals, but considering that they are, in fact, the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries in a movie franchise, they are stunningly good. Usually by the time you get to Whatever 4, it's just a self-aware, winking-at-the-audience parody of itself. (Granted, Anakin building C-3PO, R2-D2 saving the Naboo ship, and secret Death Star plans were nothing more than winks at the audience, but the prequels also contained their own new mythos that managed to expand on the original mythos while being kinda sorta consistent-ish with it.)
In fact, it is well known that only two Star Trek movies were made before 2009: Star Trek II and Star Trek VI. There was a bumbling comedy troupe of impersonators who made a Star Trek parody that they called "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," but I believe Paramount later sued them and at least forced them to take the "Star Trek IV" out of the title, but then Paramount decided not to make a IV, to avoid confusion. Why Paramount skipped odd numbers altogether is a mystery the world may never solve, as is they mystery of why Paramount never made a film with the TNG cast. Surely they could have come up with a decent script if they tried hard enough. Maybe they could have even included some heroic last stand for Captain Kirk, where he does something cool like he dies ramming a crippled starship into a fleet of Klingon battle cruisers or something. So much wasted potential.
I don't oppose them giving a quick glance around the interior of the car (you did give them permission to get inside) or underneath it, but opening the trunk is going too far in my opinion.
I think the concern is that the TSA is deputizing valets to search cars without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion. You gave a valet permission to enter your car to park it, not a TSA agent permission to search it. If a government agent asks permission to enter your car (or house), the answer should always be "no." And as somebody pointed out below, if you happen to have a copy or the Koran in your car, when Sparky reports that to the TSA, they are almost sure to strip the thing down looking for the contraband they just know is there. It's still not illegal to be Muslim in America, but there are lots of people who consider it tantamount to being an admitted terrorist.
But consider who one of the the biggest proponents of Prism is: Dick Cheney. If he's your ideal of a Nanny, you're kinkier than most of us, I think.
Umm... 2004 called and all that. Dick Cheney is no longer any part of the "state." He might daydream about being Supreme Dictator, but then the nurse has to feed him his porridge, and cold reality hits like a barrel of bricks. Sure, he called Snowden a terrorist or something along those lines, but that's just because nobody has been paying attention to him lately and he's lonely. The name you're looking for in 2013 is "Barack Obama." He's the one whose IRS is harassing political opponents today and whose NSA listened to your steamy conversation with your girlfriend last night.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the ammo situation is much better than it was a few months ago. I can usually find 9mm without calling ahead now, and they've started stocking it on the shelf again instead of behind the counter. You should be good...
Hold on. There's somebody at the door.
Really? I don't remember any good choices during primary season in 2012. And believe me, I was paying attention, because I've been in search of a candidate I like for most of my adult life.
While enshrining the right to vote solely in the hands of wealthy, white land owners
That's a crass, unfounded lie. They were protecting the right to vote for wealthy, white, land-owning males.
On that same note, "I have also had many, many opportunities to personally deal with examiners [who] rejected claims on sorely strained arguments."
I'm not trying to incite a God vs. Science battle. I accept both, so I have no dog in the fight. And the fact that we could possibly test cosmological models with godlike powers and immortality does not contribute anything to our current scientific understanding. One could just as easily say, "I can prove that God exists by standing in His presence." Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't investigate evolution or cosmology. My point is that we should avoid the type of hubris that leads some fundamentalist Christians to believe the value of pi is exactly three because the Bible describes a city wall as having a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, therefore God has decreed the exact value of pi. Instead, let's be realistic about what we do and do not know and not pretend that some god of science has decreed the absolute truth of our current evolutionary model from the top of a mountain.
I am a registered patent attorney. I live and breathe patents every day. I know what the duty of disclosure is. You do not. You sound like a twelve-year-old telling Richard Stallman that he doesn't know what the Free Software Foundation is all about because he heard the term "free software" and thought it was about warez. It's nice that you have the Google skills to find a link to the MPEP, but perhaps you should also try reading your own links. And while you're at it, read chapter 700 of the MPEP. Or at least read this page (the one that instructs the examiner to perform a search). Then try reading some patent file wrappers, and look at the examiner's search strategy that he puts in the record before every office action. And while we're at it, your misdirected ad hominem attack and your misuse of prima facie make you look all the more foolish (and yes, I'm aware that you pulled that phrase from s. 2001, but you don't understand what it means).
In short, you are clueless about how patents work, as are most people on Slashdot, who think that patent prosecution is merely a ministerial act of rubber stamping an application. Patent prosecution is arduous and expensive. While there are occasional cases where examiners allow questionable claims, I have also had many, many opportunities to personally deal with examiners rejected claims on sorely strained arguments. Under W's appointee Jon Dudas (who was not even statutorily qualified for the post), the "Reject Everything" culture got so bad that the patent bar was practically in open revolt. You really have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm not saying its the patent offices job to search for prior art,
Yes it is. That is exactly their job.
Since we are now on a first to file basis, the idea of imposing a 1 year public comment period commencing just after the Patent office published an intent-to-award notice would seem a reasonable extension to the patent process. It would put the community or others in the field on notice of which patents need attention.
That is a non-sequiter. What does first-to-file have to do with anything? That only comes into play if Samsung for example filed a patent application, and then Apple filed one later and wanted to prove that they had invented first. What's more, this is a bad idea regardless. Your patent term is calculated from your earliest priority date, which means that we arbitrarily deprive patentees of one year of term, or we tack a year on to every patent term, which doesn't seem like it would jive with the Slashdot anti-IP philosophy. And as a practical matter, when do you decide that prior art is significant enough to warrant reopening prosecution after it has been closed because somebody sent it some prior art? Who decides, for that matter? Are you going to make the patent examiner dig through a pile of crap every time, after prosecution has closed?
There is already an opposition period after a patent publishes, while it is still in prosecution. That's the time for you to muster your prior art and submit it to the examiner so he can look at it when it makes sense. After it's allowed is the worst time to do this.
If it can't be tested, it's not science*.
You mean like evolution (beyond minor intraspecies variations), or all of cosmology and astronomy, or climate theories? The best we can do for any of these is back into a theory based on the scraps of evidence we can gather, and then "test" the theory with computer models, which is not the same thing as testing. We just don't live long enough to observe them on any kind of useful scale, and in many cases, we don't have the means to do any kind of controlled experiment (unless the U.S. government has a top-secret stellar nursery lying around somewhere). That doesn't mean that we should stop trying to understand our universe as best we can. But it does mean that we should take some things we think we know with a grain of salt.
Then there's the films every geek should watch ... Avatar....
Worldwide: $2,782,275,172. Rank: 1 . You have an odd definition of what constitutes a Geek film.
If memories can be implanted from outside, then education can be delivered this way, and the services of unionized teachers will no longer be necessary...watch for them to oppose this research and make several ad-hominem attacks on it.
Unionized teachers, no. But there will always be room for real teachers who do something more than raw data transfer.
How are you handling citations?
While there've been a few developments recently, there still doesn't seem to be a single, comprehensive reference solution which will handle all of the (idiosyncratic) Bluebook style rules.
William (who always just uses \frenchspacing in his .tex documents)
I did take a gander at a "bluebook.sty" file where I could do something like \case{} with some parameters or keys, but it was never very useful because it ended up making me type more than just formatting the reference manually. Someday when I'm really ambitious, I may do one that links in to some external program that automatically inserts all the extra information and also creates a link to Westlaw or something (and KeyCites it, while I'm dreaming big). But I'm nowhere near that right now. And since I don't litigate anymore, I've stopped caring much.
zip it. Using that kind of language will kill the discussion.
1. It creates distracting rivers of white space. That's a non-arbitrary argument.
2. Manually inserting two consecutive whitespace characters of any kind is hackish. It is using content to approximate form. That's another non-arbitrary argument.
The fact that you remain unconvinced (presumably because you prefer two spaces) does not mean they are not arguments. Perhaps you could share with me your non-arbitrary argument on the benefit of two spaces.
LaTeX to generate documents is pretty resourceful. How do you manage drafts that need to be exchanged with a client or opposing counsel when they ask for a "track changes" version? What font(s) do you use?
Hence the "when I can get away with it." I have some clients that are okay marking up a PDF, and I actually have some clients who are university professors who are okay with just editing a .tex file. One of the things I really like is the way I can keep track of dependent claims in a patent as the claims change. I can do it in Word (kind of), but it's kind of kludgy, and I have to remember to hit "Print Preview" before I send out a document so the numbers auto-update.
I hadn't updated it since leaving my previous employer. It's http://www.patcapgroup.com/crandall.html now.
There is no non-arbitrary reason to use a single space.
Nonsense. Butterick has a very convincing argument. And now that you've seen his graphic, I challenge you to ever look at a document with two spaces without cringing. What's more, manually inserting two of any kind of white space character is ugly and hackish.
As with most david vs goliath stories, the law applies however the side with the biggest legal budget says it does.
So you're saying that Goliath's mistake was not having a big legal team in $1,500 tailored New York suits?
Now that I'm semi-solo, I have a Git repository for all my client files. I wrote a bunch of LaTeX class and style files to make beautiful patents, pleadings, and contracts. I write patents in vi (well, Vim) when I can get away with it. But when I was at a big firm, I spent fruitless years trying to convince lawyers that there is a better way than using kludged, recycled Word files, or at least trying to convince them to use Word's style functionality instead of manually reformatting the same flipping document EVERY SINGLE TIME. All in vain. Heck, I'd be happy if I could finally convince other lawyers that underlining is not a legitimate typesetting operation and is an embarrassing holdover from the days of typewriters (along with two spaces after a period).
One thing I've learned about lawyers it that most old lawyers learned how to do something back in 1978 or so, and believe it is the One Right Way. Those lawyers learned the One Right Way from other lawyers who learned it in the 30s. If I were king of the world, I would force every lawyer in America to get a copy of Butterick's book Typography for Lawyers and Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage, read them cover to cover, and treat them as though they were the inviolable word of God, handed down in stone from the peak of Mt. Carmel. I am so sick of looking at ugly legal documents.
So the death they gave to George Kirk in the 2009 movie. :-9
As long as it's not something epically lame like Kirk falling from a poorly-secured railing while a rocket running on a solid rocket booster goes from an earth-like planet to its sun in a matter of seconds. Just to pick a potential scenario at random. That would be truly unforgiveable.
I've had the same experience with the Star Wars prequels. I showed the original (theatrical version) trilogy to my 5-year-old son, and he fell in love with them so much (indeed, he became obsessed with them) that I finally relented and ordered the prequels off of Amazon, just so he could see the rest of the story. And when I re-watched them with him, I thought, "These aren't nearly as disappointing as I remember them being." They're not as epic as the originals, but considering that they are, in fact, the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries in a movie franchise, they are stunningly good. Usually by the time you get to Whatever 4, it's just a self-aware, winking-at-the-audience parody of itself. (Granted, Anakin building C-3PO, R2-D2 saving the Naboo ship, and secret Death Star plans were nothing more than winks at the audience, but the prequels also contained their own new mythos that managed to expand on the original mythos while being kinda sorta consistent-ish with it.)
In fact, it is well known that only two Star Trek movies were made before 2009: Star Trek II and Star Trek VI. There was a bumbling comedy troupe of impersonators who made a Star Trek parody that they called "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," but I believe Paramount later sued them and at least forced them to take the "Star Trek IV" out of the title, but then Paramount decided not to make a IV, to avoid confusion. Why Paramount skipped odd numbers altogether is a mystery the world may never solve, as is they mystery of why Paramount never made a film with the TNG cast. Surely they could have come up with a decent script if they tried hard enough. Maybe they could have even included some heroic last stand for Captain Kirk, where he does something cool like he dies ramming a crippled starship into a fleet of Klingon battle cruisers or something. So much wasted potential.
Except the TSA has apparently deputized them, so they are government actors acting under color of authority.
I don't oppose them giving a quick glance around the interior of the car (you did give them permission to get inside) or underneath it, but opening the trunk is going too far in my opinion.
I think the concern is that the TSA is deputizing valets to search cars without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion. You gave a valet permission to enter your car to park it, not a TSA agent permission to search it. If a government agent asks permission to enter your car (or house), the answer should always be "no." And as somebody pointed out below, if you happen to have a copy or the Koran in your car, when Sparky reports that to the TSA, they are almost sure to strip the thing down looking for the contraband they just know is there. It's still not illegal to be Muslim in America, but there are lots of people who consider it tantamount to being an admitted terrorist.
But consider who one of the the biggest proponents of Prism is: Dick Cheney. If he's your ideal of a Nanny, you're kinkier than most of us, I think.
Umm... 2004 called and all that. Dick Cheney is no longer any part of the "state." He might daydream about being Supreme Dictator, but then the nurse has to feed him his porridge, and cold reality hits like a barrel of bricks. Sure, he called Snowden a terrorist or something along those lines, but that's just because nobody has been paying attention to him lately and he's lonely. The name you're looking for in 2013 is "Barack Obama." He's the one whose IRS is harassing political opponents today and whose NSA listened to your steamy conversation with your girlfriend last night.
I hear that they also have tagged recursive jokes as being a red flag for socialistic leanings.