If that were the case, the banks should go belly up Not so much. I pay no fee's unless a direct debit bounces or I apply for an overdraft. But then I'm in europe. I've heard some horror stories from friends in the US- one beauty was someone who opened an account with a small amount of money, a few weeks later withdrew some of it, got hit with a fee for the transaction, got hit with a fee for going into overdraft, then got hit with more fees because they didn't bother to notify him that he owed them money and it went more than 14 days or some such without him knowing about it and he ended up with a bill for over 200.
At least here my bank is required to notify me first if I'm about to do something which will entail a fee(like requesting extra statements or some such). If I request 20 from the atm and I have 10 or I request 10 and there's a fee for using the ATM the bank can't just silently let me slip into overdraft, the transaction gets denied.(unless I have agreed to go into overdraft)
How hard is this? It's basic consumer protection legislation. Does the US have no basic consumer protection legislation?
Not so much. Given that many companies do everything they can to stop their employees looking for patents which they might be infringing as it has become a legal liability.
A patent encourages innovation, patents plural smother it- particularly when you reach the point of having to work around thousands of patents, some of which you may be infringing even if you've never heard of them and others which are so vague that a decent lawyer could convince a judge you're infringing even if you're not.
I'm all for stem cell research but the "human DNA is only slightly different from animal DNA so why not treat them the same" argument leads to HumanMcNuggets and HumanBurgers
Part of the problem though is that if I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself. I go to market and get sued out of existance. I go out of buisness and they don't have to compete with me.
Alt: I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself. I hire a massive team of lawyers, they go through my designs, go through the patents that have been filed, point out things which I've re-invented which my competitor has already patented. I spend a huge pile of money on coming up with a new design which doesn't use any of the patented parts. I go to market and get sued out of existance because while I didn't actually infringe on any of their patents I don't have the money to spend 10 years in court proving that their flux capacitor is totally different from my re-modulated flux capacitor so I go out of buisness and they don't have to compete with me.
Alt Alt: I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself. I hire a massive team of lawyers, they go through my designs, go through the patents that have been filed, point out things which I've re-invented which my competitor has already patented. I then ask them for licensing for those parts. They don't want me in the market so they refuse point blank. I go out of buisness and they don't have to compete with me.
Alt Alt Alt: I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself. I hire a massive team of lawyers, they go through my designs, go through the patents that have been filed, point out things which I've re-invented which my competitor has already patented.I then ask them for licensing for those parts. They offer to license for an insane amount of money. I go to market, my profits all go to them through the patents.
Then try looking for shares in companies with a record of paying decent dividends and remaining fairly stable in the long term. Or do such shares not exist?
One hole. If the company pays dividends to the shareholders of say 5 or 10 percent and you simply buy and do no more you'll eventually make back your investment over 10-20 years. Now if you want to make money short term the thing to do is of course to go for the quick profit but shares don't have to be a hole to throw money into.
There are nice vague things you can be slapped with like dangerous driving for a reason.
Lets try another example. You see someone a fair distance behind you with an idiot tailgating them right up their ass.
You slam on your breaks, the car behind you slams on their brakes, the guy behind them who's not leaving a safe distance slams into the car behind you.
Who is responsible- you or the tailgater? It'd be nice if it was you but in most places it's the driver right at the back who actually slammed into someone who's considered at fault. The most you'll get slapped with is something like reckless/unsafe driving or some such.
Like it or not you have a responsibility to not let yourself be manipulated easily since if you're manipulated into slamming into the back of someone, bludgeoning someone to death with a rock or hanging yourself it's ultimatly you who's to blame.
So what's with so many of the patents a few years ago which read like they'd been written by a lawyer who had the idea sketched out to him over lunch and then tried to dress it up in such a manner that it sounded meaningful?
You get my support if you add in something about a requirement that it should be possible to build a working example of whatever you're patenting using the patent documentation(you know, so that patents actually serve their stated purpose).
Look, to a great extent the net is fairly robust. it has some weak points like the top level routing algorithms and such but the die hard thing is utter bullshit.
It takes a great deal of time and effort to break into even one system(that isn't windows or out of date or both), if your plan involves hacking many many systems, some of which aren't even on the internet then best give up now.
Could it be that those school shootings could have been encouraged by the crackdown on anyone who looked or acted a little weird. hell slashdot covered the kind of hell that the weird kids went through after columbine when they went from just being weird outcasts who could keep their heads down and merely be ignored to being "dangerous" kids who had to be tortured not just by the other kids but by the teachers and administrators.
After reading some of the account of how much worse the lives of "weird" kids became after columbine it's no surprise at all that there were more such events.
You mean these killing simulators which have shown them that no matter how pasty and weak they are they can shoot a desert eagle one handed, reload by dropping one hand down out of their view, that being shot a few times in the feet won't slow them down, that medpacks are left lying around on the ground and can heal the holes in their feet in seconds?
Could it be that those school shootings could have been encouraged by the crackdown on anyone who looked or acted a little weird. hell slashdot covered the kind of hell that the weird kids went through after columbine when they went from just being weird outcasts who could keep their heads down and merely be ignored to being "dangerous" kids who had to be tortured not just by the other kids but by the teachers and administrators.
After reading some of the account of how much worse the lives of "weird" kids became after columbine it's no surprise at all that there were more such events.
There is one obvious solution: Those who value their anonymity should make an effort to expose a few of that papers anonymous sources. Then do the same for every paper that works to remove the anonymity of bloggers and other online whistle-blowers. When sources are afraid to talk to papers which have recently outed an anonymous blogger they'll get the message that it's a bad idea.
Since the starting group is random not all will choose to manipulate their offspring in this manner. If we then end up in the situation where most of humanity becomes flu-ridden corpses the survivors will either be those who chose not to manipulate their genes or those who manipulated their genes in the right manner. Either way natural selection will have played out.
As long as different people make different choices evolution does not stop. In technical terms, we will have moved some of humanity from a local random search to a heuristics based local search. There will always be people who go against the crowd.
I mean there's almost 7 billion of us. You think every one of those billions is going to be willing and able to have their children tailored? Unless they do it isn't a big problem for humanity as a whole.
We won't be make our evolution more efficient.
You seem very sure of this. For all you know some of the Sci-fi dreams could work out.
There are people who believe that human evolution has already stopped because we now support the individuals who would have otherwise died early in life. In reality to compare to algorithms we've just increased T in the annealing search to allow more variation for a while.
People will get paid in relation to how much it takes to get someone capable of doing the job to work, if your field of employment tends to attract fools who "don't do it for the money" then they're going to get paid sweet fuck all. That's not the shareholders fault, that isn't the governments fault. that's the fault of every moron who says "oh I don't do it for the money" within earshot of the guys in payroll.
This was my plan but with the downturn it's a hell of a lot harder to get a job straight out of college so I'm thinking of going for a masters and hoping that either it will help me get a job or that things will have improved a little by then.
It makes no sense for encryption systems to destroy themselves. With RSA nobody is going to be getting in without the password and since it's all just bits anyone making an effort to get in will be working off a copy. Example: You burn the truecypt volume onto a CDR, slot it into a drive which doesn't write and do what you like since it isn't going to corrupt itself.
Slashdot Mirror
If that were the case, the banks should go belly up
Not so much.
I pay no fee's unless a direct debit bounces or I apply for an overdraft.
But then I'm in europe. I've heard some horror stories from friends in the US- one beauty was someone who opened an account with a small amount of money, a few weeks later withdrew some of it, got hit with a fee for the transaction, got hit with a fee for going into overdraft, then got hit with more fees because they didn't bother to notify him that he owed them money and it went more than 14 days or some such without him knowing about it and he ended up with a bill for over 200.
At least here my bank is required to notify me first if I'm about to do something which will entail a fee(like requesting extra statements or some such). If I request 20 from the atm and I have 10 or I request 10 and there's a fee for using the ATM the bank can't just silently let me slip into overdraft, the transaction gets denied.(unless I have agreed to go into overdraft)
How hard is this?
It's basic consumer protection legislation.
Does the US have no basic consumer protection legislation?
Not so much.
Given that many companies do everything they can to stop their employees looking for patents which they might be infringing as it has become a legal liability.
A patent encourages innovation, patents plural smother it- particularly when you reach the point of having to work around thousands of patents, some of which you may be infringing even if you've never heard of them and others which are so vague that a decent lawyer could convince a judge you're infringing even if you're not.
Corruption is great isn't it.
I'm all for stem cell research but the "human DNA is only slightly different from animal DNA so why not treat them the same" argument leads to HumanMcNuggets and HumanBurgers
Part of the problem though is that if I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself.
I go to market and get sued out of existance.
I go out of buisness and they don't have to compete with me.
Alt: I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself.
I hire a massive team of lawyers, they go through my designs, go through the patents that have been filed, point out things which I've re-invented which my competitor has already patented.
I spend a huge pile of money on coming up with a new design which doesn't use any of the patented parts.
I go to market and get sued out of existance because while I didn't actually infringe on any of their patents I don't have the money to spend 10 years in court proving that their flux capacitor is totally different from my re-modulated flux capacitor so I go out of buisness and they don't have to compete with me.
Alt Alt: I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself.
I hire a massive team of lawyers, they go through my designs, go through the patents that have been filed, point out things which I've re-invented which my competitor has already patented.
I then ask them for licensing for those parts. They don't want me in the market so they refuse point blank.
I go out of buisness and they don't have to compete with me.
Alt Alt Alt: I want to get into the buisness and I have some fantastic new tech I go and try to build a car, I've never ever seen one of their cars before so I work everything out for myself.
I hire a massive team of lawyers, they go through my designs, go through the patents that have been filed, point out things which I've re-invented which my competitor has already patented.I then ask them for licensing for those parts. They offer to license for an insane amount of money. I go to market, my profits all go to them through the patents.
Ya
Real inspiration to innovate....
Then try looking for shares in companies with a record of paying decent dividends and remaining fairly stable in the long term.
Or do such shares not exist?
Nuclear power is not the same as nuclear weapons.
One hole.
If the company pays dividends to the shareholders of say 5 or 10 percent and you simply buy and do no more you'll eventually make back your investment over 10-20 years.
Now if you want to make money short term the thing to do is of course to go for the quick profit but shares don't have to be a hole to throw money into.
yep, it expects the responsibility from their parents.
There are nice vague things you can be slapped with like dangerous driving for a reason.
Lets try another example.
You see someone a fair distance behind you with an idiot tailgating them right up their ass.
You slam on your breaks, the car behind you slams on their brakes, the guy behind them who's not leaving a safe distance slams into the car behind you.
Who is responsible- you or the tailgater?
It'd be nice if it was you but in most places it's the driver right at the back who actually slammed into someone who's considered at fault.
The most you'll get slapped with is something like reckless/unsafe driving or some such.
Like it or not you have a responsibility to not let yourself be manipulated easily since if you're manipulated into slamming into the back of someone, bludgeoning someone to death with a rock or hanging yourself it's ultimatly you who's to blame.
So what's with so many of the patents a few years ago which read like they'd been written by a lawyer who had the idea sketched out to him over lunch and then tried to dress it up in such a manner that it sounded meaningful?
Is this actually enforced?
You get my support if you add in something about a requirement that it should be possible to build a working example of whatever you're patenting using the patent documentation(you know, so that patents actually serve their stated purpose).
Look, to a great extent the net is fairly robust.
it has some weak points like the top level routing algorithms and such but the die hard thing is utter bullshit.
It takes a great deal of time and effort to break into even one system(that isn't windows or out of date or both), if your plan involves hacking many many systems, some of which aren't even on the internet then best give up now.
Could it be that those school shootings could have been encouraged by the crackdown on anyone who looked or acted a little weird. hell slashdot covered the kind of hell that the weird kids went through after columbine when they went from just being weird outcasts who could keep their heads down and merely be ignored to being "dangerous" kids who had to be tortured not just by the other kids but by the teachers and administrators.
After reading some of the account of how much worse the lives of "weird" kids became after columbine it's no surprise at all that there were more such events.
Video games had fuck all to do with it.
You mean these killing simulators which have shown them that no matter how pasty and weak they are they can shoot a desert eagle one handed, reload by dropping one hand down out of their view, that being shot a few times in the feet won't slow them down, that medpacks are left lying around on the ground and can heal the holes in their feet in seconds?
Could it be that those school shootings could have been encouraged by the crackdown on anyone who looked or acted a little weird. hell slashdot covered the kind of hell that the weird kids went through after columbine when they went from just being weird outcasts who could keep their heads down and merely be ignored to being "dangerous" kids who had to be tortured not just by the other kids but by the teachers and administrators.
After reading some of the account of how much worse the lives of "weird" kids became after columbine it's no surprise at all that there were more such events.
Video games had fuck all to do with it.
.....wow..... there are really people out there who believe Palin isn't a complete twit despite having heard her speak.
There is one obvious solution: Those who value their anonymity should make an effort to expose a few of that papers anonymous sources. Then do the same for every paper that works to remove the anonymity of bloggers and other online whistle-blowers. When sources are afraid to talk to papers which have recently outed an anonymous blogger they'll get the message that it's a bad idea.
Since the starting group is random not all will choose to manipulate their offspring in this manner.
If we then end up in the situation where most of humanity becomes flu-ridden corpses the survivors will either be those who chose not to manipulate their genes or those who manipulated their genes in the right manner.
Either way natural selection will have played out.
As long as different people make different choices evolution does not stop.
In technical terms, we will have moved some of humanity from a local random search to a heuristics based local search.
There will always be people who go against the crowd.
I mean there's almost 7 billion of us.
You think every one of those billions is going to be willing and able to have their children tailored?
Unless they do it isn't a big problem for humanity as a whole.
We won't be make our evolution more efficient.
You seem very sure of this.
For all you know some of the Sci-fi dreams could work out.
There are people who believe that human evolution has already stopped because we now support the individuals who would have otherwise died early in life. In reality to compare to algorithms we've just increased T in the annealing search to allow more variation for a while.
You don't become a social workers for the money.
There's the problem right there.
People will get paid in relation to how much it takes to get someone capable of doing the job to work, if your field of employment tends to attract fools who "don't do it for the money" then they're going to get paid sweet fuck all. That's not the shareholders fault, that isn't the governments fault. that's the fault of every moron who says "oh I don't do it for the money" within earshot of the guys in payroll.
You seem to be confusing socialism and communism.
Mine was pro-active. :D
When a friend tried to get me into WoW she immediatly kissed my neck till I forgot about the game.
This was my plan but with the downturn it's a hell of a lot harder to get a job straight out of college so I'm thinking of going for a masters and hoping that either it will help me get a job or that things will have improved a little by then.
It makes no sense for encryption systems to destroy themselves. With RSA nobody is going to be getting in without the password and since it's all just bits anyone making an effort to get in will be working off a copy.
Example: You burn the truecypt volume onto a CDR, slot it into a drive which doesn't write and do what you like since it isn't going to corrupt itself.
I know I myself installed truecrypt to try it out but buggered if I can remember the password...
How do they prove you know a particular piece of information?
I was under the impression that technically drugs aren't banned, you just need a licenses to posses or sell them which is never granted.