The problem with saying that he's a lone nut without the support of anyone he needs to get the law through is that according to the article Iceland has already banned printed porn. If he's just a lone nut, how did they manage to get that law through?
They're not banning porn in the name of "old-world belief systems", they're banning it in the name of feminism. I suppose since it's located in Iceland you can consider it to be old-world simply by location, but it's not based on the kind of religious attitudes one normally means by that term. And there's no evidence that he or his supporters aren't sincere about banning porn on feminist grounds rather than religious ones. Iceland is also a very secular country overall, despite having a state church.
I'm not him, but Hollywood is notoriously left-wing and on the side of the Democrats, so maybe he assumed that Republicans wouldn't be on Hollywood's side as much.
Also, she doesn't really need to take an amount numerically equal to what she had paid in. Rather, she should take out an amount equal to what she would have gotten if what she had paid in was instead used to pay for a private insurance program. It's possible that a private insurance program would have, if she had expensive medical treatment, paid more than the sum of her insurance payments. In fact, that's how insurance works--people on the average get less than the sum of their payments but in specific cases they may get more.
The progress bar on the HTTP download doesn't show the amount of remaining time in the bar. It shows the number of bytes remaining in the bar; the number of bytes remaining can't go into reverse. The time remaining is showed as a numeric value for how long it would take assuming the speed is the same as the speed so far; if the transfer suddenly slows down, this value can go into reverse.
The problem is that employers aren't willing to pay the market rate for the job that they're demanding, and since they're not willing to pay the market rate, they can't find anyone to hire. There's only a shortage of cheap employees, not a shortage of employees.
What you don't realize is that "for the job you're demanding" doesn't just mean a list of skills. The location of the job is part of the job, and part of what affect the market rate. If the job is in the middle of nowhere in Ohio, and you're only offering a salary equivalent to that of a job in a better location (after considering cost of living), you are paying under the market rate. Of course, you won't find anyone.
He's not disputing it with another person named Ron Paul, he's disputing it with someone who is using the site to refer to him, but is not him. In other words, "what if the other person has a legitimate claim?" is a nice question, but it only applies if the other person really does have a legitimate claim. The name's not owned by someone else named Ron Paul, it's owned by a cybersquatter.
PS: the article talks about his "fans". Reading between the lines, someone charging $250000 is almost certainly going to keep the money for himself, not divide it among the 170000 members of the mailing list and give them $1.47 each, which he would do if he was really acting on behalf of the fans.
I can understand that someone who normally is okay with science may be bad at it when the bad science is usedpolitically. But you seem to be suggesting the other way around--that they may be bad at science when it's nonpolitical, but good at science when it's political. I find this questionable.
As an experiment, I just went to the Huffington Post to see if I could find any bad science on a site that leans towards the left. One headline reads "Scientists Say ETs May Be Much Closer To Us Than We Ever Before Thought". Going to the article shows that the only reference to life was added by the editors and half of it makes no sense (ET phoning home is closer than people think? Really? How close do people think it is? And I thought ET phoned a nearby ship, not his home planet, anyway) and even the article itself is woefully inaccurate; the comments themselves point out that "at a habitable distance and size" doesn't mean Earth-like, especially since planets orbiting close to red dwarfs would be tidally locked. (The astronomer used the phrase "potentially Earth-like", which is a nice way of saying "only a few of them are going to be Earth-like".)
This was the first scientifically-related article I found on the first left-wing site I picked. It may not be as dramatic an error as saying that the US has less sun than Germany, but I wonder how big a mistake I would have found had I tried for a month or two or however long it took to find the Fox News error.
The media and political commentators are horrible at science. Nothing to do with Fox News specifically, as the Slashdot headline and the absence of articles about other sites tend to imply.
It's not a "no true scotsman" fallacy to say "actually, they don't". George Bush supports the TSA. That doesn't mean that "the right" supports the TSA, it means that politicians interested in political patronage support the TSA.
Opposition to marijuana prohibition is less common among the right, but common enough that it's false to say that "the right supports marijuana prohibition".
You said that stalling can't hurt. That's legal advice. You have failed to consider the possibility that stalling means that there will be a longer period of time in which the patent owner can find past violations, and therefore, a larger amount of money he can demand from you.
(Of course, I can't claim that such a thing is proven myself--if so, I would be the one giving the legal advice. But it's certainly a possibility you'd be wise to ask a lawyer about. Blindly claiming that stalling can't hurt is lousy legal advice.)
As has been pointed out by others here, even if the patent expires you can be on the hook for damages for acts committed before expiration. In other words, you just gave lousy legal advice.
The answer here is always "call a lawyer", not "listen to any advice anyone on Slashdot gives you" (except advice on calling a lawyer).
Furthermore, the guy asking the question knows this and asked where to look for legal counsel. He specifically said he was not asking for legal advice from Slashdot. So why is it half the people answering this question are trying to give legal advice?
Anything which can grow an unlimited amount until it runs out of resources (whether those resources are food, number of potential customers, or almost anything else) follows an S-shaped curve where it grows slowly, then more rapidly, then more slowly as the supply (in this case the supply of people who might have a need for the product) becomes saturated.
As a result, claiming that a product is rapidly growing by some large-sounding percentage is basically always BS. Any product can easily have a 100% rapid growth rate at some point on the adoption curve. This does not mean that it's going to grow at 100% forever, it's going to grow until it saturates the market, and this tells us little about the size of that market. If the market was any number somewhat greater than 2000 even if it was small compared to the actual number of schools in the world, we'd still get a 100% growth rate.
But I bet a headline "Chromebook has not yet saturated its market" wouldn't get as many ad impressions.
This is also true for ideas. The fact that some religion is growing at a rapid rate may just means it appeals to 0.5% of the population, but it only has converted a segment of that 0.5% and is still on the steep part of its curve.
This whole thing is basically the gun equivalent of the Patriot Act. Wait for some people to get killed and while it has national exposure, push through laws that violate out Constitutional rights using the deaths as an excuse.
GOG doesn't take measures to prevent you from selling their games. There's nothing which prevents you from buying some games from GOG, burning them to a disk, and selling someone that disk. The person who you sell it to won't be able to redownload the games from your account, and if you try to redownload them yourself that's piracy, but there's nothing to keep the person you sell the disk to from using the disk to play the game.
Of course, it would be illegal to sell someone that disk and keep a copy for yourself, but that's also true for a game you can buy in a store.
t's shady because the games publishers are (perhaps understandably) evasive about the amount of money they are funnelling into the weapons industry, and are working under direct conditions to portray guns in a positive manner so as to encourage gun sales, even as they claim to be non-political and not pushing violence.
You could say that substituting any sort of industry for the weapons industry. And really, do you ever expect games publishers to tell you their budgets for anything? Or to work with an industry to discourage sales from the industry?
All you're doing is describing things that would be standard procedures for any industry, but since it's about guns you're making it sound evil. It's not as if had they been using Coca-Cola in the game they'd be portraying it in a negative manner.
The problem with picking Atari Paint and similar programs is that they were only "influential" because given the limited amount of software developers and the fact that as a first party program it was widely available, it was the only choice for a lot of people. There was nothing special about it except for what platform it happened to run on and who made it; it wasn't important to the larger computing populace. Nobody ever bought the system for Atari Paint, said "I wish we could have a program for my computer like Atari Paint", ripped off Atari Paint's new features, etc.
The Atari didn't really have innovative software. It had innovative hardware, and then software which used the hardware in a predictable manner.
I wouldn't mind it so much if they just made a classic mode setting in it that allowed you to go straight to the desktop without having to jump through hoops (or hacks).
Windows 8 is marketing driven. Microsoft wants to force people to use the new interface because once they get used to it, Microsoft can sell mobile devices with the same interface they are used to. Making the interface optional would defeat the purpose.
Any factory that is really "desperate for workers" would improve their pay, benefits, and working conditions until they were no longer desperate for workers. (Note that opportunities for advancement are factored in--if your job has fewer opportunities for advancement than other jobs, you need to improve the other factors enough to compensate.) If the industry is not dead (and this one clearly isn't), they will get enough workers before they make themselves unprofitable.
In the H1B context in America, "desperate for workers" means "desperate with workers who will work for what little we have to offer". Interesting to see that it works the same way in a different industry, different country, and different circumstances as well.
I'm not sure a company that employs people in positions of authority that don't realise more than one person with the same name may exist is a place you would want to work at anyway.
The place I would want to work at is a place that allows me to eat and pay rent.
If you base your believe on some keywords in a search I personally don't want to do business with you.
I personally as a business owner would want to do business with whoever has money.
A problem which only keeps the stupid people from spending money at my business and can be seen through by smart people is still going to cost me cold cash.
It's the flip side of "I wouldn't want to work at a place that takes my Google search out of context"--I want to work at a place that pays me a salary so I can eat.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with saying that he's a lone nut without the support of anyone he needs to get the law through is that according to the article Iceland has already banned printed porn. If he's just a lone nut, how did they manage to get that law through?
They're not banning porn in the name of "old-world belief systems", they're banning it in the name of feminism. I suppose since it's located in Iceland you can consider it to be old-world simply by location, but it's not based on the kind of religious attitudes one normally means by that term. And there's no evidence that he or his supporters aren't sincere about banning porn on feminist grounds rather than religious ones. Iceland is also a very secular country overall, despite having a state church.
I'm not him, but Hollywood is notoriously left-wing and on the side of the Democrats, so maybe he assumed that Republicans wouldn't be on Hollywood's side as much.
Restriction isn't what your job is about. You're not in marketing or management.
Also, she doesn't really need to take an amount numerically equal to what she had paid in. Rather, she should take out an amount equal to what she would have gotten if what she had paid in was instead used to pay for a private insurance program. It's possible that a private insurance program would have, if she had expensive medical treatment, paid more than the sum of her insurance payments. In fact, that's how insurance works--people on the average get less than the sum of their payments but in specific cases they may get more.
The progress bar on the HTTP download doesn't show the amount of remaining time in the bar. It shows the number of bytes remaining in the bar; the number of bytes remaining can't go into reverse. The time remaining is showed as a numeric value for how long it would take assuming the speed is the same as the speed so far; if the transfer suddenly slows down, this value can go into reverse.
The problem is that employers aren't willing to pay the market rate for the job that they're demanding, and since they're not willing to pay the market rate, they can't find anyone to hire. There's only a shortage of cheap employees, not a shortage of employees.
What you don't realize is that "for the job you're demanding" doesn't just mean a list of skills. The location of the job is part of the job, and part of what affect the market rate. If the job is in the middle of nowhere in Ohio, and you're only offering a salary equivalent to that of a job in a better location (after considering cost of living), you are paying under the market rate. Of course, you won't find anyone.
He's not disputing it with another person named Ron Paul, he's disputing it with someone who is using the site to refer to him, but is not him. In other words, "what if the other person has a legitimate claim?" is a nice question, but it only applies if the other person really does have a legitimate claim. The name's not owned by someone else named Ron Paul, it's owned by a cybersquatter.
PS: the article talks about his "fans". Reading between the lines, someone charging $250000 is almost certainly going to keep the money for himself, not divide it among the 170000 members of the mailing list and give them $1.47 each, which he would do if he was really acting on behalf of the fans.
I can understand that someone who normally is okay with science may be bad at it when the bad science is usedpolitically. But you seem to be suggesting the other way around--that they may be bad at science when it's nonpolitical, but good at science when it's political. I find this questionable.
As an experiment, I just went to the Huffington Post to see if I could find any bad science on a site that leans towards the left. One headline reads "Scientists Say ETs May Be Much Closer To Us Than We Ever Before Thought". Going to the article shows that the only reference to life was added by the editors and half of it makes no sense (ET phoning home is closer than people think? Really? How close do people think it is? And I thought ET phoned a nearby ship, not his home planet, anyway) and even the article itself is woefully inaccurate; the comments themselves point out that "at a habitable distance and size" doesn't mean Earth-like, especially since planets orbiting close to red dwarfs would be tidally locked. (The astronomer used the phrase "potentially Earth-like", which is a nice way of saying "only a few of them are going to be Earth-like".)
This was the first scientifically-related article I found on the first left-wing site I picked. It may not be as dramatic an error as saying that the US has less sun than Germany, but I wonder how big a mistake I would have found had I tried for a month or two or however long it took to find the Fox News error.
The media and political commentators are horrible at science. Nothing to do with Fox News specifically, as the Slashdot headline and the absence of articles about other sites tend to imply.
It's not a "no true scotsman" fallacy to say "actually, they don't". George Bush supports the TSA. That doesn't mean that "the right" supports the TSA, it means that politicians interested in political patronage support the TSA.
Opposition to marijuana prohibition is less common among the right, but common enough that it's false to say that "the right supports marijuana prohibition".
You said that stalling can't hurt. That's legal advice. You have failed to consider the possibility that stalling means that there will be a longer period of time in which the patent owner can find past violations, and therefore, a larger amount of money he can demand from you.
(Of course, I can't claim that such a thing is proven myself--if so, I would be the one giving the legal advice. But it's certainly a possibility you'd be wise to ask a lawyer about. Blindly claiming that stalling can't hurt is lousy legal advice.)
As has been pointed out by others here, even if the patent expires you can be on the hook for damages for acts committed before expiration. In other words, you just gave lousy legal advice.
The answer here is always "call a lawyer", not "listen to any advice anyone on Slashdot gives you" (except advice on calling a lawyer).
Furthermore, the guy asking the question knows this and asked where to look for legal counsel. He specifically said he was not asking for legal advice from Slashdot. So why is it half the people answering this question are trying to give legal advice?
Anything which can grow an unlimited amount until it runs out of resources (whether those resources are food, number of potential customers, or almost anything else) follows an S-shaped curve where it grows slowly, then more rapidly, then more slowly as the supply (in this case the supply of people who might have a need for the product) becomes saturated.
As a result, claiming that a product is rapidly growing by some large-sounding percentage is basically always BS. Any product can easily have a 100% rapid growth rate at some point on the adoption curve. This does not mean that it's going to grow at 100% forever, it's going to grow until it saturates the market, and this tells us little about the size of that market. If the market was any number somewhat greater than 2000 even if it was small compared to the actual number of schools in the world, we'd still get a 100% growth rate.
But I bet a headline "Chromebook has not yet saturated its market" wouldn't get as many ad impressions.
This is also true for ideas. The fact that some religion is growing at a rapid rate may just means it appeals to 0.5% of the population, but it only has converted a segment of that 0.5% and is still on the steep part of its curve.
Washing clothes in the bathtub takes extra time, and time isn't a free resource either, especially to the poor, whose job may not be 9-5.
This whole thing is basically the gun equivalent of the Patriot Act. Wait for some people to get killed and while it has national exposure, push through laws that violate out Constitutional rights using the deaths as an excuse.
GOG doesn't take measures to prevent you from selling their games. There's nothing which prevents you from buying some games from GOG, burning them to a disk, and selling someone that disk. The person who you sell it to won't be able to redownload the games from your account, and if you try to redownload them yourself that's piracy, but there's nothing to keep the person you sell the disk to from using the disk to play the game.
Of course, it would be illegal to sell someone that disk and keep a copy for yourself, but that's also true for a game you can buy in a store.
You could say that substituting any sort of industry for the weapons industry. And really, do you ever expect games publishers to tell you their budgets for anything? Or to work with an industry to discourage sales from the industry?
All you're doing is describing things that would be standard procedures for any industry, but since it's about guns you're making it sound evil. It's not as if had they been using Coca-Cola in the game they'd be portraying it in a negative manner.
The problem with picking Atari Paint and similar programs is that they were only "influential" because given the limited amount of software developers and the fact that as a first party program it was widely available, it was the only choice for a lot of people. There was nothing special about it except for what platform it happened to run on and who made it; it wasn't important to the larger computing populace. Nobody ever bought the system for Atari Paint, said "I wish we could have a program for my computer like Atari Paint", ripped off Atari Paint's new features, etc.
The Atari didn't really have innovative software. It had innovative hardware, and then software which used the hardware in a predictable manner.
Windows 8 is marketing driven. Microsoft wants to force people to use the new interface because once they get used to it, Microsoft can sell mobile devices with the same interface they are used to. Making the interface optional would defeat the purpose.
Any factory that is really "desperate for workers" would improve their pay, benefits, and working conditions until they were no longer desperate for workers. (Note that opportunities for advancement are factored in--if your job has fewer opportunities for advancement than other jobs, you need to improve the other factors enough to compensate.) If the industry is not dead (and this one clearly isn't), they will get enough workers before they make themselves unprofitable.
In the H1B context in America, "desperate for workers" means "desperate with workers who will work for what little we have to offer". Interesting to see that it works the same way in a different industry, different country, and different circumstances as well.
Those jobs haven't been easier and paid better. Those jobs have been less physically demanding and paid better, which isn't the same thing.
The place I would want to work at is a place that allows me to eat and pay rent.
I personally as a business owner would want to do business with whoever has money.
A problem which only keeps the stupid people from spending money at my business and can be seen through by smart people is still going to cost me cold cash.
It's the flip side of "I wouldn't want to work at a place that takes my Google search out of context"--I want to work at a place that pays me a salary so I can eat.
"Google's machine learning algorithm" is itself a misleading phrase, since Google refines their algorithm using actual people and is quite capable of refining it to avoid causing this guy problems--they just didn't do it to him. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/07/194210/google-outlines-the-role-of-its-human-evaluators http://slashdot.org/story/12/11/27/1435219/googles-manual-for-its-unseen-human-raters