Most government employees have to report a gift of any size. A company I used to work for had a change-box next to the fridge with the soda's, but no body ever put any money in. I asked about that one day and they said the box was for their government customers who aren't allowed to accept anything of value, even a simple can of soda (so they paid for it instead).
If I recall there was a governor that was visiting with Edwards (back when he was still running for president) who had to turn down breakfast or coffee or something because he wasn't allowed to accept gifts. Now there was a man with some freaking ethics.
I've always known Senators and Representatives are corrupt (voting themselves a 15% pay raise when the rest of the country can't afford to fill up their gas tanks), but not having to report $10,000 gifts?
Intel isn't playing the "do as we tell you or we're going home and taking our ball with us" game. What they're doing is looking out for the consumer. Why would the consumer want a fully-functional PC running a slow, innefficient processor like the Atom? Why would an atom-based computer need more than 1 memory dimm, digital video (have you seen Intel's graphics chipsets, they really aren't the greatest), and PCI-express? I don't think the FSB the Atom uses would support PCIe bandwidth. Intel is only protecting the consumer from the inadequacies of the Atom system (that and the 5+ year old northbridge they're using doesn't support many of those technologies).
If you want PCIe, more than 1 memory slot, and digital video output, might Intel receommend a Intel Core 2 Extreme on a X48 motherboard running a couple ATI x4870's in CrossFire (TM) mode?
What really bothers me is that the Atom setup seems to use as much power idle as under load. What's going on there? Did the benchmarkers forget to switch on power management or what?
According to Tom's Hardware, this is a problem with the outdated, innefficient Northbridge they use on their board. The board itself uses a lot more power than the Atom processor, so whether or not the processor is running, the board is sucking up a lot of power. This is why VIA has always been in the embedded market, cause they aren't just focused on their processor. The Nano requires more power as a processor, but the entire system doesn't use too much more because VIA makes very efficient controllers.
I remember back in the day when I wouldn't buy a motherboard without a VIA controller. The sytems have become so specific these days (AMD vs. Intel, nVidia vs. ATI) I guess they just couldn't stay in the consumer market without paying out their nose for licensing rights to the various technologies. Personally I like my C-7M powered Cloudbook.
I certainly didn't mean levels in the sense that you reach a defined point and couldn't go back (or worse, couldn't even scroll left on the screen). I just meant the story progressed naturally from once scene to the next, and it was often important to resolve what you needed to before going forwards.
You mean like all the wonderful Jumping Puzzles in the original Half-Life?
I remember games like "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and "Full Throttle" where if you didn't catch something 2 levels back you couldn't proceed. Some modern games have a nice mix (the Chrono-XX and Final Fantasy series for example) where you have to decipher clues and do things in the right order, but other games (pick any modern FPS like Prey, Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime, etc..) and the puzzles are just there to increase game-play time.
The point of the article isn't that puzzle games don't exist, they just aren't mainstream anymore. So many "gamers" of today need $4000 computers and 10 graphics cards to play their modern games. They don't care how fun or interesting or challenging the game is, as long as they get over 100f.p.s. and that it has online play.
Look at all these "professional" gamers coming out now. Are they challenging themselves with puzzle games? Do they try to finish Myst in the fastest time? No. They see who gets the most Frags in UT3.
Video games are just becoming another sport, in that sports aren't too mentally stimulating but are fun to watch/play. Nerds are now being split into two categories, high hand-eye coordination nerds cabaple of playing these FPS games online, and thinking nerds who are capable of playing and actually solving these Puzzle games. The jocks already have football, baseball, basketball, etc., etc.), now some of the jockier nerds are staking out their own claim.
Are you saying Christians don't believe in the existence of copyright law or Barack Obama? That's a pretty wide-sweeping generalization. I know it may be hard to explain things to christians when their only reponse is "Because it's in the bible", but surely some of them must have some sense of reason.
I remember using scour.net back in the day (1997) to download my mp3s. I thought it was cool because people could share their music, just like copying a casette tape or recording a song off the radio. Back then you were lucky to find an mp3 ripped at 128kbps (most often they were 64 or 92). I knew copying games was wrong (though I did it anyway), but music just seemed like an innoecent thing to copy when I was 15. I know now that copyright infringement is wrong, and that I am violating the law even by watching or listening to legitamately purchased CDs and DVDs.
The problem with people today isn't that they think something is okay to do, they just don't care. There's a wierd sense of entitlement that people have these days (mp3/divx pirating, OpenSource, etc...). Until people realize that things have value (even if not to them personally), and that taking anything of value is wrong, they will continue to loot and steal and pirate.
I know, I know, self-responsibility went the way of the dinosaurs. There are some things the music and movie industry CAN do to help the issue out. First, reduce the price. Why does a CD cost me $15-$20 in the store? Unlike a movie, there's really no upfront cost right? There are no sets to build, locations to fly to, etc.... All you need is the artist (who should get paid based on the success of their music) and a well-trained sound-editor. After that, it's an arbitrary amount of money to print and distribute the physical media. As for movies, you should have made back your investment in the initial theater release (7.50 is pretty cheap for a matinee these days). The DVD's are pure profit (I've seen some real shitty DVD menus so I know there's no money going into DVD development). Why do I need to pay $20-$30 for a "brand-new release" when I saw the movie in the theater 3-months earlier.
These industries should be realizing that the large profit margins they've enjoyed up to this point simply won't hold. People are revolting [against the studios], but rather than adjust to meet the demands, the studios are simply alienating everyone from their product. Charging more to protect your profits certainly isn't going to convince more people to pay for your product, and will just drive away those who could barely afford to pay what your were already asking. I know I personally have bought only 4 CDs in the last 5 years, have never paid to download a DRM-crippled song or album, and wait till a moive hits the $5 bin at Wal-Mart, but I also have the good sense to just live-without rather than illegally download something I can't get for the price I want.
On the plus side, there are lots of MP3 stores out now (Rhapsidy, etc...) so maybe I'll finally get to listen to some recent music.
The problem I see with software patents is that people are patenting the wrong ends of their ideas (they're putting their makeup on their asses in other words).
Take for example Amazon's one-click checkout. The idea of a one-click checkout should not be patentable. Anyone number of people should be able to accept a single click to check-out, what should be patented is the system behind the checkout. The mechanism for tying in the user's login, prioritizing recently used shipping addresses and payment methods, etc... You need to patent the process or the invention, not an ethereal idea.
If I invent Widget A that performs task A, and am awarded patent "Widget A for performing Task A", and someone realized widget A will also perform task B without any modifications, they can't patent "Widget A for peforming task B", because I still own the patent for Widget A, which is all that really matters. I own the exclusive rights for Widget A, no one else can reproduce Widget A regardless of what they want use it for. Amazon didn't invent one-clicking (didn't Microsoft patent that recently?), so they can't say no one else can use one-clicking for checking-out.
It's similar to the patent that the adult-entertainment (read: porno) industry has been fighting for years. Some company patented the idea that videos could be downloaded from the internet. Problem is, since that company did not create the internet nor the http protocol nor the first web-browser, they didn't actually create anything that had to do with the content their patent covered. Improving upon an invention means changing the invention, not mentioning something else the invention could be used for. That's the problem with software patents. People are patenting what existing technology can do, but if they don't own the existing technology, they can't tell other people they can't use it for other things.
The device is not sealed against water (i.e. it's not wrapped in celophane), so water can flow freely throughout the device. At the same time, contacts are not sealed, meaning the water that can flow freely though-out the device can short the contacts that have not been covered (battery, headphone, button, etc...), essentially destroying the device (by burning out components, batteries, etc...).
In otherwords, the coating only keeps water off the surface of a device that by itself isn't prone to water damage to begin with? I.e. all the plastic-coated IC's out there will last just fine under water, as long as you don't apply power to them.
What about moving surfaces, such as the speaker or microphone diaphram? Those devices are sensitive to water (the felt or paper used probably won't stand-up to water), and the high-frequency makes it unlikely that the coating will adhere and stay on.
Can this coating be applied to a thouch-sensitive surface? Can it be applied to the lens of a camera without severely distorting the optics?
I once dropped my phone in a bowl of soup, and the phone told me I had plugged an unrecognized peripheral into the headphone jack. It took a couple hours of carefully disassemling, cleaning, and drying before I got it working again (luckily nothing burned-out), and it sounds like this coating wouldn't have helped (since the contacts within the headphone jack wouldn't have been coated anyway) . Nothing like spending $1000 on absolutely nothing.
Don't forget Python. The Python hammer functions differently based on the relationship of where your hand is currently on the handle to where it was previously. If you drop your hammer, you have to re-build your house from scratch.
It's unclear how the lawsuit will proceed; the defendants could simply ignore it if they no U.S. assets to seize, and aren't worried about Indian courts enforcing a default judgment. RJ Softwares did not respond to queries on Thursday.
Why don't the makers of Scrabulous just ignore the lawsuit if they're all the way in India? India certainly isn't going to extradite them over a civil suit. As long as they don't plan any trips to America they should be fine to continue as they like, correct?
Is their website hosted in America, otherwise, how can Hasbro ask the courts to disable it? Certainly the courts powers don't extend to the American DNS servers. I mean, imagine the ramifications if you could sue someone and have their domain blocked in America. A great-firewall controlled not by communists but any asshole with enough money to file a lawsuit. And certainly the New York court can't force ICANN to simply disable the domain name world wide. There's already enough international outcry over the fact that America essentially controls ICANN, imagine if an American court blocked a foreign domain.
"It's really no different from when the recording industry faced the issue of folks posting music on sites like Napster and letting them copy it for free."
Wrong. This isn't copying and uploading, this is re-creating from scratch and uploading. I remember when reverse-engineering something was still legal. These guys created an internet application from scratch that mirrors the actions of a physical product created 70 years prior. Thank god the patent office/court system wasn't always this stupid, otherwise Eli Whitney would have been sued by the guy who thought-up slavery.
I agree with your point that this could act as a supplement for web browsing and word processing, but the market size for people willing to do that has to be small. I mean, couldn't you use a smart-phone or a PDA for the same purpose? Those devices can't use much more than an average of 2W. I guess the advantage of this device is you can use a full-size key board and display, which BTW, will add significantly to the 2W power draw.
I stand corrected about his intentions. But still, this sounds a whole lot like a small part of live free or die hard (i.e. him bringing up security vulnerabilities, then being fired and crucified in the press, but then those vulnerabilities still not being fixed). I wouldn't be surprised if this guy was fired because he wouldn't grant his boss superuser privaleges to the whole system so the boss could turn off that pesky filter that wouldn't let him visit his favorite off-shore gambling sites.
I was getting about 70 FPS with -threads 2 on my Athlon X2. I removed the -threads switch, and started getting about 90+ FPS, that's right, with 1 thread. I was even able to run two conversions at once, and each got about 80-90 FPS conversion rates (though I think a shared-resource violation caused a BSOD).
Any idea why a single-thread would be more efficient than 2 threads on a dual-core AMD machine? Could it have been the Windows XP binary I was using (sorry, Debian/Ubuntu doesn't understand the NVIDIA RAID5 I'm using, so I could't install linux on my machine). Could it be the fact I was using a 32-bit binary on 64-bit Windows? Could it just be Windows?
On a more broad topic, since Intel introduced hyperthreading in the P4 3+ years ago, why are so many programs still single-threaded? I mean for chrysaque, what's the point of buying a 4-core machine when 99% of applications still don't support it? Yeah, it's nice to convert a video to DIVX and browse the web at the same time, but I have enough computers to make that happen regardless. Seems to me that this problem isn't simply restricted to open-source video applications.
If only the City had watched this movie, they would know how dangerous it is to ignore someone's complaints about lack of security, then firing them and not doing anything about the lack of security your former security expert brought to your attention (the former security expert you fired, who knows all about your security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them, and who now has lots of free time, since, you know, you fired them).
I'm not saying this guy was justified in attacking the city. I'm just saying you have to protect yourself, because making something illegal doesn't protect you from it, it just means the person who does it will be held responsible after the fact. Doesn't bring back your car stereo or un-murder your loved one, and it shouldn't have brought-back the passwords.
What failure? eBay partnered up with MS Passport, and look where they (eBay) are now. Granted, eBay now uses it's own login system instead of MS Passport, but really, that shouldn't be a mark against MS. Everytime I reinstall Windows XP it asks if I want to link my login to a Microsoft Passport ID. I mean, if your system has the support of Windows, how can it fail? Granted, most of MS's own sites these days use a Windows Live! ID, which is not the same ID as the old MS Passport system, and granted, I never linked my Windows XP account to my Passport account, so I don't even know what good that did, but the fact that it's not used anymore can't be seen as a failure. Was Betamax a failure just cause everyone used Alpha? Was the Nintendo Virtual-Boy a failure just cause no one bought any of them?
In all seriousness, this isn't really a problem for MySpace. Since they are only a provider, all they have to do is provide a mechanism for other sites to authenticate against. They aren't actually investing a whole lot in the system, and they probably won't be asking other websites to start using their system anyway. They can look like they support open-ness simply by implementing the system half-way (by providing, but not accepting). I doubt MySpace will ever accept an OpenID, but they can hand them out for free so what does it hurt?
I don't think COPA should be a constitutional ammendment by any means, but for the pornographers, it just makes sense. How do you make money off of giving away free porn? I would think you would want to verify the person had a credit card, just so you knew they had a means to buy your product anyway. Pornographers have gigantic bandwidth requirements, and they could significantly reduce those requirements by not allowing every Harry Tom Dick err... Tom, Dick, and Harry into their site in the first place.
Remember when Walmart.com or Blockbuster.com or whoever it was had to pull their recommended movie service because of terribly innapropriate recommendations? How well will this TiVo/Amazon service be run, and how are they going to recommend products based on TV shows, will they be picked by humans? Will they use a super-complex inhuman computer algorithm?
I see you are watching "History of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre", can I recommend "A Box of Semi-sweet dark chocolates in a red-velvet heart-shaped box with free plush teddy-bear"?
Back in the 90's I never saw the point of a machine that could only be used to browse the web. True, the web is much larger now, but I still don't see the point of a web-only machine. You can't possibly conceive of ever needing that document you typed without having access to the internet? I know my internet goes down occasionally, and if it's due to a storm taking out the cable line, it's going to be down for a while.
At least WebTV came with a keyboard/mouse and used your TV for display. This sucker doesn't come with any peripherals, and isn't TV ready, so you have to buy an additional monitor, mouse, keyboard just to run this thing.
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that cherrypal.com redirects to an IP-based http server?
In 2000 I started a website for my family that would gather everyone's information (address, wishlist, etc...) and store it in a MySQL database for the annual christmas gift exchange. My family is spread across the country and every year one person was designated to coordinate the effort, which meant getting back in touch with everyone, getting up to date email, phone, address, etc..., then picking who gives gifts to who (people in the same immediate family don't give to each other). They would then request everyone's wishlist and forward to the appropriate giver. The website I created would consolidate the effort by handling everything. It would automatically pick givers and givees, gather wishlists, store those wishlists in a MySQL database, forward the wishlists to the appropriate giver, and even provide intelligent searches to Amazon, Wal-Mart.com, etc... for helpful links to products. Of course, family interest faded and the site never gained full acceptance, and when the Venture Capital ($100 I got from my uncle) ran out, the website folded.
Needless to say, I still have all the website code and pages, and never sold the IP rights to anyone. I think I have a legitimate case against this company for violating my intellectual property. It doesn't even take a multi-million dollar company to have an idea like this, so screw this company.
Let's just say that in any respect, I won't be having any little buttons on my site recommending that people use Firefox...
For me, the decision not to use FireFox 3 came when FireFox 3 was released, and the Ubuntu package manager didn't let me update to the release version. Why does FireFox even come with Ubuntu if it's not open source? Opera's free too, has updated.debs for it's latest release, and hasn't pestered me with an unverified SSL certificate warning in as long as I can remember. Sorry, got a little off-topic there.
As for SSL certificates themselves, I never understood the purpose of unverified/self-signed in the first place. Like many people have said, you'd only be verifying that the website is using a certificate that matches the website. There's been no effort to verify the identity of the entity that runs the website, so in the end it's worthless. I say warn away FireFox. I personally have more faith in PayPal refunding my 19.99 when my super-exciting fat-burning penis-enlarging ointment doesn't arrive in the mail than the likelyhood of any favorable legal outcome thanks to the information I got off anyone's SSL certificate.
Ted Nelson, Customer: But why do they put a guarantee on the box?
Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.
Well duh, the BSA is a for-profit organization. I mean, they aren't persuing software pirates out of the goodness of their hearts nor because they're trying to right some social injustice they've born witness to.
The BSA has the proper attitude. Unfortunately for the RIAA and MPAA, companies as a whole don't tend to pirate music and movies, so they're aren't any big cash cows to go after (not since Naptser fell). Unless you count GooTube, but the individual studios are going after that giant, bypassing the MPAA/RIAA processing fee.
There is some legitamacy to the BSA's claims, but not that much. Many companies incorrectly implement site licenses of software, or misenterpret the scope of the license. Therefore, a company may not knowingly be violating the terms of the license, and therefore not be pirating the software, but may still be out of compliance.
You've got to think about how those licenses work anyway. Every time your business orders a new Dell or HP workstation, it comes with a Windows2000/XP/Vista license sticker. What happens to the old sticker that was on the machine your company returned? Where did the new sticker come from? What if the sticker is for XP, but you are running 2000? What about Office/Visio/Visual Studio/etc... that came pre-installed. Some licenses don't allow downgrading, but even though you have an Office 2005 license, you HAVE to install 97/2000 because of the other applications you may be using. There's lots of ways "unlicensed" software can be installed on a companies PC without anyone thinking about it. Now, is that justifiable cause to fine/sue a company out of existence? No way, but then again, I don't work for the BSA.
Don't forget that you'd also be supporting Al-Queda and be figuratively spitting in the faces of the America troops. Anything that sparks fear in the simple minded and shame into those who dare to think otherwise.
Sadly, views like yours will be considered paranoid, until of course they come to fruition, but by then you've already been labelled a communist and no one will listen to you anyway.
Well for one thing, Linux is being installed on more and more consumer PCs these days. Most of the UMPCs out there run some sort of Linux, as does every $200 PC sold at Walmart. You can't expect all the people buying these computers to know anything about how to patch a kernel. If Linux is to be accepted, it needs to be easy to use, and recompiling a kernel is not something the average user should ever have to do. If you want to keep Linux for the nerds, that's fine, but then don't complain about Microsoft and Apple when their OSs are not to your liking (not that you personally have done so).
Slashdot Mirror
Most government employees have to report a gift of any size. A company I used to work for had a change-box next to the fridge with the soda's, but no body ever put any money in. I asked about that one day and they said the box was for their government customers who aren't allowed to accept anything of value, even a simple can of soda (so they paid for it instead).
If I recall there was a governor that was visiting with Edwards (back when he was still running for president) who had to turn down breakfast or coffee or something because he wasn't allowed to accept gifts. Now there was a man with some freaking ethics.
I've always known Senators and Representatives are corrupt (voting themselves a 15% pay raise when the rest of the country can't afford to fill up their gas tanks), but not having to report $10,000 gifts?
Puh-lease.
Intel isn't playing the "do as we tell you or we're going home and taking our ball with us" game. What they're doing is looking out for the consumer. Why would the consumer want a fully-functional PC running a slow, innefficient processor like the Atom? Why would an atom-based computer need more than 1 memory dimm, digital video (have you seen Intel's graphics chipsets, they really aren't the greatest), and PCI-express? I don't think the FSB the Atom uses would support PCIe bandwidth. Intel is only protecting the consumer from the inadequacies of the Atom system (that and the 5+ year old northbridge they're using doesn't support many of those technologies).
If you want PCIe, more than 1 memory slot, and digital video output, might Intel receommend a Intel Core 2 Extreme on a X48 motherboard running a couple ATI x4870's in CrossFire (TM) mode?
What really bothers me is that the Atom setup seems to use as much power idle as under load. What's going on there? Did the benchmarkers forget to switch on power management or what?
According to Tom's Hardware, this is a problem with the outdated, innefficient Northbridge they use on their board. The board itself uses a lot more power than the Atom processor, so whether or not the processor is running, the board is sucking up a lot of power. This is why VIA has always been in the embedded market, cause they aren't just focused on their processor. The Nano requires more power as a processor, but the entire system doesn't use too much more because VIA makes very efficient controllers.
I remember back in the day when I wouldn't buy a motherboard without a VIA controller. The sytems have become so specific these days (AMD vs. Intel, nVidia vs. ATI) I guess they just couldn't stay in the consumer market without paying out their nose for licensing rights to the various technologies. Personally I like my C-7M powered Cloudbook.
I certainly didn't mean levels in the sense that you reach a defined point and couldn't go back (or worse, couldn't even scroll left on the screen). I just meant the story progressed naturally from once scene to the next, and it was often important to resolve what you needed to before going forwards.
You mean like all the wonderful Jumping Puzzles in the original Half-Life?
I remember games like "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and "Full Throttle" where if you didn't catch something 2 levels back you couldn't proceed. Some modern games have a nice mix (the Chrono-XX and Final Fantasy series for example) where you have to decipher clues and do things in the right order, but other games (pick any modern FPS like Prey, Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime, etc..) and the puzzles are just there to increase game-play time.
The point of the article isn't that puzzle games don't exist, they just aren't mainstream anymore. So many "gamers" of today need $4000 computers and 10 graphics cards to play their modern games. They don't care how fun or interesting or challenging the game is, as long as they get over 100f.p.s. and that it has online play.
Look at all these "professional" gamers coming out now. Are they challenging themselves with puzzle games? Do they try to finish Myst in the fastest time? No. They see who gets the most Frags in UT3.
Video games are just becoming another sport, in that sports aren't too mentally stimulating but are fun to watch/play. Nerds are now being split into two categories, high hand-eye coordination nerds cabaple of playing these FPS games online, and thinking nerds who are capable of playing and actually solving these Puzzle games. The jocks already have football, baseball, basketball, etc., etc.), now some of the jockier nerds are staking out their own claim.
Are you saying Christians don't believe in the existence of copyright law or Barack Obama? That's a pretty wide-sweeping generalization. I know it may be hard to explain things to christians when their only reponse is "Because it's in the bible", but surely some of them must have some sense of reason.
I remember using scour.net back in the day (1997) to download my mp3s. I thought it was cool because people could share their music, just like copying a casette tape or recording a song off the radio. Back then you were lucky to find an mp3 ripped at 128kbps (most often they were 64 or 92). I knew copying games was wrong (though I did it anyway), but music just seemed like an innoecent thing to copy when I was 15. I know now that copyright infringement is wrong, and that I am violating the law even by watching or listening to legitamately purchased CDs and DVDs.
The problem with people today isn't that they think something is okay to do, they just don't care. There's a wierd sense of entitlement that people have these days (mp3/divx pirating, OpenSource, etc...). Until people realize that things have value (even if not to them personally), and that taking anything of value is wrong, they will continue to loot and steal and pirate.
I know, I know, self-responsibility went the way of the dinosaurs. There are some things the music and movie industry CAN do to help the issue out. First, reduce the price. Why does a CD cost me $15-$20 in the store? Unlike a movie, there's really no upfront cost right? There are no sets to build, locations to fly to, etc.... All you need is the artist (who should get paid based on the success of their music) and a well-trained sound-editor. After that, it's an arbitrary amount of money to print and distribute the physical media. As for movies, you should have made back your investment in the initial theater release (7.50 is pretty cheap for a matinee these days). The DVD's are pure profit (I've seen some real shitty DVD menus so I know there's no money going into DVD development). Why do I need to pay $20-$30 for a "brand-new release" when I saw the movie in the theater 3-months earlier.
These industries should be realizing that the large profit margins they've enjoyed up to this point simply won't hold. People are revolting [against the studios], but rather than adjust to meet the demands, the studios are simply alienating everyone from their product. Charging more to protect your profits certainly isn't going to convince more people to pay for your product, and will just drive away those who could barely afford to pay what your were already asking. I know I personally have bought only 4 CDs in the last 5 years, have never paid to download a DRM-crippled song or album, and wait till a moive hits the $5 bin at Wal-Mart, but I also have the good sense to just live-without rather than illegally download something I can't get for the price I want.
On the plus side, there are lots of MP3 stores out now (Rhapsidy, etc...) so maybe I'll finally get to listen to some recent music.
The problem I see with software patents is that people are patenting the wrong ends of their ideas (they're putting their makeup on their asses in other words).
Take for example Amazon's one-click checkout. The idea of a one-click checkout should not be patentable. Anyone number of people should be able to accept a single click to check-out, what should be patented is the system behind the checkout. The mechanism for tying in the user's login, prioritizing recently used shipping addresses and payment methods, etc... You need to patent the process or the invention, not an ethereal idea.
If I invent Widget A that performs task A, and am awarded patent "Widget A for performing Task A", and someone realized widget A will also perform task B without any modifications, they can't patent "Widget A for peforming task B", because I still own the patent for Widget A, which is all that really matters. I own the exclusive rights for Widget A, no one else can reproduce Widget A regardless of what they want use it for. Amazon didn't invent one-clicking (didn't Microsoft patent that recently?), so they can't say no one else can use one-clicking for checking-out.
It's similar to the patent that the adult-entertainment (read: porno) industry has been fighting for years. Some company patented the idea that videos could be downloaded from the internet. Problem is, since that company did not create the internet nor the http protocol nor the first web-browser, they didn't actually create anything that had to do with the content their patent covered. Improving upon an invention means changing the invention, not mentioning something else the invention could be used for. That's the problem with software patents. People are patenting what existing technology can do, but if they don't own the existing technology, they can't tell other people they can't use it for other things.
So let me see if I understand this.
The device is not sealed against water (i.e. it's not wrapped in celophane), so water can flow freely throughout the device. At the same time, contacts are not sealed, meaning the water that can flow freely though-out the device can short the contacts that have not been covered (battery, headphone, button, etc...), essentially destroying the device (by burning out components, batteries, etc...).
In otherwords, the coating only keeps water off the surface of a device that by itself isn't prone to water damage to begin with? I.e. all the plastic-coated IC's out there will last just fine under water, as long as you don't apply power to them.
What about moving surfaces, such as the speaker or microphone diaphram? Those devices are sensitive to water (the felt or paper used probably won't stand-up to water), and the high-frequency makes it unlikely that the coating will adhere and stay on.
Can this coating be applied to a thouch-sensitive surface? Can it be applied to the lens of a camera without severely distorting the optics?
I once dropped my phone in a bowl of soup, and the phone told me I had plugged an unrecognized peripheral into the headphone jack. It took a couple hours of carefully disassemling, cleaning, and drying before I got it working again (luckily nothing burned-out), and it sounds like this coating wouldn't have helped (since the contacts within the headphone jack wouldn't have been coated anyway) . Nothing like spending $1000 on absolutely nothing.
I thought American McGee created Alice, and if I recall, it really wasn't a barn-burner.
Don't forget Python. The Python hammer functions differently based on the relationship of where your hand is currently on the handle to where it was previously. If you drop your hammer, you have to re-build your house from scratch.
It's unclear how the lawsuit will proceed; the defendants could simply ignore it if they no U.S. assets to seize, and aren't worried about Indian courts enforcing a default judgment. RJ Softwares did not respond to queries on Thursday.
Why don't the makers of Scrabulous just ignore the lawsuit if they're all the way in India? India certainly isn't going to extradite them over a civil suit. As long as they don't plan any trips to America they should be fine to continue as they like, correct?
Is their website hosted in America, otherwise, how can Hasbro ask the courts to disable it? Certainly the courts powers don't extend to the American DNS servers. I mean, imagine the ramifications if you could sue someone and have their domain blocked in America. A great-firewall controlled not by communists but any asshole with enough money to file a lawsuit. And certainly the New York court can't force ICANN to simply disable the domain name world wide. There's already enough international outcry over the fact that America essentially controls ICANN, imagine if an American court blocked a foreign domain.
"It's really no different from when the recording industry faced the issue of folks posting music on sites like Napster and letting them copy it for free."
Wrong. This isn't copying and uploading, this is re-creating from scratch and uploading. I remember when reverse-engineering something was still legal. These guys created an internet application from scratch that mirrors the actions of a physical product created 70 years prior. Thank god the patent office/court system wasn't always this stupid, otherwise Eli Whitney would have been sued by the guy who thought-up slavery.
I agree with your point that this could act as a supplement for web browsing and word processing, but the market size for people willing to do that has to be small. I mean, couldn't you use a smart-phone or a PDA for the same purpose? Those devices can't use much more than an average of 2W. I guess the advantage of this device is you can use a full-size key board and display, which BTW, will add significantly to the 2W power draw.
I stand corrected about his intentions. But still, this sounds a whole lot like a small part of live free or die hard (i.e. him bringing up security vulnerabilities, then being fired and crucified in the press, but then those vulnerabilities still not being fixed). I wouldn't be surprised if this guy was fired because he wouldn't grant his boss superuser privaleges to the whole system so the boss could turn off that pesky filter that wouldn't let him visit his favorite off-shore gambling sites.
I was getting about 70 FPS with -threads 2 on my Athlon X2. I removed the -threads switch, and started getting about 90+ FPS, that's right, with 1 thread. I was even able to run two conversions at once, and each got about 80-90 FPS conversion rates (though I think a shared-resource violation caused a BSOD).
Any idea why a single-thread would be more efficient than 2 threads on a dual-core AMD machine? Could it have been the Windows XP binary I was using (sorry, Debian/Ubuntu doesn't understand the NVIDIA RAID5 I'm using, so I could't install linux on my machine). Could it be the fact I was using a 32-bit binary on 64-bit Windows? Could it just be Windows?
On a more broad topic, since Intel introduced hyperthreading in the P4 3+ years ago, why are so many programs still single-threaded? I mean for chrysaque, what's the point of buying a 4-core machine when 99% of applications still don't support it? Yeah, it's nice to convert a video to DIVX and browse the web at the same time, but I have enough computers to make that happen regardless. Seems to me that this problem isn't simply restricted to open-source video applications.
If only the City had watched this movie, they would know how dangerous it is to ignore someone's complaints about lack of security, then firing them and not doing anything about the lack of security your former security expert brought to your attention (the former security expert you fired, who knows all about your security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them, and who now has lots of free time, since, you know, you fired them).
I'm not saying this guy was justified in attacking the city. I'm just saying you have to protect yourself, because making something illegal doesn't protect you from it, it just means the person who does it will be held responsible after the fact. Doesn't bring back your car stereo or un-murder your loved one, and it shouldn't have brought-back the passwords.
What failure? eBay partnered up with MS Passport, and look where they (eBay) are now. Granted, eBay now uses it's own login system instead of MS Passport, but really, that shouldn't be a mark against MS. Everytime I reinstall Windows XP it asks if I want to link my login to a Microsoft Passport ID. I mean, if your system has the support of Windows, how can it fail? Granted, most of MS's own sites these days use a Windows Live! ID, which is not the same ID as the old MS Passport system, and granted, I never linked my Windows XP account to my Passport account, so I don't even know what good that did, but the fact that it's not used anymore can't be seen as a failure. Was Betamax a failure just cause everyone used Alpha? Was the Nintendo Virtual-Boy a failure just cause no one bought any of them?
In all seriousness, this isn't really a problem for MySpace. Since they are only a provider, all they have to do is provide a mechanism for other sites to authenticate against. They aren't actually investing a whole lot in the system, and they probably won't be asking other websites to start using their system anyway. They can look like they support open-ness simply by implementing the system half-way (by providing, but not accepting). I doubt MySpace will ever accept an OpenID, but they can hand them out for free so what does it hurt?
I don't think COPA should be a constitutional ammendment by any means, but for the pornographers, it just makes sense. How do you make money off of giving away free porn? I would think you would want to verify the person had a credit card, just so you knew they had a means to buy your product anyway. Pornographers have gigantic bandwidth requirements, and they could significantly reduce those requirements by not allowing every Harry Tom Dick err... Tom, Dick, and Harry into their site in the first place.
Remember when Walmart.com or Blockbuster.com or whoever it was had to pull their recommended movie service because of terribly innapropriate recommendations? How well will this TiVo/Amazon service be run, and how are they going to recommend products based on TV shows, will they be picked by humans? Will they use a super-complex inhuman computer algorithm?
I see you are watching "History of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre", can I recommend "A Box of Semi-sweet dark chocolates in a red-velvet heart-shaped box with free plush teddy-bear"?
Back in the 90's I never saw the point of a machine that could only be used to browse the web. True, the web is much larger now, but I still don't see the point of a web-only machine. You can't possibly conceive of ever needing that document you typed without having access to the internet? I know my internet goes down occasionally, and if it's due to a storm taking out the cable line, it's going to be down for a while.
At least WebTV came with a keyboard/mouse and used your TV for display. This sucker doesn't come with any peripherals, and isn't TV ready, so you have to buy an additional monitor, mouse, keyboard just to run this thing.
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that cherrypal.com redirects to an IP-based http server?
In 2000 I started a website for my family that would gather everyone's information (address, wishlist, etc...) and store it in a MySQL database for the annual christmas gift exchange. My family is spread across the country and every year one person was designated to coordinate the effort, which meant getting back in touch with everyone, getting up to date email, phone, address, etc..., then picking who gives gifts to who (people in the same immediate family don't give to each other). They would then request everyone's wishlist and forward to the appropriate giver. The website I created would consolidate the effort by handling everything. It would automatically pick givers and givees, gather wishlists, store those wishlists in a MySQL database, forward the wishlists to the appropriate giver, and even provide intelligent searches to Amazon, Wal-Mart.com, etc... for helpful links to products. Of course, family interest faded and the site never gained full acceptance, and when the Venture Capital ($100 I got from my uncle) ran out, the website folded.
Needless to say, I still have all the website code and pages, and never sold the IP rights to anyone. I think I have a legitimate case against this company for violating my intellectual property. It doesn't even take a multi-million dollar company to have an idea like this, so screw this company.
Let's just say that in any respect, I won't be having any little buttons on my site recommending that people use Firefox...
.debs for it's latest release, and hasn't pestered me with an unverified SSL certificate warning in as long as I can remember. Sorry, got a little off-topic there.
For me, the decision not to use FireFox 3 came when FireFox 3 was released, and the Ubuntu package manager didn't let me update to the release version. Why does FireFox even come with Ubuntu if it's not open source? Opera's free too, has updated
As for SSL certificates themselves, I never understood the purpose of unverified/self-signed in the first place. Like many people have said, you'd only be verifying that the website is using a certificate that matches the website. There's been no effort to verify the identity of the entity that runs the website, so in the end it's worthless. I say warn away FireFox. I personally have more faith in PayPal refunding my 19.99 when my super-exciting fat-burning penis-enlarging ointment doesn't arrive in the mail than the likelyhood of any favorable legal outcome thanks to the information I got off anyone's SSL certificate.
Ted Nelson, Customer: But why do they put a guarantee on the box?
Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.
Well duh, the BSA is a for-profit organization. I mean, they aren't persuing software pirates out of the goodness of their hearts nor because they're trying to right some social injustice they've born witness to.
The BSA has the proper attitude. Unfortunately for the RIAA and MPAA, companies as a whole don't tend to pirate music and movies, so they're aren't any big cash cows to go after (not since Naptser fell). Unless you count GooTube, but the individual studios are going after that giant, bypassing the MPAA/RIAA processing fee.
There is some legitamacy to the BSA's claims, but not that much. Many companies incorrectly implement site licenses of software, or misenterpret the scope of the license. Therefore, a company may not knowingly be violating the terms of the license, and therefore not be pirating the software, but may still be out of compliance.
You've got to think about how those licenses work anyway. Every time your business orders a new Dell or HP workstation, it comes with a Windows2000/XP/Vista license sticker. What happens to the old sticker that was on the machine your company returned? Where did the new sticker come from? What if the sticker is for XP, but you are running 2000? What about Office/Visio/Visual Studio/etc... that came pre-installed. Some licenses don't allow downgrading, but even though you have an Office 2005 license, you HAVE to install 97/2000 because of the other applications you may be using. There's lots of ways "unlicensed" software can be installed on a companies PC without anyone thinking about it. Now, is that justifiable cause to fine/sue a company out of existence? No way, but then again, I don't work for the BSA.
Don't forget that you'd also be supporting Al-Queda and be figuratively spitting in the faces of the America troops. Anything that sparks fear in the simple minded and shame into those who dare to think otherwise.
Sadly, views like yours will be considered paranoid, until of course they come to fruition, but by then you've already been labelled a communist and no one will listen to you anyway.
Well for one thing, Linux is being installed on more and more consumer PCs these days. Most of the UMPCs out there run some sort of Linux, as does every $200 PC sold at Walmart. You can't expect all the people buying these computers to know anything about how to patch a kernel. If Linux is to be accepted, it needs to be easy to use, and recompiling a kernel is not something the average user should ever have to do. If you want to keep Linux for the nerds, that's fine, but then don't complain about Microsoft and Apple when their OSs are not to your liking (not that you personally have done so).