True, there's a lot of prior art, but IBM has been around awhile (1888!), and might just be able to claim the lead in this practice; perhaps why they applied for the patent.
Irrelevant. You can't patent something everybody has done the last 100 years, and claim that the patent is valid because you were the first to do it. Sure, there is the US-speciality of a "grace period" of one year, but patent extortion is a bit older than that.
It isn't. If saying "I for one welcome our [subject of article]" is funny, then you have absolutely no sense of humor, at all. It was funny in the original Simpsons episode, and perhaps two or three times after that, but not anymore. For a joke to be actually funny, it must involve some element of surprise. If you've read slashdot for at least a week, you know that certain unfunny attempts at joke-patterns will repeat themselves endlessly, including, among others, this one, "Imagine a Beowulf of [object]", and "In Soviet Russia the [object] [verb]s you!". Since there is no longer any element of surprise involved in these, it's no longer funny.
More accurately, it can be viewed as a form of ritual communication used by many slahdot-readers to give a sense of community. It's like "Halleluja" used excessively by carismatic christian preachers, weird handshakes among homies, or a random selection of words from a bullshit-bingo card (e.g. proactively, strategy, implementation, leverage)used among middle management. But funny, no.
Now regarding the cockroach... WHY IN THIS F****** WORLD THEY WANT TO KNOW IT?
"Myth Busters" is a popular TV show that lives up to it's name. It takes popular myths, such as people saying cockroaches survive radioactivity, or whether tomato juice removes skunk odor, and tests them. Often in a humorous setting, and often by blowing things up in the end, especially if the subject involves explosives. As such, this is just another episode, and therefore not particulary interesting compared to all of the others. I have no idea why the slashdot editors thought this particulary experiment was so interesting as to deserve its own article. Most episodes of "Myth Busters" consists of three or four such experiments.
Only if you believe that a few extra degrees Celsius will wipe out humanity. Despite claims to the contrary, people are not immobile, and can relocate in the event that their current residence becomes uninhabitable
Sure, humans can move. That isn't the problem. The problem is that other species can move too, and those species aren't all necessarily moving at the same time. Which means that you will have e.g. diseases and parasites moving faster than the (immune) hosts living where those diseases and parasites came from. This can damage entire ecosystems. Sure, things will stabilize again some years later (or perhaps millions of years, depending on the amount of damage), but even a single year of lost biological production can do significant damage to us, as my fridge does not store food for a full year (or millions of years, depending on the amount of damage).
We see this happening already. Certain species of fish are getting dramatically fewer, either from overfishing, disease, lack of food, or other factors. And as replacements we get less specialized species, such as algae or jellyfish. Which means that one source of human food is already in danger. But it's not just something that can happen to fish. Bees are needed to pollinate just about everything you grow on land. What would happen if the bees rapidly declined in numbers? Or some new disease was attacking wheat? Or if certain predators keeping e.g. rats or rabbits were to disappear? And so on... Global warming isn't just about us, we can surely build more dams in Netherland if needed, but if it effects other species, it could well effect us more dramatically taking this indirect route.
More to the point--if we both had Claymores of the same length and sharpness, except mine was heavier, and if we had the same level of skill and physical ability, I would probably win.
If the swords were blunt, you would win. If the swords were razor sharp, I would win. A heavier sword can still do damage, even if it's not usable for cutting. If the sword is razor sharp, I do not need much momentum to penetrate your body, and the sword that can be handled most easily will be the best. If you add armor to the equation, it would again be to your advantage, unless we're talking lightsabers that would cut through the armor as easily as your flesh. Anyway, if the material is stronger and lighter than steel, but you still depend upon momentum, there's nothing stopping me from fine-tuning the feel of the sword with added weight where needed. With a steel sword, it's a bit more impractical to add antigravity/antimomentum-devices, and attaching helium-balloons would look very funny.
Here's my official WTF? I posted this exact story w/ a link to Science Daily's article two days ago
That's what you did wrong. You need to rewrite the summary in your own words, slightly more imprecise and misguiding compared to the original. You must put it in your blog. And you must be friends with the slashdot editors. Failing to meet these three simple rules, your article didn't get posted.
Think about it: The weight of the steel is an essential part of the design of a sword. The whole reason your _swing_ it instead of "just press it against somebody" is to give it impulse that will keep it going when meeting resistance.
So if I let you have a 50-pound heavy blade, and I can carry a razor-sharp blade that is longer than yours, but with almost no momentum or weight, you would win? I don't think so. At least not unless you were significantly better than me at fencing.
Am I the only one who read the first few lines and though "hmm, crows using tools? Such as hammers and screw drivers? AMAZING!"
Yeah, but do they have the proper understanding required to be passive consumers, and define their personality through what they buy? I believe that untill crows start getting immersed in consumer fads and trends, that there still must be some difference between us.
Actually, whales are fish. They look like fish, smell like fish, and they live in the ocean. And if you have a large enough hook, you can catch them the same way you normally fish smaller fish. Just because what biologists call fish evolved from different ancestors than whales, doesn't mean that whales aren't fish. It just means that whales aren't what biologists call fish.
Can you show me where in my previous posts I ever saw "software companies" ?
The article is about companies releasing linux-powered devices, but the software for controlling them that can only be used from windows (or mac) but not linux. The post you were responding to, was talking about the possibility for companies to release unsupported linux drivers. Whether the companies are "software companies" or not, is irrelevant. But it should be pretty clear by now that we are talking about "software products"
I'm just pointing to you guys some red flags that might be triggered on the legal department of those companies. Companies that work with mostly with non-software stuff, and get sued mostly by non-software stuff.
The companies in question already release drivers for other operating systems. Their legal departments are therefore already familiar with the legalities of software.
if apple really wanted to start a revolution, they should've made it voip
A revolution backwards then? You get GSM coverage pretty much anywhere, as long as it's reasonably civilized (i.e. you can see a road or a house). And you get WiFi where? At your home, office, and?
but i guess that's not really practical right now...
At least not untill it's voip over 3g or something, but then what would be the point?
It's not that I actually like the cell-phone companies, or anything. But when I have to choose between using their networks, or not, I choose to use them. It's just more practical.
Please provide at least one verifiable example. I haven't even heard of any software company that has lost such a case---with a product they sell. Microsoft Windows offers exactly the same warranty as GNU Hello, none!
From my experience, this is a huge win for Amazon. Many, many patents look "obvious" in restrospect.
I don't get this argument. If it looks obvious in retrospect, it's still obvious. Patents exist because it's good for society to have a system where individuals or companies that choose to spend money on expensive research, have a way of profiting from it. If your research wasn't expensive, and your "invention" was the result of a single aha-moment, then society does not benefit from you getting a patent.
And that's the way obviousness should be interpreted. There's no way someone else wouldn't have "invented" ("discovered" is perhaps a better word) one-click shopping, if Amazon didn't. Perhaps Amazon was first, but it's still obvious.
AOL, regarding wikipedia. Compare: Ronald Reagan: 23 PageDown(s), Leonid Brezhnev: 9 PageDown(s), List of Pokemon Characters: 24 PageDown(s) with links going to uncountably many subpages describing each characters in mind-boggling detail.
I'm pretty sure judges in many countries would also have problems with a company "releasing something and not supporting it".
Uhm, no. Maybe if you sell it, and if you sold it under such circumstances that it is reasonable for the buyer to assume that he gets a working product, and you refuse to return the money to the buyer when he tries to get a refund for his useless new acquisition. Otherwise, forget it, you're not getting rich by suing companies releasing unfinished or incomplete open source software just yet.
Well, I'm probably not the first to comment on how braindead this decision is by Verizon, how troublesome it is for the future of democracy and free speach if this sort of shit is allowed to continue, and all that.
But one thing that also catched my eye was this comment by Christopher S. Yoo (a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania) from the original article: "Instead of having the government get in the game of regulating who can carry what, I would get in the game of promoting as many options as possible. You might find text-messaging companies competing on their openness policies."
What's there to compete for? Either you are open, or you are not. If you have the choice between a simple law amendment that mandates phone-companies to not discriminate upon content, regardless of media-type (and not just voice as it is today), or allowing carriers to compete in a vain hope that at least some of them will go for openness, I'd go for the simple law. This case has already proven that the free market doesn't work, if that's so: regulate!
Very well. While your definition of science isn't what most scientists say they are doing, I agree that it gives a pretty accurate picture of what most scientists actually are doing, and also of what the public perceives the scientists as doing. Which is also why the math department is usually grouped in the faculty of natural science in most universities.
(Given "math=language", math should be placed in the philological faculty, and given "math=methodology" it should be placed in a separate methodology faculty reserved for philosophy, metaphysics, math, statistics, logic, taxonomy, computing, hermeneutics, interview techniques, deconstruction, and lots of other more-or-less wacky subjects...)
Mathematics is a science - indeeed, a collection of sciences. Fundamentally, it is the study of number, form and space. Mathematics did not (and generally does not) start from a set of axioms although many have tried to impose purely axiomatic systems upon it.
I disagree. Science is about expaining the world. Math doesn't explain the world, it's one of the languages of choice we use to describe it, some others are logic, statistics, ad-hoc languages such as chemical formulas, algorithmic computer languages, and of course [native toungue].
If we disregard the axiomatic basis later imposed upon math, math is about counting, measuring, and manipulating (hypothetical) collections of countable objects or measurable substances. Thus math can be used to describe precisely why 2 liters of water is more than 1.37 liters of water. On the other hand, math doesn't attempt to explain why there are 2 liters of water there in the first place (or what water is), as that would be in the realm of science.
And yes, it is used by many other sciences just as other sciences employ one another to achieve their end (though to a lesser extent than maths is used).
Not "just as". Science constitutes knowledge, and knowledge in one field is often useful in another. Does understanding how birds fly help zoology or aerodynamics most? On the other hand, math is math. While it's possible for a biologist to contribute both to math and to biology, rarely will you have any problems classifying where the contribution belongs.
It's not just about profits today as profits tomorrow. Treat customers with contempt and you might be able to get a few more bucks out of them this time, but next time, they'll go elsewhere.
Actually, modern business practices are exactly the opposite of what you preach. The important thing is the bottom line. Money you earn now can be accounted for, and are proof to your stockholders that you are successful. Money earned later is hypothetical money, and must be viewed just as any other investment. If banks wouldn't lend you money for such an investment, there's little reason to assume stockholders would.
Also, if you treat your customers good, you are wasting money on already satisfied customers. What you should do, is to treat your loyal customers like crap. If some customers are getting so dissatisfied that it's likely they switch, you throw them a bone or two, as long as it's not more than what you would loose if they switched. Thus, paradoxically, the worst customers gets the best treatment, which feels "wrong", but quite certainly maximizes what's important: profit!
Apple has understood this for a long time. Apples loyal customers, or "fanboys" aren't loyal because they get good treatment from Apple. They are loyal because they (a) actually like the products, (b) see Apple as a fashion statement, (c) prefer to vote for the underdog, or (d) are graphic designers.
I sometimes carry desktop machines on my handluggage [snip]
Haven't been on airports that have currently bombthreat going on after 9/11
That means you haven't been flying for the last 6 years. I believe your expression sometimes is an exaggeration.
If I'd refuse to tell security people what it was and turned away walking, I'd expect nothing else but trouble.
I agree with this statement 100%. The only trouble is, that you are talking about something hypothetical, and try to make it sound like the girl did something similar. She didn't. According the the article, she cooperated with the security people 100%, just as they expected her too. So why was she arrested (and nearly shot) again?
So you believe it's better for security to waste time on some nerd girl, than to start chasing actual terrorists? This could have been over, with no fuzz, in less than a minute.
Ticketer alerts security
Some security guard approaches the girl and asks about the device
The girl shows the device to the security guard, and convinces him/her it's harmless
The security guard can start looking for other threats
What happened here, is that pure lunacy from the security people involved here, has wasted valuable police and security guard time. Time that could be used for protecting the passengers, has instead been wasted in harassing some weird, but harmless MIT student meeting a friend. Every second the guards waste in harassing people who are no longer viewed as threats, is time real terrorists can walk by. No, I'm not impressed. And I work in security.
Slashdot Mirror
Irrelevant. You can't patent something everybody has done the last 100 years, and claim that the patent is valid because you were the first to do it. Sure, there is the US-speciality of a "grace period" of one year, but patent extortion is a bit older than that.
More accurately, it can be viewed as a form of ritual communication used by many slahdot-readers to give a sense of community. It's like "Halleluja" used excessively by carismatic christian preachers, weird handshakes among homies, or a random selection of words from a bullshit-bingo card (e.g. proactively, strategy, implementation, leverage)used among middle management. But funny, no.
"Myth Busters" is a popular TV show that lives up to it's name. It takes popular myths, such as people saying cockroaches survive radioactivity, or whether tomato juice removes skunk odor, and tests them. Often in a humorous setting, and often by blowing things up in the end, especially if the subject involves explosives. As such, this is just another episode, and therefore not particulary interesting compared to all of the others. I have no idea why the slashdot editors thought this particulary experiment was so interesting as to deserve its own article. Most episodes of "Myth Busters" consists of three or four such experiments.We see this happening already. Certain species of fish are getting dramatically fewer, either from overfishing, disease, lack of food, or other factors. And as replacements we get less specialized species, such as algae or jellyfish. Which means that one source of human food is already in danger. But it's not just something that can happen to fish. Bees are needed to pollinate just about everything you grow on land. What would happen if the bees rapidly declined in numbers? Or some new disease was attacking wheat? Or if certain predators keeping e.g. rats or rabbits were to disappear? And so on... Global warming isn't just about us, we can surely build more dams in Netherland if needed, but if it effects other species, it could well effect us more dramatically taking this indirect route.
If the swords were blunt, you would win. If the swords were razor sharp, I would win. A heavier sword can still do damage, even if it's not usable for cutting. If the sword is razor sharp, I do not need much momentum to penetrate your body, and the sword that can be handled most easily will be the best. If you add armor to the equation, it would again be to your advantage, unless we're talking lightsabers that would cut through the armor as easily as your flesh. Anyway, if the material is stronger and lighter than steel, but you still depend upon momentum, there's nothing stopping me from fine-tuning the feel of the sword with added weight where needed. With a steel sword, it's a bit more impractical to add antigravity/antimomentum-devices, and attaching helium-balloons would look very funny.
On this I would disagree. George Bush is definitely a big fish.
I agree. I prefer to use electronic money. My card takes up a lot less space in my pocket than my wallet.
That's what you did wrong. You need to rewrite the summary in your own words, slightly more imprecise and misguiding compared to the original. You must put it in your blog. And you must be friends with the slashdot editors. Failing to meet these three simple rules, your article didn't get posted.
So if I let you have a 50-pound heavy blade, and I can carry a razor-sharp blade that is longer than yours, but with almost no momentum or weight, you would win? I don't think so. At least not unless you were significantly better than me at fencing.
Actually, whales are fish. They look like fish, smell like fish, and they live in the ocean. And if you have a large enough hook, you can catch them the same way you normally fish smaller fish. Just because what biologists call fish evolved from different ancestors than whales, doesn't mean that whales aren't fish. It just means that whales aren't what biologists call fish.
The article is about companies releasing linux-powered devices, but the software for controlling them that can only be used from windows (or mac) but not linux. The post you were responding to, was talking about the possibility for companies to release unsupported linux drivers. Whether the companies are "software companies" or not, is irrelevant. But it should be pretty clear by now that we are talking about "software products"
The companies in question already release drivers for other operating systems. Their legal departments are therefore already familiar with the legalities of software.
A revolution backwards then? You get GSM coverage pretty much anywhere, as long as it's reasonably civilized (i.e. you can see a road or a house). And you get WiFi where? At your home, office, and?
At least not untill it's voip over 3g or something, but then what would be the point?
It's not that I actually like the cell-phone companies, or anything. But when I have to choose between using their networks, or not, I choose to use them. It's just more practical.
Please provide at least one verifiable example. I haven't even heard of any software company that has lost such a case---with a product they sell. Microsoft Windows offers exactly the same warranty as GNU Hello, none!
I don't get this argument. If it looks obvious in retrospect, it's still obvious. Patents exist because it's good for society to have a system where individuals or companies that choose to spend money on expensive research, have a way of profiting from it. If your research wasn't expensive, and your "invention" was the result of a single aha-moment, then society does not benefit from you getting a patent.
And that's the way obviousness should be interpreted. There's no way someone else wouldn't have "invented" ("discovered" is perhaps a better word) one-click shopping, if Amazon didn't. Perhaps Amazon was first, but it's still obvious.
AOL, regarding wikipedia. Compare: Ronald Reagan: 23 PageDown(s), Leonid Brezhnev: 9 PageDown(s), List of Pokemon Characters: 24 PageDown(s) with links going to uncountably many subpages describing each characters in mind-boggling detail.
Uhm, no. Maybe if you sell it, and if you sold it under such circumstances that it is reasonable for the buyer to assume that he gets a working product, and you refuse to return the money to the buyer when he tries to get a refund for his useless new acquisition. Otherwise, forget it, you're not getting rich by suing companies releasing unfinished or incomplete open source software just yet.
Well, I'm probably not the first to comment on how braindead this decision is by Verizon, how troublesome it is for the future of democracy and free speach if this sort of shit is allowed to continue, and all that.
But one thing that also catched my eye was this comment by Christopher S. Yoo (a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania) from the original article: "Instead of having the government get in the game of regulating who can carry what, I would get in the game of promoting as many options as possible. You might find text-messaging companies competing on their openness policies."
What's there to compete for? Either you are open, or you are not. If you have the choice between a simple law amendment that mandates phone-companies to not discriminate upon content, regardless of media-type (and not just voice as it is today), or allowing carriers to compete in a vain hope that at least some of them will go for openness, I'd go for the simple law. This case has already proven that the free market doesn't work, if that's so: regulate!
No, it's probably just your imagination
Shut up. You don't exist.
Very well. While your definition of science isn't what most scientists say they are doing, I agree that it gives a pretty accurate picture of what most scientists actually are doing, and also of what the public perceives the scientists as doing. Which is also why the math department is usually grouped in the faculty of natural science in most universities.
(Given "math=language", math should be placed in the philological faculty, and given "math=methodology" it should be placed in a separate methodology faculty reserved for philosophy, metaphysics, math, statistics, logic, taxonomy, computing, hermeneutics, interview techniques, deconstruction, and lots of other more-or-less wacky subjects...)
So yes, I guess it depends on your perspective...
I disagree. Science is about expaining the world. Math doesn't explain the world, it's one of the languages of choice we use to describe it, some others are logic, statistics, ad-hoc languages such as chemical formulas, algorithmic computer languages, and of course [native toungue].
If we disregard the axiomatic basis later imposed upon math, math is about counting, measuring, and manipulating (hypothetical) collections of countable objects or measurable substances. Thus math can be used to describe precisely why 2 liters of water is more than 1.37 liters of water. On the other hand, math doesn't attempt to explain why there are 2 liters of water there in the first place (or what water is), as that would be in the realm of science.
Not "just as". Science constitutes knowledge, and knowledge in one field is often useful in another. Does understanding how birds fly help zoology or aerodynamics most? On the other hand, math is math. While it's possible for a biologist to contribute both to math and to biology, rarely will you have any problems classifying where the contribution belongs.
Actually, modern business practices are exactly the opposite of what you preach. The important thing is the bottom line. Money you earn now can be accounted for, and are proof to your stockholders that you are successful. Money earned later is hypothetical money, and must be viewed just as any other investment. If banks wouldn't lend you money for such an investment, there's little reason to assume stockholders would.
Also, if you treat your customers good, you are wasting money on already satisfied customers. What you should do, is to treat your loyal customers like crap. If some customers are getting so dissatisfied that it's likely they switch, you throw them a bone or two, as long as it's not more than what you would loose if they switched. Thus, paradoxically, the worst customers gets the best treatment, which feels "wrong", but quite certainly maximizes what's important: profit!
Apple has understood this for a long time. Apples loyal customers, or "fanboys" aren't loyal because they get good treatment from Apple. They are loyal because they (a) actually like the products, (b) see Apple as a fashion statement, (c) prefer to vote for the underdog, or (d) are graphic designers.
That means you haven't been flying for the last 6 years. I believe your expression sometimes is an exaggeration.
I agree with this statement 100%. The only trouble is, that you are talking about something hypothetical, and try to make it sound like the girl did something similar. She didn't. According the the article, she cooperated with the security people 100%, just as they expected her too. So why was she arrested (and nearly shot) again?
What happened here, is that pure lunacy from the security people involved here, has wasted valuable police and security guard time. Time that could be used for protecting the passengers, has instead been wasted in harassing some weird, but harmless MIT student meeting a friend. Every second the guards waste in harassing people who are no longer viewed as threats, is time real terrorists can walk by. No, I'm not impressed. And I work in security.
I believe that any insult from someone that responds like you to the grandparent post, should be a hallmark of pride.