This will encourage a new crime, called stealing someone else's legitimate license plate.
And replacing the victim's legitimate license plate with a legitimate-looking fake one, unbeknownst to the victim.
Yes, yes, and then people will start making masks that look like your face and robbing banks with them. And they'll steal some loose hairs from your keyboard at work, Gattaca-style, and plant those at the scene. And they'll replace all your friends and relatives with body-doubles who will lie about your whereabouts on that day.
FYI, poor people don't disappear when you stop looking at them.
Having large amounts of poverty in the nation will breed crime, reduce sales, cause layoffs, and generally decrease the quality of life for those of us who planned ahead.
Sometimes it sucks to be one of the responsible ones. If you didn't learn that throughout grade school and college, then I don't know what more to tell you.
Kaspersky's firewall automatically blocks the ads and instantly jumps back to the show as well. I haven't taken the time to investigate exactly how it does it, but I'm sure that any firewall could be configured to do the same.
I read Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone when I was that age, and found it to be a very intriguing introduction to game theory. It is fairly light on math, providing only enough to show that there are calculable solutions to situations that are otherwise difficult to reason through. It also provides some real life examples which are easy to relate to, e.g. letting one child cut a piece of food in half and the other choose the half they want in order to ensure "fair" portions.
It's a good choice for showing that there's more to math than finding the length of the hypotenuse.
My god.... you actually believe you're doing this math correctly?
If the top 5% pay that much, that makes up $479.5B. The top 10%, according to you, pay a total of $560B. That means that the second highest 5% would pay ~$80B, which, divided over 7M people is about $11,400, which is in direct contradiction to your earlier assertion that someone making $109K would pay $40,000.
To put it simply, you're full of shit, and don't know even the slightest thing about math.
The majority of Slashdot mods probably know enough math to see why the parent is complete BS. I'm not going to rehash the reasons... but the upshot is that you can't take the average amount payed and assume that the guy earning $109k will need to shoulder as much as the guy earning $10M.
And yet, it's modded insightful. Gee, could that be because people, when they really want to believe something, will lie to themselves to convince themselves that they're right? Naww.... I'm sure all the mods' fingers slipped.
I recall reading years ago that one of the most simple, common, and effective Prisoner Dilemma strategies, used by both humans and computers, was "tit for tat with random forgiveness". Basically, start by cooperating, then always repeat the other player's last move, except sometimes cooperate even if they defected last move. It doesn't really matter whether your playing with a computer or a human. The rules are simple enough to negate the ability of the computer to consider all possible moves (there are only two!), and the interaction is so limited as to negate the advantage humans normally have in reading each other. Heck, it would probably be impossible to determine whether it was a computer or a human you were playing with.
I can't help but wonder why they chose such a simple game. Maybe they wanted something non-competitive?
Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.
A tad melodramatic, isn't it? Ooh, scary secret internal workings... I don't think this is going to increase adoption rates of FOSS PDF readers one bit, and for one simple reason.
No one cares. Sure, maybe a few people do, but the VAST majority of people really couldn't care less if their PDF reader is free as in speech, so long as its free as in beer. They're gonna google "free pdf reader", find Adobe's and use that. Or, if they really don't like Adobe (who could blame them?), they'll see Foxit next on the list, and use that.
If you want to get people to switch, you need your product to be substantially superior in terms of features, not philosophy. Packaging it with something people already have would also be a good method. If there was a PDF reader good enough to be packaged with OOo, that'd be a start.
*Yeah, I know I'll probably get modded down for daring to use FOSS and FUD in the same breath, but come on! That description was so over the top*
There's a difference between assuming the possibility of evil behavior, and just flat out assuming evil behavior. With MS (and most major corporations) you should always do the former. But the latter? That's just closed-mindedness.
That said, MS should have had a little pop-up box asking to install a compatibility add-on to Firefox. Or, at the very least, made it easy to remove. Doing it this way is just scummy, and akin to when Apple made Safari part of the iTunes update. It sure would be nice if companies needed my permission to install stuff on my computer.
BTW, I don't read a lot anymore, but besides the odd fanfiction (fanfiction.net), I find fictionpress for original stuff a decent place to read. Perhaps there are others. The problem is (and what magazines with editors used to do) was picking out the gems from the crap. There are various ways to do this on those type of sites, but many still still don't make any effort and dump the whole lot of listings on you.
Having not read much amateur writing myself, I think you make an interesting point. I wonder if a magazine like F&SF could have any success by having a website on which anyone could submit stories, and their editors read through, find the good ones and publish them. All the stories could be available for users to browse through and rate, but the prospect of being put into print might attract more authors and make the site a success.
Read a report, did you? Well, studies have shown that Windows 7 really is better. Everyone knows the GUI has improved. Experts have found that it runs faster. Surveys have said that the look and feel is much nicer as well.
Whether or not the DCMA route was the right way to go about it may be debatable. Part of me does say they're not circumventing copyright protection but another part of me says that bot users in any game are scum so fuck 'em.
Of course, if this were the RIAA suing file sharers, you probably wouldn't hold that opinion. Don't you think we ought to follow the rules, instead of twisting them to punish whoever we don't like?
Yeah, DTV is absolutely terrible quality compared to analog for anyone who lives more than a couple dozen miles from the tower. With analog, if the signal was weak, you got some white noise over the picture and sound, but it was still totally watchable. With DTV, all you get is a black screen. It is utterly unusable. As soon as the switch happens, I won't be able to watch my local news ever again. *sigh*
At the lowest possible level, we're talking about electrons moving around. Every time you do an instruction, a bunch of electrons have to move from one place to another. On the way, they inevitably bump into things. Whenever that happens, you lose a bit of energy as heat. That's what the oh-so-common equation, P=(I^2)R means. The I is the current (moving electrons), the R is the resistance (things electrons bump into), and the P is the power (energy per second that you lose as heat).
As for what you read about (ir)reversible math, that does contribute as well. Consider a single bit of a register, where a zero is represented as 0V, and a one is represented as 1V. If that bit contains a 0, and I want to make it a 1, I need to pull out a bunch of electrons. If I am going to move the 0 that used to be there someplace else, then I could, theoretically, move the electrons there. In that case, the only loss would come from the very short distance that those electrons move. But if I am just getting rid of the 0, those electrons go to the 1V supply, and get sent back to the power supply and all the way back to the power company*. That's a longer distance, so there's going to be more loss. But even if all the math was reversible (i.e. no bits were ever overwritten, only shuffled around) there would still be loss. That's a purely theoretical system anyway - no one actually shuffles their bits around like that.
Hopefully that answers your question.
* Note, what I said here isn't actually true. The electron would never make it back to the power company, and is unlikely to even leave the chip -- electrons don't move that fast. But a current would be set up that goes all the way back to the power company, and a bunch of electrons along the path would move a little bit, like a sub-atomic conga line, so the loss of power is the same.
I'm sure this will be lost among the sea of comments, but I'll throw it out there anyway. As a former LabVIEW/Matlab user, I have had tremendous success with the Python(x,y) package.
All the development is done in Eclipse. You have a WYSIWYG editor built into Eclipse, with which to design Qt GUIs. The signal/slot methodology in Qt is similar to LabVIEW, but easier to work with once you've learned it, since you can make connections in text or the drag and drop interface, whichever is easier.
You can use the generic Qt widgets to display Matplotlib graphs, which use similar syntax to Matlab.
You have numpy/scipy, which are fantastic for processing data.
You have pyvisa/serial/parallel, which will control any instrument you have, or even ones you make/program yourself, such as FPGAs or MCUs.
You can use Python's pickling to store your data in rapidly-accessible modes (I've opened hundred million datapoint sets in seconds), or CSV/Excelerator to store smaller chunks of data in more human-readable modes. Python also provides a fairly simple database system if you need one, and you can always use Zope or Django if you want a web interface (though that will be harder to learn).
On top of all that, there are many more field-specific modules available in Python than in LabVIEW.
I've been using it for months now (I should emphasize that I had never even heard of Qt or numpy or any of those things before that), and I cannot wait to drop LabVIEW. If you think Perl is bad, try to debug a 5 year old LabVIEW program, developed by ten different people, each of whom was using LabVIEW because they don't know how to program properly. One of our old VIs, which only sends a string of commands over a serial port and then reads a DMM, weighed in at over 350 MB. No one can even figure out how it works any more. The same system, done with Python(x,y), came out to under 200 lines of code.
If Jimbo tells you that there's a 1% chance that your tire will go flat if you don't fix it, that's not 1% if Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time. At best, it's 50.5%. Or something like that.
So all we need to do is find someone who's always wrong, and have them calculate the odds of world peace! Whatever value they find, the actual odds will become 100%!
If you have 100,000 Joe Schmoes, and two versions, you can divide the Joes into two groups: those who can afford the pricier version, and those who cannot. If you only have the pricier version, you lose the latter group. If you only have the cheaper version, you lose part of your profits from the former group. By having both, you improve your profits.
In fact, in some cases it can be good if the Joes can't differentiate, since that way some of the Joes who can afford (but do not need) the pricier version will buy it.
The only problem with what MS is doing is that they're taking it so far that people feel overwhelmed trying to figure out what features they need, and end up going with the nice, simple Mac.
Incorrect. Any detail of the technology you disclose is no longer patentable. I think what you are thinking of are trade secrets. Keeping the inner workings of your technology secret is dangerous, because someone else might come along and patent it.
Heuristics is just a buzzword you add to any patent application to make it sound more innovative. All it means is that the software makes a good guess based on less than perfect data. It would be impossible to make a decent touch screen without heuristics.
My company makes the microchips that Apple uses for their touch screens, and our app notes describe some basic heuristic algorithms for properly detecting fingers. I think the only reason we don't count as prior art is because their patent says it's done as a "computer-implemented method".
Disclaimer: IANAL, all this info is based on seminars on IP that I have (been forced to) attend.
What about those which developed products with similar features while the patent was under examination? To they just put their blueprints in the bin and try to find another idea?
Yes, unless they had already filed a provisional patent, which essentially says, "We're working on X, but don't have it developed enough to patent yet." In that case, so long as they file for the actual patent within a year, they will be the ones who end up getting the rights to the invention. Of course, only the details covered in the provisional will be granted to them.
I'm actually quite interested, if anyone has an idea, in the answer to this question: if you release a product before you get the patent, and concurent makers release similar products before said patent is granted, doesn't that constitute prior art?
If you release a product, or even announce technical details, before you apply for a patent or a provisional, then your own invention now counts as prior art which will prevent you (or anyone else) from ever patenting it. If I start selling time machines today, and apply for the patent tomorrow, I'll get rejected as there is prior art (fortunately, in that case I can just refile the day before I started selling).
However, if you applied for the patent, and then the other company made their device, and then you received the patent, you can stop the other company from making any more of their device. Since your patent was filed before their device existed, there was no prior art.
Working in a research lab, we are regularly reminded that we should not publish patentable ideas before having patented them, as such publication would constitute prior art voiding any subsequent patent.
As I said above, that is absolutely right. Once information is available publicly, it is considered no longer novel, which means that no one can ever patent it. Not even the inventors who released the info.
I really like the iPhone UI but it's far from perfect. I could think of lots of different ways to improve on that.
If I can do it, I'm sure some phone makers can do it too.
Can you really think of any improvements that don't involve scrolling or submenus? Remember, if I patent a wheel, and you then patent a bicycle, you still can't make any bikes without my permission. Apple has patented using your fingers to scroll in one or two dimensions, and using your fingers to enter a submenu. That means that no other company can have any sort of touch screen-based scrolling or menus for the next two decades, no matter what sort of improvements they may think of.
If this patent stands, it pretty much guarantees that touchscreen technology will stagnate and die.
Slashdot Mirror
This will encourage a new crime, called stealing someone else's legitimate license plate.
And replacing the victim's legitimate license plate with a legitimate-looking fake one, unbeknownst to the victim.
Yes, yes, and then people will start making masks that look like your face and robbing banks with them. And they'll steal some loose hairs from your keyboard at work, Gattaca-style, and plant those at the scene. And they'll replace all your friends and relatives with body-doubles who will lie about your whereabouts on that day.
Rumor has it that MS now has a hundred sock-puppet accounts on slashdot...
Next to the hundred thousand vehemently anti-MS posters, I don't think that that would even be worth their time.
FYI, poor people don't disappear when you stop looking at them.
Having large amounts of poverty in the nation will breed crime, reduce sales, cause layoffs, and generally decrease the quality of life for those of us who planned ahead.
Sometimes it sucks to be one of the responsible ones. If you didn't learn that throughout grade school and college, then I don't know what more to tell you.
Kaspersky's firewall automatically blocks the ads and instantly jumps back to the show as well. I haven't taken the time to investigate exactly how it does it, but I'm sure that any firewall could be configured to do the same.
I read Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone when I was that age, and found it to be a very intriguing introduction to game theory. It is fairly light on math, providing only enough to show that there are calculable solutions to situations that are otherwise difficult to reason through. It also provides some real life examples which are easy to relate to, e.g. letting one child cut a piece of food in half and the other choose the half they want in order to ensure "fair" portions.
It's a good choice for showing that there's more to math than finding the length of the hypotenuse.
My god.... you actually believe you're doing this math correctly?
If the top 5% pay that much, that makes up $479.5B. The top 10%, according to you, pay a total of $560B. That means that the second highest 5% would pay ~$80B, which, divided over 7M people is about $11,400, which is in direct contradiction to your earlier assertion that someone making $109K would pay $40,000.
To put it simply, you're full of shit, and don't know even the slightest thing about math.
The majority of Slashdot mods probably know enough math to see why the parent is complete BS. I'm not going to rehash the reasons... but the upshot is that you can't take the average amount payed and assume that the guy earning $109k will need to shoulder as much as the guy earning $10M.
And yet, it's modded insightful. Gee, could that be because people, when they really want to believe something, will lie to themselves to convince themselves that they're right? Naww.... I'm sure all the mods' fingers slipped.
I recall reading years ago that one of the most simple, common, and effective Prisoner Dilemma strategies, used by both humans and computers, was "tit for tat with random forgiveness". Basically, start by cooperating, then always repeat the other player's last move, except sometimes cooperate even if they defected last move. It doesn't really matter whether your playing with a computer or a human. The rules are simple enough to negate the ability of the computer to consider all possible moves (there are only two!), and the interaction is so limited as to negate the advantage humans normally have in reading each other. Heck, it would probably be impossible to determine whether it was a computer or a human you were playing with.
I can't help but wonder why they chose such a simple game. Maybe they wanted something non-competitive?
Desktop environments only around since the early 2000s? I guess I just imagined all those PCs we had in high school.
Or is this one of those magical cases where you define "decent" as whatever it needs to be to make you right?
Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.
A tad melodramatic, isn't it? Ooh, scary secret internal workings... I don't think this is going to increase adoption rates of FOSS PDF readers one bit, and for one simple reason.
No one cares. Sure, maybe a few people do, but the VAST majority of people really couldn't care less if their PDF reader is free as in speech, so long as its free as in beer. They're gonna google "free pdf reader", find Adobe's and use that. Or, if they really don't like Adobe (who could blame them?), they'll see Foxit next on the list, and use that.
If you want to get people to switch, you need your product to be substantially superior in terms of features, not philosophy. Packaging it with something people already have would also be a good method. If there was a PDF reader good enough to be packaged with OOo, that'd be a start.
*Yeah, I know I'll probably get modded down for daring to use FOSS and FUD in the same breath, but come on! That description was so over the top*
There's a difference between assuming the possibility of evil behavior, and just flat out assuming evil behavior. With MS (and most major corporations) you should always do the former. But the latter? That's just closed-mindedness.
That said, MS should have had a little pop-up box asking to install a compatibility add-on to Firefox. Or, at the very least, made it easy to remove. Doing it this way is just scummy, and akin to when Apple made Safari part of the iTunes update. It sure would be nice if companies needed my permission to install stuff on my computer.
BTW, I don't read a lot anymore, but besides the odd fanfiction (fanfiction.net), I find fictionpress for original stuff a decent place to read. Perhaps there are others. The problem is (and what magazines with editors used to do) was picking out the gems from the crap. There are various ways to do this on those type of sites, but many still still don't make any effort and dump the whole lot of listings on you.
Having not read much amateur writing myself, I think you make an interesting point. I wonder if a magazine like F&SF could have any success by having a website on which anyone could submit stories, and their editors read through, find the good ones and publish them. All the stories could be available for users to browse through and rate, but the prospect of being put into print might attract more authors and make the site a success.
Read a report, did you? Well, studies have shown that Windows 7 really is better. Everyone knows the GUI has improved. Experts have found that it runs faster. Surveys have said that the look and feel is much nicer as well.
Whether or not the DCMA route was the right way to go about it may be debatable. Part of me does say they're not circumventing copyright protection but another part of me says that bot users in any game are scum so fuck 'em.
Of course, if this were the RIAA suing file sharers, you probably wouldn't hold that opinion. Don't you think we ought to follow the rules, instead of twisting them to punish whoever we don't like?
Yeah, DTV is absolutely terrible quality compared to analog for anyone who lives more than a couple dozen miles from the tower. With analog, if the signal was weak, you got some white noise over the picture and sound, but it was still totally watchable. With DTV, all you get is a black screen. It is utterly unusable. As soon as the switch happens, I won't be able to watch my local news ever again. *sigh*
At the lowest possible level, we're talking about electrons moving around. Every time you do an instruction, a bunch of electrons have to move from one place to another. On the way, they inevitably bump into things. Whenever that happens, you lose a bit of energy as heat. That's what the oh-so-common equation, P=(I^2)R means. The I is the current (moving electrons), the R is the resistance (things electrons bump into), and the P is the power (energy per second that you lose as heat).
As for what you read about (ir)reversible math, that does contribute as well. Consider a single bit of a register, where a zero is represented as 0V, and a one is represented as 1V. If that bit contains a 0, and I want to make it a 1, I need to pull out a bunch of electrons. If I am going to move the 0 that used to be there someplace else, then I could, theoretically, move the electrons there. In that case, the only loss would come from the very short distance that those electrons move. But if I am just getting rid of the 0, those electrons go to the 1V supply, and get sent back to the power supply and all the way back to the power company*. That's a longer distance, so there's going to be more loss. But even if all the math was reversible (i.e. no bits were ever overwritten, only shuffled around) there would still be loss. That's a purely theoretical system anyway - no one actually shuffles their bits around like that.
Hopefully that answers your question.
* Note, what I said here isn't actually true. The electron would never make it back to the power company, and is unlikely to even leave the chip -- electrons don't move that fast. But a current would be set up that goes all the way back to the power company, and a bunch of electrons along the path would move a little bit, like a sub-atomic conga line, so the loss of power is the same.
Fixed that for you.
Honestly, the people who find that icon funny are the ones who spell MS with a dollar sign.
I'm sure this will be lost among the sea of comments, but I'll throw it out there anyway. As a former LabVIEW/Matlab user, I have had tremendous success with the Python(x,y) package.
All the development is done in Eclipse. You have a WYSIWYG editor built into Eclipse, with which to design Qt GUIs. The signal/slot methodology in Qt is similar to LabVIEW, but easier to work with once you've learned it, since you can make connections in text or the drag and drop interface, whichever is easier.
You can use the generic Qt widgets to display Matplotlib graphs, which use similar syntax to Matlab.
You have numpy/scipy, which are fantastic for processing data.
You have pyvisa/serial/parallel, which will control any instrument you have, or even ones you make/program yourself, such as FPGAs or MCUs.
You can use Python's pickling to store your data in rapidly-accessible modes (I've opened hundred million datapoint sets in seconds), or CSV/Excelerator to store smaller chunks of data in more human-readable modes. Python also provides a fairly simple database system if you need one, and you can always use Zope or Django if you want a web interface (though that will be harder to learn).
On top of all that, there are many more field-specific modules available in Python than in LabVIEW.
I've been using it for months now (I should emphasize that I had never even heard of Qt or numpy or any of those things before that), and I cannot wait to drop LabVIEW. If you think Perl is bad, try to debug a 5 year old LabVIEW program, developed by ten different people, each of whom was using LabVIEW because they don't know how to program properly. One of our old VIs, which only sends a string of commands over a serial port and then reads a DMM, weighed in at over 350 MB. No one can even figure out how it works any more. The same system, done with Python(x,y), came out to under 200 lines of code.
Who would remember if we all died?
The race of intelligent beings who, millions of years from now, finds a small black hole orbiting a star, with a flag on its moon.
Honestly, if the human race has to end, that is exactly how I want us to go out.
If Jimbo tells you that there's a 1% chance that your tire will go flat if you don't fix it, that's not 1% if Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time. At best, it's 50.5%. Or something like that.
So all we need to do is find someone who's always wrong, and have them calculate the odds of world peace! Whatever value they find, the actual odds will become 100%!
That's not how demand curves work. Not at all.
If you have 100,000 Joe Schmoes, and two versions, you can divide the Joes into two groups: those who can afford the pricier version, and those who cannot. If you only have the pricier version, you lose the latter group. If you only have the cheaper version, you lose part of your profits from the former group. By having both, you improve your profits.
In fact, in some cases it can be good if the Joes can't differentiate, since that way some of the Joes who can afford (but do not need) the pricier version will buy it.
The only problem with what MS is doing is that they're taking it so far that people feel overwhelmed trying to figure out what features they need, and end up going with the nice, simple Mac.
Incorrect. Any detail of the technology you disclose is no longer patentable. I think what you are thinking of are trade secrets. Keeping the inner workings of your technology secret is dangerous, because someone else might come along and patent it.
Heuristics is just a buzzword you add to any patent application to make it sound more innovative. All it means is that the software makes a good guess based on less than perfect data. It would be impossible to make a decent touch screen without heuristics.
My company makes the microchips that Apple uses for their touch screens, and our app notes describe some basic heuristic algorithms for properly detecting fingers. I think the only reason we don't count as prior art is because their patent says it's done as a "computer-implemented method".
Disclaimer: IANAL, all this info is based on seminars on IP that I have (been forced to) attend.
What about those which developed products with similar features while the patent was under examination? To they just put their blueprints in the bin and try to find another idea?
Yes, unless they had already filed a provisional patent, which essentially says, "We're working on X, but don't have it developed enough to patent yet." In that case, so long as they file for the actual patent within a year, they will be the ones who end up getting the rights to the invention. Of course, only the details covered in the provisional will be granted to them.
I'm actually quite interested, if anyone has an idea, in the answer to this question: if you release a product before you get the patent, and concurent makers release similar products before said patent is granted, doesn't that constitute prior art?
If you release a product, or even announce technical details, before you apply for a patent or a provisional, then your own invention now counts as prior art which will prevent you (or anyone else) from ever patenting it. If I start selling time machines today, and apply for the patent tomorrow, I'll get rejected as there is prior art (fortunately, in that case I can just refile the day before I started selling).
However, if you applied for the patent, and then the other company made their device, and then you received the patent, you can stop the other company from making any more of their device. Since your patent was filed before their device existed, there was no prior art.
Working in a research lab, we are regularly reminded that we should not publish patentable ideas before having patented them, as such publication would constitute prior art voiding any subsequent patent.
As I said above, that is absolutely right. Once information is available publicly, it is considered no longer novel, which means that no one can ever patent it. Not even the inventors who released the info.
I really like the iPhone UI but it's far from perfect. I could think of lots of different ways to improve on that.
If I can do it, I'm sure some phone makers can do it too.
Can you really think of any improvements that don't involve scrolling or submenus? Remember, if I patent a wheel, and you then patent a bicycle, you still can't make any bikes without my permission. Apple has patented using your fingers to scroll in one or two dimensions, and using your fingers to enter a submenu. That means that no other company can have any sort of touch screen-based scrolling or menus for the next two decades, no matter what sort of improvements they may think of.
If this patent stands, it pretty much guarantees that touchscreen technology will stagnate and die.