To anyone that has purchased a cheap consumer thermostat, the need or market for improvement is absolutely obvious and the IP thicket is pretty much the only conceivable problem.
The Nest is definitely not "cheap". In fact, it costs more than Honeywell's Prestige thermostat, which does all of the same things that the Nest does (which is what Honeywell has patents on). Your problem is in buying a "cheap" thermostat. The products are there, just not at your price point, and the Nest definitely doesn't fit into your price point.
I believe the Nest attempts to learn your habits, which the Prestige does not do. I'm not entirely certain that this is a useful feature, mind you, as I figure most people's schedules are regular enough to just program in. However, the point remains that the functionality is somewhat different.
While I understand your cynicism, I believe it to be a bit misplaced in this instance. These rules are to protect the rights of the people. Specifically, the defendant.
Also, I don't believe the situation to be quite so hopeless as you put forth. When I last served on a jury, I was picked to be the "extra guy" (unsure of the proper term), so I didn't get to join in deliberations. Instead, the judge called me into his chambers. I felt this was a bit odd, but he just wanted to talk about my jury duty experience, and any way they could try and make it better for the jurors. He (and I suspect most other court staff) was well aware of the generally negative perception of Jury duty, and wanted to try and help fix that. That concern was genuine, and not required of him in any capacity.
I have never spoken to another judge in the same manner, so I have but one data point to give, but its a very promising and hopeful data point. I think it has a little smiley face on it, actually.
Relevant snippet: "While the PDF specification was available for free since at least 2001,[4] PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008.[1][5] In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.[6]"
Building the deck is the part that takes skill. A good deck will have a high win/loss ratio. Playing the deck is largely procedural, although there usually are a number of decisions in the game you need to make based on an estimated probability of certain actions taken by your opponent. Play enough games to remove the random factors from the equation, and you can see how well your deck performs on average, and work to improve that.
In my experience, those shareholders that have voting rights are usually aware. Of course, if you invest in a fund, the fund is usually the shareholder, so even if you have voting rights you don't count.
You seem to be confusing the C&C network with the infection vector. This article is about hackers using twitter, etc, as a way to provide instructions to their botnets.
While I am not the person you replied to, I believe I can help you interpret his post. Basically, he seemed to be saying that most of the iPhone apps/games/etc could be just as easily implemented in flash and stuck on a webpage somewhere. If the iPhone could run flash, then popcap (for example) would simply host its own games, keep all of its tasty revenue and Apple wouldn't get its 30%.
Having just gotten into the beta, and played through a chunk of what you have just described, I concur. They do state that they are "disconnected" borg, but still... its a pretty strange way to open the series. I haven't been able to finish, however, due to server disconnects. They could potentially salvage this if it were to turn out to be a holodeck simulation, though.
Update: You can indeed still schedule events in the way I mentioned, I was just too blind to see the option. Its just that the automatic tool Palm gives you can't translate complex custom repeats like that, apparently.
You can. I upgraded from a Treo 755p to the Pre, and Palm has a little app on their website to move data over. You just run it on the pc that was the Palm desktop on it (and has your new Pre connected) and (almost) everything moves over. It wasn't able to copy over a few of my calendar events. There was a log to tell me which ones. Basically, its calendar can't handle some of the more advanced repeating options that their old one could (ie repeat every monday, tuesday, thursday from date X to date Y). I hope they fix that. I miss that functionality most...
I can't comment on Apple, but Microsoft and Sony both have only kept partial backwards compatibility in their new consoles. I am, of course, assuming this is what you are speaking of.
The new PS3s actually have no PS2 backwards compatibility. The 360 has only limited backwards compatibility - basically only the popular titles from the classic XBOX lineup.
Slashdot Mirror
To anyone that has purchased a cheap consumer thermostat, the need or market for improvement is absolutely obvious and the IP thicket is pretty much the only conceivable problem.
The Nest is definitely not "cheap". In fact, it costs more than Honeywell's Prestige thermostat, which does all of the same things that the Nest does (which is what Honeywell has patents on). Your problem is in buying a "cheap" thermostat. The products are there, just not at your price point, and the Nest definitely doesn't fit into your price point.
I believe the Nest attempts to learn your habits, which the Prestige does not do. I'm not entirely certain that this is a useful feature, mind you, as I figure most people's schedules are regular enough to just program in. However, the point remains that the functionality is somewhat different.
While I understand your cynicism, I believe it to be a bit misplaced in this instance. These rules are to protect the rights of the people. Specifically, the defendant.
Also, I don't believe the situation to be quite so hopeless as you put forth. When I last served on a jury, I was picked to be the "extra guy" (unsure of the proper term), so I didn't get to join in deliberations. Instead, the judge called me into his chambers. I felt this was a bit odd, but he just wanted to talk about my jury duty experience, and any way they could try and make it better for the jurors. He (and I suspect most other court staff) was well aware of the generally negative perception of Jury duty, and wanted to try and help fix that. That concern was genuine, and not required of him in any capacity.
I have never spoken to another judge in the same manner, so I have but one data point to give, but its a very promising and hopeful data point. I think it has a little smiley face on it, actually.
They probably think they are Judges, and are telling you how the court works.
PDF is free and open now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
Relevant snippet:
"While the PDF specification was available for free since at least 2001,[4] PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008.[1][5] In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.[6]"
You know what else can get you into town with chemical, biological, or worse weapons? A truck.
Building the deck is the part that takes skill. A good deck will have a high win/loss ratio. Playing the deck is largely procedural, although there usually are a number of decisions in the game you need to make based on an estimated probability of certain actions taken by your opponent. Play enough games to remove the random factors from the equation, and you can see how well your deck performs on average, and work to improve that.
Its a game for people who like spreadsheets.
I would strongly consider the possibility that, while overlap does exist, the console market is fairly distinct from the phone-gaming market.
Neither - they are right.
You must be new here.
In my experience, those shareholders that have voting rights are usually aware. Of course, if you invest in a fund, the fund is usually the shareholder, so even if you have voting rights you don't count.
You seem to be confusing the C&C network with the infection vector. This article is about hackers using twitter, etc, as a way to provide instructions to their botnets.
I can imagine how much more festive Christmas would be when in place of little blinky lights we have a nationwide raging inferno of conifers.
Someone is too young to remember the Voyager spacecraft ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_spacecraft
Cat5e works for gigabit networking. Unless you are trying to go faster than that (10GBASE-T), you don't need to pay the extra for Cat6.
*House catches fire, burns down*
Boy, this wood shed sure is awesome.
While I am not the person you replied to, I believe I can help you interpret his post. Basically, he seemed to be saying that most of the iPhone apps/games/etc could be just as easily implemented in flash and stuck on a webpage somewhere. If the iPhone could run flash, then popcap (for example) would simply host its own games, keep all of its tasty revenue and Apple wouldn't get its 30%.
You teach him how to build robots, of course.
True, but they do make money off of your data. I'm pretty sure they will go to great lengths to protect their source of revenue.
Having just gotten into the beta, and played through a chunk of what you have just described, I concur. They do state that they are "disconnected" borg, but still ... its a pretty strange way to open the series. I haven't been able to finish, however, due to server disconnects. They could potentially salvage this if it were to turn out to be a holodeck simulation, though.
Get one or two beefy graphics cards in there and you will start sucking close to (if not more than) 400 watts.
Update: You can indeed still schedule events in the way I mentioned, I was just too blind to see the option. Its just that the automatic tool Palm gives you can't translate complex custom repeats like that, apparently.
You can. I upgraded from a Treo 755p to the Pre, and Palm has a little app on their website to move data over. You just run it on the pc that was the Palm desktop on it (and has your new Pre connected) and (almost) everything moves over. It wasn't able to copy over a few of my calendar events. There was a log to tell me which ones. Basically, its calendar can't handle some of the more advanced repeating options that their old one could (ie repeat every monday, tuesday, thursday from date X to date Y). I hope they fix that. I miss that functionality most...
I can't comment on Apple, but Microsoft and Sony both have only kept partial backwards compatibility in their new consoles. I am, of course, assuming this is what you are speaking of. The new PS3s actually have no PS2 backwards compatibility. The 360 has only limited backwards compatibility - basically only the popular titles from the classic XBOX lineup.
Wait ... what?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html
I believe the existence of this article kind of proves that not all people are socially-inclined either.