is it really a good idea to give a computer company (IBM is not an urban planner!) so much control over one of the world's biggest cities?
When the alternative is for it to be completely out of control, then yes, that's probably the better option.
I mean, sure, when they're disconnected and disjointed systems, one going down every couple days for extended periods, it won't gain the kind of press a single, major, centralized outage for a few hours would, but you're really far better off. Think of it as cars versus jets... People are far more afraid of the one that they're considerably safer in.
My tax dollars go to pay the commissars of the US empire to erase the evidence of their massacres from history.
Give me a break. You're basically talking about one soldier, going around with a magic marker in a library... and calling it prrof we live in a police state. If you actually believe that BS, your tin-foil hat may be on too tight.
Your entire complaint is with Wikipedia being wide open and trivially easy for any 2 year-old to corrupt, NOT with the fact that there's a handful of guys in the military not editing wikipedia in good faith. The military hasn't stormed Britannica's office and ordered embarassing incidents redacted... if they did, THAT would be an indication of a huge problem. Wikipedia being unreliable, untenable, unsustainable, and untrustworthy is entirely Wikipedia's problem.
They are? Really? Because it seems the biggest economies are the same one who enforce software patents. USA, Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. So who's laughing at us, exactly? France?
Patents in general have clearly gone off the deep end in the US, and need to be reigned back in, but IP laws in general are quite beneficial when handled properly.
Updating my resume on Dice.com got me flooded with non-natively English speaking recruiters calling and e-mailing me about every job that matches a single keyword in my resume, anywhere.
It would seem that when Indian call centers can't keep their people busy, they switch them over to being zerg rush style moron recruiters. Call center jobs might suck, but do recruiter jobs suck? Does every job where all you need is internet access and a phone, suck?
But why would you have compressed air flowing into the building's water tank?
Water doesn't flow uphill, and water towers are out of fashion. An unpressurized tank at ground level would just barely dribble out of wide-open faucets on the first floor, at best. And finally, water is non-compressible, itself, so air is used as a propellant.
A water tank typically comes with an air-filled bladder taking up most of the volume. When your well pump kicks-in, water flows into the opposite side of the bladder, compressing the air behind the bladder in the process. When the tank is nearly full, the pump shuts off, and the water is under pressure. This means you have significant water pressure, and more importantly, the well pump doesn't have to turn on to maintain pressure, every single time someone uses a tiny amount of water (otherwise it would burn out the motor in short-order).
There are also (cheaper) bladder-less tank designs, where there's no hard barrier strictly keeping the air and water separate, and those are the ones that most often need to have a compressor hooked-up to them and air added, as a routine maintenance step.
Wikipedia disagrees with you, and so does my memory of events (I was born in 1952)
Your memory? From when you were 2 years old?
The introduction of the first few nuclear subs and ICBMs didn't eliminate the need for (or use of) B-52s. The Strategic Air Command continued to keep nuclear-armed B-52s in the air around-the-clock, despite the tremendous expense. There was resistance using B-52s in the Vietnam war, because it pulled them off their primary mission of nuclear deterrence.
The Soviets were really afraid of our ICBMs and especially our balistic submarines
B-52s were the atomic bomb delivery system of choice long before either of those two. For the first couple decades, it was ALL strategic bombers. The Soviets captured and copied a few US craft just to get those capabilities themselves, back when they didn't have any.
Oh and let me tell you about how our Air Force and Army will hold up against the Chinese - they couldn't. They will just out number us with shear quanitity. Whiz bang jet fighters? Bombers? Etc?
Technology and training allows for a large disparity in kill rates. China only outnumbers the US by 4.3 to 1. Can 1 advanced fighter take out 4-5 of the Chinese's low-end junk? Most definitely. We've seen bigger disparities in previous wars.
For a quick comparison. The US has 11 active aircraft carriers. China has zero, working on one right now. That's a massive millitary advantage.
Afghanistan? Not freedom. Like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda could take our Freedom away
No, we're fighting for Afghani freedom. If we didn't care about them, we would have carpet-bombed the Taliban out of existence and left the wreckage for someone else to clean-up. Instead, the war has dragged on as we struggle in our attempts at nation-building.
we shouldn't be involved in their affairs and have no right to punish or sanction a nation for doing the same thing we do.
First of all, isolationism was tried, and failed spectacularly. The world political stability of the past half century is ample proof that isolationism is the exact wrong way to go.
As far as hypocracy, once the US turns into a theo-dictatorship, which has repeatedly threatened it's neighbors, we can talk. Besides, once they get nuclear weapons, there's no way to stop them from using them... doing things we don't do, so it sounds nice in theory, but practice is a bit different.
It's the US after all with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the only nation to have ever used them (we get sort of a pass since they were unprecedented at the time).
There aren't many large countries out there, so it just makes sense that the US would have one of the largest stockpiles. And the US' use of atomic weapons against Japan was basically unavoidable, and saved many lives on both the US and Japanese sides, not to mention likely having a large role in preventing WWIII.
. Israel claims to feel threatened and vulnerable, that they're being menaced by Iran, yet they're the ones murdering scientists and sabotaging industries of other nations.
And? Is every country that ever launched a premptive strike the guilty party? The aggressor nation? How far along does it have to be? Troops massing at the border? Missiles being launched, before it's okay to launch a defensive strike?
Your magical thinking an disconnection from reality probably make logical discussions unlikely, but at least I tried.
Since people are already using brick and mortar stores as showrooms to try before buying online, maybe that's what BB needs to embrace in order to survive. Stop holding vast inventory, trade in big stores for smaller spaces
My plan is similar... The bane of online-shoppers is shipping prices. Ship-to-store (for free) only works if you're shopping the online store of a local brick and mortar. So, we just need someone with a physical presence to open themselves up as distributors for any online stores, for a modest fee. Customer saves on shipping, online store sells more thanks to the lower price, and the middle-man gets a modest cut. Only one who loses is UPS.
Plus, there's a decent number of people for whom UPS/Fedex/USPS delivery simply doesn't work. Away at work all day without anyone to sign for packages? In a high traffic area where someone's likely to come along and steal your package? Living on some access road not on the maps, and a long distance from the nearest hub? All solved, with everyone making money.
For example, everyone knows that you have the see a cashier at a gas station if you are paying cash.
AM/PM (Arco) have kiosks at the pump or center island where you can pay with cash. In fact only cash, no credit cards accepted, and I believe a rather high debit-card fee, so it's the CC users forced to go inside. I don't think AM/PM will be going out of business soon.
You haven't really said how bad he was about it, but I generally have a hard time feeling sympathetic for these stores. They advertise their return policies as ultra liberal, no questions asked, any reason you want, etc. And salesman will happily dangle the return policies in front of anyone hesitant to buy, knowing full well that enough people simply won't go to the hassle of it. Then they pump their own extended warranties, again saying it'll let them swap it for another product down the road, again knowing most people won't bother. etc.
So, after all of that, if a few people REALLY got the message loud and clear, that weren't too busy to hassle with it, and simple worked it to their advantage (instead of the store's) I say it just serves them right. I don't condone outright abuse of it, but I'll enjoy the little bit of schadenfreud, as the hard-sell I've had to tolerate for years, backfires in incredibly predictable ways.
If there's a deer in your lane, swerving is likely a death sentence (oncoming traffic if you retain control, most people don't and end up hitting a tree, much less forgiving than a deer).
It's brain-dead obvious that you DON'T STEER INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC. However, steering onto the shoulder is quite effective, and even a procedure taught in defensive driving courses. Rear-ending the car in-front of you, rather than steering onto the shoulder, is horrendously bad driving. Advising people to just slam on their brakes and do nothing else, is a good way to guarantee you will cause a rear-end collision, as the car behind you doesn't stop quite as fast.
I thought you were someone questioning me, instead you are a "I'm better than everyone else, so I'll speak as to how it 'should be'" even if you are flat out wrong.
Bullshit. You're the one who just got finished saying: "every professional you've talked to is wrong." It's exceeding clear who's arrogant and self-righteous here...
I'm just someone who is asking you: WHY ARE YOU GIVING DRIVING ADVICE THAT FLIES IN THE FACE OF EVERY BIT OF EXPERT ADVICE, EVERY DEFENSIVE DRIVING COURSES, ETC.
Just try to find some EXPERTS that state, on the record, that drivers absolutely positively should NOT try to steer out of danger, and should always hope their brakes will save them. You know what you'll find? Damn near everyone who knows what they are talking about will say:
Generally, you are much safer stopping in a straight line than trying to "avoid" anything.
This is the exact opposite of all professional opinion I have ever heard on the subject.
It's estimated that more accidents are avoided by steering around an obstacle, rather than braking. Defensive driving teaches people to have an escape route (that they can safely steer into). There's certainly no question on the math... You can steer around an object in under a car length, while your vehicle will never stop in so short a distance.
Thanks for the link. He really didn't address anything, though... In fact he's talking in circles...
He admits that: "CSIRO made the IEEE aware of its patent, and says it was willing to license it on fair terms."
Yet he still rants on as if that discussion didn't take place, and portrays them as just another patent troll: "why did CSIRO bypass the only meaningful way to determine the best methodâ"submitting an IEEE proposal that could be voted on? Instead, CSIRO went to a US court, years after the fact"
Of course it's only been a day... maybe this is his method of _slowly_ back peddling away from his own claims, after being called on them by many.
Think back 20 years. That's 1992. That means no Facebook, no Google, no Slashdot either. You'd run Windows 3.1 or if you are amongst the geekiest of the geeks, Linux 0.1 or so. But you had to roll it on your own because there are no distributions (Slackware started in '93).
Yggdrasil was released at the very end of '92. Before that, MCC Interim Linux was around as early as '91. Slackware gets tremendous credit for staying power, but it wasn't the first distro.
In healthcare, we didn't yet have bird-flu and pandemics, AIDS was the scare of the day.
Bird-flu, no, but people were certainly aware of Pandemic disease outbreaks. The "Spanish Flu" was over a century ago, and the even old "Black Death" is still well known. And AIDS kinda underminds your argument... we aren't exactly rid of that, yet.
There's plenty that can't be predicted, in generally agree with you, but it's not as impossible to ballpark as you make it out to be.
Zblockquote> Does your company use Exchange? Is there an OWA server available so you can hook it up to a non-Outlook client? I
Evolution no longer needs OWA. There's a native MAPI connector. You need something newer than Rhel5.x though (or a hell of a lot of coding work to backport it).
If this is true then how did the IEEE committee manage to include these ideas in the 802.11 standard despite never having heard of Dr. John O'Sullivan or his patents?
They DIDN'T. There's documentation to prove IEEE knew of the CISRO patent. IIRC, they first requested free usage, and when CISRO refused, they request FRAND licensing, and when they agreed, went forward with the standard.
WiFi would have progressed along fine without him.
Yes it would have, but the IEEE found the technology they developed as compelling enough to tie themselves to required licensing on that patent. Maybe 802.11g would have been slower, less resilient to interference, etc. Whatever the case, they did use this tech, and need to license it.
, when this happens it should be considered proof that the idea does not meet obviousness criteria
Either an idea is obvious, or it isn't, it doesn't change in hindsight vs foresight. If someone spends a mil to develop something after someone else developed and patented it, too bad, that doesn't make it obvious. Besides, it would be far, far too easy to defraud the legitimate inventor, just claiming so-and-so hasn't seen the patent, but came up with the same thing.
Right now, the burden of proof for overturning a patent is too high, but throwing more rules and schemes and exceptions won't solve the problem, it'll make it worse... and even bigger mess you need more lawyers and money to avoid getting screwed-over by.
What a slimy article. The writer is doing a few dishonest thing here... First, he exaggerates the claims being made. Nobody ever claimed Austraila invented WiFi, in fact, what they said is later in TFA: . "CSIRO did not invent the concept of wireless LAN, it just invented the best way of doing it, the best way it's used now throughout the world," Furniss told the jury in 2009.
Second, he does some iirrelevant hand-waving, talking about IEEE defining the standard, talking about WiFi (802.11b presumably) existing before CSIRO's patent, asking a rep from one company if he'd heard of CISRO, etc. All this is completely irrelevant. Either the WiFi standards in question use technologies that CISRO developed and patented, or they don't. Everything else is pointless distraction from the topic at-hand.
Third, he tries to just lump them in with patent trolls... guilt by association. These other companies are making baseless claims about WiFi, and CISRO is suing over WiFi, ergo, CISRO's claims MUST be baseless as well. It's a bit like insurance companies claiming that, because there are some frivilous lawsuits against them, EVERY suit against them MUST be frivilous.
Nowhere in the article is there ANY discussion at all about the patented technologies in question, and whether CISRO's patented technology is, in-fact, integrated into the 802.11 standards. That's what matters, and that's what the author doesn't want to talk about at all.
Correct me if I am wrong, but encryption prevents caching.
You're wrong. It prevents downstream proxies from caching, but Google is perfectly capable of putting the SSL layer in-front of Varnish/Squid, and caching rather than always hit the backend.
It hardly matters, these days. So much of the web is dynamically generated that caching hasn't been very useful in a long time, for anything but images.
That "saving" would be more than offset by the lower capabilities and higher failure rates of 10-year-old hardware.
I've deployed hundreds of older, off-lease systems in a corporaate environment, and have not seen anything like you've described. Failure-rate is slightly higher than brand-new systems, but still very low. They are also cheap enough there are ready spares, clones from the same base image, that the lowliest tech is empowered to use/swap at-will.
Do you really want to trust your work, even temporarily, to a 10-year-old PC hard drive. Or use a 10mbps network card on a gigabit network if you're sharing files on a server?
HDD failure rates follow a bathtub curve, so I'd actually rather have an old HDD that passes SMART tests, than a brand-new one.
And NICs? They've ALL been 100Mbit since the mid 90s, which is plenty fast enough for all but the heaviest file-transfer uses. And it's only been a little under 10 years ago that GigE showed-up in PCs, so you might get lucky.
Or laptops (the project included converting lots of laptops) with only wireless b and crappy encryption?
You need to go read-up... WPA was a drop-in replacement for WEP, and cards much more than a decade only will only need a firmware upgrade. Besides, nothing says you have to depend on either... My company requires laptops to VPN in, even one the company's Wifi APs. It's only slightly inconvenient.
2. Xenophobe: a person who fears or hates foreigners, strange customs, etc. Yeah, that sounds about right. Sorry if you got your wordy-things wrong, but yep, that's what I meant to say.
Absolutely nothing I've said could possibly indicate fear or hate of Canadians. As I said, my statement was the absolute, positive, polar opposite of that.
1. We're absolutely not "practically one of you". That's not only a false statement, but it makes me puke in my mouth just a bit. That's just an asinine thing to even aver.
Ah, I see... That explains it. So what you're trying to express is the fact that YOU are the xenophobe, who fears and hates the US. I guess you're just upset at me for not playing along, like a racist, yelling at someone for saying we're all basically the same.
3. See all of the above if you still have any questions as to why I'm so friggin' proud I'm not an "American" like you.
Xenophobia often results from nationalistic sentiment.
Slashdot Mirror
When the alternative is for it to be completely out of control, then yes, that's probably the better option.
I mean, sure, when they're disconnected and disjointed systems, one going down every couple days for extended periods, it won't gain the kind of press a single, major, centralized outage for a few hours would, but you're really far better off. Think of it as cars versus jets... People are far more afraid of the one that they're considerably safer in.
Give me a break. You're basically talking about one soldier, going around with a magic marker in a library... and calling it prrof we live in a police state. If you actually believe that BS, your tin-foil hat may be on too tight.
Your entire complaint is with Wikipedia being wide open and trivially easy for any 2 year-old to corrupt, NOT with the fact that there's a handful of guys in the military not editing wikipedia in good faith. The military hasn't stormed Britannica's office and ordered embarassing incidents redacted... if they did, THAT would be an indication of a huge problem. Wikipedia being unreliable, untenable, unsustainable, and untrustworthy is entirely Wikipedia's problem.
They are? Really? Because it seems the biggest economies are the same one who enforce software patents. USA, Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. So who's laughing at us, exactly? France?
Patents in general have clearly gone off the deep end in the US, and need to be reigned back in, but IP laws in general are quite beneficial when handled properly.
Be careful what you wish for.
Updating my resume on Dice.com got me flooded with non-natively English speaking recruiters calling and e-mailing me about every job that matches a single keyword in my resume, anywhere.
It would seem that when Indian call centers can't keep their people busy, they switch them over to being zerg rush style moron recruiters. Call center jobs might suck, but do recruiter jobs suck? Does every job where all you need is internet access and a phone, suck?
Water doesn't flow uphill, and water towers are out of fashion. An unpressurized tank at ground level would just barely dribble out of wide-open faucets on the first floor, at best. And finally, water is non-compressible, itself, so air is used as a propellant.
A water tank typically comes with an air-filled bladder taking up most of the volume. When your well pump kicks-in, water flows into the opposite side of the bladder, compressing the air behind the bladder in the process. When the tank is nearly full, the pump shuts off, and the water is under pressure. This means you have significant water pressure, and more importantly, the well pump doesn't have to turn on to maintain pressure, every single time someone uses a tiny amount of water (otherwise it would burn out the motor in short-order).
There are also (cheaper) bladder-less tank designs, where there's no hard barrier strictly keeping the air and water separate, and those are the ones that most often need to have a compressor hooked-up to them and air added, as a routine maintenance step.
http://inspectapedia.com/water/WaterTankAir2.htm
Look-up "Hydro-pneumatic tank" if you want to know more about them. If you ever get off of city water, you'll really, really need to.
http://www.highlandtank.com/PressureVessels/Products.asp?ProdID=Hydropneumatic
Their primary mission wasn't canceled until 1991. Most were destroyed as one of the terms of the arms reduction treaties.
Cite: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42732.html
Your memory? From when you were 2 years old?
The introduction of the first few nuclear subs and ICBMs didn't eliminate the need for (or use of) B-52s. The Strategic Air Command continued to keep nuclear-armed B-52s in the air around-the-clock, despite the tremendous expense. There was resistance using B-52s in the Vietnam war, because it pulled them off their primary mission of nuclear deterrence.
B-52s were the atomic bomb delivery system of choice long before either of those two. For the first couple decades, it was ALL strategic bombers. The Soviets captured and copied a few US craft just to get those capabilities themselves, back when they didn't have any.
Technology and training allows for a large disparity in kill rates. China only outnumbers the US by 4.3 to 1. Can 1 advanced fighter take out 4-5 of the Chinese's low-end junk? Most definitely. We've seen bigger disparities in previous wars.
For a quick comparison. The US has 11 active aircraft carriers. China has zero, working on one right now. That's a massive millitary advantage.
No, we're fighting for Afghani freedom. If we didn't care about them, we would have carpet-bombed the Taliban out of existence and left the wreckage for someone else to clean-up. Instead, the war has dragged on as we struggle in our attempts at nation-building.
First of all, isolationism was tried, and failed spectacularly. The world political stability of the past half century is ample proof that isolationism is the exact wrong way to go.
As far as hypocracy, once the US turns into a theo-dictatorship, which has repeatedly threatened it's neighbors, we can talk. Besides, once they get nuclear weapons, there's no way to stop them from using them... doing things we don't do, so it sounds nice in theory, but practice is a bit different.
There aren't many large countries out there, so it just makes sense that the US would have one of the largest stockpiles. And the US' use of atomic weapons against Japan was basically unavoidable, and saved many lives on both the US and Japanese sides, not to mention likely having a large role in preventing WWIII.
And? Is every country that ever launched a premptive strike the guilty party? The aggressor nation? How far along does it have to be? Troops massing at the border? Missiles being launched, before it's okay to launch a defensive strike?
Your magical thinking an disconnection from reality probably make logical discussions unlikely, but at least I tried.
My plan is similar... The bane of online-shoppers is shipping prices. Ship-to-store (for free) only works if you're shopping the online store of a local brick and mortar. So, we just need someone with a physical presence to open themselves up as distributors for any online stores, for a modest fee. Customer saves on shipping, online store sells more thanks to the lower price, and the middle-man gets a modest cut. Only one who loses is UPS.
Plus, there's a decent number of people for whom UPS/Fedex/USPS delivery simply doesn't work. Away at work all day without anyone to sign for packages? In a high traffic area where someone's likely to come along and steal your package? Living on some access road not on the maps, and a long distance from the nearest hub? All solved, with everyone making money.
AM/PM (Arco) have kiosks at the pump or center island where you can pay with cash. In fact only cash, no credit cards accepted, and I believe a rather high debit-card fee, so it's the CC users forced to go inside. I don't think AM/PM will be going out of business soon.
You haven't really said how bad he was about it, but I generally have a hard time feeling sympathetic for these stores. They advertise their return policies as ultra liberal, no questions asked, any reason you want, etc. And salesman will happily dangle the return policies in front of anyone hesitant to buy, knowing full well that enough people simply won't go to the hassle of it. Then they pump their own extended warranties, again saying it'll let them swap it for another product down the road, again knowing most people won't bother. etc.
So, after all of that, if a few people REALLY got the message loud and clear, that weren't too busy to hassle with it, and simple worked it to their advantage (instead of the store's) I say it just serves them right. I don't condone outright abuse of it, but I'll enjoy the little bit of schadenfreud, as the hard-sell I've had to tolerate for years, backfires in incredibly predictable ways.
Once again, you've got absolutely no sources or statistics to back this nonsense up. Thank you and goodbye.
It's brain-dead obvious that you DON'T STEER INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC. However, steering onto the shoulder is quite effective, and even a procedure taught in defensive driving courses. Rear-ending the car in-front of you, rather than steering onto the shoulder, is horrendously bad driving. Advising people to just slam on their brakes and do nothing else, is a good way to guarantee you will cause a rear-end collision, as the car behind you doesn't stop quite as fast.
Bullshit. You're the one who just got finished saying: "every professional you've talked to is wrong." It's exceeding clear who's arrogant and self-righteous here...
I'm just someone who is asking you: WHY ARE YOU GIVING DRIVING ADVICE THAT FLIES IN THE FACE OF EVERY BIT OF EXPERT ADVICE, EVERY DEFENSIVE DRIVING COURSES, ETC.
Just try to find some EXPERTS that state, on the record, that drivers absolutely positively should NOT try to steer out of danger, and should always hope their brakes will save them. You know what you'll find? Damn near everyone who knows what they are talking about will say:
"Steer clear of hazards while keeping your foot firmly on the brake pedal."
http://www.safetyserve.com/ax/default.aspx?id=34
All your ranting bad advice seems to boil down to either you not knowing how to drive, or knowing someone else who screwed up badly.
This is the exact opposite of all professional opinion I have ever heard on the subject.
It's estimated that more accidents are avoided by steering around an obstacle, rather than braking. Defensive driving teaches people to have an escape route (that they can safely steer into). There's certainly no question on the math... You can steer around an object in under a car length, while your vehicle will never stop in so short a distance.
Thanks for the link. He really didn't address anything, though... In
fact he's talking in circles...
He admits that: "CSIRO made the IEEE aware of its patent, and says it was willing to license it on fair terms."
Yet he still rants on as if that discussion didn't take place, and portrays them as just another patent troll: "why did CSIRO bypass the only meaningful way to determine the best methodâ"submitting an IEEE proposal that could be voted on? Instead, CSIRO went to a US court, years after the fact"
Of course it's only been a day... maybe this is his method of _slowly_ back peddling away from his own claims, after being called on them by many.
Yggdrasil was released at the very end of '92. Before that, MCC Interim Linux was around as early as '91. Slackware gets tremendous credit for staying power, but it wasn't the first distro.
Bird-flu, no, but people were certainly aware of
Pandemic disease outbreaks. The "Spanish Flu" was over a century ago, and the even old "Black Death" is still well known. And AIDS kinda underminds your argument... we aren't exactly rid of that, yet.
There's plenty that can't be predicted, in generally agree with you, but it's not as impossible to ballpark as you make it out to be.
Zblockquote> Does your company use Exchange? Is there an OWA server available so you can hook it up to a non-Outlook client? I
Evolution no longer needs OWA. There's a native MAPI connector. You need something newer than Rhel5.x though (or a hell of a lot of coding work to backport it).
They DIDN'T. There's documentation to prove IEEE knew of the CISRO patent. IIRC, they first requested free usage, and when CISRO refused, they request FRAND licensing, and when they agreed, went forward with the standard.
Yes it would have, but the IEEE found the technology they developed as compelling enough to tie themselves to required licensing on that patent. Maybe 802.11g would have been slower, less resilient to interference, etc. Whatever the case, they did use this tech, and need to license it.
Either an idea is obvious, or it isn't, it doesn't change in hindsight vs foresight. If someone spends a mil to develop something after someone else developed and patented it, too bad, that doesn't make it obvious. Besides, it would be far, far too easy to defraud the legitimate inventor, just claiming so-and-so hasn't seen the patent, but came up with the same thing.
Right now, the burden of proof for overturning a patent is too high, but throwing more rules and schemes and exceptions won't solve the problem, it'll make it worse... and even bigger mess you need more lawyers and money to avoid getting screwed-over by.
What a slimy article. The writer is doing a few dishonest thing here... First, he exaggerates the claims being made. Nobody ever claimed Austraila invented WiFi, in fact, what they said is later in TFA: . "CSIRO did not invent the concept of wireless LAN, it just invented the best way of doing it, the best way it's used now throughout the world," Furniss told the jury in 2009.
Second, he does some iirrelevant hand-waving, talking about IEEE defining the standard, talking about WiFi (802.11b presumably) existing before CSIRO's patent, asking a rep from one company if he'd heard of CISRO, etc. All this is completely irrelevant. Either the WiFi standards in question use technologies that CISRO developed and patented, or they don't. Everything else is pointless distraction from the topic at-hand.
Third, he tries to just lump them in with patent trolls... guilt by association. These other companies are making baseless claims about WiFi, and CISRO is suing over WiFi, ergo, CISRO's claims MUST be baseless as well. It's a bit like insurance companies claiming that, because there are some frivilous lawsuits against them, EVERY suit against them MUST be frivilous.
Nowhere in the article is there ANY discussion at all about the patented technologies in question, and whether CISRO's patented technology is, in-fact, integrated into the 802.11 standards. That's what matters, and that's what the author doesn't want to talk about at all.
My slow-ass 5900 RPM W.D. "Green" drive can do 140MB/s as well, and seeks are orders of magnitude faster than any kind of tape.
It's not hard to architect... The more spindles you've got, the better.
Yes, but they may have gone from 1TB to 3TB by adding 3x as many platters... not increasing density at all.
You're wrong. It prevents downstream proxies from caching, but Google is perfectly capable of putting the SSL layer in-front of Varnish/Squid, and caching rather than always hit the backend.
It hardly matters, these days. So much of the web is dynamically generated that caching hasn't been very useful in a long time, for anything but images.
I've deployed hundreds of older, off-lease systems in a corporaate environment, and have not seen anything like you've described. Failure-rate is slightly higher than brand-new systems, but still very low. They are also cheap enough there are ready spares, clones from the same base image, that the lowliest tech is empowered to use/swap at-will.
HDD failure rates follow a bathtub curve, so I'd actually rather have an old HDD that passes SMART tests, than a brand-new one.
And NICs? They've ALL been 100Mbit since the mid 90s, which is plenty fast enough for all but the heaviest file-transfer uses. And it's only been a little under 10 years ago that GigE showed-up in PCs, so you might get lucky.
You need to go read-up... WPA was a drop-in replacement for WEP, and cards much more than a decade only will only need a firmware upgrade. Besides, nothing says you have to depend on either... My company requires laptops to VPN in, even one the company's Wifi APs. It's only slightly inconvenient.
Absolutely nothing I've said could possibly indicate fear or hate of Canadians. As I said, my statement was the absolute, positive, polar opposite of that.
Ah, I see... That explains it. So what you're trying to express is the fact that YOU are the xenophobe, who fears and hates the US. I guess you're just upset at me for not playing along, like a racist, yelling at someone for saying we're all basically the same.
Xenophobia often results from nationalistic sentiment.