I entered college with over 100 AP credits. I never dared take 20+ hours of classes though. I can't believe they even let him take over 30 hours in one semester.
My entire first year was a waste, mainly a review of the last few years of high school. After that, an 18-20 hour load kept me pretty busy. I had a little social life but no job, so not much to do besides studying and games.:)
You're right. The distance has almost nothing to do with my reasons.
If there were a crosswalk at the intersection I need to cross at, I would have no problem walking the two miles to the bus stop. As it is, I have walked across that street twice and have no intention of ever doing so again. The next intersection, a mile away (and therefore another mile back), also does not have a crosswalk but is not nearly as dangerous. The city is about as bicycle friendly as it is pedestrian friendly: not at all.
However, the main reason I gave was due to timing. To be able to take the bus, I would have to find someone who could take my son before 6am and take him to school at 8. I don't even want to speculate on how many extra jobs I would need to work to be able to pay for that kind of service. Why would I want to leave home at 5:50 (assuming I drive to the bus stop) instead of 7:15 just to same a few dollars in gas and arrive at work at the same time? The cost of the bus ride would eat up half of what I save, leaving me with wasting 85 minutes to save one dollar, before you add the cost of whoever takes my kid to school. It's not worth it.
I guess I partially missed your point. However, until the extra, faster bus routes become available, people in my position will not be able to switch to the bus, and until enough people switch to the bus, they won't start new routes. It's a catch-22.
Sure, some people will switch. Those for whom it is a viable option even if a minor inconvenience. For many people though, it will not be a viable option at all until new and faster routes exist, until park & ride lots are closer, and until cities improve on pedestrian friendliness.
Gas prices are going to have to really climb, probably by a few thousand percent, before I could see any economic benefit to selling my current home and buying one closer to work for about three times the price (if I get lucky, and if any bank would approve that large a loan for me). When I moved out here five years ago, the house I bought was among the closest to work that I could afford, and it's still a 25 minute drive on an average day.
I've already got a smaller car. I would like to get one of the hybrids, but I just can't afford them yet.
In the meantime, as you say, I've still "gotta get to work."
I've tried taking the bus. It turns my 25 minute drive into a 70 minute bus ride. I still have to drive 2 miles to reach the bus stop, mainly because I have to cross a 6-lane road that has no pedestrian conveniences such as a crosswalk at the nearest intersections (walking to the nearest crosswalk would make the trip a 4 mmile walk). I have two choies of bus routes, and both are about equivalent in inconvenience, only a few minutes difference in travel time.
I hate driving in traffic. I would love to take the bus. However, I just can't do it with the current options. One major reason is that I have to pick up one of my children from after school care by 6:00pm. To do that, I would have to take the 4:25 bus from work, which is a little difficult when I get off at 5:00. Of course, I could start work earlier, which means I would have to catch the first bus of the day at 6:00, which is a little difficult since my son's school bus doesn't arrive until 7:25 and the school won't allow children to be dropped off until 8:00. I could enroll him in the before school care, too, but that doesn't start until 7:00, which still is insufficient for catching the 6:00 bus.
So, as much as I hate driving during rush hour (if you can call creeping at 15 mph driving), I still prefer it over riding the bus with the options I currently have.
The city here puts a lot of effort into showing how much effort they are putting into public transportation. They don't seem to put much effort into making it at all convenient for people to use.
My concern isn't for reliability so much as longevity. I want something that is going to stick around. After college graduation, then a ISP buyout less than two years later, and having to notify everyone I knew each time about a change in email address, I bough my own domain and setup my own mail server on my linux box at home. Reliability may be a tad bit lower than my ISP (probably not from what I hear) and probably is lower than the majors such as google, hotmail, yahoo, etc. But, unless I really screw up, I'll never have to notify people about another email address change again, even when changing physical addresses.
Continuing to live in a city represents an agreement that you will abide by that city's laws.
Involuntary annexation puts a big crimp in that argument. I never made any such agreement with the city I now live in. The city came and made that agreement against the will of almost everyone in my neighborhood. Most of us can't afford to pack up and buy another house womewhere else even if we wanted to. The only "agreement" here is that we understand what the city will do if we try to exercise some of the rights we lost when we were annexed.
The "content industry" would like to have an implied ongoing agreement that you will do nothing at all with "their" content unless you get permission.
Wow. That sure sounds like what we experienced with the city's involuntary annexation. Suddenly, our rights are less than they were. It wasn't easy to make a copy of a vinyl record, but I could record it playing onto a cassette tape so I could listen to it in my car. I could do the same with CDs before I got a CD player for my car. I could even copy my tapes so I wouldn't have to risk the originals melting in the summer (it's happened a few times). Now, they're trying to prevent us from ripping a CD to MP3s for my MP3 player. They're trying to prevent any form of backup or conversion because it could be dstributed en masse, irregardless of whether I ever intend to do so or not. I'm still wondering when exactly we agreed to this change.
I like logo. You can get graphical results with a simple program. It is easy to see how minor logic changes make huge differences in the results. And for the first few dozen exercises, the assignments can be to draw specific pictures. Starting with simple shapes (square, rectangle), moving to harder ones (triangle), then even harder (circle, oval, arc). Then, more complex designs (a triangle on a square, a circle inside a square, etc.). A christmas tree is good for an introduction of subroutines. Then you can start drawing graphs based on static data, then based on calculated data. But the best thing is the results are immediate, obvious, and simple to understand. Plus, watching the turtle racing around the screen is good for quite a bit of entertainment before you start geting bored of it.
With all that said, I first started off by entering in hex data from an Apple magazine (Byte?), later progressing to writing my own programs in AppleSoft Basic before I ever heard of Logo. I've dabbled with Pascal, Fortran, C, and Java. Of course, now most of my "programming" is shell and perl scripts with an occasional DOS batch script.
For learning how to program (the logic and though, not the syntax), I like Logo best for the reasons above. I also like Pascal for the strict structuring (good to learn even though a pain in the rear).
I'm impressed! I did attempt something like that at the time. Unfortunately, I could only figure out how to do it between linux boxes, and most of my friends had only windows, so my solution didn't work for the group. I'll have to keep this in minde for other games, though!
Dang! When bnetd went down, I figured something like that would appear, but I was never able to find it then and haven't even looked for a few years now. Thanks for the info!
I ran a bnetd server at home, so my friends and I could play. Battlenet was useless. When using battlenet, we would spend an hour or more trying to login, and then not be able to see each other even though we were all in the same private chat room and all on the same server. When we could see each other, often starting a game would fail. When we actually managed to play a game, we would usually lose our battlenet connecting during the game, so after the game ended we had to start the whole painful process over again. When I ran my bnetd server, we could all get on quickly and never had trouble seeing each other or starting games. We went from playing one or two games in an evening to four or five games, sometimes even more depending on if the next day was a workday or not. When Blizzard shut bnetd down, we quit playing Starcraft on a regular basis, and switched to Age of Empires. Now we occasionally will play a game or two of Startcraft, and find the battlenet servers to be decent. I figure that is probably because people have moved on to other games so battlenet isn't as overloaded as it used to be.
2) Technology: Make it more difficult to EXECUTE acts of terrorism. Facial recognition, bomb detection, etc... are all important tools in combatting terrorists (disclaimer: It is definitely important to balance privacy and security, that's not what this post is about). By increasing the costs of subverting the technological barriers to terrorism, we can eliminate a HIGH percentage of potential terrorists. Most terrorists lack the money or the smarts needed to subvert technological solutions. Not all, but the goal here isn't total elmination but simply thinning the herd of potential terrorists.
This is the part that I haven't figured out. Why do they keep attacking planes? Wouldn't it be smarter to attack the technology? Blow up all the security stations; by the time they detect the bomb, that's the same time it blows up. With the crowds waiting to get through the security stations, you'd probably injure quite a few people, too.
If that happens often enough, it won't be long before you can't find anyone willing to work anywhere near the checkpoint. And it would have the added benefit of completely shutting the airport down for a significant time (how long does it take to cleanup the mess and install a new security station?).
The technology is only good for preventing passage of material through the checkpoint. It won't do any good if the material is destined to end there.
I am not advocating doing this! I am just curious why all the focus is on the plane itself. I would be more scared to stand in the line at the security station than I am of getting on a plane.
I can't think of any solution to that, though. After all, are you going to add a security check to process people so they can go stand in line at the next security check?
Make the information available to everyone, with maybe a small charge to deter massive overuse. Also, associate with each license plate number a list of people who searched specifically for that plate. So, not only can anyone track me, but I can also see who is tracking me. Of course, this would require some form of ID-verified account creation.
Maybe even include an option to opt-out of (or opt-in to) tracking. If you opt out of being tracked, you can't track anyone else. If you want to track someone else, you have to opt in for at least a day before and cannot opt out for at least a week after. The more often you track someone else, then longer the waiting period would become.
General info about what is in an area (like car models, colors, state of origin, etc) could be viewed in aggregate by anyone, but searches for specific plates would require an account.
Only then would I be comfortable with this. The way things are now, only the government (and probably a few of the more wealthy people who are interested) has access to this info. Ideally, even the police would only have access when pursuing a specific crime. But, if companies are going to be able to get access for marketing, then everyone should have access.
Even though TV tells you that cell phone triangulation is a common practice, it's not. Triangulating on a cell phone call requires police, on foot, with three antennas, to find the right signal and take a measurement, from there they sit down with a map and work it out. This isn't built into the phone system, and its certainly not automatic.
Triangulation is difficult, as you describe. However, I have visited my local police communications center, and I can verify that they DO get the information about which cell tower your call goes through when you place a 911 call. Yeah, that only narrows it to a circle with about a six mile radius.
It may not be as automatic if the police are tracking your phone around, but the technology is there. The cellular company should be able to identify the tower you're near if your phone is on, even if you're not using it right then. Over time, tracking your movement by cell tower, they should be able to get a decent idea of what road you're on.
But, the people in the stores won't have access to that, and the regular customer support people won't have access to that. Some cellular companies are even providing phone tracking on the web as an extra-charge service for your kids' phones.
Put a few merchants in each town to buy all the farmable resources (metals, herbs, hides, etc.) and sell for a set price (sell for a little more than they will buy for). People without money can still go farming, and can even earn a little money for it, but not enough to make it a full-time job. People with money can buy it for reasonable prices.
Maybe even have the prices fluctuate slightly with supply/demand. If demand is high, there obviously aren't enought farmers, so the merchant will pay a little more. If demand is low, the prices will drop and the farmers won't find it worth their time if they're only doing it to earn money.
Then adjust the respawn rates and number of farmable resources to allow the supply to at least be able to satify demand (assuming resources are being continuously farmed.
This alone would probably have kept me from tiring of the game. Having spent time building up skill in mining, it was really frustrating that I had to do other things to earch gold and buy metals from the auction house because beating the farmers to the ores was just about impossible.
When I couldn't get on (maintenance, crash, full), I couldn't switch to single player. Come on folks; how hard would it be to have a single player setting (or better yet a limited multiplayer server for a local LAN!) for those long times when the servers are down?
Lots of well-documented bugs that never got fixed
Even a 2nd grader understands "honor" better than Blizzard does.
I have since figured out that I would rather play a multiplayer (4-10 people) game than a MMORPG. The server tends to be more stable, the players more consistent, and the cost a LOT less. Even when I played Wow, I seldom got the feeling of the supposed millions of people who were playing, except when I walked into one of the major towns. Other than in town, I doubt I ever saw more than a dozen people at any one time, anyway, so what's the difference?
Who would you give the pass-phrase to? If you give it to the person/company you hand the application to, then it's no different than the current system; it's just one more piece of data for them to collect.
On the other hand, if you want it to be secure, you have to have a centralized organization to process requests. You would submit the application normally, wait for it to be processed. If approved, they would send you a code string. You would then call/web/text the code string and your ID and secret pass-phrase to the processing organization to approve it.
So, who would that centralized organization be? The Social Seecurity Association? Considering they already have a database of just about everyone who is legally in the country, I suppose that would make sense. Then we really could use our SSN as an identifier, yet not have to worry about identity theft*.
* Unless you write your secret pass phrase down, or send it over an unencrypted connection, or fall for phishing, etc.
They won't be out any money. The farmers will have to buy a new copy of the game to get a new serial number. So, the regular monthly subscriptions will still be there, plus 5000 new $50 serials will be sold. Sounds like even more profit.
So, they are cancelling accounts using an excuse that many people will consider legitimate, causing the cancelled players to buy new accounts. How much is the farmer's profit compared to the cost of the new account?
If I were getting the money from the sale of new serial numbers, I'd keep banning the farmers every chance I had, too.:)
Yeah, because heatsinks coming unlatched all by themselves and falling off has been shown to be a common occurence.
It happened to my wife's computer. The case is behind her desk, so I'm pretty sure nobody was picking it up and dropping it. One day it started spontaneously turning off after only a few minutes of use. After a little frustration at not even being able to complete any diagnostics on my CD, I finally pulled the desk out and opened the case up. I found the heatsick hanging from one peg, and the strength of the spring arm caused the heatsink to be held away from the CPU. It turned out that the lower peg (a stub of plastic poking out of the base of the CPU socket) had broken off. Repairing that was a pain; those heatsick spring arms are strong! I finally epoxied the arm to the base and weighted it down with a screwdriver wedged under a board with 6 bricks on top. The next day, it was working as good as ever.
It does relate. It's just a matter of terminology. Whetever they call it, I am effectively renting a bus seat or parking space for my use until I relinqish it or the rental term ends (service on that route ends; parking lot closes).
Using the same scenario you discussed, but changing the object...
What if I were the first to think of paving my yard and selling tickets to park on it? Would I have been able to patent that idea? No! If my neighbor were to do the same because he saw how lucrative it was, would I have any right to prevent it? No!
Unfortunately, that is no longer true. Can you imagine where we'd be if one person had a patent on parking lots? 5 years of patent pending, 14 years of patent, 14 years of renewal (I think I have that right). 33 years where one person could control where a lot could be built in the whole country. 33 years where one person could demand just about any amount of royalty.
And that's not just for one type of lot, that's for any parking lot of any design whatsoever, for the idea of "parking lot".
Going back to DVD rentals, why should netflix have a monopoly on "DVD rental by mail using the web"? That's an idea, not an object. The DVD is patentable. The movie is copyrightable. The envelope design is patentable. The artwork is copyrightable. The logos and name are trademarkable. But the concept of renting DVDs by mail should not be protected.
How about all those book-of-the-month subscriptions? Isn't that basically the same thing, except you get the pre-selected book of the month? Many of those now have an online presence allowing you to select a different book. I've even recently received an ad for a CD subscription service that lets you build a queue of albums which they will ship 1 per month for a flat monthly fee. None of these are rentals, but the overall concept is the same.
One final comment.... Eckerd and Walgreens seem to quickly follow each other around. When one is built on a street corner, the other usually appears on the opposite corner within months. The same seems true for Lowes and Home Depot. If they have ever sued to prevent it, they obviously failed.
They provide similar services. It's called competition. They are not producing anything. Like those examples, Netflix and Blockbuster are providing similar services, competing against each other. The producers get to patent the design of what they produce. The service providers just provide services.
Netflix may have been the first to offer "all you want for a single monthly fee" for DVDs, but they aren't the first to have an "all you want for a single monthly fee" offer. Check out the local bus line at any large city. Check out downtown parking lots at any large city.
Come to think of it, almost any restaurant or fast food store offers "all you can drink until you leave for a single fee". Many sports teams offer a season pass, which is "all the local games you can attend this season for a single fee".
How does applying this concept to DVD rentals make it unique?
The library system in Wake County, North Carolina has an online catalog where I can create a list of books I want to read or select some and request those be transferred to a specified branch to be picked up at my convenience. I can keep them for three weeks, and even renew the "rental" online for at least two more periods. So far, I have found no limit where they tell me I can't chek out any more books. (My wife grabbed 20 books for our kids one time; I never figured out why.)
Except for the cost (free vs. 17.95/month), duration (3 weeks + another optional 3-6 weeks vs. unlimited), quantity (20+ vs at most 3), and delivery (to local branch vs my mailbox), it has a lot of similarities to Netflix's methods.
I don't think I've ever kept a DVD 3 weeks. If I can't manage to watch a 2 hour movie in 3 weeks, I obviously am not too interested in it and might as well return it for something else I am interested in.
A colleague at work who lives in Durham County has a large selection of movies on DVD and VHS available at her library.
It sure sounds like both of these library systems are potentially infringing on Netflix's patents...
Slashdot Mirror
My entire first year was a waste, mainly a review of the last few years of high school. After that, an 18-20 hour load kept me pretty busy. I had a little social life but no job, so not much to do besides studying and games. :)
If there were a crosswalk at the intersection I need to cross at, I would have no problem walking the two miles to the bus stop. As it is, I have walked across that street twice and have no intention of ever doing so again. The next intersection, a mile away (and therefore another mile back), also does not have a crosswalk but is not nearly as dangerous. The city is about as bicycle friendly as it is pedestrian friendly: not at all.
However, the main reason I gave was due to timing. To be able to take the bus, I would have to find someone who could take my son before 6am and take him to school at 8. I don't even want to speculate on how many extra jobs I would need to work to be able to pay for that kind of service. Why would I want to leave home at 5:50 (assuming I drive to the bus stop) instead of 7:15 just to same a few dollars in gas and arrive at work at the same time? The cost of the bus ride would eat up half of what I save, leaving me with wasting 85 minutes to save one dollar, before you add the cost of whoever takes my kid to school. It's not worth it.
Sure, some people will switch. Those for whom it is a viable option even if a minor inconvenience. For many people though, it will not be a viable option at all until new and faster routes exist, until park & ride lots are closer, and until cities improve on pedestrian friendliness.
I've already got a smaller car. I would like to get one of the hybrids, but I just can't afford them yet.
In the meantime, as you say, I've still "gotta get to work."
I hate driving in traffic. I would love to take the bus. However, I just can't do it with the current options. One major reason is that I have to pick up one of my children from after school care by 6:00pm. To do that, I would have to take the 4:25 bus from work, which is a little difficult when I get off at 5:00. Of course, I could start work earlier, which means I would have to catch the first bus of the day at 6:00, which is a little difficult since my son's school bus doesn't arrive until 7:25 and the school won't allow children to be dropped off until 8:00. I could enroll him in the before school care, too, but that doesn't start until 7:00, which still is insufficient for catching the 6:00 bus.
So, as much as I hate driving during rush hour (if you can call creeping at 15 mph driving), I still prefer it over riding the bus with the options I currently have.
The city here puts a lot of effort into showing how much effort they are putting into public transportation. They don't seem to put much effort into making it at all convenient for people to use.
My concern isn't for reliability so much as longevity. I want something that is going to stick around. After college graduation, then a ISP buyout less than two years later, and having to notify everyone I knew each time about a change in email address, I bough my own domain and setup my own mail server on my linux box at home. Reliability may be a tad bit lower than my ISP (probably not from what I hear) and probably is lower than the majors such as google, hotmail, yahoo, etc. But, unless I really screw up, I'll never have to notify people about another email address change again, even when changing physical addresses.
Why? I'd much rather watch them on DVD so I don't have to mess with skipping commercials. Don't all the Firefly fans already have it on DVD?
Involuntary annexation puts a big crimp in that argument. I never made any such agreement with the city I now live in. The city came and made that agreement against the will of almost everyone in my neighborhood. Most of us can't afford to pack up and buy another house womewhere else even if we wanted to. The only "agreement" here is that we understand what the city will do if we try to exercise some of the rights we lost when we were annexed.
The "content industry" would like to have an implied ongoing agreement that you will do nothing at all with "their" content unless you get permission.
Wow. That sure sounds like what we experienced with the city's involuntary annexation. Suddenly, our rights are less than they were. It wasn't easy to make a copy of a vinyl record, but I could record it playing onto a cassette tape so I could listen to it in my car. I could do the same with CDs before I got a CD player for my car. I could even copy my tapes so I wouldn't have to risk the originals melting in the summer (it's happened a few times). Now, they're trying to prevent us from ripping a CD to MP3s for my MP3 player. They're trying to prevent any form of backup or conversion because it could be dstributed en masse, irregardless of whether I ever intend to do so or not. I'm still wondering when exactly we agreed to this change.
With all that said, I first started off by entering in hex data from an Apple magazine (Byte?), later progressing to writing my own programs in AppleSoft Basic before I ever heard of Logo. I've dabbled with Pascal, Fortran, C, and Java. Of course, now most of my "programming" is shell and perl scripts with an occasional DOS batch script.
For learning how to program (the logic and though, not the syntax), I like Logo best for the reasons above. I also like Pascal for the strict structuring (good to learn even though a pain in the rear).
I'm impressed! I did attempt something like that at the time. Unfortunately, I could only figure out how to do it between linux boxes, and most of my friends had only windows, so my solution didn't work for the group. I'll have to keep this in minde for other games, though!
Dang! When bnetd went down, I figured something like that would appear, but I was never able to find it then and haven't even looked for a few years now. Thanks for the info!
I ran a bnetd server at home, so my friends and I could play. Battlenet was useless. When using battlenet, we would spend an hour or more trying to login, and then not be able to see each other even though we were all in the same private chat room and all on the same server. When we could see each other, often starting a game would fail. When we actually managed to play a game, we would usually lose our battlenet connecting during the game, so after the game ended we had to start the whole painful process over again. When I ran my bnetd server, we could all get on quickly and never had trouble seeing each other or starting games. We went from playing one or two games in an evening to four or five games, sometimes even more depending on if the next day was a workday or not. When Blizzard shut bnetd down, we quit playing Starcraft on a regular basis, and switched to Age of Empires. Now we occasionally will play a game or two of Startcraft, and find the battlenet servers to be decent. I figure that is probably because people have moved on to other games so battlenet isn't as overloaded as it used to be.
This is the part that I haven't figured out. Why do they keep attacking planes? Wouldn't it be smarter to attack the technology? Blow up all the security stations; by the time they detect the bomb, that's the same time it blows up. With the crowds waiting to get through the security stations, you'd probably injure quite a few people, too.
If that happens often enough, it won't be long before you can't find anyone willing to work anywhere near the checkpoint. And it would have the added benefit of completely shutting the airport down for a significant time (how long does it take to cleanup the mess and install a new security station?).
The technology is only good for preventing passage of material through the checkpoint. It won't do any good if the material is destined to end there.
I am not advocating doing this! I am just curious why all the focus is on the plane itself. I would be more scared to stand in the line at the security station than I am of getting on a plane.
I can't think of any solution to that, though. After all, are you going to add a security check to process people so they can go stand in line at the next security check?
As long as it doesn't try to give me something that is "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"...
Maybe even include an option to opt-out of (or opt-in to) tracking. If you opt out of being tracked, you can't track anyone else. If you want to track someone else, you have to opt in for at least a day before and cannot opt out for at least a week after. The more often you track someone else, then longer the waiting period would become.
General info about what is in an area (like car models, colors, state of origin, etc) could be viewed in aggregate by anyone, but searches for specific plates would require an account.
Only then would I be comfortable with this. The way things are now, only the government (and probably a few of the more wealthy people who are interested) has access to this info. Ideally, even the police would only have access when pursuing a specific crime. But, if companies are going to be able to get access for marketing, then everyone should have access.
Triangulation is difficult, as you describe. However, I have visited my local police communications center, and I can verify that they DO get the information about which cell tower your call goes through when you place a 911 call. Yeah, that only narrows it to a circle with about a six mile radius.
It may not be as automatic if the police are tracking your phone around, but the technology is there. The cellular company should be able to identify the tower you're near if your phone is on, even if you're not using it right then. Over time, tracking your movement by cell tower, they should be able to get a decent idea of what road you're on.
But, the people in the stores won't have access to that, and the regular customer support people won't have access to that. Some cellular companies are even providing phone tracking on the web as an extra-charge service for your kids' phones.
Maybe even have the prices fluctuate slightly with supply/demand. If demand is high, there obviously aren't enought farmers, so the merchant will pay a little more. If demand is low, the prices will drop and the farmers won't find it worth their time if they're only doing it to earn money.
Then adjust the respawn rates and number of farmable resources to allow the supply to at least be able to satify demand (assuming resources are being continuously farmed.
This alone would probably have kept me from tiring of the game. Having spent time building up skill in mining, it was really frustrating that I had to do other things to earch gold and buy metals from the auction house because beating the farmers to the ores was just about impossible.
I have since figured out that I would rather play a multiplayer (4-10 people) game than a MMORPG. The server tends to be more stable, the players more consistent, and the cost a LOT less. Even when I played Wow, I seldom got the feeling of the supposed millions of people who were playing, except when I walked into one of the major towns. Other than in town, I doubt I ever saw more than a dozen people at any one time, anyway, so what's the difference?
On the other hand, if you want it to be secure, you have to have a centralized organization to process requests. You would submit the application normally, wait for it to be processed. If approved, they would send you a code string. You would then call/web/text the code string and your ID and secret pass-phrase to the processing organization to approve it.
So, who would that centralized organization be? The Social Seecurity Association? Considering they already have a database of just about everyone who is legally in the country, I suppose that would make sense. Then we really could use our SSN as an identifier, yet not have to worry about identity theft*.
* Unless you write your secret pass phrase down, or send it over an unencrypted connection, or fall for phishing, etc.
So, they are cancelling accounts using an excuse that many people will consider legitimate, causing the cancelled players to buy new accounts. How much is the farmer's profit compared to the cost of the new account?
If I were getting the money from the sale of new serial numbers, I'd keep banning the farmers every chance I had, too. :)
It happened to my wife's computer. The case is behind her desk, so I'm pretty sure nobody was picking it up and dropping it. One day it started spontaneously turning off after only a few minutes of use. After a little frustration at not even being able to complete any diagnostics on my CD, I finally pulled the desk out and opened the case up. I found the heatsick hanging from one peg, and the strength of the spring arm caused the heatsink to be held away from the CPU. It turned out that the lower peg (a stub of plastic poking out of the base of the CPU socket) had broken off. Repairing that was a pain; those heatsick spring arms are strong! I finally epoxied the arm to the base and weighted it down with a screwdriver wedged under a board with 6 bricks on top. The next day, it was working as good as ever.
From TFA: "Every computer that runs on x86 chip architecture may be vulnerable to this attack"
Using the same scenario you discussed, but changing the object...
What if I were the first to think of paving my yard and selling tickets to park on it? Would I have been able to patent that idea? No! If my neighbor were to do the same because he saw how lucrative it was, would I have any right to prevent it? No!
Unfortunately, that is no longer true. Can you imagine where we'd be if one person had a patent on parking lots? 5 years of patent pending, 14 years of patent, 14 years of renewal (I think I have that right). 33 years where one person could control where a lot could be built in the whole country. 33 years where one person could demand just about any amount of royalty.
And that's not just for one type of lot, that's for any parking lot of any design whatsoever, for the idea of "parking lot".
Going back to DVD rentals, why should netflix have a monopoly on "DVD rental by mail using the web"? That's an idea, not an object. The DVD is patentable. The movie is copyrightable. The envelope design is patentable. The artwork is copyrightable. The logos and name are trademarkable. But the concept of renting DVDs by mail should not be protected.
How about all those book-of-the-month subscriptions? Isn't that basically the same thing, except you get the pre-selected book of the month? Many of those now have an online presence allowing you to select a different book. I've even recently received an ad for a CD subscription service that lets you build a queue of albums which they will ship 1 per month for a flat monthly fee. None of these are rentals, but the overall concept is the same.
One final comment.... Eckerd and Walgreens seem to quickly follow each other around. When one is built on a street corner, the other usually appears on the opposite corner within months. The same seems true for Lowes and Home Depot. If they have ever sued to prevent it, they obviously failed.
They provide similar services. It's called competition. They are not producing anything. Like those examples, Netflix and Blockbuster are providing similar services, competing against each other. The producers get to patent the design of what they produce. The service providers just provide services.
Come to think of it, almost any restaurant or fast food store offers "all you can drink until you leave for a single fee". Many sports teams offer a season pass, which is "all the local games you can attend this season for a single fee".
How does applying this concept to DVD rentals make it unique?
Except for the cost (free vs. 17.95/month), duration (3 weeks + another optional 3-6 weeks vs. unlimited), quantity (20+ vs at most 3), and delivery (to local branch vs my mailbox), it has a lot of similarities to Netflix's methods.
I don't think I've ever kept a DVD 3 weeks. If I can't manage to watch a 2 hour movie in 3 weeks, I obviously am not too interested in it and might as well return it for something else I am interested in.
A colleague at work who lives in Durham County has a large selection of movies on DVD and VHS available at her library.
It sure sounds like both of these library systems are potentially infringing on Netflix's patents...