I think that the question is being raised because that case was settled out of court, so there was no decision from the case that resolved the GPL's enforceability. Nonetheless, I'm sure that the MySQL case will come up if IBM and SCO ever get to court.
Can somebody tell me exactly where bluetooth's niche is?
Extremely low power requirements when compared to 802.11. Just the thing for battery powered devices, which, coincidentally, is where Bluetooth is employed.
I have yet to see a Bluetooth device anywhere for sale, or in use by anyone I know. Everyone mentions cellphones, but um.. I thought they already WERE wireless devices. I guess whatever features BT adds don't ring my bell. I've played with 802.11 on iPaqs, but have yet to see a PDA with BT on it, which is about the only use I can think for this stuff. Sorry, wireless mice and keyboards are a hassle to use IMHO - batteries, the extra cost, etc - and it's not like a wired keyboard that never moves makes one bit of difference to me.
All of the Palm Tungstens except the E have Bluetooth. The top of the line Zire might, too, but I'm not sure about that. I have a T2 and synchronize over Bluetooth. AvantGo works in real time and I can send and receive email. Web browsing kind of sucks on a 320x320 screen, but it works. I bought a Belkin USB adapter for $35, both Windows XP and Linux recognize it just fine.
A significant feature that Bluetooth adds for portable devices is that it uses significantly less power than 802.11.
From a corporate perspective, BT keyboards and mice are great. They untether the keyboard and mouse from the computer and allow the presenter to be somewhere other than right next to the computer - an excellent thing if the presentation computer is in a locked cabinet, but the presenter is in the middle of the room. I happen to like the reduction in cable clutter. Yes, the batteries wear out, I go through four about every two to three weeks. But my desk has no cables. That's important to me. But, like you didn't say, that's just my opinion.
Of the people that I've talked to, those who have used BT really like it, those who haven't either have no opinion or don't think it's worth it. Draw your own conclusion from that. -h-
... I would disagree that the bias in this case is going to be small because it seems to me that my prison analogy IS correct. Specifically, the population that is willing to be monitored and/or answer honestly about their possession of pirated music is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY differen than the population as a whole, specifically those that share music.
Perhaps we will have to agree to disagree. You are making an assumption about the behavior of how people would answer a survey without having any data to support that assumption, other than, I suppose, your own reaction to how you would participate.
Now as to your analogy, again, I must point out that it is still flawed. You are using the results of your sample of prison inmates to apply to the population at large. The problem is that your sample only applies to the population of prison inmates. In other words, you can draw some conclusions about the number of murderers being held in prison, but you cannot extrapolate that to the number of murderers that are in the population outside of prisons.
Likewise, NPD cannot use the results of their sample of 5000 online PC users and draw conclusions about the behavior of the general population that are not online or that do not use PCs. In other words, in your analogy, a requirement to be a member of the population is to be incarcerated. To be a member of the sample, the requirement is to be incarcerated at a given prison under study. To be a "positive" in the sample, you must be incarcerated at the prison under study and you must be a murderer.
In NPD's study, the population is that of online PC users. The sample is a group of 5000 online PC users participating in a panel. A "positive" is one of the group of 5000 in the panel who deleted all of his or her music files.
I can't begin to count the number of studies that have shown the significant reduction or elimination of bias in large samples, even in studies that researched participation in illegal activities. There are virtually no studies, however, that hold that significant bias does occur in large samples. An example is that of focus groups. They are widely used as statistical predictors of any number of things. One could argue that those focus groups are really testing the behavior of people who are apt to participate in focus groups. But, time and time again, research has shown that a properly crafted study will return accurate results. Believe me, I know, because, to twist a phrase, it is my job to know. But you don't have to take my word for it, you can Google around a bit for yourself, or better yet, take a course on statistics and ask the question there.
Finally, it's important to realize that the numbers that are being tossed around in NPD's press release are incomplete. Yes, the claim is that 1.4 million households deleted all of their music files. What is not stated is the total number of households that had music files to begin with! A million is a big number, but without having an idea of what the population size is, we have no way of determining just how significant that number is.
Though you may be right about statistics, the article isn't implying statistics are used. If they were, NPD could _estimate_ that 1.4 million households are deleting their files. Instead, it replies with a certainty which some of us find suspicious.
The problem with the article is that it is a summary of a press release, not a summary of the actual study. Unfortunately, since we aren't in the position of being able to purchase the study from NPD, the next best thing is to realize that NPD is a company that performs statistical analysis of marketing research. Also, since the press release provides a hint at the methodology used to collect the sample data, it is quite safe to conclude that they used statistical analysis methods to obtain their data.
True, but as others have said, I seriously doubt the population of people that willingly and honestly allow an outside organization to monitor the files they have or delete is representative of the overall filesharing population. It's kind of like going into a prison and asking how many people have comitted murder and then extrapolating that to the general non-prison population. Your results are going to be grossly skewed to the point of not being useful.
It's nothing like the analogy that you describe. The surveyors did not ask the questions of the filesharing population, then extrapolate the results to the non-filesharing population, as your analogy would suggest. Your analogy would be correct if you went into a single maximum security prison, found out how many convicted murderers there were, then applied that data to the prison population of all maximum security prisons. And it would be a legitimate method of determining the percentage of murderers (within a certain confidence interval) in maximum security prisons.
The question that you raise has been raised for decades - how can you be sure that the sample that you are testing is only representative of the population that is willing to answer questions? Well, obviously, that sample is representative of the question answering population, but when the sample is large enough (and 5000 is certainly a large sample), it is also representative of the population whose behavior is being examined. Yes, there is some bias, but if the sample is large enough then that bias is small. This isn't anything new...the issue gets raised every time a controversial poll result is released, but the answer has been known for years.
Given that the company has been doing statistical research since 1967, I suspect that they are well aware of the potential biases that can be introduced into a statistical survey.
Having taken several undergraduate and graduate level statistics classes, I'm familiar with those biases. Generally speaking, with a large sample (and 5000 is a large sample), the bias is small.
I understand your analogy, although it's not such a good one...the penetration of telephone service into US households is nearly 100%. The question that comes up very often in statistics courses is how do you account for the problem that when you are taking a survey, you can only get answers from people who are willing to give them? In other words, aren't your results only applicable to those who are willing to answer questions from a survey taker? The answer to that question was discovered years ago - there is virtually no bias introduced into a sufficiently large sample.
The same situation should apply in this case. Also, bear in mind that what we know about the results of this survey are from a press release. The actual results are only available for purchase, and would include a detailed description of the survey methodology, as well as the margin of error for the survey.
There are a lot of misconceptions about surveys and statistics in general. The science is much more accurate than people are willing to accept - the whole "lies, damn lies and statistics" quote gets much play from people who either do not or will not understand how statistics works.
40,000 volunteers....yet the press release title says "Millions of households". And then, the survey itself was fielded by only 5,000 respondents.
I may be a little behind the bell curve here, but how does that add up then to "millions" of households. I can understand maybe millions of files deleted...but I checked and rechecked the release and it plainly states "More than a million households deleted all the digital music files they had saved on their PCs in August".
Through the miracle of statistics, it's possible (within a certain margin of error) to extrapolate information on the behavior of a large group of people by analyzing the behavior of a small (but representative) group of people. Thus, if you know how many households are involved in music sharing, you can apply the results of your sample to the population at large and get a very good idea of how that population will behave.
Or is NPD MusicWatch Digital just a puppet of the RIAA? Spreading around a little FUD and dis-information...kinda like the inflated enemy body counts of Vietnam.
A recent study by Arctic researchers showed that the polar ice cap isn't just shrinking in terms of land mass [bbc.co.uk], it's shrinking in terms of depth too [bbc.co.uk], by 4cm a year.
All that water's going somewhere, and that somewhere is the oceans. Global sea levels are rising, and you only have to look at the situation in Tuvalu in the Pacific [bbc.co.uk] or Venice, Italy [veniceinperil.org] to see that the threat of rising tides isn't a myth.
"Arctic researchers", "polar ice cap". Pretty clear to me. Oh, and I think that somebody already mentioned that Venice's major problem is subsidence, not rising ocean levels.
As others have pointed out much better than I have, only part of the ice is floating in the seas and supported by displacement, much of the rest of it is supported by land. Where this is the case, there's no equivalent volume of water that's being replaced by an equivalent volume of melted ice.
You're kidding me, right? How much of the Arctic ice cap is supported by land? You do know the difference between north and south, right?
Incidentally, others pointed out much better than you because you didn't point out anything of the kind! And you're still wrong because the volume of the ice doesn't matter. It's the MASS!
Ice is less dense than water. So, an ice cube melting in a glass of water will cause the level of water to rise. If you don't believe me then try it.
The ice cube displaces an amount of water equal to its mass. Its volume is completely irrelevant. If you drop an ice cube into a glass of water, it will displace an amount of water equal to its mass. When the ice melts, it still displaces an amount of water equal to its mass. Nothing has changed. A gram of ice displaces as much water as a gram of water. The water level cannot change unless the mass of the ice changes when it melts...and while its density certainly changes, its mass most definitely does not!
After reading the patent, the claims that are made don't appear to support updating or installing software over the Internet. They do seem to support maintaining a database of system settings that can be updated at a given workstation by a technician, then accessed by the same, or different technician, in order to account for existing user settings and to maintain a list of installed hardware and software so that when a software installation is performed, the technician can rely on this database to make sure that the software is installed to the user's satisfaction. It really seems to me that all that is really claimed is a way to utilize a remote database to maintain records of a particular computer's software and hardware configuration. The things that we write down on paper are now contained in a database. The critical part of the patent appears to be that the database is relational, maintained at a different location from the computer under examination and is accessed via the Internet.
There aren't any claims about installing software or software updates. Perhaps a case could be made that an online software installation/update system that copies a computer's configuration from the computer to a remote system via the Internet could be infringing, but as far as I can tell software installers/updaters simply send an installer program that examines what's on the computer, then requests the appropriate files from the remote server. And it seems to me that that's how it should be done, anyway.
Nonetheless, this still does not seem like anything particularly novel. The idea of maintaining a database of settings is certainly nothing new. Making that database accessible over the Internet doesn't seem like a particularly significant improvement. In fact, what is (critically) missing is automation. The claims that are made in the patent specifically call for the intervention of a technician in the process, to interpret the settings reported from the remote database. Regardless of the novelty of the idea, it doesn't seem to be as broadly applicable as the title of the/. summary makes it appear. I'm sure that the company can try to sue to enforce the patent against others delivering software updates over the Internet, but the claims that the patent makes (at least the novel claims) are so narrow that I don't think that they will enjoy too much success.
And it seems that if anybody wants to look at an existing system that might infringe, Red Hat's RHN system may be just the thing. But I think that it's been around since well before 2002.
Mostly abysmal argument (China did not spent billions on invading Tibet, and to say the US has accomplished everything China has is stupid -- what about the history and culture? You can't just buy that with your dollars).
Well, even though you didn't have the courage to reply with your name, I'll answer your complaint.
You're right, China didn't spend billions invading Tibet. That's because Tibet couldn't fight back. My point was not that China spent billions to invade (incidentally, the US did not spend billions to invade Iraq - the billions are to rebuild the country after the previous regime raped its infrastructure), but that China invaded a country that posed no threat to it, other than being a vocal critic of its form of government.
I did not say that the US accomplished everything that China has accomplished...I said that it has overcome the things that China has not been able to overcome - a totalitarian regime that does not represent the desires of its people.
History and culture come with time. If being a young nation is something to be critical about, then there are plenty of countries to pick on. Given that the US is a country of immigrants, an excellent case can be made that our history and culture goes back to the middle ages of Europe. While that's not several thousand years of Chinese history and culture, I'll also point out that Mao Tse-Tung's government did its damndest to wipe out China's history and culture. Really, you don't think that the Cultural Revolution was about getting back to their historical roots, do you?
The document that I linked to does indeed show reported crimes. I agree, it makes third world countries look outrageously safe. But if you consider the reports from developed countries, you'll find that those statistics are quite accurate. And, after all, the comments that I made and responded to were about crime in the developed world.
The point is that the parent post stated that "at least China is better than America", a patently ludicrous statement, given that the arguments backing it up are, for the most part, wrong.
God Bless America, with the worst crime levels in the first world
Except for Sweden, New Zealand and Denmark. In fact, the US has about an average per capita crime rate as the rest of the world, according to the UN
God Bless America, where "democracy" means a rich, white male as President
Who serves by the will of the population, is limited in the length of term and whose powers are tempered by two other branches of government. A president who transfers power peacefully, something that has been done every four or eight years for over two hundred years. Incidentally, America is a democratic republic. When did China have its last free presidential election?
God Bless America, the biggest consumer of the world's natural resources
Actually, the "problem" is a first world issue, not an American issue. Per capita, America is not a leader. Look to Japan.
God Bless America, so happy to violate international laws
Riiiiiight. Let's see. America violated international law by...uh...hmmm. By...hmm. Oh, you mean by invading Iraq? The one that appears to be authorized by UN Resolution 1441? Hmmm...
God Bless America, where "freedom of speech" means race-hate groups like KKK
Yes, and the ACLU and the Sierra Club and the NAACP and Greenpeace and any other organization that criticizes the government. Freedom of speech is not freedom to act. You clearly do not understand what freedom of speech means. To limit one organization's speech because you do not agree with it is to open the door to limit anyone to make the same claim about any organization. Of course, China doesn't have that problem. When you disallow freedom of speech, you only have to worry about the hate groups that keep quiet.
God Bless America, and its massive and ever-growing poverty gap
America's poverty rate in 2000 was the lowest in 26 years. It has only slightly increased, from 8.7% to 9.2%. Recently, NPR reported that instead of people spending vast periods of time in poverty, they tend to move out of poverty in a period of a few years, but others, due to a variety of reasons, move into poverty, again, generally, to move out in a few years. This, of course, is in contrast to China's poverty rate...11.2% in urban areas, darn near 100% in rural areas.
God Bless America, with barely 300 years of dire history and culture
The world's oldest, continously functioning representative democracy. America has managed to overcome, in less than 300 years what China, with over a thousand years of history has not.
God Bless America, all its appalling "sitcoms" with no grasp of irony
OK, I guess I can accept this as a strike against America...
God Bless America, with the highest obesity levels in the developed world
One of the pitfalls of freedom of choice is that one is free to make personal choices that are bad for you.
God Bless America, because corporations should be allowed to run amok
Actually, corporations are not allowed to do that. A tiny bit of research will show you that in the end, they do get caught.
God Bless America, wasting billions to attack foreign countries
Like Tibet? Like Nepal?
God Bless America, and thank God I don't have to live there.
And the final difference between the US and China? In the US, nobody has to live here!
I read the article and it doesn't sound at all like Google is considering merging with Microsoft. It sounds to me more like Microsoft wants Google to merge with it. And it doesn't sound like Google is interested.
How could they do that, really? Aren't the ships made of materials that don't exist ('yet')?
Oh, they exist, all right. It's just that the secret agreement with the aliens say that the government can't release any information about them until the human race reaches a more enlightened state. Their mind scanning brainwave detectors will tell them when we have matured enough to take advantage of their largesse.
It's kind of interesting, as trivia goes, but what of it? Given that the large amount of lawn clippings, leaves and such that I put into my composter ends up as a much smaller mass, I'm not surprised that some massive amount of vegetation was required to end up with a gallon of gas.
"Staggering"? Not really. Most of what used to be a plant was water. And if, as the article says, only 1/10750th of the carbon from the plan makes it to become oil, the rest served as fertilizer (to help other plants grow and become oil (and more fertilizer)).
If the idea is to point out that gasoline engines are inefficient, well, duh! If the idea is to point out that oil is an unsustainable energy source, well, duh! If the idea is to point out that we need to develop new energy technologies, well, duh! But "98 tons of plants per gallon" is kind of a red herring. Plants die, the water evaporates, the plant mass decomposes and serves as fertilizer and a little bit, over a long period of time, ends up as oil. As a system, it's somewhat inappropriate to pick out a single element the way that the author of this paper did. Yes, it did take quite a large amount of plant material to make a gallon of gas, but if more of the plant material turned into oil, then less would have been available to enrich the soil and provide for the growth of new plants. The numbers are interesting, but they only tell part of the story.
Oh, and to add to the conclusion of the article, the author left out nuclear power from "other technologies".
Now, the thing I find curious is that since this is a patent infringement case, typically it can be settled by signing a license with the patent holder and paying a royalty going forward *plus* some sort of settlement for past infringement. The settlement is usually proportional to the economic harm experienced by the patent holder as a result of the infringement plus a little vig. So, why this case got this far is beyond me.
The case was not a patent infringement case, it was simply a case of X10 not paying their bill to a couple of guys who provided the pop-under service. Nobody has a patent on pop-under ads.
The award was for the amount of money that X10 owed for services rendered. The punative phase was to determine if an additional award was appropriate because after X10 stiffed the brothers, they apparently began providing their own pop-under service.
But not only is the SCO share price rising, but there are a lot of shares being traded too. The markets back SCO at the moment and not us.
It doesn't really matter, though, because the markets don't decide legal issues. Sure, SCO stock prices are going up...some people are going to make a lot of money, some people are going to lose a lot of money. But the market valuation of a company is not evidence that a court of law will consider in deciding the outcome of a lawsuit.
SCO prices could be sinking like a rock and some people would make a lot of money and some people would lose a lot of money. And yet, it still wouldn't mean a thing to SCO's case against IBM, SGI and the rest of the world.
Even though SCO's prices are rising, the sort of turmoil that the company is embroiled in is more of a draw for speculators than investors. If there is a lot of share volume, then I suspect that we're seeing quick in and outs, taking advantage of fast rising prices. I doubt that the buyers of this stock are in it because they believe that SCO has a case - they're probably in it because the price is moving...and by getting in and out quickly, the increase in price will be self sustaining for a while. But it won't last.
There are many people here who are pointing out that this was a nonpayment/contractual violation issue, rather than a patent issue. Read more of the articles, and you'll find that it was both.
Patents? Patents? They got no stinkin' patents...they don't have to show you no stinkin' patents!
Nobody had patents on anything. Those "many people" are exactly right. A business model does not a patent make.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently many of them have taken their cars to Canyon County in Idaho. Or maybe it's the other way around. Same effect though.
-h-
And do you think that Joe Sixpack even knows what
-h-
Extremely low power requirements when compared to 802.11. Just the thing for battery powered devices, which, coincidentally, is where Bluetooth is employed.
-h-
All of the Palm Tungstens except the E have Bluetooth. The top of the line Zire might, too, but I'm not sure about that. I have a T2 and synchronize over Bluetooth. AvantGo works in real time and I can send and receive email. Web browsing kind of sucks on a 320x320 screen, but it works. I bought a Belkin USB adapter for $35, both Windows XP and Linux recognize it just fine.
A significant feature that Bluetooth adds for portable devices is that it uses significantly less power than 802.11.
From a corporate perspective, BT keyboards and mice are great. They untether the keyboard and mouse from the computer and allow the presenter to be somewhere other than right next to the computer - an excellent thing if the presentation computer is in a locked cabinet, but the presenter is in the middle of the room. I happen to like the reduction in cable clutter. Yes, the batteries wear out, I go through four about every two to three weeks. But my desk has no cables. That's important to me. But, like you didn't say, that's just my opinion.
Of the people that I've talked to, those who have used BT really like it, those who haven't either have no opinion or don't think it's worth it. Draw your own conclusion from that.
-h-
Perhaps we will have to agree to disagree. You are making an assumption about the behavior of how people would answer a survey without having any data to support that assumption, other than, I suppose, your own reaction to how you would participate.
Now as to your analogy, again, I must point out that it is still flawed. You are using the results of your sample of prison inmates to apply to the population at large. The problem is that your sample only applies to the population of prison inmates. In other words, you can draw some conclusions about the number of murderers being held in prison, but you cannot extrapolate that to the number of murderers that are in the population outside of prisons.
Likewise, NPD cannot use the results of their sample of 5000 online PC users and draw conclusions about the behavior of the general population that are not online or that do not use PCs. In other words, in your analogy, a requirement to be a member of the population is to be incarcerated. To be a member of the sample, the requirement is to be incarcerated at a given prison under study. To be a "positive" in the sample, you must be incarcerated at the prison under study and you must be a murderer.
In NPD's study, the population is that of online PC users. The sample is a group of 5000 online PC users participating in a panel. A "positive" is one of the group of 5000 in the panel who deleted all of his or her music files.
I can't begin to count the number of studies that have shown the significant reduction or elimination of bias in large samples, even in studies that researched participation in illegal activities. There are virtually no studies, however, that hold that significant bias does occur in large samples. An example is that of focus groups. They are widely used as statistical predictors of any number of things. One could argue that those focus groups are really testing the behavior of people who are apt to participate in focus groups. But, time and time again, research has shown that a properly crafted study will return accurate results. Believe me, I know, because, to twist a phrase, it is my job to know. But you don't have to take my word for it, you can Google around a bit for yourself, or better yet, take a course on statistics and ask the question there.
Finally, it's important to realize that the numbers that are being tossed around in NPD's press release are incomplete. Yes, the claim is that 1.4 million households deleted all of their music files. What is not stated is the total number of households that had music files to begin with! A million is a big number, but without having an idea of what the population size is, we have no way of determining just how significant that number is.
-h-
The problem with the article is that it is a summary of a press release, not a summary of the actual study. Unfortunately, since we aren't in the position of being able to purchase the study from NPD, the next best thing is to realize that NPD is a company that performs statistical analysis of marketing research. Also, since the press release provides a hint at the methodology used to collect the sample data, it is quite safe to conclude that they used statistical analysis methods to obtain their data.
I refer you to this link.
-h-
It's nothing like the analogy that you describe. The surveyors did not ask the questions of the filesharing population, then extrapolate the results to the non-filesharing population, as your analogy would suggest. Your analogy would be correct if you went into a single maximum security prison, found out how many convicted murderers there were, then applied that data to the prison population of all maximum security prisons. And it would be a legitimate method of determining the percentage of murderers (within a certain confidence interval) in maximum security prisons.
The question that you raise has been raised for decades - how can you be sure that the sample that you are testing is only representative of the population that is willing to answer questions? Well, obviously, that sample is representative of the question answering population, but when the sample is large enough (and 5000 is certainly a large sample), it is also representative of the population whose behavior is being examined. Yes, there is some bias, but if the sample is large enough then that bias is small. This isn't anything new...the issue gets raised every time a controversial poll result is released, but the answer has been known for years.
-h-
Having taken several undergraduate and graduate level statistics classes, I'm familiar with those biases. Generally speaking, with a large sample (and 5000 is a large sample), the bias is small.
I understand your analogy, although it's not such a good one...the penetration of telephone service into US households is nearly 100%. The question that comes up very often in statistics courses is how do you account for the problem that when you are taking a survey, you can only get answers from people who are willing to give them? In other words, aren't your results only applicable to those who are willing to answer questions from a survey taker? The answer to that question was discovered years ago - there is virtually no bias introduced into a sufficiently large sample.
The same situation should apply in this case. Also, bear in mind that what we know about the results of this survey are from a press release. The actual results are only available for purchase, and would include a detailed description of the survey methodology, as well as the margin of error for the survey.
There are a lot of misconceptions about surveys and statistics in general. The science is much more accurate than people are willing to accept - the whole "lies, damn lies and statistics" quote gets much play from people who either do not or will not understand how statistics works.
-h-
I may be a little behind the bell curve here, but how does that add up then to "millions" of households. I can understand maybe millions of files deleted...but I checked and rechecked the release and it plainly states "More than a million households deleted all the digital music files they had saved on their PCs in August".
Through the miracle of statistics, it's possible (within a certain margin of error) to extrapolate information on the behavior of a large group of people by analyzing the behavior of a small (but representative) group of people. Thus, if you know how many households are involved in music sharing, you can apply the results of your sample to the population at large and get a very good idea of how that population will behave.
Or is NPD MusicWatch Digital just a puppet of the RIAA? Spreading around a little FUD and dis-information...kinda like the inflated enemy body counts of Vietnam.
It's just statistics, not a conspiracy!
-h-
Look at the parent post that started all of this:
A recent study by Arctic researchers showed that the polar ice cap isn't just shrinking in terms of land mass [bbc.co.uk], it's shrinking in terms of depth too [bbc.co.uk], by 4cm a year.
All that water's going somewhere, and that somewhere is the oceans. Global sea levels are rising, and you only have to look at the situation in Tuvalu in the Pacific [bbc.co.uk] or Venice, Italy [veniceinperil.org] to see that the threat of rising tides isn't a myth.
"Arctic researchers", "polar ice cap". Pretty clear to me. Oh, and I think that somebody already mentioned that Venice's major problem is subsidence, not rising ocean levels.
-h-
You're kidding me, right? How much of the Arctic ice cap is supported by land? You do know the difference between north and south, right?
Incidentally, others pointed out much better than you because you didn't point out anything of the kind! And you're still wrong because the volume of the ice doesn't matter. It's the MASS!
-h-
The ice cube displaces an amount of water equal to its mass. Its volume is completely irrelevant. If you drop an ice cube into a glass of water, it will displace an amount of water equal to its mass. When the ice melts, it still displaces an amount of water equal to its mass. Nothing has changed. A gram of ice displaces as much water as a gram of water. The water level cannot change unless the mass of the ice changes when it melts...and while its density certainly changes, its mass most definitely does not!
-h-
Oh, I don't know...maybe because of due process ?
-h-
There aren't any claims about installing software or software updates. Perhaps a case could be made that an online software installation/update system that copies a computer's configuration from the computer to a remote system via the Internet could be infringing, but as far as I can tell software installers/updaters simply send an installer program that examines what's on the computer, then requests the appropriate files from the remote server. And it seems to me that that's how it should be done, anyway.
Nonetheless, this still does not seem like anything particularly novel. The idea of maintaining a database of settings is certainly nothing new. Making that database accessible over the Internet doesn't seem like a particularly significant improvement. In fact, what is (critically) missing is automation. The claims that are made in the patent specifically call for the intervention of a technician in the process, to interpret the settings reported from the remote database. Regardless of the novelty of the idea, it doesn't seem to be as broadly applicable as the title of the
And it seems that if anybody wants to look at an existing system that might infringe, Red Hat's RHN system may be just the thing. But I think that it's been around since well before 2002.
-h-
Well, even though you didn't have the courage to reply with your name, I'll answer your complaint.
You're right, China didn't spend billions invading Tibet. That's because Tibet couldn't fight back. My point was not that China spent billions to invade (incidentally, the US did not spend billions to invade Iraq - the billions are to rebuild the country after the previous regime raped its infrastructure), but that China invaded a country that posed no threat to it, other than being a vocal critic of its form of government.
I did not say that the US accomplished everything that China has accomplished...I said that it has overcome the things that China has not been able to overcome - a totalitarian regime that does not represent the desires of its people.
History and culture come with time. If being a young nation is something to be critical about, then there are plenty of countries to pick on. Given that the US is a country of immigrants, an excellent case can be made that our history and culture goes back to the middle ages of Europe. While that's not several thousand years of Chinese history and culture, I'll also point out that Mao Tse-Tung's government did its damndest to wipe out China's history and culture. Really, you don't think that the Cultural Revolution was about getting back to their historical roots, do you?
The document that I linked to does indeed show reported crimes. I agree, it makes third world countries look outrageously safe. But if you consider the reports from developed countries, you'll find that those statistics are quite accurate. And, after all, the comments that I made and responded to were about crime in the developed world.
The point is that the parent post stated that "at least China is better than America", a patently ludicrous statement, given that the arguments backing it up are, for the most part, wrong.
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God Bless America, with the worst crime levels in the first world
Except for Sweden, New Zealand and Denmark. In fact, the US has about an average per capita crime rate as the rest of the world, according to the UN
God Bless America, where "democracy" means a rich, white male as President
Who serves by the will of the population, is limited in the length of term and whose powers are tempered by two other branches of government. A president who transfers power peacefully, something that has been done every four or eight years for over two hundred years. Incidentally, America is a democratic republic. When did China have its last free presidential election?
God Bless America, the biggest consumer of the world's natural resources
Actually, the "problem" is a first world issue, not an American issue. Per capita, America is not a leader. Look to Japan.
God Bless America, so happy to violate international laws
Riiiiiight. Let's see. America violated international law by...uh...hmmm. By...hmm. Oh, you mean by invading Iraq? The one that appears to be authorized by UN Resolution 1441? Hmmm...
God Bless America, where "freedom of speech" means race-hate groups like KKK
Yes, and the ACLU and the Sierra Club and the NAACP and Greenpeace and any other organization that criticizes the government. Freedom of speech is not freedom to act. You clearly do not understand what freedom of speech means. To limit one organization's speech because you do not agree with it is to open the door to limit anyone to make the same claim about any organization. Of course, China doesn't have that problem. When you disallow freedom of speech, you only have to worry about the hate groups that keep quiet.
God Bless America, and its massive and ever-growing poverty gap
America's poverty rate in 2000 was the lowest in 26 years. It has only slightly increased, from 8.7% to 9.2%. Recently, NPR reported that instead of people spending vast periods of time in poverty, they tend to move out of poverty in a period of a few years, but others, due to a variety of reasons, move into poverty, again, generally, to move out in a few years. This, of course, is in contrast to China's poverty rate...11.2% in urban areas, darn near 100% in rural areas.
God Bless America, with barely 300 years of dire history and culture
The world's oldest, continously functioning representative democracy. America has managed to overcome, in less than 300 years what China, with over a thousand years of history has not.
God Bless America, all its appalling "sitcoms" with no grasp of irony
OK, I guess I can accept this as a strike against America...
God Bless America, with the highest obesity levels in the developed world
One of the pitfalls of freedom of choice is that one is free to make personal choices that are bad for you.
God Bless America, because corporations should be allowed to run amok
Actually, corporations are not allowed to do that. A tiny bit of research will show you that in the end, they do get caught.
God Bless America, wasting billions to attack foreign countries
Like Tibet? Like Nepal?
God Bless America, and thank God I don't have to live there.
And the final difference between the US and China? In the US, nobody has to live here!
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Then you haven't seen this!
Oh, they exist, all right. It's just that the secret agreement with the aliens say that the government can't release any information about them until the human race reaches a more enlightened state. Their mind scanning brainwave detectors will tell them when we have matured enough to take advantage of their largesse.
No, really! It's true! I heard it on Art Bell!
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"Staggering"? Not really. Most of what used to be a plant was water. And if, as the article says, only 1/10750th of the carbon from the plan makes it to become oil, the rest served as fertilizer (to help other plants grow and become oil (and more fertilizer)).
If the idea is to point out that gasoline engines are inefficient, well, duh! If the idea is to point out that oil is an unsustainable energy source, well, duh! If the idea is to point out that we need to develop new energy technologies, well, duh! But "98 tons of plants per gallon" is kind of a red herring. Plants die, the water evaporates, the plant mass decomposes and serves as fertilizer and a little bit, over a long period of time, ends up as oil. As a system, it's somewhat inappropriate to pick out a single element the way that the author of this paper did. Yes, it did take quite a large amount of plant material to make a gallon of gas, but if more of the plant material turned into oil, then less would have been available to enrich the soil and provide for the growth of new plants. The numbers are interesting, but they only tell part of the story.
Oh, and to add to the conclusion of the article, the author left out nuclear power from "other technologies".
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Yeah, nobody tell General Motors about this or they might invent OnStar.
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The case was not a patent infringement case, it was simply a case of X10 not paying their bill to a couple of guys who provided the pop-under service. Nobody has a patent on pop-under ads.
The award was for the amount of money that X10 owed for services rendered. The punative phase was to determine if an additional award was appropriate because after X10 stiffed the brothers, they apparently began providing their own pop-under service.
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It doesn't really matter, though, because the markets don't decide legal issues. Sure, SCO stock prices are going up...some people are going to make a lot of money, some people are going to lose a lot of money. But the market valuation of a company is not evidence that a court of law will consider in deciding the outcome of a lawsuit.
SCO prices could be sinking like a rock and some people would make a lot of money and some people would lose a lot of money. And yet, it still wouldn't mean a thing to SCO's case against IBM, SGI and the rest of the world.
Even though SCO's prices are rising, the sort of turmoil that the company is embroiled in is more of a draw for speculators than investors. If there is a lot of share volume, then I suspect that we're seeing quick in and outs, taking advantage of fast rising prices. I doubt that the buyers of this stock are in it because they believe that SCO has a case - they're probably in it because the price is moving...and by getting in and out quickly, the increase in price will be self sustaining for a while. But it won't last.
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Patents? Patents? They got no stinkin' patents...they don't have to show you no stinkin' patents!
Nobody had patents on anything. Those "many people" are exactly right. A business model does not a patent make.
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