Is it cheaper to develop a flying humvee than it is to fly an extra 95 miles?
Is it cheaper to build flying humvees than it is to fly an extra 95 miles?
Wait - hold on a second - I thought the war was winding down and the plan was to slowly pull out... Over the next decade.... Supposedly... Why is the US military spending money on innovative war machines when they are already on top?
No no no, he financed the development of this a little over a decade ago. He filed for these about a decade ago and they were only actually issued about 5 years ago - Now, why he waited 5 years to sue is beyond me, but that seems to be the growing trend nowadays. Wait until the most profitable organizations are using it and then sue them for infringement and make a bit of profit.
Is he trolling? Well, kind of, yes. But its not like he bought up these patents and are now suing anyone he wants, he actually did have invested interest in these and they were actually developed. He's playing favourites of course, he co-founded Microsoft.
I don't think he is trolling anymore than he is just 'playing the game'. I mean how many times have Nokia and Apple gone toe to toe with infringement?
Helicopters don't need to be driven on the ground - BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY - and nor could any flying vehicle be operated by 18 year old combat infantry.
So really, is the cost in fuel savings for being able to temporarily drive on the ground, or temporarily lift off, really worth the money being dumped into the engineering, design and production of this vehicle, not to mention the increased target profile... Is it really worth it when we have vehicles that already fit this niche pretty well? You need to avoid the ground, go by air. We have air. You're going to need a qualified flight operator whether you only need to fly 50m or 5000m, so its not like you're saving on personel training by implementing this.
Not really. To make real money out of selling clothes you need factories, workers, distribution channels, preferably your own retail outlets etc. You also need reputation which is why selling other people's designs under your own brand is not very profitable.
Also not true. There are many outlets in my city of over a million people that make plenty of money for the proprieter when she is the only one who produces, sells, and distributes her clothes, with nothing but the "retail outlet" that is basically a house which is decorated.
Making one or two copies of a clothing item is not the issue here. As Pirate Bay shows you can easily make millions selling advertising while providing other people's content (oh ok, links to other people's content). There is a big difference between copying physical items like in the fashion industry and copying bits.
But why? It's just an arrangement of bits, just like an arrangement of cloth. I don't see how you are arriving at any of these conclusions.
But how do you look at the bottom right part of a hud then? You'd need some serious training in peripheral vision or trained to look in various directions with a relaxed eye, which is not as easy as it seems.
Well, if we're talking about game reviews, I think a safe assumption is that if it's glowingly positive, it's fake.
Hold your horses there cowboy. Now I don't disagree that game reviews are flooded with terribly positive reviews but there is no reason to assume that because a review is positive that it's faked.
Because every odd once in a while, a good game WILL be released and it goes from glowingly positive to explosively positive. I think Portal is one of the more recent/popular ones, so it makes a great example. Now, how many positive reviews have you read for that game? Well if you're anything like me, you heard the positive reviews before the game even came out, which would normally be a great indicator that its about to flop. Most games get that sufficient build up that it ends up a bit disappointing in the end. (Halo ODST, we're looking at you).
Now, there's no real "trick" to figuring out if a game review is fake or not. After all, some people are paid to write good reviews and some people are so inexperienced in gaming that they haven't actually played a good game. It'll make me sound like an old geezer to preach about classics so we'll steer clear of that.* But in all honesty, there are basically 2 types of reviews that come out. Type A is the kind you find on a tech site that basically works it as an advertising campaign for the game, by basically spewing everything thats on the box onto a web page and telling you to read it. Tybe B is a critique of the game, sometimes finding the most insurmountable details to nit pick on just to keep their cred as a cold-hearted-hard-to-please-hard-core-gamer.
If there's any "trick" at all, its to not rely on reviews. Specifically the online ones, but even word of mouth can be misleading at times.** So to tie this all in to the article, I think its good that the FTC is working on this kind of stuff, even if it ends with "settling" out of court. Slow and steady wins the race, most change in North America gets enacted slowly so its good to see that kind of approach working in benefit of the consumers.
*For Now
** One of my ex room-mates could not stop preaching about Borderlands. I had watched him play it a few times but it never really drew my interest as it seemed to be another run-kill-upgrade-repeat games with a few gimmicks here and there. Then he went on about how the opening theme song was just so good, but what he didn't realize was that it wasn't an original track, and it had been on the top of the radio charts for about 3 weeks before he even started playing the game, so when I drove to and from work I would hear it 3 times a day. He took the bus to school so I can't really blame him though.
Why do people assume that just because something is free and trivial that you wouldn't pay someone to do it? Time is money, and its up to you to decide whether the money you save for posting your own fake reviews is worth the money you could be making doing something else - and whether the fake reviews are worth the money of paying someone else.
I mean - I'll give the neighbourhood kid 10 bucks to mow my lawn, even though I have a lawn mower and could easily do it on a Saturday afternoon.
It'd need some way to determine how your eyes are focused though - whether you are intending to look at your hud or something distant. Hold up an object up to your eye about where your glasses would rest. Close the other eye that won't see the object. Look at the object, then look at the wall behind it. Edges should get fuzzy and details will get blurred. When you get into thin lines like a GUI Frame or Text Font, this kind of focus is crucial.
The annoying thing is, once you've been taught to read, any time the center of your gaze lands on upon letters your muscle memory forces you to read it, ultimately taking focus off of what you might have actually been looking at. Its possible to force yourself to ignore it, but you have to generally be trying not to read in order to not to read, which seems weird, because it should be easier to NOT do something than do something, right? Imagine words being printed on your glasses, and how quickly you'll be shifting back and forth between 1 inch from your eye and that person 5 feet away, how much eye strain that will cause and how this system will have to either adjust to be readable at both focal points, or at a very minimum NOT get in your way when you are looking at something else.
This fantasy of an good GUI overlay right over the eyes is really a difficult one to tackle. I'm not saying it can't be done, but even once we get the display down, there are still hurdles.
Oh I know, I just like to hate on the French because I am Canadian, thus forced to try and learn the language for half a dozen years of my life despite whether I want to or not (and they're forced to try English whether they want to or not, so its a mutual dislike for each other). I wouldn't normally hold a grudge but the drivers in Quebec (mostly Montreal though) are quite possibly the worst drivers on the planet. The stop sign is just a suggestion over there.
None of that really has anything to do with France, in fact, I think the French don't like Quebec either, for butchering their language, but its all tomato tomahto in a general sense so all french get tossed in together. Is that fair? meh, C'est la vie.
You mean his sig? His sig that plugs his site? No one else's sig plugs their site? His sig that you can turn off if you don't want to see it? You mean him plugging Kotaku, like kotaku needs plugging? I'm not sure I see your angle.
Unless we can figure out the kinks in Cryogenics. I mean keeping something frozen in space isn't all that difficult. All that's required is enough power to keep the timer online for the thousands of years it takes to travel the distance, and then wake up when the time is right.
With the advances in Medicine we've been seeing, and I mean that in the broad sense of bionics and stem cells and genetics and all that stuff, it's not unreasonable to think that we might reach a state where its possible for someone to survive a deep freeze.
I'm not so sure he's bang on with his advertising technique. Who can honestly remember the authors of all the cracks they use? I can think of a handful of old Star Wars games I downloaded cracks for, and I definately remember someone posting their name in the readme file on who to give props for the cracks for, but... nope, drawing a blank now. However, I do remember Lucasarts as their name is plastered all over the place and has a nice splash screen for whenever I launch any of those old things.
So, the whole
I demand that you don't remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto.
Well - that's probably not going to happen as much as he'd like. The laughing part I mean.
However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn't cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.
Really, he should just crack his own program then, since he wants to show his mad CORE skills and not cripple the user experience.
The guy will garner a bit of attention in some circles like slashdot, so I mean its not BAD publicity in any sense. I think he sounds like a bit of a tool but it's not like I was rushing out to buy his software anyways. Which, by the way, doesn't strike me as the kind of software someone would want to crack/torrent anyways. A glorified Journal Application? Does the Mac user base actually have that many people who torrent applications? I was under the impression they mostly downloaded music/movies/tv shows. Since they're willing to shell out for an upgrade to their OS so that they can get iTunes working with the latest iPhone, I figured they could pitch in $30 for a digital journal. But then again, I'm not really in with that crowd, they could be crackin' apps and slaughtering goats for all I know.
But my point is that this guy has basically drawn attention to his torrent and since not a whole lot of people are going to want to pay for kicks and giggles, the currently crippled version of his app is going to be the one they use and its going to take Dmitry down with Minamoto
I know - like what exactly are they trying to say? Don't sit? Theres far more risk in driving your car, walking across the street, drinking, smoking...
I mean, Aging is mostly caused by breathing Oxygen! I mean, you'll live longer if you breath, but it will increase your risk of dieing.
I'd like to see how long someone could survive if they were never allowed to sit. You can't spell guilty conscience without science!
The reason being is that I just made a flash drive today that can still blank out the local system admin password on any windows computer in existance (unless they have BitLocker or TruCrypt).
Assuming you have a way to physically access the computer.
Locking the box inside a steel cage could also keep you out, with the added benefit of being harder to physically steal. But then again, TruCrypt and Bitlocker have the added benefit of making the drive much more difficult to access in the event it does get stolen.
And the cons are of course locking in a steel cage means you don't get to use CD's or USB sticks - and of course Encrypting the drive means you can't use a flash drive to reset the admin password should there be an entire turnover of the IT staff.
There is never a perfect solution to IT, this I've learned.
Do you really think a civilization that had the ability to travel light-years to reach a nebula would really have a need to harvest hydrogen to burn up in wasteful chemical reactions?
A nomadic one, yes. Are you presuming that they have unlocked FTL travel or something? Hydrogen has some very specific properties, in its elemental state and in any compound it ends up in - which makes it valuable. Suppose Hydrogen became the only resource we needed because we could engineer any compound out of simple Hydrogen Molecules
Slashdot Mirror
Better that the patent trolls fight amongst themselves than smaller startups though, right?
So its designed to work similar to a Microsoft product...
It's name has a strange resemblance to a Microsoft product...
How does that expression about Ducks go again?
Anyways, Kinect is patented, so if the technology is similar enough, I smell a potential lawsuit.
Is it cheaper to develop a flying humvee than it is to fly an extra 95 miles?
Is it cheaper to build flying humvees than it is to fly an extra 95 miles?
Wait - hold on a second - I thought the war was winding down and the plan was to slowly pull out... Over the next decade.... Supposedly... Why is the US military spending money on innovative war machines when they are already on top?
If I was trying to get money out of AOL, I'd be in a big hurry too!
That's worth at least +1 Funny.
No no no, he financed the development of this a little over a decade ago. He filed for these about a decade ago and they were only actually issued about 5 years ago - Now, why he waited 5 years to sue is beyond me, but that seems to be the growing trend nowadays. Wait until the most profitable organizations are using it and then sue them for infringement and make a bit of profit.
Is he trolling? Well, kind of, yes. But its not like he bought up these patents and are now suing anyone he wants, he actually did have invested interest in these and they were actually developed. He's playing favourites of course, he co-founded Microsoft.
I don't think he is trolling anymore than he is just 'playing the game'. I mean how many times have Nokia and Apple gone toe to toe with infringement?
Navigating 3D space just requires its own sort of "Drivers test".
I nominate Descent as the best candidate to virtually test if a person is capable of navigating 3D space.
If they Die - they fail.
3 Bumps - they fail.
If they don't make it out before the level blows up - hmmm 1 demerit.
Helicopters don't need to be driven on the ground - BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY - and nor could any flying vehicle be operated by 18 year old combat infantry.
So really, is the cost in fuel savings for being able to temporarily drive on the ground, or temporarily lift off, really worth the money being dumped into the engineering, design and production of this vehicle, not to mention the increased target profile...
Is it really worth it when we have vehicles that already fit this niche pretty well? You need to avoid the ground, go by air. We have air. You're going to need a qualified flight operator whether you only need to fly 50m or 5000m, so its not like you're saving on personel training by implementing this.
Not really. To make real money out of selling clothes you need factories, workers, distribution channels, preferably your own retail outlets etc. You also need reputation which is why selling other people's designs under your own brand is not very profitable.
Also not true. There are many outlets in my city of over a million people that make plenty of money for the proprieter when she is the only one who produces, sells, and distributes her clothes, with nothing but the "retail outlet" that is basically a house which is decorated.
Making one or two copies of a clothing item is not the issue here. As Pirate Bay shows you can easily make millions selling advertising while providing other people's content (oh ok, links to other people's content). There is a big difference between copying physical items like in the fashion industry and copying bits.
But why? It's just an arrangement of bits, just like an arrangement of cloth. I don't see how you are arriving at any of these conclusions.
Take off and nuke the site from Orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
But how do you look at the bottom right part of a hud then? You'd need some serious training in peripheral vision or trained to look in various directions with a relaxed eye, which is not as easy as it seems.
I'm sure Hollywood Undead would love to sign with them.
I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
(I think thats how I'd like to be remembered)
Well, if we're talking about game reviews, I think a safe assumption is that if it's glowingly positive, it's fake.
Hold your horses there cowboy. Now I don't disagree that game reviews are flooded with terribly positive reviews but there is no reason to assume that because a review is positive that it's faked.
Because every odd once in a while, a good game WILL be released and it goes from glowingly positive to explosively positive. I think Portal is one of the more recent/popular ones, so it makes a great example. Now, how many positive reviews have you read for that game? Well if you're anything like me, you heard the positive reviews before the game even came out, which would normally be a great indicator that its about to flop. Most games get that sufficient build up that it ends up a bit disappointing in the end. (Halo ODST, we're looking at you).
Now, there's no real "trick" to figuring out if a game review is fake or not. After all, some people are paid to write good reviews and some people are so inexperienced in gaming that they haven't actually played a good game. It'll make me sound like an old geezer to preach about classics so we'll steer clear of that.* But in all honesty, there are basically 2 types of reviews that come out. Type A is the kind you find on a tech site that basically works it as an advertising campaign for the game, by basically spewing everything thats on the box onto a web page and telling you to read it. Tybe B is a critique of the game, sometimes finding the most insurmountable details to nit pick on just to keep their cred as a cold-hearted-hard-to-please-hard-core-gamer.
If there's any "trick" at all, its to not rely on reviews. Specifically the online ones, but even word of mouth can be misleading at times.** So to tie this all in to the article, I think its good that the FTC is working on this kind of stuff, even if it ends with "settling" out of court. Slow and steady wins the race, most change in North America gets enacted slowly so its good to see that kind of approach working in benefit of the consumers.
*For Now
** One of my ex room-mates could not stop preaching about Borderlands. I had watched him play it a few times but it never really drew my interest as it seemed to be another run-kill-upgrade-repeat games with a few gimmicks here and there. Then he went on about how the opening theme song was just so good, but what he didn't realize was that it wasn't an original track, and it had been on the top of the radio charts for about 3 weeks before he even started playing the game, so when I drove to and from work I would hear it 3 times a day. He took the bus to school so I can't really blame him though.
Correctumundo!
Why do people assume that just because something is free and trivial that you wouldn't pay someone to do it? Time is money, and its up to you to decide whether the money you save for posting your own fake reviews is worth the money you could be making doing something else - and whether the fake reviews are worth the money of paying someone else.
I mean - I'll give the neighbourhood kid 10 bucks to mow my lawn, even though I have a lawn mower and could easily do it on a Saturday afternoon.
It'd need some way to determine how your eyes are focused though - whether you are intending to look at your hud or something distant. Hold up an object up to your eye about where your glasses would rest. Close the other eye that won't see the object. Look at the object, then look at the wall behind it. Edges should get fuzzy and details will get blurred. When you get into thin lines like a GUI Frame or Text Font, this kind of focus is crucial.
The annoying thing is, once you've been taught to read, any time the center of your gaze lands on upon letters your muscle memory forces you to read it, ultimately taking focus off of what you might have actually been looking at. Its possible to force yourself to ignore it, but you have to generally be trying not to read in order to not to read, which seems weird, because it should be easier to NOT do something than do something, right? Imagine words being printed on your glasses, and how quickly you'll be shifting back and forth between 1 inch from your eye and that person 5 feet away, how much eye strain that will cause and how this system will have to either adjust to be readable at both focal points, or at a very minimum NOT get in your way when you are looking at something else.
This fantasy of an good GUI overlay right over the eyes is really a difficult one to tackle. I'm not saying it can't be done, but even once we get the display down, there are still hurdles.
Oh I know, I just like to hate on the French because I am Canadian, thus forced to try and learn the language for half a dozen years of my life despite whether I want to or not (and they're forced to try English whether they want to or not, so its a mutual dislike for each other). I wouldn't normally hold a grudge but the drivers in Quebec (mostly Montreal though) are quite possibly the worst drivers on the planet. The stop sign is just a suggestion over there.
None of that really has anything to do with France, in fact, I think the French don't like Quebec either, for butchering their language, but its all tomato tomahto in a general sense so all french get tossed in together. Is that fair? meh, C'est la vie.
You mean his sig? His sig that plugs his site? No one else's sig plugs their site? His sig that you can turn off if you don't want to see it? You mean him plugging Kotaku, like kotaku needs plugging? I'm not sure I see your angle.
Unless we can figure out the kinks in Cryogenics. I mean keeping something frozen in space isn't all that difficult. All that's required is enough power to keep the timer online for the thousands of years it takes to travel the distance, and then wake up when the time is right.
With the advances in Medicine we've been seeing, and I mean that in the broad sense of bionics and stem cells and genetics and all that stuff, it's not unreasonable to think that we might reach a state where its possible for someone to survive a deep freeze.
Yeah but then you have to learn French, and you're also stuck living in France.
Some things just aren't worth it, mate.
I'm not so sure he's bang on with his advertising technique. Who can honestly remember the authors of all the cracks they use? I can think of a handful of old Star Wars games I downloaded cracks for, and I definately remember someone posting their name in the readme file on who to give props for the cracks for, but... nope, drawing a blank now. However, I do remember Lucasarts as their name is plastered all over the place and has a nice splash screen for whenever I launch any of those old things.
So, the whole
I demand that you don't remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto.
Well - that's probably not going to happen as much as he'd like. The laughing part I mean.
However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn't cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.
Really, he should just crack his own program then, since he wants to show his mad CORE skills and not cripple the user experience.
The guy will garner a bit of attention in some circles like slashdot, so I mean its not BAD publicity in any sense. I think he sounds like a bit of a tool but it's not like I was rushing out to buy his software anyways. Which, by the way, doesn't strike me as the kind of software someone would want to crack/torrent anyways. A glorified Journal Application? Does the Mac user base actually have that many people who torrent applications? I was under the impression they mostly downloaded music/movies/tv shows. Since they're willing to shell out for an upgrade to their OS so that they can get iTunes working with the latest iPhone, I figured they could pitch in $30 for a digital journal. But then again, I'm not really in with that crowd, they could be crackin' apps and slaughtering goats for all I know.
But my point is that this guy has basically drawn attention to his torrent and since not a whole lot of people are going to want to pay for kicks and giggles, the currently crippled version of his app is going to be the one they use and its going to take Dmitry down with Minamoto
I know - like what exactly are they trying to say? Don't sit? Theres far more risk in driving your car, walking across the street, drinking, smoking...
I mean, Aging is mostly caused by breathing Oxygen! I mean, you'll live longer if you breath, but it will increase your risk of dieing.
I'd like to see how long someone could survive if they were never allowed to sit. You can't spell guilty conscience without science!
The reason being is that I just made a flash drive today that can still blank out the local system admin password on any windows computer in existance (unless they have BitLocker or TruCrypt).
Assuming you have a way to physically access the computer.
Locking the box inside a steel cage could also keep you out, with the added benefit of being harder to physically steal. But then again, TruCrypt and Bitlocker have the added benefit of making the drive much more difficult to access in the event it does get stolen.
And the cons are of course locking in a steel cage means you don't get to use CD's or USB sticks - and of course Encrypting the drive means you can't use a flash drive to reset the admin password should there be an entire turnover of the IT staff.
There is never a perfect solution to IT, this I've learned.
With good reason
</marquee>
Do you really think a civilization that had the ability to travel light-years to reach a nebula would really have a need to harvest hydrogen to burn up in wasteful chemical reactions?
A nomadic one, yes. Are you presuming that they have unlocked FTL travel or something? Hydrogen has some very specific properties, in its elemental state and in any compound it ends up in - which makes it valuable. Suppose Hydrogen became the only resource we needed because we could engineer any compound out of simple Hydrogen Molecules
* almost forgot. Is Nebulae the proper plural form of Nebula? or is it just Nebulas?