Second, the courts are setting a fairly high bar for the 'intent to deceive the public' element of false marking. The majority of these cases are the result of typos or failing to retool an assembly line the moment a patent expires.
If you're putting together an assembly line, it's your call whether or not to mark things with a patent number. If you do, you better be sure that you will retool before that patent expires. If you want to avoid that, the solution is to not mark. Simple, easy, foolproof. Whether or not that hurts your patents is completely uninteresting.
If you're continuing to run a production line, knowing you're marking with expired patents, your intention is to deceive the public and the penalties should be harsh. I think it's bizarre to suggest otherwise.
Or if you do think the penalties for misusing patents should be light, then they need to be light for everyone, always.
mmm at least in the UK trams don't tend to share the road with cars. Sure they cross roads and sometimes run along them for short sections but for the most part they run along dedicated routes.
Not the same in the US. We stick tracks on regular streets all the time. The local one here is http://www.seattlestreetcar.org/
It's not quite that bad - it's more like assuming every case is equally interesting to the supremes, which obviously isn't true. Bilski may be the bottom of the barrel, and 1 in 75 may be far too generous.
But do you disagree with the basic point? Appeals to the Supreme Court are very rarely successful. Saying that a case is "far from decided" simply because an appeal is submitted seems to me to be deceptive. The chances of even going in front of the court are slim, much less winning. "Bilski pursues slim chance of victory," maybe, or "Bilski takes last, desperate shot at vindication." But no way can you say "far from decided."
People hear about successful appeals all the time (they're news - failed appeals are the boring, normal case), so they have an exaggerated idea of what the likely outcome is.
However, as far as I am aware ALL 50 STATES have "use taxes" in place, that are supposed to be paid for out-of-state purchases. Not every state has a sales tax. I think it's a pretty safe bet that means not every state has a use tax, too, no?
Here in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon went with just an income tax (no sales tax), and Washington went with sales tax and a Business and Occupation tax (no income tax - B&O is a strange beast that I don't think caught on with any other state).
Washington may have a use tax - but I challenge you to find anyone who knows how to pay it. Since we don't have income taxes, Washingtonians don't have something like another line on their income tax forms for a use tax.
Seems like that "one specific part of the act" you're talking about clearly states that they'd have to apply to the "Commission" to get a waiver, and the commission would have to find that "such a waiver is in the public interest." Any evidence that Apple has gone through that process? Until that happens, sounds like Apple is SOL.
Take a look at 2006. There were six different elections over the year, each one of which had multiple issues on the ballot.
In the general election (the big one), there were about 15 different things to vote on, depending on where you live. City councils, county councils, fire districts, school districts, local initiatives, county initiatives, state initiatives, district court, supreme court, court of appeals, public utility district, etc. Some of these are yes/no/pick one, some are pick N candidates from a list.
What does a typical Canadian/European example look like?
Try the 128 vs (whatever) test yourself - 128kbit MP3 files are easy to detect (and are annoying) if you like acoustic music. It's not a subtle distinction. Maybe 128 is OK if you're into techno or the like, but make up your own mind. No need to trust a bunch of articles that rely on other people's musical listening habits.
The idea that 128 is decent is completely dependent on what you listen to - and to me, it's bogus. Try solo vocals, or a solo fiddle, or something where the percussion isn't just a wall of sound, and you'll ditch your 128 files immediately.
You vastly underestimate the amount of effort it would take to create those communities. No one has the kind of resources it would take to "fork every open source project at the point where it switches to GPLv3."
You're assuming that the reason you were told for not getting an offer bears some relationship to the actual reason you didn't get a job offer.
This assumption is incorrect. Most people make gut decisions about whether or not to hire someone, then grovel around for a reason to give to HR to spraypaint on top of their real answer. Most feedback you get about an interview is almost useless without a large amount of contextual information that you're just not going to see.
Google et al don't need to be anywhere near that passive.
AT&T slows down Google.
Google retaliates by one of:
1) Cut off AT&T IP addresses. 2) Display a message to everyone coming from AT&T: "AT&T uses slave labor from kittens to create their bandwidth. Click here to switch to one of their competitors."
Owning the pipe isn't nearly as big a hammer as owning the content/service people want that pipe to reach.
Interesting article on the subject of open access points.
Hale, Robert V., "Wi-Fi Liability: Potential Legal Risks in Accessing and Operating Wireless Internet" . Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, Vol. 21, p. 543 http://ssrn.com/abstract=692881
"Morse code can be learned relatively quickly, actually - within a week"
Burst out laughing that that one. Relatively quickly compared to what? I'd say that it takes less than a minute to tell someone how to use SMS systems. A week doesn't play in the same solar system, much less the same game.
Sure, so do we, and the predictions are usually accurate too.
Here in Washington the time the polls close is not very meaninful, since the majority of our votes are cast by mail (about 66% in the last election). That's true for most sensible western states - Oregon is 100% vote by mail. I think eastern states haven't quite figured out the vote-by-mail thing.
But I suspect a couple things are going on when you're comparing German votes American.
How many questions are on a typical German ballot? Or last ballot was both sides of a sheet of paper about 20% larger than A4, with probably 25 races to vote on spread across multiple categories:
City School board Judges County State Federal Proposition s
The more races you have, the more chances you have for a close race, and the only time accuracy starts to be significant is when the vote counts are very close.
The number of people voting on the issues makes a huge difference as well. In most parlimentary systems the number of voters in any one race is usually smaller than the number of people voting on a single race in the US (for statewide issues at least).
What's the physical process of voting in Germany look like? What do you do that's so different from the United States?
And most important, why do you think that you're more accurate? If you talk to a German elections official, would they admit that you have the same issues we do, and that they just don't come up as often? Or are you doing something magical that we should simply copy?
Aparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening here in Washington (as in the Pacific Northwest, not DC). The Republican candidate finally gave up Monday on his lawsuit claiming that fraud determined the outcome of the extremely close governors race.
The vast majority of our voting is done on paper, and at least here in King County we use bubble-in ballots.
It doesn't scale very well, at least at the budget levels we've been willing to tolerate. It may scale if you're willing to pay skilled people to run and monitor it, but we don't do anything of the kind. Instead we pay people very little money to run polling stations (they're basically retirees who volunteer for a tiny amount of money), and they don't know what they're doing. In theory everyone who votes is supposed to be checked off on the registrar, but even that doesn't work (off by hundreds of votes here in KC, which is better than I'd expect.)
You also have to deal with:
1. Idiots. People simply can't read and follow basic instructions. They circle the candidates names, they black out all the bubbles _except_ for the person they want to vote for, you name it, they do it. And the Washington state constitution pretty reasonably says that you have to figure out what the voter wanted. If it's obvious to a human, then that's what you do, but it's sure not going to be obvious to a scantron.
2. Physical damage. In a very close race, you're going to get damage to the ballots. In the hand recount they found things like bugs squished in the right place to make it look like an overvote. What are you supposed to do there?
3. Other flavors of idiots. Basically, people who don't want to follow rules for voting, and will do whatever they think will be most confusing for the poor slob counting votes.
4. Illegal voters. Voters who lost the right to vote through a felony conviction, for example, but still voted. Huge issue here, and the Republican who lost the election claimed that we should throw out the votes of felons we could identify. (He had a specious formula worked out that basically claimed "felons vote for my opponent, so I really won!")
5. More physical problems. Absentee ballots stored but not counted. A tiny, tiny fraction of the votes, but unless you're willing to spend the money to have redundant checks built into the system you're going to have some guy stick a package of envelopes in the wrong place.
Really what we've got is a paper voting system that has a margin of error that was greater than the winning margin. 99.9% accuracy (which, amazingly enough, is what elections officials claim constantly around here) just isn't good enough in a really tight state race. Getting to 99.99999 is, shall we say, significantly more money than we've ever been willing to spend on elections.
Weather prediction was a big deal in WWII; the Evil Nazi Hordes were certainly hurt by the Allies destroying their meterology resources in the North Atlantic. Weather's a big deal when you're playing convoys-vs-uboats.
Everyone I know with a MiniDisc player is a musician who uses it to record. I don't think this is a sampling problem; my suspicion is that that's the majority of the market for MiniDisc "players" these days.
So far, there aren't a lot of other options. A decent cassette recorder is bulky (I still use my Sony WMD6 pro model recorder), so are DAT recorders, and neither offer the convenience of easy access to multiple tracks.
What's the recording like? All the product literature I've seen talks about the "voice recorder" capabilities of the iRiver units. I'd like to use this to record live music (essentially, as a replacement for the MiniDisc players most musicians are using these days) but it seems like it's not really up to the task.
I'm talking about recording things like sessions and classes, the kind of thing where decent audio is desired but it doesn't have to be great. Convenience matters, as well as quality (so MiniDisc wins over DAT for these kinds of applications).
We're talking about a for-profit operation here. Whether or not you charge specifically for the wireless connection is probably irrelvant - you're still reselling bandwidth. If you're not charging $X/hr, it just means that the cost is rolled into the cost of the cup of coffee.
Re:Double density floppy anyone?
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 1
Prices are very dependant on where you live.
It's been a few years since I've spent more than $1/100 CDR discs. Almost every weekend at least one of the big computer retailers gives away a spindle of CDR discs for free after the rebate. You end up paying for a stamp and the tax on the purchase price (about 8% here in Seattle).
Slashdot Mirror
Second, the courts are setting a fairly high bar for the 'intent to deceive the public' element of false marking. The majority of these cases are the result of typos or failing to retool an assembly line the moment a patent expires.
If you're putting together an assembly line, it's your call whether or not to mark things with a patent number. If you do, you better be sure that you will retool before that patent expires. If you want to avoid that, the solution is to not mark. Simple, easy, foolproof. Whether or not that hurts your patents is completely uninteresting.
If you're continuing to run a production line, knowing you're marking with expired patents, your intention is to deceive the public and the penalties should be harsh. I think it's bizarre to suggest otherwise.
Or if you do think the penalties for misusing patents should be light, then they need to be light for everyone, always.
mmm at least in the UK trams don't tend to share the road with cars. Sure they cross roads and sometimes run along them for short sections but for the most part they run along dedicated routes.
Not the same in the US. We stick tracks on regular streets all the time. The local one here is http://www.seattlestreetcar.org/
Agreed. There is one sensible arrangement: 1 developer, 1 office. There are many other terrible arrangements.
Interruptions need to go to zero. Intentionally creating a physical setup that increases interruptions is astonishingly stupid.
It's not quite that bad - it's more like assuming every case is equally interesting to the supremes, which obviously isn't true. Bilski may be the bottom of the barrel, and 1 in 75 may be far too generous.
But do you disagree with the basic point? Appeals to the Supreme Court are very rarely successful. Saying that a case is "far from decided" simply because an appeal is submitted seems to me to be deceptive. The chances of even going in front of the court are slim, much less winning. "Bilski pursues slim chance of victory," maybe, or "Bilski takes last, desperate shot at vindication." But no way can you say "far from decided."
People hear about successful appeals all the time (they're news - failed appeals are the boring, normal case), so they have an exaggerated idea of what the likely outcome is.
"It's entirely within the Supreme Court's discretion to take the case or not, but for now it looks like the issue is far from decided."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/washington/07scotus.html
Number of cases that go to the Supreme Court: 7000-8000. Number decided? About 100.
You DO NOT want to be the side appealing. You're better off in Vegas.
Bilski is done. The chance that it isn't done is about one in 75. That's "over, for all practical purposes," not "far from decided."
Here in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon went with just an income tax (no sales tax), and Washington went with sales tax and a Business and Occupation tax (no income tax - B&O is a strange beast that I don't think caught on with any other state).
Washington may have a use tax - but I challenge you to find anyone who knows how to pay it. Since we don't have income taxes, Washingtonians don't have something like another line on their income tax forms for a use tax.
Seems like that "one specific part of the act" you're talking about clearly states that they'd have to apply to the "Commission" to get a waiver, and the commission would have to find that "such a waiver is in the public interest." Any evidence that Apple has gone through that process? Until that happens, sounds like Apple is SOL.
It's not the population, it's how many different things we vote on.
Here's a concrete set of examples from King County, Washington (as in Seattle/Boeing/Microsoft/salmon/Gore-tex, not DC)
http://www.metrokc.gov/elections/archive/default.asp
Take a look at 2006. There were six different elections over the year, each one of which had multiple issues on the ballot.
In the general election (the big one), there were about 15 different things to vote on, depending on where you live. City councils, county councils, fire districts, school districts, local initiatives, county initiatives, state initiatives, district court, supreme court, court of appeals, public utility district, etc. Some of these are yes/no/pick one, some are pick N candidates from a list.
What does a typical Canadian/European example look like?
Try the 128 vs (whatever) test yourself - 128kbit MP3 files are easy to detect (and are annoying) if you like acoustic music. It's not a subtle distinction. Maybe 128 is OK if you're into techno or the like, but make up your own mind. No need to trust a bunch of articles that rely on other people's musical listening habits.
The idea that 128 is decent is completely dependent on what you listen to - and to me, it's bogus. Try solo vocals, or a solo fiddle, or something where the percussion isn't just a wall of sound, and you'll ditch your 128 files immediately.
You vastly underestimate the amount of effort it would take to create those communities. No one has the kind of resources it would take to "fork every open source project at the point where it switches to GPLv3."
You're assuming that the reason you were told for not getting an offer bears some relationship to the actual reason you didn't get a job offer.
This assumption is incorrect. Most people make gut decisions about whether or not to hire someone, then grovel around for a reason to give to HR to spraypaint on top of their real answer. Most feedback you get about an interview is almost useless without a large amount of contextual information that you're just not going to see.
Google et al don't need to be anywhere near that passive.
AT&T slows down Google.
Google retaliates by one of:
1) Cut off AT&T IP addresses.
2) Display a message to everyone coming from AT&T: "AT&T uses slave labor from kittens to create their bandwidth. Click here to switch to one of their competitors."
Owning the pipe isn't nearly as big a hammer as owning the content/service people want that pipe to reach.
- James
Interesting article on the subject of open access points.
Hale, Robert V., "Wi-Fi Liability: Potential Legal Risks in Accessing and Operating Wireless Internet" . Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, Vol. 21, p. 543 http://ssrn.com/abstract=692881
"Morse code can be learned relatively quickly, actually - within a week"
Burst out laughing that that one. Relatively quickly compared to what? I'd say that it takes less than a minute to tell someone how to use SMS systems. A week doesn't play in the same solar system, much less the same game.
Sure, so do we, and the predictions are usually accurate too.
n s
Here in Washington the time the polls close is not very meaninful, since the majority of our votes are cast by mail (about 66% in the last election). That's true for most sensible western states - Oregon is 100% vote by mail. I think eastern states haven't quite figured out the vote-by-mail thing.
But I suspect a couple things are going on when you're comparing German votes American.
How many questions are on a typical German ballot? Or last ballot was both sides of a sheet of paper about 20% larger than A4, with probably 25 races to vote on spread across multiple categories:
City
School board
Judges
County
State
Federal
Propositio
The more races you have, the more chances you have for a close race, and the only time accuracy starts to be significant is when the vote counts are very close.
The number of people voting on the issues makes a huge difference as well. In most parlimentary systems the number of voters in any one race is usually smaller than the number of people voting on a single race in the US (for statewide issues at least).
What's the physical process of voting in Germany look like? What do you do that's so different from the United States?
And most important, why do you think that you're more accurate? If you talk to a German elections official, would they admit that you have the same issues we do, and that they just don't come up as often? Or are you doing something magical that we should simply copy?
Aparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening here in Washington (as in the Pacific Northwest, not DC). The Republican candidate finally gave up Monday on his lawsuit claiming that fraud determined the outcome of the extremely close governors race.
The vast majority of our voting is done on paper, and at least here in King County we use bubble-in ballots.
It doesn't scale very well, at least at the budget levels we've been willing to tolerate. It may scale if you're willing to pay skilled people to run and monitor it, but we don't do anything of the kind. Instead we pay people very little money to run polling stations (they're basically retirees who volunteer for a tiny amount of money), and they don't know what they're doing. In theory everyone who votes is supposed to be checked off on the registrar, but even that doesn't work (off by hundreds of votes here in KC, which is better than I'd expect.)
You also have to deal with:
1. Idiots. People simply can't read and follow basic instructions. They circle the candidates names, they black out all the bubbles _except_ for the person they want to vote for, you name it, they do it. And the Washington state constitution pretty reasonably says that you have to figure out what the voter wanted. If it's obvious to a human, then that's what you do, but it's sure not going to be obvious to a scantron.
2. Physical damage. In a very close race, you're going to get damage to the ballots. In the hand recount they found things like bugs squished in the right place to make it look like an overvote. What are you supposed to do there?
3. Other flavors of idiots. Basically, people who don't want to follow rules for voting, and will do whatever they think will be most confusing for the poor slob counting votes.
4. Illegal voters. Voters who lost the right to vote through a felony conviction, for example, but still voted. Huge issue here, and the Republican who lost the election claimed that we should throw out the votes of felons we could identify. (He had a specious formula worked out that basically claimed "felons vote for my opponent, so I really won!")
5. More physical problems. Absentee ballots stored but not counted. A tiny, tiny fraction of the votes, but unless you're willing to spend the money to have redundant checks built into the system you're going to have some guy stick a package of envelopes in the wrong place.
Really what we've got is a paper voting system that has a margin of error that was greater than the winning margin. 99.9% accuracy (which, amazingly enough, is what elections officials claim constantly around here) just isn't good enough in a really tight state race. Getting to 99.99999 is, shall we say, significantly more money than we've ever been willing to spend on elections.
Amusing, but...
Weather prediction was a big deal in WWII; the Evil Nazi Hordes were certainly hurt by the Allies destroying their meterology resources in the North Atlantic. Weather's a big deal when you're playing convoys-vs-uboats.
Everyone I know with a MiniDisc player is a musician who uses it to record. I don't think this is a sampling problem; my suspicion is that that's the majority of the market for MiniDisc "players" these days.
So far, there aren't a lot of other options. A decent cassette recorder is bulky (I still use my Sony WMD6 pro model recorder), so are DAT recorders, and neither offer the convenience of easy access to multiple tracks.
What's the recording like? All the product literature I've seen talks about the "voice recorder" capabilities of the iRiver units. I'd like to use this to record live music (essentially, as a replacement for the MiniDisc players most musicians are using these days) but it seems like it's not really up to the task.
I'm talking about recording things like sessions and classes, the kind of thing where decent audio is desired but it doesn't have to be great. Convenience matters, as well as quality (so MiniDisc wins over DAT for these kinds of applications).
The article referenced is from the Associated Press. OK, the PI is paying to have those bits shipped out, but they didn't write it.
I would expect both the Times and the PI to cover the issue in tomorrow's editions.
We're talking about a for-profit operation here. Whether or not you charge specifically for the wireless connection is probably irrelvant - you're still reselling bandwidth. If you're not charging $X/hr, it just means that the cost is rolled into the cost of the cup of coffee.
Prices are very dependant on where you live.
It's been a few years since I've spent more than $1/100 CDR discs. Almost every weekend at least one of the big computer retailers gives away a spindle of CDR discs for free after the rebate. You end up paying for a stamp and the tax on the purchase price (about 8% here in Seattle).
And as far as I can tell Klocek v. Gateway is the latest case saying shrinkwrap agreements aren't worth the bits they flip.
This an interesting collection of some related cases.
"Theft, lies, deceit, are all perfectly acceptable business practices these days, especially in east Asia."
I hadn't realized WorldCom, Enron, Arthur Anderson and the like were based in east Asia.
My error - I didn't mean to imply otherwise.