FYI, anybody who allegedly owes the state of California over $50 million in taxes earned way more than that. The maximum income tax rate in California in 1990 was 9.3% for individuals (although I'm not sure if individual income tax is the rate that would apply). We're looking at about $500 million in earnings for which he was allegedly dodging a $50 million tax. Not to mention that those $500 million he got was from a patent granted in 1990 for microprocessors, long after they were invented by someone else and in common use. Don't feel too sorry for him.
Damnit people, why doesn't anybody realize that the government is the people? A nearly $400 million dollar judgement paid out from the state of California is $400 million dollars in tax hikes (or college tuition hikes, or delayed infrastructure maintenance, or funding cuts for public schools, police departments, state parks, etc.) for everyone else that doesn't have $500 million in ill-gotten patent license deals to pay for lawyers.
At 74, with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank from the 1990 patent on microprocessors detailed in TFA, this man has no business suing anybody. He should be out enjoying his ill-gotten gains instead of holding the electronics industry ransom once more.
The article states that due to age of the patent, the application is confidential.
You mean the patent is not patent?
Yeah, that's the point. It's a patent application that has not been granted, and applications made prior to a 1995 change in the law are confidential while being processed.
No way should the PTO get a "pocket veto" authority.
Why not? There's no other mechanism for somebody to refuse a patent for the good of the people. I'm sure that at Slashdot at least we can agree that is necessary. And if you're concerned about legality, if the director of the PTO is involved then that person should have the right to make such judgements by virtue of being appointed by the President.
A company that many thought would be bankrupt and closed by now has produced a brand-new electric car from scratch that Consumer Reports feels is the best car it's actually tested since 2007.
I have yet to meet anybody who thought Tesla "would be bankrupt and closed by now" who wasn't actively scheming toward that end. And yes, FUD counts as actively scheming.
Are you saying that boring cars that aren't EV / Hybrid / Autonomous are really that interested to the "news for nerds" crowd? For that matter, what about Ford F-150 story? That's definitely not EV / Hybrid / Autonomous, unless you count the little spies built into the vehicle. But go ahead. You were busy trying to downplay the newsworthiness of a vehicle which manages to impress everybody despite a sizable contingent devoted to grinding all EVs into dust.
Correction: Hybrid cars can be greener than electric ones. I'm sure you didn't mean to lump the hybrid SUVs in when you blanket claimed all hybrids were greener than all electrics. Especially since technically a golf cart should also count as an electric car (or at least could be retrofitted into one) and that would definitely be greener, if a bit less refined than a Tesla.
Except when the autocompleate function jumps out of the window and suggests similar named but different functions.
Using the wrong function is not a syntax error.
However, I never intended to defend IDEs. I personally hate them. But at least they don't tell you that your good grammar is wrong and tell you to replace it with something actually is wrong.
But hey, at least Word won't complain about your grammar until you've finished your sentence. Unlike an IDE that thinks you're never going to close that parenthesis you just opened.
I would argue that it's more like relying on Word's grammar checker. The suggested way may be technically correct...
I've got to take issue with you there. I've had Word suggest outright wrong grammar several times before. Things that would be clearly marked wrong by a grader. At least an IDE won't (usually) introduce blatant syntax errors.
Finally, someone who hates Obama enough to overcome the right-wing tendency towards more government surveillance. It's easy enough for a Democratic congress to go after a Republican president who abuses the rights of the American people, but apparently you have to call in the radicals to get a Republican congress to go after a Democratic president. I would have thought it wouldn't be that hard, though, with all the radicals around.
Amendments like the 1st and 4th and the 14th, which guarantee individual liberty, are categorically different from amendments like the 16th, which expand state power. Paul is entirely consistent in being in favor of individual liberty and against state power.
And apparently ambivalent towards the constitution as well.
I tried to post a comment on beta the other day. I wanted to be a coward, but there was no check box. So in trying to find a convenient way without logging out, I ended up back on the front page without the comment I already wrote, and the back button on the browser was even disabled. How the hell did that happen? Fuck beta.
$80 million may not be much money in comparison to a lot of other things, but we are in the middle of budget battles in Congress. How much would that $80 million be worth towards balancing the budget? Maybe saving government programs that do more proven and obvious good, like food stamps? How about using it directly on infrastructure repairs to both fix our massive number of failing bridges and inject a major stimulus into the bottom end of the economy, where it will do the most good? These are just my political suggestions; I don't feel confident to suggest without cynicism what that money could go to with different politics. But my point is that any money wasted from the federal budget is money that could been used much better in at least a dozen different ways.
The more I learn about charter schools, the more it seems that they obviously are not supposed to be a permanent solution. The institution itself is seems explicitly designed to produce a scattershot of ideas and methods, some of which might fail spectacularly, and some of which might succeed spectacularly. While it is troubling that we as a society are learning which ideas work at the expense of our children, that doesn't mean we should just throw away what we've learned. I'm not talking about whether or not to keep charter schools around. I'm talking about taking some of the more successful methods and implementing them in our public schools. It concerns me that every time I hear about how awful charter schools are supposed to be, the speaker acts as though the best solution would be to nuke them and pretend the whole experiment never happened.
With my 4-year CS degree I could tell you the basic idea, and I could recognize software that did it, but it would take a month for me to implement something myself. So here's my stab at the problem.
The crux of the issue is to reduce the software to specific operations for which you know how many gates are needed. To get a rough idea, I'd look at the compiled bytecode. There might then be an existing table of how many gates are needed to implement each operation in the resulting bytecode, or even more likely a number of transistors. But if not, that's where it would take a month of doing rough logical analysis to put together such a table. Then you add it up and get your result, which is kind of "it shouldn't take more than X many gates".
But then somebody has to actually transform the program into transistors so maybe you should just hire somebody that can do that. If you have the hardware design, it's trivial to tell someone how many transistors/gates are in it.
The disturbing part is not that the NSA might be able to listen to everyone's encryption someday. They are not an engineering organization and they will not be at the forefront of qubit manufacturing. The disturbing part is that they are wasting an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars on an impossible task aimed at ultimately destroying the ability to have security of any kind.
Is it big pharma pushing doctors to prescribe more? Is it doctors too lazy/busy to do a proper diagnosis? Is it mothers, fathers and teachers who seek to explain bad behavior and poor discipline (which is largely their fault) on medical conditions? Is it our foods which have changed over to GMO based content over the same period of time?
The basic cause of this is simple: lack of physical activity causes kids to be fidgety. They can't concentrate. Kids that fidget in class are disruptive. They are marked as "trouble".
You sir are full of shit.
Lack of physical activity? Are you serious? I was training in gymnastics for sixteen hours a week when I was diagnosed. I was winning state and regional medals until I was fifteen.
You're missing the target of her pronoun. The "this" in "basic cause of this" is not legitimate ADHD diagnoses. It's those being diagnosed who don't really have it. The whole point of TFA is that ADHD is over-diagnosed. 15% of children diagnosed for something an estimated 5% of them have? It's that extra 10% that are probably just fidgety 'cause recess and PE got cut so the district can cram more for the test.
As for the 5% who actually have the disorder, let's put it this way. I don't know what it's like, but I know some very smart people decided that it exists and has very real effects on a person's life. If medication fixes that, great! But we don't want to medicate the other 10% that don't actually have the disorder. It's apparently really hard to separate the over-diagnosis issue from ADHD being a real thing at all. And if only 1/3 of the people diagnosed really should have been, that mean 2/3 of every person I meet claiming to have ADHD really doesn't and doesn't know what it's like any better than I do.
But I'd guess that you really have it because you don't describe it the way everybody assumes "attention deficit" would work. It's not that you can't focus on any particular thing, it's that your mind just doesn't identify the same things to focus on as everyone else.
I want to buy fake product reviews for my awesome product. But everybody already knows the reviews are fake most places, so my fake reviews will be ignored. Can you please tell me what places remain that people won't know the reviews I plant are fake?
If you like sub-1080p resolutions and an already-obsolete and non-upgradeable CPU and GPU, sure. Not that those pieces are normally upgradeable, but why pay full price today for last year's technology?
(Some people don't. Apparently there are people who put their laptop on the desk, remove the charger, work until the battery is empty, then plug in the charger)
This probably has something to do with manufacturer "guidelines" instructing users that they need to completely discharge their battery and then fully charge it at least once a week. Apple was (is?) guilty of this. The guideline has something to do with the computer being able to accurately display time remaining, but it's always seemed like a Bad Idea (tm) to me.
(Slashdot, would it kill you to allow UTF-8, or even HTML escaped entities like ™ or at least <sup> tags?)
It's not Apple's pretty little prison, it's Adobe's. When you're using "mainstream" software, that means Windows or (most of the time these days) OS X. Lots of people have decided in the last 10 years than Microsoft simply does not make a modern operating system anymore. I'm sure we would all love to have the Linux revolution...any day now...but that's simply not feasible for the people who've invested their skills in Adobe, or MS Office, or ProTools, or any other professional software. There may be equivalent (or superior!) free options but the people who need them would have to start learning from nothing; Photoshop skills don't really translate to GIMP skills.
So really, it's prisons all around. Would you rather live in Apple's pretty walled garden, or Microsoft's smelly old dungeon? Or would you rather be free and live with the Linux penguins in Antarctica?
Especially once we figure out how to 'convince' it to give us the best discount on everything.
Sounds like a great idea for manipulating human psychology to me. Lead the human to believe it fooled the machine into giving it a "discount", which is going to make that human feel good about buying whatever. It only has to manipulate 5% of people to be successful, and I think you underestimate how easily we are manipulated.
I read TFA (but didn't watch the video because I hate watching interviews on the internet). The argument boiled down to:
Targeted ads give less information because economics reasons.
Low quality sellers are indistinguishable from high quality sellers when there's less information.
People therefore avoid targeted ads because they notice there's less information and so it's not as meaningful.
The last part is classic wrong thinking in economics, but I think in this case the rest of the argument is still valid. It just takes a different mechanism. I've never known somebody who thought ads actually communicated anything about how likely the seller is lying. But I have known many people who enjoy creative ads, like Geico (before it just got self-referential and boring) and others I can't remember right now.
Targeted ads are not creative. They're actually a little creepy most of the time, which is probably a major part of why more people are trying to block them. But more importantly, and here's where TFA has a good point, the ads are usually crap. The kind of crap we've seen in our email for the last decade. The kind that people have already figured out is dumb.
The point in TFA applies here because it explains how this happens. Targeted ads are dumb because they're cheaper than running expensive ads on high quality sites. That causes more low quality sellers to be able to afford the ads.
The key here is that we're picking up on the average low quality of the ads, not the underlying reason. Nobody goes around thinking about how much information an ad is signaling (besides its literal content). But in this case, the underlying reason seems directly related to our perception.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, anybody who allegedly owes the state of California over $50 million in taxes earned way more than that. The maximum income tax rate in California in 1990 was 9.3% for individuals (although I'm not sure if individual income tax is the rate that would apply). We're looking at about $500 million in earnings for which he was allegedly dodging a $50 million tax. Not to mention that those $500 million he got was from a patent granted in 1990 for microprocessors, long after they were invented by someone else and in common use. Don't feel too sorry for him.
Damnit people, why doesn't anybody realize that the government is the people? A nearly $400 million dollar judgement paid out from the state of California is $400 million dollars in tax hikes (or college tuition hikes, or delayed infrastructure maintenance, or funding cuts for public schools, police departments, state parks, etc.) for everyone else that doesn't have $500 million in ill-gotten patent license deals to pay for lawyers.
At 74, with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank from the 1990 patent on microprocessors detailed in TFA, this man has no business suing anybody. He should be out enjoying his ill-gotten gains instead of holding the electronics industry ransom once more.
Yeah, that's the point. It's a patent application that has not been granted, and applications made prior to a 1995 change in the law are confidential while being processed.
Why not? There's no other mechanism for somebody to refuse a patent for the good of the people. I'm sure that at Slashdot at least we can agree that is necessary. And if you're concerned about legality, if the director of the PTO is involved then that person should have the right to make such judgements by virtue of being appointed by the President.
Alright Mr. Pedantic, let me fix that headline for you:
"Consumer Reports Says Tesla Model S Is Best Overall Land-based Self-moving Street-legal Consumer Vehicle"
I have yet to meet anybody who thought Tesla "would be bankrupt and closed by now" who wasn't actively scheming toward that end. And yes, FUD counts as actively scheming.
Are you saying that boring cars that aren't EV / Hybrid / Autonomous are really that interested to the "news for nerds" crowd? For that matter, what about Ford F-150 story? That's definitely not EV / Hybrid / Autonomous, unless you count the little spies built into the vehicle. But go ahead. You were busy trying to downplay the newsworthiness of a vehicle which manages to impress everybody despite a sizable contingent devoted to grinding all EVs into dust.
Correction: Hybrid cars can be greener than electric ones. I'm sure you didn't mean to lump the hybrid SUVs in when you blanket claimed all hybrids were greener than all electrics. Especially since technically a golf cart should also count as an electric car (or at least could be retrofitted into one) and that would definitely be greener, if a bit less refined than a Tesla.
Using the wrong function is not a syntax error.
However, I never intended to defend IDEs. I personally hate them. But at least they don't tell you that your good grammar is wrong and tell you to replace it with something actually is wrong.
But hey, at least Word won't complain about your grammar until you've finished your sentence. Unlike an IDE that thinks you're never going to close that parenthesis you just opened.
I've got to take issue with you there. I've had Word suggest outright wrong grammar several times before. Things that would be clearly marked wrong by a grader. At least an IDE won't (usually) introduce blatant syntax errors.
Finally, someone who hates Obama enough to overcome the right-wing tendency towards more government surveillance. It's easy enough for a Democratic congress to go after a Republican president who abuses the rights of the American people, but apparently you have to call in the radicals to get a Republican congress to go after a Democratic president. I would have thought it wouldn't be that hard, though, with all the radicals around.
And apparently ambivalent towards the constitution as well.
I tried to post a comment on beta the other day. I wanted to be a coward, but there was no check box. So in trying to find a convenient way without logging out, I ended up back on the front page without the comment I already wrote, and the back button on the browser was even disabled. How the hell did that happen? Fuck beta.
$80 million may not be much money in comparison to a lot of other things, but we are in the middle of budget battles in Congress. How much would that $80 million be worth towards balancing the budget? Maybe saving government programs that do more proven and obvious good, like food stamps? How about using it directly on infrastructure repairs to both fix our massive number of failing bridges and inject a major stimulus into the bottom end of the economy, where it will do the most good? These are just my political suggestions; I don't feel confident to suggest without cynicism what that money could go to with different politics. But my point is that any money wasted from the federal budget is money that could been used much better in at least a dozen different ways.
The more I learn about charter schools, the more it seems that they obviously are not supposed to be a permanent solution. The institution itself is seems explicitly designed to produce a scattershot of ideas and methods, some of which might fail spectacularly, and some of which might succeed spectacularly. While it is troubling that we as a society are learning which ideas work at the expense of our children, that doesn't mean we should just throw away what we've learned. I'm not talking about whether or not to keep charter schools around. I'm talking about taking some of the more successful methods and implementing them in our public schools. It concerns me that every time I hear about how awful charter schools are supposed to be, the speaker acts as though the best solution would be to nuke them and pretend the whole experiment never happened.
With my 4-year CS degree I could tell you the basic idea, and I could recognize software that did it, but it would take a month for me to implement something myself. So here's my stab at the problem.
The crux of the issue is to reduce the software to specific operations for which you know how many gates are needed. To get a rough idea, I'd look at the compiled bytecode. There might then be an existing table of how many gates are needed to implement each operation in the resulting bytecode, or even more likely a number of transistors. But if not, that's where it would take a month of doing rough logical analysis to put together such a table. Then you add it up and get your result, which is kind of "it shouldn't take more than X many gates".
But then somebody has to actually transform the program into transistors so maybe you should just hire somebody that can do that. If you have the hardware design, it's trivial to tell someone how many transistors/gates are in it.
The disturbing part is not that the NSA might be able to listen to everyone's encryption someday. They are not an engineering organization and they will not be at the forefront of qubit manufacturing. The disturbing part is that they are wasting an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars on an impossible task aimed at ultimately destroying the ability to have security of any kind.
Is it big pharma pushing doctors to prescribe more? Is it doctors too lazy/busy to do a proper diagnosis? Is it mothers, fathers and teachers who seek to explain bad behavior and poor discipline (which is largely their fault) on medical conditions? Is it our foods which have changed over to GMO based content over the same period of time?
The basic cause of this is simple: lack of physical activity causes kids to be fidgety. They can't concentrate. Kids that fidget in class are disruptive. They are marked as "trouble".
You sir are full of shit.
Lack of physical activity? Are you serious? I was training in gymnastics for sixteen hours a week when I was diagnosed. I was winning state and regional medals until I was fifteen.
You're missing the target of her pronoun. The "this" in "basic cause of this" is not legitimate ADHD diagnoses. It's those being diagnosed who don't really have it. The whole point of TFA is that ADHD is over-diagnosed. 15% of children diagnosed for something an estimated 5% of them have? It's that extra 10% that are probably just fidgety 'cause recess and PE got cut so the district can cram more for the test.
As for the 5% who actually have the disorder, let's put it this way. I don't know what it's like, but I know some very smart people decided that it exists and has very real effects on a person's life. If medication fixes that, great! But we don't want to medicate the other 10% that don't actually have the disorder. It's apparently really hard to separate the over-diagnosis issue from ADHD being a real thing at all. And if only 1/3 of the people diagnosed really should have been, that mean 2/3 of every person I meet claiming to have ADHD really doesn't and doesn't know what it's like any better than I do.
But I'd guess that you really have it because you don't describe it the way everybody assumes "attention deficit" would work. It's not that you can't focus on any particular thing, it's that your mind just doesn't identify the same things to focus on as everyone else.
If you like sub-1080p resolutions and an already-obsolete and non-upgradeable CPU and GPU, sure. Not that those pieces are normally upgradeable, but why pay full price today for last year's technology?
This probably has something to do with manufacturer "guidelines" instructing users that they need to completely discharge their battery and then fully charge it at least once a week. Apple was (is?) guilty of this. The guideline has something to do with the computer being able to accurately display time remaining, but it's always seemed like a Bad Idea (tm) to me.
(Slashdot, would it kill you to allow UTF-8, or even HTML escaped entities like ™ or at least <sup> tags?)
It's not Apple's pretty little prison, it's Adobe's. When you're using "mainstream" software, that means Windows or (most of the time these days) OS X. Lots of people have decided in the last 10 years than Microsoft simply does not make a modern operating system anymore. I'm sure we would all love to have the Linux revolution...any day now...but that's simply not feasible for the people who've invested their skills in Adobe, or MS Office, or ProTools, or any other professional software. There may be equivalent (or superior!) free options but the people who need them would have to start learning from nothing; Photoshop skills don't really translate to GIMP skills.
So really, it's prisons all around. Would you rather live in Apple's pretty walled garden, or Microsoft's smelly old dungeon? Or would you rather be free and live with the Linux penguins in Antarctica?
Sounds like a great idea for manipulating human psychology to me. Lead the human to believe it fooled the machine into giving it a "discount", which is going to make that human feel good about buying whatever. It only has to manipulate 5% of people to be successful, and I think you underestimate how easily we are manipulated.
I read TFA (but didn't watch the video because I hate watching interviews on the internet). The argument boiled down to:
The last part is classic wrong thinking in economics, but I think in this case the rest of the argument is still valid. It just takes a different mechanism. I've never known somebody who thought ads actually communicated anything about how likely the seller is lying. But I have known many people who enjoy creative ads, like Geico (before it just got self-referential and boring) and others I can't remember right now.
Targeted ads are not creative. They're actually a little creepy most of the time, which is probably a major part of why more people are trying to block them. But more importantly, and here's where TFA has a good point, the ads are usually crap. The kind of crap we've seen in our email for the last decade. The kind that people have already figured out is dumb.
The point in TFA applies here because it explains how this happens. Targeted ads are dumb because they're cheaper than running expensive ads on high quality sites. That causes more low quality sellers to be able to afford the ads.
The key here is that we're picking up on the average low quality of the ads, not the underlying reason. Nobody goes around thinking about how much information an ad is signaling (besides its literal content). But in this case, the underlying reason seems directly related to our perception.
Since 2000? They didn't fall flat in everything. They did pretty well the XBox, not to mention their success with Windows XP.