I dunno - might be interesting to see the FTC's notes on these calls.
"Got another call today from somebody complaining about this company called, uh, "hell-bound bastards", or possibly "Skoh". The complaint was along the lines of 'that fucking Darl better not leave Utah, because if he does he'll get a giant penguin made of barbed wire crammed up his ass'. Caller sounded fairly annoyed. Possibly bears further investigation, in light of the 4000 other calls we've received today saying much the same thing. Sure wouldn't want to be this Darl guy. What kind of a name is Darl, anyway? Sounds like some fatass lawyer to me."
LOL! Damn, just ran out of mod points. That really deserves a +1 Funny.
I suppose, then, that the inverse would have to hold as well - that any man with this sort of colorblindness had a tetrachromatic mother?
Faulty logic. Just because X is true doesn't mean that the reverse of X is true. The gene is recessive, meaning for the woman to be tetrachromatic she must have both recessive genes for tetrachromaticity. This gene is carried on the X chromosome, which she has two of, but her prospective son only has one of. It only takes one such gene to make her son colorblind, since he is only capable of carrying one such gene. His mother could have either one or two recessive genes, so she could have either normal vision or 4 color vision.
What's that like, anyway? Do oranges just appear more brilliant?
I suppose trying to describe it to us with only three colors would be much like trying to describe any kind of color to somebody completely color blind. It's a futile exercise. Try explaining vision to somebody who was born blind.
The suspect, now in police custody, was an employee with legitimate access to the information.
Geez, even the submitters don't RTFA, do they? From the NYT:
Barrett said the individual in police custody is a former employee of one of Acxiom's clients and that the information was stolen while the person had legitimate access to Acxiom servers.
The suspect was not an Acxiom employee, but an employee of one of Acxiom's clients (banks, cc companies, etc.). He had access to the server, but he cracked the server to access information from other Acxiom clients as well. So yes, this is a cracked server, which BTW was placed outside the company firewall. I'm no security expert, but doesn't that sound stupid to anybody else?
I don't think any company would trust Windows 95 as an embeded solution.
You might be surprised. In a city I used to work in, all the county ambulances had these little computer terminals in to retrieve data. I was with a paramedic friend of mine (mandatory ride along for my job) and the thing had to be rebooted in between a call because it crashed. I was utterly flabbergasted when I watched the thing reboot.
All the ambulances were running Windows 3.1 (on DOS of course)! This was only a couple years ago, so I doubt anything's changed. This 5MB Win95 install could actually be a nice upgrade for them!
It's weird seeing his name in the news. A friend of mine is the personal chef for Robbie Williams in LA. According to my friend, he's not at all the typical druggie, hedonistic, pop star archetype. Mostly he spends time with his friends or messing around on his guitar. Some of the stuff he hears Robbie playing while cooking is supposedly actually pretty good, and my friend (almost as a rule) generally doesn't like pop music.
100th year, 90th Tour de France. they paused for a little while for WW 1 and 2.
And Jacques Anquetil took off three years to fight, then came back to win more Tours. It's widely regarded that had not the World War so rudely interrupted, Anquetil would have been the all-time leader by far with eight Tour wins.
I guess I should've taken the train, but I didn't realize just how far away it was!
No, you made the right decision. Those that have been to DFW regularly know that the "train" is even slower than the slidewalks. Their amazingly slow, not even counting the waiting time. They were originally supposed to go much faster, but somehow didn't make spec.
Odd, I always thought the CE stamped on products (and not just electronics) in Europe stood for "Communauté Européenne", French for "European Community."
Considering Honda is near the top of the *Top 10* list of most popular cars stolen in the U.S., they should be working on better standard theft-detection systems
Maybe it's because Hondas are among the top ten selling cars in the US, rather than some inherent "steal me" features in the car? Looking down the list, the most commonly stolen cars are generally the most common cars. It only makes sense. There are more of them to steal. I'd have thought this would be common sense.
Does anybody public statistics about which cars have the highest theft "rate"?
The other confounding factor that comes to mind is that some cars will get stolen more often because they're more attractive. Nobody's going to spend much effort to steal an AMC pacer, no matter how easy it is.
Toyotas and Hondas lead the most-stolen list partly due to their popularity with consumers. But these cars are popular with thieves also because they tend to have interchangeable parts amongst their model years, creating a profitable market for replacement parts.
Gonna have to agree with the first reply. Shorts are not "dated". You can sell a stock short and hold that position indefinitely, barring margin calls.
Selling calls or buying puts are a different matter, both of which are time-limited transactions. Another thing to keep in mind is that you cannot short stocks that are priced less than $5/share on the NASDAQ, which is where SCOX is listed, IIRC.
The problem (as I understand it) is that he published her name, and assiciated it with her house. That information is not published publicly, and she feels that this violated her rights.
Land deeds are public information, even in Malibu, California. The LA County Office of the Assessor has these documents for public perusal upon the asking.
Q: HOW DO I FIND OUT THE NAME OF THE OWNER OF A PARTICULAR PROPERTY?
A: The Office of Assessor maintains the property assessment roll, which lists the assessee (normally the property owner). The roll may be inspected by the public at the main office or regional offices. For a list of the offices, go to the Assessor's website at: http://www.lacountyassessor.com/contactUs/contactI nfo.asp. You may also request this information by phone at (213) 974-3211 or by e-mail at assessor@co.la.ca.us
Rounder Records has several artists I like quite a lot, so it dismays me that they are also a member of the RIAA. It doesn't absolutely prevent me from buying their CD's, but I certainly think twice about it. There are probably some I haven't bought just for that reason.
He's not trolling, and your link doesn't prove the point. He stated that Microsoft had nothing to do with the design of the Opteron. What your link states is that AMD helped Microsoft design Windows so that it would run well on the Opteron. Two very different things.
Everybody hauls this example out, and it isn't a good one. The woman who spilled coffee on herself was permanently maimed by it. The coffee machine's heating element was set far too high (just below boiling). It had been noted in an inspection and the store had been ordered to fix it. They did not. Then the moron put the coffee between her legs and drove off.
Mostly correct. Inspection notwithstanding, it was McDonald's policy to serve coffee at that temperature, as their court testimony demonstrated.
While the victim may have been a moron (and in my opinion was) she was not driving at the time. She was a passenger. The driver had stopped the car in order that she could place the styrofoam coffee cup between her knees and try to remove the plastic lid so she could put sugar or cream in her coffee. Now that's stupid.
I strongly suspect that her grammar was one of the reasons she did not want it read. She possibly *can't* spell or construct proper sentences when she rights, and depends on an editor to fix her writing. If so, then the change in public perception will damage her credibility as a journalist. It shouldn't, but it will. If she *can* spell, then the poorer level of writing may still make people assume she can't, with the same result.
But it really was her own fault. I have this problem myself, not only with email, but on Slashdot.
Thanks, I couldn't find the relevant passages. However...
"In addition to other rights provided by this section, a patent shall include the right to obtain a reasonable royalty from any per-son who,..."
Granted, that section deals with royalties from entities who intentionally or inadvertently copy your patent, but another section applies to making the product available to the public for "reasonable" cost. Page 44, section 35 USC 200:
It does not state the patent holder has an obligation to provide for collection of reasonable royalties, however, only the right to do so. Not nearly the same thing.
Granted, that section deals with royalties from entities who intentionally or inadvertently copy your patent, but another section applies to making the product available to the public for "reasonable" cost. Page 44, section 35 USC 200:
"ensure that the Government obtains sufficient rights in federally supported inventions to meet the needs of the Government and protect the public against nonuse or unreasonable use of inventions;"
This passage you quoted which your argument is based upon only applies to patents whose development was federally funded. Indeed, if you look at the top of the page you quote, the header states:
Chapter 18--Patent Rights in Inventions made with Federal Assistance. Also, as written the passage applies only to small business (as defined in the document) or non-profit organizations.
And no, IANAL. Are you?
Let me tell you where I'm coming from on this issue. Last year I had to watch an uncle die from cancer. Financially, he didn't do too badly, but his insurance policy limits hit and he had to start paying pretty much out of his own pocket. His medicinal bills (not including hospital stays, etc.) were on the order of $15,000 per month. Did they buy him a couple more months of life? Yes, but the fact that it can completely wipe a family out just buying medicine for a dying man just doesn't seem right to me. This was a man with a family. To save his life, they would have given everything they had. And they pretty much did.
Fair enough. Sorry if I came off aggressive on my previous post, but I hear so much of this "steal from the rich and give to the poor" crap that it gets old after a while.
On the subject of your uncle's death (my condolances): this is a question that should have been discussed with the family and your uncle well ahead of time. How much do they want done, and how much does the patient want done in case of serious illness? It costs a lot of money to treat critically ill patients, as well as time and risk to the care providers involved. To ask, or even worse, require that they do it for free is unreasonable. Instead, the patient and the family should have set limits before it got that bad. If the family decided it was worth spending every last cent they had to keep him alive for a couple months longer, then that's the decision they made. Cancer therapy is a painful field to work in. After a certain point when it's clear that the end is near, it makes good sense to withhold the cancer treatments and simply provide care to make the patient as comfortable as possible. At some point, you just have to say that the cost of the treatment (both monetarily and in time and pain) isn't worth it any more. The tough part comes when the family is divided, and some of them want "everything done" regardless of the condition of the patient, or even regardless of the patient's previously stated desires.
I've already talked to my parents about such things, although neither is seriously ill. I know what limits they've set, and how much they're willing to go through and spend for what kind of quality of life.
Really, go read an introductory macroeconomics textbook, and you'll see that your ideas have no concordance with reality as we live it.
First: I made no illusions of this being a gov't controlled resource. It may work out to be something similar to that in the end, but I've never taken the idea that far.
It took me all of 5 seconds to take your idea beyond where you had. That's why I suggested that you keep thinking.
Second: Money == Gold...I'm talking about a non-tangible here. Right now companies prosper by making dollars at whatever cost. Lock up IP for 50 years? Sure, if it makes us more money.
I don't know about Canada, but Money does not equal Gold in the US or in most industrialized Western countries, where the currency "floats," meaning it is traded at whatever value the world thinks it happens to be worth that day. Money is very intangible. If the US economy dropped to crap in the next year, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to get any decent amount of gold for US dollars.
The business you work in (IT) has IP laws that extend that long. Drug patents are good for only 17 years, much of which is spent developing and testing, not actually making any money on the things.
This raises their value in the eyes of the people, and therefore makes them more profitable.
Explain to me how raising a company in the companies eyes makes them more "profitable" or puts food on the table of the people who work in that company. I see you're recently married. Would you be satisfied with working for a company whose main concern was increasing their reputation in the public's eye without regard to whether or not they could actually pay you enough to afford housing, clothes, a decent wedding, etc.?
These "evil" companies are contributing to the good the world. Monetary compensation is how they are rewarded for their contributions. It's not the perfect system, nor do I think we'll even find such a perfect system, but it's better than anything I've seen yet. What you propose is fluffy and lacks definition, and clearly could not be implemented in anything but fantasies.
Ultimately, I would like to see a combination between the good parts of socialism (welfare systems, health care, etc) mixed with the good parts of capitalism (competition, open market). I'd remove the fixation on physical wealth, and replace it with an untangible.
We have that both in the US and in Canada already. Which parts are you unhappy with? There are always more and less socialized countries you can choose to live in if you like. A fair amount of medicine in both Canada and the US is already socialized, but if you want more socialized medicine you can always move to China or Cuba. Alternatively, you could vote to try to make Canadian medicine more like Chinese or Cuban medicine.
I'd remove the fixation on physical wealth, and replace it with an untangible.
I'll tell you what. I'd like to remove your fixation on physical wealth. Give me all the money you earn from now on, and I'll give you lots and lots of "goodwill." On second thought, you're right! This system is going to work out great!:)
Yes, I have a background in both economics and medicine, so I take offense when laypersons start talking about how I or my colleagues should be obligated to work for free more than we already do.
Secondly, part of patent law states that in being granted a patent, you must make the product available to the public at reasonable cost. The company that comes up with a cure for AIDS will not be granted a patent for the cure unless it is produced in a lab, and they will not be allowed to charge $200 a pill for it.
I can't find anything in the US Patent Code that requires that the inventor of a patented creation make it available to anyone at any price. Are you just making this stuff up as you go along?
Also, you clearly have no clue what the average current triple drug therapy for HIV actually costs. If a drug company were to offer a cure for AIDS for $200, it would be an unbelievable bargin. It would be tantamount to somebody coming up to you and offering to sell you a new Ferrari for a thousand bucks. Maybe even better. The cure for AIDS, if it is ever found, would be easily worth tens of thousands of dollars per cure in the US, given the current costs associated with treating the disease and the lost economic capacity of the infected individuals.
I realize that a lot of people will say, "They worked hard. They have marketable skills. They deserve every thing that they have. They earned it." I used to feel this way. But now, I fail to see how anyone deserves to live in a $50 million dollar house, driving $200,000 dollar cars, drinking $1,000 bottles of wine, and spending more on an evening out on the town than some people make in a year. How can this be right, when millions of their fellow humans are dying from treatable and curable diseases? When others, who work just as hard as they ever did, live in abject poverty--unable to provide for the basic needs of there families.
A little bitter about the dot-com bubble bursting?:)
Well, when you're posting to/. from some crappy little Angolan village after having dug them a new sewage system, then let's talk. Until then, you and I can both work to make ourselves more comfortable. Your level of comfort would probably be viewed similarly to the guy drinking $1000 bottles of wine from the perspective of said Angolan peasant.
And before you get on my case, I'd bet a lot of money that the dollar value of services I provide to the poor for free exceeds yours by at least an order of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Eddie Izzard fan?
"The bad things we bring to death."
LOL! Damn, just ran out of mod points. That really deserves a +1 Funny.
Geez, even the submitters don't RTFA, do they? From the NYT:
The suspect was not an Acxiom employee, but an employee of one of Acxiom's clients (banks, cc companies, etc.). He had access to the server, but he cracked the server to access information from other Acxiom clients as well. So yes, this is a cracked server, which BTW was placed outside the company firewall. I'm no security expert, but doesn't that sound stupid to anybody else?
You might be surprised. In a city I used to work in, all the county ambulances had these little computer terminals in to retrieve data. I was with a paramedic friend of mine (mandatory ride along for my job) and the thing had to be rebooted in between a call because it crashed. I was utterly flabbergasted when I watched the thing reboot.
All the ambulances were running Windows 3.1 (on DOS of course)! This was only a couple years ago, so I doubt anything's changed. This 5MB Win95 install could actually be a nice upgrade for them!
It's weird seeing his name in the news. A friend of mine is the personal chef for Robbie Williams in LA. According to my friend, he's not at all the typical druggie, hedonistic, pop star archetype. Mostly he spends time with his friends or messing around on his guitar. Some of the stuff he hears Robbie playing while cooking is supposedly actually pretty good, and my friend (almost as a rule) generally doesn't like pop music.
And Jacques Anquetil took off three years to fight, then came back to win more Tours. It's widely regarded that had not the World War so rudely interrupted, Anquetil would have been the all-time leader by far with eight Tour wins.
No, you made the right decision. Those that have been to DFW regularly know that the "train" is even slower than the slidewalks. Their amazingly slow, not even counting the waiting time. They were originally supposed to go much faster, but somehow didn't make spec.
Odd, I always thought the CE stamped on products (and not just electronics) in Europe stood for "Communauté Européenne", French for "European Community."
Maybe it's because Hondas are among the top ten selling cars in the US, rather than some inherent "steal me" features in the car? Looking down the list, the most commonly stolen cars are generally the most common cars. It only makes sense. There are more of them to steal. I'd have thought this would be common sense.
Does anybody public statistics about which cars have the highest theft "rate"?
The other confounding factor that comes to mind is that some cars will get stolen more often because they're more attractive. Nobody's going to spend much effort to steal an AMC pacer, no matter how easy it is.
A quick Google turned up this information:
Toyotas and Hondas lead the most-stolen list partly due to their popularity with consumers. But these cars are popular with thieves also because they tend to have interchangeable parts amongst their model years, creating a profitable market for replacement parts.
Selling calls or buying puts are a different matter, both of which are time-limited transactions. Another thing to keep in mind is that you cannot short stocks that are priced less than $5/share on the NASDAQ, which is where SCOX is listed, IIRC.
Land deeds are public information, even in Malibu, California. The LA County Office of the Assessor has these documents for public perusal upon the asking.
From their website:
[paranoia]Either that, or they're even more sneaky about it, and nobody's caught them at it yet.[/paranoia]
Rounder Records has several artists I like quite a lot, so it dismays me that they are also a member of the RIAA. It doesn't absolutely prevent me from buying their CD's, but I certainly think twice about it. There are probably some I haven't bought just for that reason.
He's not trolling, and your link doesn't prove the point. He stated that Microsoft had nothing to do with the design of the Opteron. What your link states is that AMD helped Microsoft design Windows so that it would run well on the Opteron. Two very different things.
Mostly correct. Inspection notwithstanding, it was McDonald's policy to serve coffee at that temperature, as their court testimony demonstrated.
While the victim may have been a moron (and in my opinion was) she was not driving at the time. She was a passenger. The driver had stopped the car in order that she could place the styrofoam coffee cup between her knees and try to remove the plastic lid so she could put sugar or cream in her coffee. Now that's stupid.
Yeah, but at least I got first post! Honestly, I wasn't sure whether you intended to make a funny or not.
No kidding. :)
It does not state the patent holder has an obligation to provide for collection of reasonable royalties, however, only the right to do so. Not nearly the same thing.
This passage you quoted which your argument is based upon only applies to patents whose development was federally funded. Indeed, if you look at the top of the page you quote, the header states: Chapter 18--Patent Rights in Inventions made with Federal Assistance. Also, as written the passage applies only to small business (as defined in the document) or non-profit organizations. And no, IANAL. Are you?
Fair enough. Sorry if I came off aggressive on my previous post, but I hear so much of this "steal from the rich and give to the poor" crap that it gets old after a while.
On the subject of your uncle's death (my condolances): this is a question that should have been discussed with the family and your uncle well ahead of time. How much do they want done, and how much does the patient want done in case of serious illness? It costs a lot of money to treat critically ill patients, as well as time and risk to the care providers involved. To ask, or even worse, require that they do it for free is unreasonable. Instead, the patient and the family should have set limits before it got that bad. If the family decided it was worth spending every last cent they had to keep him alive for a couple months longer, then that's the decision they made. Cancer therapy is a painful field to work in. After a certain point when it's clear that the end is near, it makes good sense to withhold the cancer treatments and simply provide care to make the patient as comfortable as possible. At some point, you just have to say that the cost of the treatment (both monetarily and in time and pain) isn't worth it any more. The tough part comes when the family is divided, and some of them want "everything done" regardless of the condition of the patient, or even regardless of the patient's previously stated desires.
I've already talked to my parents about such things, although neither is seriously ill. I know what limits they've set, and how much they're willing to go through and spend for what kind of quality of life.
It took me all of 5 seconds to take your idea beyond where you had. That's why I suggested that you keep thinking.
I don't know about Canada, but Money does not equal Gold in the US or in most industrialized Western countries, where the currency "floats," meaning it is traded at whatever value the world thinks it happens to be worth that day. Money is very intangible. If the US economy dropped to crap in the next year, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to get any decent amount of gold for US dollars.
The business you work in (IT) has IP laws that extend that long. Drug patents are good for only 17 years, much of which is spent developing and testing, not actually making any money on the things.
Explain to me how raising a company in the companies eyes makes them more "profitable" or puts food on the table of the people who work in that company. I see you're recently married. Would you be satisfied with working for a company whose main concern was increasing their reputation in the public's eye without regard to whether or not they could actually pay you enough to afford housing, clothes, a decent wedding, etc.?
These "evil" companies are contributing to the good the world. Monetary compensation is how they are rewarded for their contributions. It's not the perfect system, nor do I think we'll even find such a perfect system, but it's better than anything I've seen yet. What you propose is fluffy and lacks definition, and clearly could not be implemented in anything but fantasies.
We have that both in the US and in Canada already. Which parts are you unhappy with? There are always more and less socialized countries you can choose to live in if you like. A fair amount of medicine in both Canada and the US is already socialized, but if you want more socialized medicine you can always move to China or Cuba. Alternatively, you could vote to try to make Canadian medicine more like Chinese or Cuban medicine.
I'll tell you what. I'd like to remove your fixation on physical wealth. Give me all the money you earn from now on, and I'll give you lots and lots of "goodwill." On second thought, you're right! This system is going to work out great! :)
Yes, I have a background in both economics and medicine, so I take offense when laypersons start talking about how I or my colleagues should be obligated to work for free more than we already do.
I can't find anything in the US Patent Code that requires that the inventor of a patented creation make it available to anyone at any price. Are you just making this stuff up as you go along?
Also, you clearly have no clue what the average current triple drug therapy for HIV actually costs. If a drug company were to offer a cure for AIDS for $200, it would be an unbelievable bargin. It would be tantamount to somebody coming up to you and offering to sell you a new Ferrari for a thousand bucks. Maybe even better. The cure for AIDS, if it is ever found, would be easily worth tens of thousands of dollars per cure in the US, given the current costs associated with treating the disease and the lost economic capacity of the infected individuals.
A little bitter about the dot-com bubble bursting? :)
Well, when you're posting to /. from some crappy little Angolan village after having dug them a new sewage system, then let's talk. Until then, you and I can both work to make ourselves more comfortable. Your level of comfort would probably be viewed similarly to the guy drinking $1000 bottles of wine from the perspective of said Angolan peasant.
And before you get on my case, I'd bet a lot of money that the dollar value of services I provide to the poor for free exceeds yours by at least an order of magnitude.