Question: For any given projectile, would it generally be preferable to be on the ground or in an airplane at the time of impact? How about deep underground in a bunker? On the ocean floor in a habitat? Or aloft in an aircraft specially designed to withstand a sudden pressure differential?
Or would in a spacecraft orbiting above the atmosphere be the best location?
By not responding to Real's threat, Apple would be opening themselves up to lawsuits by the shareholders for not protecting their intellectual property rights.
Seems that periodically this meme gets trotted out, totally without substantiation. I call "bullshit." For one, IBM has famously failed to "protect" a great many of its IP rights, notably those it has open-sourced to Linux. And this has met with nothing but applause from the open-source advocates populating this site. Certainly if IBM had been sued by its own shareholders for giving away source-code, it would be big news here.
It seems to me that the officers of a company have a great deal of latitude to make business decisions without being second guessed by the individual shareholders, and barring some kind of flagrant breach of fiduciary duty, are basically not accountable for their actions, other than being forced out of office, of course.
If I am mistaken, that's fine, just clarify my error. But if not, can we please let this silly Slashmeme die?
The examples that you mention of species which thrive in a new environment are species which have already evolved (there's that word again) to survive and compete in very similar environments. Japanese beetles natively exist in temperate climates which are not terribly different from Michigan's except for the unfortunate lack of predators. Notice that Japanese beetles haven't proven a threat to the Antarctic or the Sahara. And it's fair to conclude they would not do too well on Mars, despite having zero natural predators there. And D. radiodurans, for all its varied resistances and defenses, for all of its millions of years headstart with respect to a hypothetical Martian superbug, still doesn't thrive in the environment that matters most to us -- within our own bodies.
On Earth, bacteria and molds eat just about anything that contains an energy source and has not evolved a way to fight off an attack. What leads you to think that a Martian bug's got some extra mojo that isn't already here in one of our Earth-optimized species?
There's also the fact which many others have already pointed out. If Mars is populated by microbes, they've probably been here already, via meteorites. So to sum up, I think the threat, if any, is minimal.
And furthermore, referring to Mavis Beacon in the summary just goes to show that the submitter didn't even bother to read his own fripping sources. The patent application specifically refers to prior art using keyboard charaters as input and claims that it is an improvement to that kind of method. So no, MS is clearly not going after typing programs. At least, not here.
This patent app is referring to a (possibly networked) pen and tablet type device used as an educational tool. As this person points out, one can think of possible prior art here. But really, this is just an ordinary straightforward patent. It's not any more evil than any other patent application.
If anything, it looks to me like MS is trying to end-run some of the Nintendo DS's possible functionality.
That's a valid consideration, but should really be a reply to the grandparent post, not to mine. My point was that even without any "take down" action initiated by the user or by Microsoft, shops now have a reason to be more cautious about building bootleg PCs, since the shop will be aware that the customer can report it without getting punished.
But let's take what you wrote a step further. The shop sells you a computer with a $500 video card. Meaning a $2000 computer, albeit one with a fake version of Windows. And you're one of those clueless customers who thinks a CD-ROM tray holds floppies. Within days of purchase, you've got viruses, your hard drive is acting up, you can't get the printer to work. And you bring your system back to the shop a few times. Because you're such a lamer, every time they fix it, you break it again. Since you don't know your butt from your elbow, you think the it's the shop's fault. But they tire of giving you free 24/7 support and won't give you your money back. Now you have a reason, in your mind, to retaliate against the shop for selling you defective goods. And all it takes is one disgruntled customer like you to put a shop at risk. And as any business will tell you, no matter how good your service, there are always dissatisfied customers.
Now we're back to what I wrote earlier. Thanks to this latest move by MS, it's better for the shop to just charge you for Windows instead of worrying about customers being able to threaten them in this fashion.
Microsoft doesn't actually have to find anybody to come out a winner here. Just the threat that their customers now have a risk-free incentive to turn them in will discourage computer shops from installing bootlegged copies of Windows.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything at the linked article indicating that Palm users are in fact cancelling their orders "in droves." It seems to me that this is much ado over a rather esoteric bug that won't affect most people, and that possibly, Slashdot is being irresponsible here for allowing such an allegation to reach the front page with nothing resembling research.
It would be ironic if this Slashdot writeup indirectly causes one of Microsoft's few remaining competitors to bite the dust.
Licensing capacity The lucid nature of open source software means that to obtain a mandatory license for a patent would be prohibitively expensive for two reasons. First, open source software does not have deep pockets or the capacity for a cross licensing agreement. Second, even if either were available, the nature of open source software would wholly undermine the purpose of the patent: an open source implementation of the patent would be available for free, unrestricted use.
A proprietary software company, on the other hand, has the economic means and an economic incentive to obtain a license or cross license, and would presumably do so only for the benefit of the company, and would not threaten the other economic interests of the patent.
You seem to be saying that "open source" is synonymous with "no money" and that proprietary software is synonymous with deep pockets. There are plenty of companies, IBM, Sun, Novell, etc., who publish Open Source Software and can pay to license patents. And there are plenty of proprietary companies which do not have the economic means to pay for patent licensing. OSS is not a synonym for "freeware."
Furthermore, all patents are in a sense "open source" since the patent is itself open to public view. Compulsory licensing does not, therefore, give away any secrets.
Am I the only one who does not need this feature? I listen to my iPod when I'm on the train, when I'm walking somewhere, or when I'm working out.. all of these activities require using your eyes, so
Hello? We've already established that Google hasn't done an image refresh since before the Abu Ghraib story broke. Cannes '04 took place in May, which means none of those pictures have been spidered by Google images.
Besides, Google seems to have no problem showing older pictures that would be uncomfortable for Kerry. So can we drop this conspiracy silliness?
Which part of their response did you not understand/ They simply have not updated their image index since before the Abu Ghraib incident took place. Look, do a search on some other recent news of international import. Observe, for instance, that a search of Mary-Kate Olsen fails to turn up any pictures of her as a skeeved-out anorexic. In addition to that, notice that a very large percentage of any picture search turns up as 404 errors, which result is consistent with the database not being updated recently.
A few more such patents, and this will end up snowballing companies into realizing how futile their patents are.
Unfortunately, I disagree. The large companies just consider this as a business expense. Eventually they will either settle for an undisclosed sum, license for the agreed terms or litigate the matter into oblivion. Of course, nobody wants to pay unnecessary expenses, but overall, they LIKE this sort of behavior. Why? Because it keeps smaller companies from even coming to the table. It enforces a technological cartel and that means greater profits.
Even so, it would be interesting to speculate on, if what you say was true, which large company would break ranks first and start to lobby for the abolition of software patents.
1) Inappropriate scare quotes around "moderators." 2) Should of -> should have 3) All of the sudden -> all of a sudden 4) Deep-seeded -> deep-seated 5) Loose -> lose 6) Free reign -> Free rein 7) Authoratitive -> authoritative (probably a typo)
Do you think, maybe, this was supposed to be funny?
Anyone care to explain how 'half an inch' converts to ounces?
Simple. Jump into lightspeed, divide by your unit of time (i.e. parsecs), and boom, there you go!
Full review of the game is on the newsstands
on
Half Life 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 4, Informative
PC Gamer's latest December 2004 issue has a very extensive review of the completed HL2 with loads of screenshots and spoilers. They call it "history in the making" and "arguably the best game ever made," finally giving it a 98% rating. For comparison's sake, the same issue also rates Call of Duty:UO at 93%, Evil Genius at 88% and The Sims 2 at 85%.
I was getting to write a screed on how the headline to this topic is verging on libel, with reckless disregard for the truth. But then I realized there are spyware-like aspects to the software. Imagine a husband and wife sharing the same machine. The tech-savvy husband suspects his wife is cheating on him with his neighbor Rick. So he installs Google Search on the machine. Whenever the wife logs on, her email is indexed, and then, yes, the husband is thus able to spy on her by looking up any instances of the name "Rick."
Of course, any reasonably expert computer user is going to be able to view the wife's info anyway. But since this software seems to greatly facilitate the process, and reportedly does so in a way which is not necessarily transparent to all the users, I think that calling it potential spyware really is not that much of a stretch.
A possible solution might be to force each user to enter her password into the software before it starts to index any of their files. And then to offer her a choice -- to make her information globally accessible, or to encrypt her index so it is only accessible to the individual user.
I haven't downloaded or used this program yet, so if I've somehow misunderstood and it already does something like this, then I apologize in advance.
Just because you don't like the music being sold at Wal-Mart doesn't mean that it sucks.
He didn't say it sucked. He said they don't carry "developing and independent artists." That seems like a fairly rational assessment. Not sure why you bit his head off. Unless it has to do with that whole "Evil" thing.:)
If you don't like the price, don't buy it.
Surely if he had known in advance that the CDs were crappy, he wouldn't have bought them. Anyway, it might've been more constructive to point out that $4 is not a huge markup at all. You have to pay rent, salaries, compensate for shrinkage etc. The article itself notes that on average, after overhead costs, retail profits per CD amount to just 89 cents. I wouldn't call that gouging by any means.
Who do you regard as a credible news source? Fox News? They don't just get stuff wrong, they make silly stuff up about the Democrats. (See their retraction.)
The fact is that all news sources make mistake and they all have biases. The Times, at least, will occasionally question the aims and motives of it's own party, unlike most of the right-wing organs in this country.
And Sadam did have illegal weapons, he even used some of them in the war.
And if you happen to have a joint in your house, it's okay for the cops to bomb it to bits? "Illegal" doesn't mean, "I get to destroy your country." Hussein didn't have the WMDs that the US claimed he had, the ones we supposedly invaded him over. If Bush had said, "We're gonna put Saddam out of power because he's a bad guy sitting on a heap of oil that we want, plain and simple," then we as Americans could have decided, before the fact, whether we'd jump on board with him. But he didn't say that. Up until the last moment, he engaged in the blatant pretense of waiting for Saddam to "disarm" his nonexistent WMDs. He lied.
The solution? Someone comes out with a popular piece of software with some crazy clause in the EULA.
Sorry but that's silly. If you put an unconscionable clause in a regular ol' pre-Internet-style written contract, a court can easily find it unenforeceable without throwing away the entirety of contract law. So putting a bogus clause in a shrink-wrap contract will have the same lack of effect. It may void that particular contract, whoop-de-do, but it won't strike down EULAs in general.
We need to stop pinning our hopes on an activist judiciary. They may nick around the edges of UCITA but the killing stroke is not going to happen. At this point, the only way to substantially limit the scope of EULA's is through legislative amendments.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the links, but even if you had completely pulled all that out of your ass, I'd still be going, "hiryuu>>>> me".
Actually, WMP10 is fairly easy to configure to prevent this from happening. Turn off all the automatic crap in Privacy and Security and you're done.
Question: For any given projectile, would it generally be preferable to be on the ground or in an airplane at the time of impact? How about deep underground in a bunker? On the ocean floor in a habitat? Or aloft in an aircraft specially designed to withstand a sudden pressure differential?
Or would in a spacecraft orbiting above the atmosphere be the best location?
By not responding to Real's threat, Apple would be opening themselves up to lawsuits by the shareholders for not protecting their intellectual property rights.
Seems that periodically this meme gets trotted out, totally without substantiation. I call "bullshit." For one, IBM has famously failed to "protect" a great many of its IP rights, notably those it has open-sourced to Linux. And this has met with nothing but applause from the open-source advocates populating this site. Certainly if IBM had been sued by its own shareholders for giving away source-code, it would be big news here.
It seems to me that the officers of a company have a great deal of latitude to make business decisions without being second guessed by the individual shareholders, and barring some kind of flagrant breach of fiduciary duty, are basically not accountable for their actions, other than being forced out of office, of course.
If I am mistaken, that's fine, just clarify my error. But if not, can we please let this silly Slashmeme die?
The examples that you mention of species which thrive in a new environment are species which have already evolved (there's that word again) to survive and compete in very similar environments. Japanese beetles natively exist in temperate climates which are not terribly different from Michigan's except for the unfortunate lack of predators. Notice that Japanese beetles haven't proven a threat to the Antarctic or the Sahara. And it's fair to conclude they would not do too well on Mars, despite having zero natural predators there. And D. radiodurans, for all its varied resistances and defenses, for all of its millions of years headstart with respect to a hypothetical Martian superbug, still doesn't thrive in the environment that matters most to us -- within our own bodies.
On Earth, bacteria and molds eat just about anything that contains an energy source and has not evolved a way to fight off an attack. What leads you to think that a Martian bug's got some extra mojo that isn't already here in one of our Earth-optimized species?
There's also the fact which many others have already pointed out. If Mars is populated by microbes, they've probably been here already, via meteorites. So to sum up, I think the threat, if any, is minimal.
And furthermore, referring to Mavis Beacon in the summary just goes to show that the submitter didn't even bother to read his own fripping sources. The patent application specifically refers to prior art using keyboard charaters as input and claims that it is an improvement to that kind of method. So no, MS is clearly not going after typing programs. At least, not here.
This patent app is referring to a (possibly networked) pen and tablet type device used as an educational tool. As this person points out, one can think of possible prior art here. But really, this is just an ordinary straightforward patent. It's not any more evil than any other patent application.
If anything, it looks to me like MS is trying to end-run some of the Nintendo DS's possible functionality.
Not that it's much fancier, but their main website is at SolarPC.com.
First of all, no species has ever been shown to evolve into another species. No scientific experiment has ever proved this.
I was going to mod you down but I think it's better to just say that you are wrong.
That's a valid consideration, but should really be a reply to the grandparent post, not to mine. My point was that even without any "take down" action initiated by the user or by Microsoft, shops now have a reason to be more cautious about building bootleg PCs, since the shop will be aware that the customer can report it without getting punished.
But let's take what you wrote a step further. The shop sells you a computer with a $500 video card. Meaning a $2000 computer, albeit one with a fake version of Windows. And you're one of those clueless customers who thinks a CD-ROM tray holds floppies. Within days of purchase, you've got viruses, your hard drive is acting up, you can't get the printer to work. And you bring your system back to the shop a few times. Because you're such a lamer, every time they fix it, you break it again. Since you don't know your butt from your elbow, you think the it's the shop's fault. But they tire of giving you free 24/7 support and won't give you your money back. Now you have a reason, in your mind, to retaliate against the shop for selling you defective goods. And all it takes is one disgruntled customer like you to put a shop at risk. And as any business will tell you, no matter how good your service, there are always dissatisfied customers.
Now we're back to what I wrote earlier. Thanks to this latest move by MS, it's better for the shop to just charge you for Windows instead of worrying about customers being able to threaten them in this fashion.
Microsoft doesn't actually have to find anybody to come out a winner here. Just the threat that their customers now have a risk-free incentive to turn them in will discourage computer shops from installing bootlegged copies of Windows.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything at the linked article indicating that Palm users are in fact cancelling their orders "in droves." It seems to me that this is much ado over a rather esoteric bug that won't affect most people, and that possibly, Slashdot is being irresponsible here for allowing such an allegation to reach the front page with nothing resembling research.
It would be ironic if this Slashdot writeup indirectly causes one of Microsoft's few remaining competitors to bite the dust.
Licensing capacity
The lucid nature of open source software means that to obtain a mandatory license for a patent would be prohibitively expensive for two reasons. First, open source software does not have deep pockets or the capacity for a cross licensing agreement. Second, even if either were available, the nature of open source software would wholly undermine the purpose of the patent: an open source implementation of the patent would be available for free, unrestricted use.
A proprietary software company, on the other hand, has the economic means and an economic incentive to obtain a license or cross license, and would presumably do so only for the benefit of the company, and would not threaten the other economic interests of the patent.
You seem to be saying that "open source" is synonymous with "no money" and that proprietary software is synonymous with deep pockets. There are plenty of companies, IBM, Sun, Novell, etc., who publish Open Source Software and can pay to license patents. And there are plenty of proprietary companies which do not have the economic means to pay for patent licensing. OSS is not a synonym for "freeware."
Furthermore, all patents are in a sense "open source" since the patent is itself open to public view. Compulsory licensing does not, therefore, give away any secrets.
Am I the only one who does not need this feature? I listen to my iPod when I'm on the train, when I'm walking somewhere, or when I'm working out.. all of these activities require using your eyes, so
Exactly! Oops, somebody forgot to tell Apple.
Hello? We've already established that Google hasn't done an image refresh since before the Abu Ghraib story broke. Cannes '04 took place in May, which means none of those pictures have been spidered by Google images.
Besides, Google seems to have no problem showing older pictures that would be uncomfortable for Kerry. So can we drop this conspiracy silliness?
Which part of their response did you not understand/ They simply have not updated their image index since before the Abu Ghraib incident took place. Look, do a search on some other recent news of international import. Observe, for instance, that a search of Mary-Kate Olsen fails to turn up any pictures of her as a skeeved-out anorexic. In addition to that, notice that a very large percentage of any picture search turns up as 404 errors, which result is consistent with the database not being updated recently.
A few more such patents, and this will end up snowballing companies into realizing how futile their patents are.
Unfortunately, I disagree. The large companies just consider this as a business expense. Eventually they will either settle for an undisclosed sum, license for the agreed terms or litigate the matter into oblivion. Of course, nobody wants to pay unnecessary expenses, but overall, they LIKE this sort of behavior. Why? Because it keeps smaller companies from even coming to the table. It enforces a technological cartel and that means greater profits.
Even so, it would be interesting to speculate on, if what you say was true, which large company would break ranks first and start to lobby for the abolition of software patents.
1) Inappropriate scare quotes around "moderators."
2) Should of -> should have
3) All of the sudden -> all of a sudden
4) Deep-seeded -> deep-seated
5) Loose -> lose
6) Free reign -> Free rein
7) Authoratitive -> authoritative (probably a typo)
Do you think, maybe, this was supposed to be funny?
Anyone care to explain how 'half an inch' converts to ounces?
Simple. Jump into lightspeed, divide by your unit of time (i.e. parsecs), and boom, there you go!
PC Gamer's latest December 2004 issue has a very extensive review of the completed HL2 with loads of screenshots and spoilers. They call it "history in the making" and "arguably the best game ever made," finally giving it a 98% rating. For comparison's sake, the same issue also rates Call of Duty:UO at 93%, Evil Genius at 88% and The Sims 2 at 85%.
I was getting to write a screed on how the headline to this topic is verging on libel, with reckless disregard for the truth. But then I realized there are spyware-like aspects to the software. Imagine a husband and wife sharing the same machine. The tech-savvy husband suspects his wife is cheating on him with his neighbor Rick. So he installs Google Search on the machine. Whenever the wife logs on, her email is indexed, and then, yes, the husband is thus able to spy on her by looking up any instances of the name "Rick."
Of course, any reasonably expert computer user is going to be able to view the wife's info anyway. But since this software seems to greatly facilitate the process, and reportedly does so in a way which is not necessarily transparent to all the users, I think that calling it potential spyware really is not that much of a stretch.
A possible solution might be to force each user to enter her password into the software before it starts to index any of their files. And then to offer her a choice -- to make her information globally accessible, or to encrypt her index so it is only accessible to the individual user.
I haven't downloaded or used this program yet, so if I've somehow misunderstood and it already does something like this, then I apologize in advance.
Just because you don't like the music being sold at Wal-Mart doesn't mean that it sucks.
:)
He didn't say it sucked. He said they don't carry "developing and independent artists." That seems like a fairly rational assessment. Not sure why you bit his head off. Unless it has to do with that whole "Evil" thing.
If you don't like the price, don't buy it.
Surely if he had known in advance that the CDs were crappy, he wouldn't have bought them. Anyway, it might've been more constructive to point out that $4 is not a huge markup at all. You have to pay rent, salaries, compensate for shrinkage etc. The article itself notes that on average, after overhead costs, retail profits per CD amount to just 89 cents. I wouldn't call that gouging by any means.
Just curious. Do you have the same problems with native OOo documents, or just imported MSWord docs?
Who do you regard as a credible news source? Fox News? They don't just get stuff wrong, they make silly stuff up about the Democrats. (See their retraction.)
The fact is that all news sources make mistake and they all have biases. The Times, at least, will occasionally question the aims and motives of it's own party, unlike most of the right-wing organs in this country.
And Sadam did have illegal weapons, he even used some of them in the war.
And if you happen to have a joint in your house, it's okay for the cops to bomb it to bits? "Illegal" doesn't mean, "I get to destroy your country." Hussein didn't have the WMDs that the US claimed he had, the ones we supposedly invaded him over. If Bush had said, "We're gonna put Saddam out of power because he's a bad guy sitting on a heap of oil that we want, plain and simple," then we as Americans could have decided, before the fact, whether we'd jump on board with him. But he didn't say that. Up until the last moment, he engaged in the blatant pretense of waiting for Saddam to "disarm" his nonexistent WMDs. He lied.
The solution? Someone comes out with a popular piece of software with some crazy clause in the EULA.
Sorry but that's silly. If you put an unconscionable clause in a regular ol' pre-Internet-style written contract, a court can easily find it unenforeceable without throwing away the entirety of contract law. So putting a bogus clause in a shrink-wrap contract will have the same lack of effect. It may void that particular contract, whoop-de-do, but it won't strike down EULAs in general.
We need to stop pinning our hopes on an activist judiciary. They may nick around the edges of UCITA but the killing stroke is not going to happen. At this point, the only way to substantially limit the scope of EULA's is through legislative amendments.