The real problem is that patents should only be awarded in any field based on innovativeness - the likelyhood that it could or would have been invented without a substantial investment of sweat equity.
How likely something is to have been invented is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it ought to be patentable.
Patents don't reward inventors, they protect investors. They are an economic device to encourage investment in things that otherwise are considered too risky by those with the money to pay for them. (We already have a system for rewarding inventors; it's called "business".)
If the dot-com boom showed anything, it was that there is plentiful investment for software-related innovation; the very fact that really stupid ideas got money as well as the really good ones means that things like patents aren't needed to make software-related investment happen.
And if things like BitTorrent and Linux show anything, it's that there is no need for any significant investment to bring new software inventions to market at all.
If investment is readily available, or if investment is not required to bring a new idea to market, then patents are not only not required, they are an unnecessary burden that everyone pays for.
If you know that one gender is smarter then another gender - given all else equal, who would you most likely want to perform brain surgery on you? And if you say the dumber one, you are a liar.
You're making the classic error of reasoning here, also commonly made by bigots, that conflates the general "...one gender is smarter than another..." with the specific "...who would you most likely want to perform brain surgery?"
Thing is, genders don't perform surgery, highly-trained people do. Even if you could show that, on average, one gender was the smarter one, that doesn't mean that every surgeon of that gender is the better choice against any surgeon of the other.
If I'm presented with a choice for brain surgery, I'd like the better one between those two, not the better one in general. And when deciding this, I won't be checking their gonads, because I won't need to.
(And your "given all else equal" qualifier is just a way of pretending you're being balanced -- we already know that all else cannot be equal, because, as you already know, gender doesn't just affect smarts.)
Or, put another way...
You're at home, it's on fire, and you're waiting to be rescued. In general, men are stronger than women. So, do you reject all the women who come to rescue you, and wait for the men? Or do you accept rescue from anyone who is strong enough to save you, no matter what their gender is?
Your sig forks a process per file, how inefficiant...
Try using:
`find / -name "*your_base*" -print | xargs chown us:us`
Unfortunately, this suggestion is less robust than the original version; it breaks when the file names contain symbols that the shell thinks are special.
If you have support for the options that separate args with null, you can do:
Lets say that sweater has some interesting effect to it. Researching this effect cost me 1 million dollars and two years of time. Now I want to sell this sweater. To recoup my costs and make a profit I need to sell this sweater at $50/sweater.
No, to recoup your costs, you need to make at least a million dollars in profit; there's no law forcing you to sell sweaters to do this.
However, we now have technology that will let other people replicate my sweater exactly for little or no cost. Now people will utilize this new method (can you blame them) and I am screwed out of recouping 1 million dollars and two years of invested time. This is wrong.
It's not wrong, it's just bad business management.
If you invest a million bucks to make something that you know can be copied trivially by everyone for nothing, with no business model beyond hoping that lots of people will pay over the odds for it anyway, then you're just bad at business.
Instead of attempting to criminalize your potential customers, either find a way to use the free-sweater-copying technology for your own business, or find something else you can do for them that they will pay for.
The capacity of short term memory is important here: a person at random can remember or concentrate on 7 +/- 2 items at once.
This is a myth, often attached to bogus claims about the length of phone numbers. Other posters are already providing links to articles that put Miller's research in its proper perspective, but statements about being able to concentrate on at most 7-plus-or-minus-2 items are just wrong.
Cognitive psychologists don't even recognize the term "short-term memory" any more; they've preferred the term "working memory" since the 1970s.
At no point should a person be presented with more than 9 items in a selection when one has to be chosen. So there should be at most 9 menus, 9 items per menu, etc. Any more than that and people are operating at less than peak efficiency in order to find the functionality they want.
This is a wholly mistaken deduction from Miller's work, and should not be used in user interface design. Your working memory capacity, by definition, limits what you can remember, not what you can see or read from what's right in front of you. There are many reasons to consider limiting the size of menus, but working memory capacity isn't one of them. If anything, by artifically restricting the view of a necessarily large number of choices, you're actually burdening the user by forcing them to remember what they could just read off the screen, if only the options were all presented at once.
Didn't think you made an agreement when you purchased / loaded / used Microsoft's copyrighted operating system?
No. Purchasing something that comes with a bunch of random conditions ensconced in legalistic verbiage that you see after the sale does not bind you to a contract. If you think it does, please cite the laws that make this possible.
Also, the copyright thing is a red herring; most jurisdictions specifically exempt from copyright protection those transitory copies of software, not fixed in tangible media, that are necessary for its proper operation. This is just like the copies of data from CDs and DVDs that their players make in internal memory to play music and movies. No media company in their wildest dreams would be able to make the case that playing a CD was a copyright violation that required the purchaser to agree to an additional "End-Listener Licence Agreement".
Think again, you most certainly did, regardless of how much you would like to delude yourself into thinking you didn't.
I can tell that you are neither a lawyer, nor informed about the law. I am not a lawyer either, but I am familiar with my rights in such circumstances, because I have taken specific legal advice for them.
I still think that the indefinite-she implies an overly political correct thought process that can be offensive to some people.
Then those people should move back to the 19th century, where it was still okay to pretend that "men" and "everyone" were interchangeable concepts.
People offended by the possibility that a woman might perform a particular role deserve every bit of offence we can throw at them, since there is always hope that one day, they might realise that it's not a linguistic quibble that's discomfiting them.
This is just truly awful. Patrick Stewart, Tobe Hooper directing and Dan O'Bannon writing, and it's still dire.
Naked female space vampires wandering about for half the movie fail to compensate for the sheer crappiness of the whole thing. The only ridiculous plot twist I didn't see coming a mile away was when the hero uses the space shuttle's previously unmentioned one-man escape pod.
It's not bad enough to enjoy for being bad, and it's not stupid enough to enjoy when you're drunk.
It manages to make crap like 'Event Horizon' or 'Lost In Space' look like 'The Godfather'.
In the special features I recall a segment where Peter explains that he was simply hoping to get a studio to let him do two films at the same time, and the person he talked to said, "Wouldn't it be better as a trilogy?" and that's how he got the trilogy, and picked the studio.
Yeah, I remember this story along these lines: Jackson et al had hawked the project around studios for more than a year, and had been making the pitch as a pair of movies. When the Newline executive saw their proposal, his first words were "I don't understand", and Jackson's heart sank. Then the executive said: "It's three books, why aren't you making three movies?" and Jackson knew he'd found a studio that understood.
Statistically, motorbikes are dangerous to ride but I know motorcyclists who have never had an accident.
Well, I have several friends who ride motorbikes, and most of them have been in an accident that wasn't their fault (according to the police), where their bike was wrecked, and where they required hospital treatment and surgery.
So while, like you, I can say that I know bikers who haven't been in an accident, my friends' experience doesn't encourage me to ride a motorbike myself.
Although Flanders didn't succeed with his store, there's nothing wrong with it in principle. The
left-handed shop in central London has been in business since the 1960s.
Well, here's my quick translation of your ruby program into standard Java:
import java.math.*;
public class Ack { public static final BigInteger ZERO =BigInteger.ZERO; public static final BigInteger ONE =BigInteger.ONE; public static final BigInteger TWO =new BigInteger("2"); public static final BigInteger THREE=new BigInteger("3");
public static BigInteger ack(BigInteger m, BigInteger n) { if (m.compareTo(ZERO)==0) return n.add(ONE); else if (m.compareTo(ONE)==0) return n.add(TWO); else if (m.compareTo(TWO)==0) return n.multiply(TWO).add(THREE); else return ack(m.subtract(ONE), (n.compareTo(ZERO)==1)?ack(m,n.subtract(ONE)):ONE); }
public static void main(String[] argv) { BigInteger n; if (argv.length>0) n=new BigInteger(argv[0]); else n=ONE;
In a discussion I had recently with a medical researcher, he claimed that there is solid research that pens are the number one vehicle for spreading germs around in hospitals.
Slashdot Mirror
ITYM Donald Norman.
How likely something is to have been invented is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it ought to be patentable.
Patents don't reward inventors, they protect investors. They are an economic device to encourage investment in things that otherwise are considered too risky by those with the money to pay for them. (We already have a system for rewarding inventors; it's called "business".)
If the dot-com boom showed anything, it was that there is plentiful investment for software-related innovation; the very fact that really stupid ideas got money as well as the really good ones means that things like patents aren't needed to make software-related investment happen.
And if things like BitTorrent and Linux show anything, it's that there is no need for any significant investment to bring new software inventions to market at all.
If investment is readily available, or if investment is not required to bring a new idea to market, then patents are not only not required, they are an unnecessary burden that everyone pays for.
You're making the classic error of reasoning here, also commonly made by bigots, that conflates the general "...one gender is smarter than another..." with the specific "...who would you most likely want to perform brain surgery?"
Thing is, genders don't perform surgery, highly-trained people do. Even if you could show that, on average, one gender was the smarter one, that doesn't mean that every surgeon of that gender is the better choice against any surgeon of the other.
If I'm presented with a choice for brain surgery, I'd like the better one between those two, not the better one in general. And when deciding this, I won't be checking their gonads, because I won't need to.
(And your "given all else equal" qualifier is just a way of pretending you're being balanced -- we already know that all else cannot be equal, because, as you already know, gender doesn't just affect smarts.)
Or, put another way...
You're at home, it's on fire, and you're waiting to be rescued. In general, men are stronger than women. So, do you reject all the women who come to rescue you, and wait for the men? Or do you accept rescue from anyone who is strong enough to save you, no matter what their gender is?
I dunno, but I know how to call one: "Heeere, printy, printy, printy."
Unfortunately, this suggestion is less robust than the original version; it breaks when the file names contain symbols that the shell thinks are special.
If you have support for the options that separate args with null, you can do:
find / -name "*your_base*" -print0 | xargs -0 chown us:usOtherwise, the original version is better, despite being less efficient.
ITYM mitochondrial. No need to look like your Freudian slip is showing, it'll only encourage the buggers.
No, to recoup your costs, you need to make at least a million dollars in profit; there's no law forcing you to sell sweaters to do this.
It's not wrong, it's just bad business management.
If you invest a million bucks to make something that you know can be copied trivially by everyone for nothing, with no business model beyond hoping that lots of people will pay over the odds for it anyway, then you're just bad at business.
Instead of attempting to criminalize your potential customers, either find a way to use the free-sweater-copying technology for your own business, or find something else you can do for them that they will pay for.
I think you'll find that the Earth is more than twelve kilometres wide.
I think it deserves a pullet surprise.
This is a myth, often attached to bogus claims about the length of phone numbers. Other posters are already providing links to articles that put Miller's research in its proper perspective, but statements about being able to concentrate on at most 7-plus-or-minus-2 items are just wrong.
Cognitive psychologists don't even recognize the term "short-term memory" any more; they've preferred the term "working memory" since the 1970s.
This is a wholly mistaken deduction from Miller's work, and should not be used in user interface design. Your working memory capacity, by definition, limits what you can remember, not what you can see or read from what's right in front of you. There are many reasons to consider limiting the size of menus, but working memory capacity isn't one of them. If anything, by artifically restricting the view of a necessarily large number of choices, you're actually burdening the user by forcing them to remember what they could just read off the screen, if only the options were all presented at once.
No. Purchasing something that comes with a bunch of random conditions ensconced in legalistic verbiage that you see after the sale does not bind you to a contract. If you think it does, please cite the laws that make this possible.
Also, the copyright thing is a red herring; most jurisdictions specifically exempt from copyright protection those transitory copies of software, not fixed in tangible media, that are necessary for its proper operation. This is just like the copies of data from CDs and DVDs that their players make in internal memory to play music and movies. No media company in their wildest dreams would be able to make the case that playing a CD was a copyright violation that required the purchaser to agree to an additional "End-Listener Licence Agreement".
I can tell that you are neither a lawyer, nor informed about the law. I am not a lawyer either, but I am familiar with my rights in such circumstances, because I have taken specific legal advice for them.
Then those people should move back to the 19th century, where it was still okay to pretend that "men" and "everyone" were interchangeable concepts.
People offended by the possibility that a woman might perform a particular role deserve every bit of offence we can throw at them, since there is always hope that one day, they might realise that it's not a linguistic quibble that's discomfiting them.
Only among the illiterate, whose opinions on this are irrelevant by definition.
This is just truly awful. Patrick Stewart, Tobe Hooper directing and Dan O'Bannon writing, and it's still dire.
Naked female space vampires wandering about for half the movie fail to compensate for the sheer crappiness of the whole thing. The only ridiculous plot twist I didn't see coming a mile away was when the hero uses the space shuttle's previously unmentioned one-man escape pod.
It's not bad enough to enjoy for being bad, and it's not stupid enough to enjoy when you're drunk.
It manages to make crap like 'Event Horizon' or 'Lost In Space' look like 'The Godfather'.
Smaller than this mistake, I hope.
Yeah, I remember this story along these lines: Jackson et al had hawked the project around studios for more than a year, and had been making the pitch as a pair of movies. When the Newline executive saw their proposal, his first words were "I don't understand", and Jackson's heart sank. Then the executive said: "It's three books, why aren't you making three movies?" and Jackson knew he'd found a studio that understood.
Well, I have several friends who ride motorbikes, and most of them have been in an accident that wasn't their fault (according to the police), where their bike was wrecked, and where they required hospital treatment and surgery.
So while, like you, I can say that I know bikers who haven't been in an accident, my friends' experience doesn't encourage me to ride a motorbike myself.
Now also known as Javagadro's number, the number of functions in the standard class libraries.
A friend of mine (ex-Army, of course) once exclaimed: "That fucking fucker's fucking fucked me. Fuck!" Very flexible word, that.
Although Flanders didn't succeed with his store, there's nothing wrong with it in principle. The left-handed shop in central London has been in business since the 1960s.
Well, here's my quick translation of your ruby program into standard Java:
And here's the result of running them on the same box:
You've licked your computer's ass? Boy, are you under the thumb.
In a discussion I had recently with a medical researcher, he claimed that there is solid research that pens are the number one vehicle for spreading germs around in hospitals.
Of course it was.
Otherwise, why would HP have called the proprietary windowing system for their 1985 portable Unix workstation "HP Windows" ?