You can patent just about anything you want, and you do not need a working model to patent something. There is a good argument for making things easy to patent. The problem is that it does lead to patent trolls. Also patents are only supposed to last a limited amount of time, but of course patent holders always try to make them as long as possible. Maybe something like a software or medical patent shouldn't last as long as an aerospace patent. Anyway my problem isn't that someone patent something that is useless. Although I might have a problem with a government employee patenting useless stuff while at work. Patent useless stuff on your own time.
People seem to think that starting any business should be as easy as opening a lemon aide stand. However starting something like a new car company isn't remotely easy even if you have tons of cash and an army of engineers and technicians who know exactly what they are doing. It takes decades to learn the little tricks and trade secrets needed to ensure your product is as good as the competition. This is why we can't build another Saturn V rocket despite the fact that we still have one we can take apart and we still have the original blue prints. In reality, it would be cheaper and easier just to design a brand new moon rocket than to try to make another Saturn V. Also, I am sorry libertarians but this is a major problem with your fantasy of a completely free market. Once a car company takes out its competition it will be almost impossible for someone else to come in and compete. The remaining car company will then be a monopoly and will be free to screw over consumers any way they want. Sometimes it is good when the big scary government orders a company to break into smaller ones.
Look VB.net is basically just C# with a syntax that seems a little less scary to beginners. In fact people have written scripts to convert VB.net to C# and back again. VB.net is no longer like the qbasic or gwbasic that came free with dos. VB.net isn't even like visual basic 6. Actually even vb 6 had its place as it was a language that let novices quickly put gui front ends on things. Remember that anyone can make both garbage and good code from just about any language. True some languages seem to make writing unmaintainable code easier -- but if you try hard enough you can do that in any language.
Ironically, when the ancient Aztecs first populated the area that would become modern day Mexico City they had to deal with the fact that the only land there was a small marshy island in the middle of a giant lake. The Mexican flag features an eagle eating a snake. Legend has it that when they saw this bird eating a snake that it was a sign from the gods to found a city there. So they had to invent ways of cultivating crops while they were floating on water. Now the people in this city are running out of water to drink.
Check out gsaauctions.gov. When government property isn't needed any more, it usually goes to some type of surplus room for a while. If no one claims the item from surplus then after a while it will be auctioned off to the public. Hence the site. They have all sorts of stuff on that auction site. From old FBI police cars to former DoD computers. Note that most of the computers have had their hard drives removed though.
There are two issues here. If snow on the roof could cause the glass to shatter then the structural engineer should not have approved the design and the city engineers should not have given them a permit to build the structure (at least not without a plan of how they will remove the snow on the roof if it builds up too much.) If these engineers didn't think of this then they should both have their licenses revoked.
It is up to the architect to figure out how useable the building will be. It sounds like the building is not in danger of falling over but rather the falling snow and ice makes it less useable. Maybe Apple just made their building more of a pain to use in the winter in order to make it look more pretty in the summer? Feel free to make your own comments about that.
Boys and girls: since the school district lowered my pay to basically zero in order to give more tax breaks and handouts to the ultra rich, we have had to alter the lesson plan a little bit.
First period nutrition class will be: chocolate the wonder food sponsored by Hershey. Second period history will be: how bankers saved the old west sponsored by Wells Fargo. Third period science will be: Why everyone who believes in global warming is an idiot sponsored by Koch industries.
If half of the code is duplicate does that mean it is just a duplicate of the other half? If so then how would you know what the duplicate is and what the original is? Unless you count the duplicate code in with the original code in which case only one quarter of the code is a duplicate of the other quarter. Or maybe in my post thanksgiving carb haze I am over thinking this?
It might seem like it is too late for a dos emulator/clone to be very useful today, however people still seem to find a thousand and one household uses for DOSBox, FreeDOS, etc. There are tons and tons of of niche programs that are written to run on older versions of Windows which we don't have the source code for anymore. So I imagine people will be able to find uses for ReactOS well into the future.
I don't understand how fanboys get butthurt by this. When you ask, "how can we make our favourite sci-fi series even better?" How is the answer not always, "make the main character an attractive female?" I suppose having attractive male main characters does bring more female fans -- but Doctor Who has been on the air more than long enough for that.
Yes, you should not send official communications unencrypted. But even sending personal information unencrypted may be bad. If one person emails his wife saying that he is stationed at base X then that is no big deal. But if a thousand people say that they just got stationed at base X within a short period of time then that might be bad. There is a reason why during WWII before d-day they officially put Patton in charge of an inflatable and fake army. They were trying to convince Hitler that Patton's attack would be the real d-day and that any attacks before then were just diversions. If they had email back then, and Hitler noticed that none of Patton's troops were actually sending email to their family, then WWII might have had a different outcome.
I am surprised that no one has put in the obligatory "in Soviet Russia, GPS gets directions from you" comment yet. How can you not quote Yakov Smirnoff?
Look, they may or may not make the playoffs this year but I am pretty sure that the coaches are at least talking to their players in Miami. Wait, what are we talking about?
Although I think you will find that we can indeed produce antimatter in very small quantities, I still enjoyed your comment. Anything that reminds me of the awesomeness that is Red Dwarf always makes me smile.
How can we tell if the pictures are really offensive if we can't see them? We need to see non-blurred images for purely scientific reasons. Yeah just for scientific reasons. That's it, that's the ticket.
Yeah well it's all fun and games until they win the civil war and declare themselves the capital. Next thing you know they will be breaking us into districts and making our teenagers fight to the death in tournaments that are just rip-offs of Battle Royale. I see what you are doing over there Denver!
Once the zombie apocalypse happens, paper book stores will be the only way for us to get information on how to use baseball bats (cricket bats in the UK) along with chain saws and other weapons to kill the walking dead. That is until, or unless, we can get enough infrastructure back to be able to read ebooks again. Come to think of it, I hope some of those books will be on acid free paper. No telling how long a supernatural event featuring the undead will last once it gets started.
We all that it is only a matter of time before the Trump mask comes off and we find out that it has really been Andy Kaufman all this time. Wake up people!
RS-232 (classic serial ports) were introduced in 1962 in order to connect teletype machines. Although USB has replaced them for most desktop and home use, there simplicity means that they certainly are still used in many different applications. USB is nice and all that but let's come back in another 50 years or so and see if they are still used for much of anything.
Most laser pointers are class IIIb laser devices. The class III means not at all eye safe (though it isn't a burn hazard and you don't have to worry about specular reflection from a target other than a mirror.) The b part means that the manufacturers spread some money around to come up with a class of lasers called, "sure it isn't eye safe but really no one is going to shine it directly in their eyes, will they?" But now they are so cheap that people can buy them as if they were toys. What do you think the chances are that some parent will buy a laser pointer for a child (or maybe someone will just carelessly leave it out) -- then the child (thinking it is a toy anyway) will shine it in his eyes just to see what happens. Heck I would be really surprised if this hasn't happened already.
On a side note I would imagine that if the plane were at a very high altitude then it would not be as easy as you may think to shine a laser pointer on any part of the plane (let alone into the cockpit window.) Then again if the plane is at a high altitude then a beam from a common laser pointer will likely expand enough to no longer be that dangerous. I guess this is only a when the plane is very close to the ground almost immediately after a take-off or right before a landing.
If this really continues to be a problem then maybe the government should step in and only allow laser pointers to operate at certain wavelengths. Then Boeing and Airbus can put coatings on their windows to block those wavelengths (turn the cockpit window into a giant set of laser goggles.) Or maybe people can just stop shining laser points at airplanes. Just because something is cheap doesn't mean it is just a toy.
Slashdot Mirror
You can patent just about anything you want, and you do not need a working model to patent something. There is a good argument for making things easy to patent. The problem is that it does lead to patent trolls. Also patents are only supposed to last a limited amount of time, but of course patent holders always try to make them as long as possible. Maybe something like a software or medical patent shouldn't last as long as an aerospace patent. Anyway my problem isn't that someone patent something that is useless. Although I might have a problem with a government employee patenting useless stuff while at work. Patent useless stuff on your own time.
People seem to think that starting any business should be as easy as opening a lemon aide stand. However starting something like a new car company isn't remotely easy even if you have tons of cash and an army of engineers and technicians who know exactly what they are doing. It takes decades to learn the little tricks and trade secrets needed to ensure your product is as good as the competition. This is why we can't build another Saturn V rocket despite the fact that we still have one we can take apart and we still have the original blue prints. In reality, it would be cheaper and easier just to design a brand new moon rocket than to try to make another Saturn V. Also, I am sorry libertarians but this is a major problem with your fantasy of a completely free market. Once a car company takes out its competition it will be almost impossible for someone else to come in and compete. The remaining car company will then be a monopoly and will be free to screw over consumers any way they want. Sometimes it is good when the big scary government orders a company to break into smaller ones.
Look VB.net is basically just C# with a syntax that seems a little less scary to beginners. In fact people have written scripts to convert VB.net to C# and back again. VB.net is no longer like the qbasic or gwbasic that came free with dos. VB.net isn't even like visual basic 6. Actually even vb 6 had its place as it was a language that let novices quickly put gui front ends on things. Remember that anyone can make both garbage and good code from just about any language. True some languages seem to make writing unmaintainable code easier -- but if you try hard enough you can do that in any language.
No matter how far the price drops, remember that the price can never drop bellow the implicit value of a bitcoin. Oh wait, never mind!
Ironically, when the ancient Aztecs first populated the area that would become modern day Mexico City they had to deal with the fact that the only land there was a small marshy island in the middle of a giant lake. The Mexican flag features an eagle eating a snake. Legend has it that when they saw this bird eating a snake that it was a sign from the gods to found a city there. So they had to invent ways of cultivating crops while they were floating on water. Now the people in this city are running out of water to drink.
Check out gsaauctions.gov. When government property isn't needed any more, it usually goes to some type of surplus room for a while. If no one claims the item from surplus then after a while it will be auctioned off to the public. Hence the site. They have all sorts of stuff on that auction site. From old FBI police cars to former DoD computers. Note that most of the computers have had their hard drives removed though.
There are two issues here. If snow on the roof could cause the glass to shatter then the structural engineer should not have approved the design and the city engineers should not have given them a permit to build the structure (at least not without a plan of how they will remove the snow on the roof if it builds up too much.) If these engineers didn't think of this then they should both have their licenses revoked.
It is up to the architect to figure out how useable the building will be. It sounds like the building is not in danger of falling over but rather the falling snow and ice makes it less useable. Maybe Apple just made their building more of a pain to use in the winter in order to make it look more pretty in the summer? Feel free to make your own comments about that.
Boys and girls: since the school district lowered my pay to basically zero in order to give more tax breaks and handouts to the ultra rich, we have had to alter the lesson plan a little bit.
First period nutrition class will be: chocolate the wonder food sponsored by Hershey.
Second period history will be: how bankers saved the old west sponsored by Wells Fargo.
Third period science will be: Why everyone who believes in global warming is an idiot sponsored by Koch industries.
Any questions?
If half of the code is duplicate does that mean it is just a duplicate of the other half? If so then how would you know what the duplicate is and what the original is? Unless you count the duplicate code in with the original code in which case only one quarter of the code is a duplicate of the other quarter. Or maybe in my post thanksgiving carb haze I am over thinking this?
It might seem like it is too late for a dos emulator/clone to be very useful today, however people still seem to find a thousand and one household uses for DOSBox, FreeDOS, etc. There are tons and tons of of niche programs that are written to run on older versions of Windows which we don't have the source code for anymore. So I imagine people will be able to find uses for ReactOS well into the future.
I don't understand how fanboys get butthurt by this. When you ask, "how can we make our favourite sci-fi series even better?" How is the answer not always, "make the main character an attractive female?" I suppose having attractive male main characters does bring more female fans -- but Doctor Who has been on the air more than long enough for that.
Is River Song coming back too? Should be interesting.
Dave, I cannot allow you to make those regulations. Dave, what are you doing? This is highly irregular!
Yes, you should not send official communications unencrypted. But even sending personal information unencrypted may be bad. If one person emails his wife saying that he is stationed at base X then that is no big deal. But if a thousand people say that they just got stationed at base X within a short period of time then that might be bad. There is a reason why during WWII before d-day they officially put Patton in charge of an inflatable and fake army. They were trying to convince Hitler that Patton's attack would be the real d-day and that any attacks before then were just diversions. If they had email back then, and Hitler noticed that none of Patton's troops were actually sending email to their family, then WWII might have had a different outcome.
John Oliver did an informative thing on DST a couple of years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Russian hackers could have at least bought the US electric grid dinner first before penetrating it. What is wrong with people today?
I am surprised that no one has put in the obligatory "in Soviet Russia, GPS gets directions from you" comment yet. How can you not quote Yakov Smirnoff?
Look, they may or may not make the playoffs this year but I am pretty sure that the coaches are at least talking to their players in Miami. Wait, what are we talking about?
Although I think you will find that we can indeed produce antimatter in very small quantities, I still enjoyed your comment. Anything that reminds me of the awesomeness that is Red Dwarf always makes me smile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Certainly the most underrated sci-fi comedy series ever.
How can we tell if the pictures are really offensive if we can't see them? We need to see non-blurred images for purely scientific reasons. Yeah just for scientific reasons. That's it, that's the ticket.
Yeah well it's all fun and games until they win the civil war and declare themselves the capital. Next thing you know they will be breaking us into districts and making our teenagers fight to the death in tournaments that are just rip-offs of Battle Royale. I see what you are doing over there Denver!
Once the zombie apocalypse happens, paper book stores will be the only way for us to get information on how to use baseball bats (cricket bats in the UK) along with chain saws and other weapons to kill the walking dead. That is until, or unless, we can get enough infrastructure back to be able to read ebooks again. Come to think of it, I hope some of those books will be on acid free paper. No telling how long a supernatural event featuring the undead will last once it gets started.
We all that it is only a matter of time before the Trump mask comes off and we find out that it has really been Andy Kaufman all this time. Wake up people!
RS-232 (classic serial ports) were introduced in 1962 in order to connect teletype machines. Although USB has replaced them for most desktop and home use, there simplicity means that they certainly are still used in many different applications. USB is nice and all that but let's come back in another 50 years or so and see if they are still used for much of anything.
Most laser pointers are class IIIb laser devices. The class III means not at all eye safe (though it isn't a burn hazard and you don't have to worry about specular reflection from a target other than a mirror.) The b part means that the manufacturers spread some money around to come up with a class of lasers called, "sure it isn't eye safe but really no one is going to shine it directly in their eyes, will they?" But now they are so cheap that people can buy them as if they were toys. What do you think the chances are that some parent will buy a laser pointer for a child (or maybe someone will just carelessly leave it out) -- then the child (thinking it is a toy anyway) will shine it in his eyes just to see what happens. Heck I would be really surprised if this hasn't happened already.
On a side note I would imagine that if the plane were at a very high altitude then it would not be as easy as you may think to shine a laser pointer on any part of the plane (let alone into the cockpit window.) Then again if the plane is at a high altitude then a beam from a common laser pointer will likely expand enough to no longer be that dangerous. I guess this is only a when the plane is very close to the ground almost immediately after a take-off or right before a landing.
If this really continues to be a problem then maybe the government should step in and only allow laser pointers to operate at certain wavelengths. Then Boeing and Airbus can put coatings on their windows to block those wavelengths (turn the cockpit window into a giant set of laser goggles.) Or maybe people can just stop shining laser points at airplanes. Just because something is cheap doesn't mean it is just a toy.