Surely you mean: some people planned to do something similar but the plans were thwarted after they tried to make a bomb and accidentally set fire to their own apartment.
Article 52 of the European Patent Convention says that "programs for computers" shall not be regarded as inventions, "only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such".
So, if the crucial inventive step is merely that something is being implemented as a computer program, it cannot be patented. The subject matter of the patent must be more than merely, "hey, it's now being done on a computer".
But, if the patent involved a software program that did some technical job in a novel way, so long as the novelty did not lie only or primarily in it being a software program as such, then it could be patented. As I understand it, this is the stance of the EPO and is in accordance with the European Patent Convention.
I've just examined a random sample of ten cds from my record collection and not one displayed the compact disc logo on the cd case or cover. Only one displayed the compact disc logo on the actual disc itself, which you cannot see until you've purchased the disc. All the sample were proper legally bought compact discs without any DRM on them.
From this I conclude that if I only bought discs with the compact disc logo on them, my record collection would be rather smaller than it is now - if not non-existant.
Also, I buy a lot of cds online. How do I check the packaging then?
"The Right Honourable" is Jack Straw's title as a member of the Cabinet. Thus etiquette would require this particular spelling be observed and diplomats would normally be sensitive to such matters. Just as a British diplomat might talk about defence policy, but when referring to Donald Rumsfeld would call him the Secretary of Defense. It's just about being polite.
Correct grammar and spelling is a courtesy to the reader. When you read a sentence containing errors, each error forces a pause as you decode the intended meaning. This is a confounded nuisance for the reader.
Arbitrary questions about the behaviour of the operating system? What?! Does this mean questions like: "will this operating system bake me the perfect scone?" Answer from DTrace: "No".
Of course, anyone can get a child of their own without any vetting at all by the state - assuming they can find a willing partner. I wonder if we will see articles worried that this provide an easy way for a paedophile to gain access to a child? NYT to call for licensing of parents?
Mind you, "internet enables child abuse" makes for a good scare story. I don't suppose the headline "Families enable child abuse" is going to sell so many newspapers.
Part of the conservatism that tends to arrive with age stems from the sure knowledge that you are going to get old, decay and die - that your body is starting to fail you. With this knowledge comes a desire to play it safe, to keep the status quo and to avoid new and unknown things for fear they may go pear shaped.
If you knew you weren't going to decay and die, and that your body could be kept in trim and good health, would the same conservatism arise?
I suspect that immortality would not lead to social stagnation but to some radical changes in the political landscape.
Except that, to stop the spam, the spammers need to actually realise that you apply rel="nofollow" attribute to links. Somehow, I suspect they won't bother examining previous comments on your site to see. They'll just spam you anyway on the off chance.
This will only work if everyone does it. We need a critical mass of sites that apply rel="nofollow" to user submitted links, so that there is no longer any profit in spamming sites.
I added some information to the wikipedia article about my home town a while ago. Some time later, I revisited it to discover that the article had become rather innacurate.
This wasn't the result of malicious action. What had happened was that a succession of well meaning people, despite knowing little about the subject, had edited the article in an attempt to improve the language. Each edit had subtly changed various sentences until, eventually, facts had become transposed and confused. The net result was that the article contained incorrect information.
I corrected the errors, but it did make me wonder how many other articles had suffered a similar fate. I guess this is a problem when you allow anyone to edit an entry, even when they have no expertise in that area. For popular articles it is not really an issue as the problems will be quickly spotted. But the inaccuracies in the article about my home town had stood for quite a while before I happened to spot them.
"cocaine doesn't grow very well in the Middle East. They grow opium poppies instead"
According to this report (a pdf) produced by the United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime:
No licit or illicit cultivation of narcotic plants is reported to have taken place in the territory of the I.R. of Iran. No reports indicate the existence of illicit drug manufacturing in the I.R. of Iran.
Of course, since the fall of the brutal Taliban regime in Afghanistan, opium poppy production has exploded in that country. I don't think you can blame the Iranians though.
"I dunno if Bush would go for it. After all, I'm not sure if there's oil to conquest in Iran"
Never fear, Iran has extensive reserves of both oil and natural gas. The country possesses about 913 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 100 billion barrels of oil. These figures represent a significant chunk of the world's reserves.
However, destabilising such an important and reliable source of oil and gas by invading it (or "conquesting" it, if you prefer) may not make for sound economic policy.
http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0872964.html h ttp://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0872966.html
What King of England? And I suspect it might be the nuclear weapons, immense armies and, um, friendship that provide a more significant deterrent to invasion of America.
Given your reference to diabetes, for example there is Sir Philip Cohen, Director of the MRC Protein and Phosphorylation Unit at Dundee University who has done a lot of work to advance understanding of how insulin acts in the body.
This isn't America, it's looks more like Britain to me.;-)
Anyway, I should have said that people are supposed to honour KBEs with the prefix "Sir". Unless the KBE is not from a Commonwealth coutry, in which case they don't have to.
Of course, anyone may choose not to do so but it would be a terrible faux pas.
Re:What exactly is knighthood?
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You get a medal, the Queen taps your shoulder with a sword and, if you are a citizen of a Commonwealth country, you would become Sir Samir.
Re:OBE doesn't make you a Sir.
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not Sir Steven Spielberg. As Mr Spielberg is not a citizen of a Commonwealth country he can only receive an honorary knighthood. This means he can append the "KBE" (Knight of the British Empire) suffix to his name but cannot claim the honorary prefix of "Sir".
"I haven't had time to look at the published paper"
When I heard this reported on the BBC this morning they mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the research in question was unpublished. Cue the ringing of alarm bells in my head. Dissemination by press release is not an ideal way to do science.
Re:Why not some mainstream fallacies?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
"yet consensus science tends to be used to support it"... by the media. An important caveat.
A large part of the media doesn't understand science (hence the appeal to consensus). Nor, it seems, do you - hence the complaint that global warming is unproven. Scientific theories are never proven, the accepted ones have merely withstood attempts to falsify them.
A valid point. But, unfortunately, it is also true that many news outlets are filled with misinformation too. Generally people need a critical sensibility, some common sense and a large pinch of salt to filter out the crap.
Taking your sample from visitors to one particular live website is never going to be representative of web users as a whole. A decent statistical study has to take great care over the selection of its sample. Picking this or that bunch of visitors to website x (even if x equals general sites such as ebay or the bbc) just doesn't cut the mustard.
It would be interesting to see a proper statistical study of web use rather than all these pseudo-news reports quoting visitor stats from one website or another.
If it is the case that "liberals" and "conservatives" have different brains, why don't similar divisions of political views exist all over the planet. Perhaps you Americans really are a breed apart...
Slashdot Mirror
"it has already been done on a plane, years ago."
Surely you mean: some people planned to do something similar but the plans were thwarted after they tried to make a bomb and accidentally set fire to their own apartment.
Article 52 of the European Patent Convention says that "programs for computers" shall not be regarded as inventions, "only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such".
So, if the crucial inventive step is merely that something is being implemented as a computer program, it cannot be patented. The subject matter of the patent must be more than merely, "hey, it's now being done on a computer".
But, if the patent involved a software program that did some technical job in a novel way, so long as the novelty did not lie only or primarily in it being a software program as such, then it could be patented. As I understand it, this is the stance of the EPO and is in accordance with the European Patent Convention.
I've just examined a random sample of ten cds from my record collection and not one displayed the compact disc logo on the cd case or cover. Only one displayed the compact disc logo on the actual disc itself, which you cannot see until you've purchased the disc. All the sample were proper legally bought compact discs without any DRM on them.
From this I conclude that if I only bought discs with the compact disc logo on them, my record collection would be rather smaller than it is now - if not non-existant.
Also, I buy a lot of cds online. How do I check the packaging then?
"The Right Honourable" is Jack Straw's title as a member of the Cabinet. Thus etiquette would require this particular spelling be observed and diplomats would normally be sensitive to such matters. Just as a British diplomat might talk about defence policy, but when referring to Donald Rumsfeld would call him the Secretary of Defense. It's just about being polite.
"it's going to impact the message for me"
Surely you mean, "it's going to affect the message..."?
Correct grammar and spelling is a courtesy to the reader. When you read a sentence containing errors, each error forces a pause as you decode the intended meaning. This is a confounded nuisance for the reader.
Arbitrary questions about the behaviour of the operating system? What?! Does this mean questions like: "will this operating system bake me the perfect scone?" Answer from DTrace: "No".
Of course, anyone can get a child of their own without any vetting at all by the state - assuming they can find a willing partner. I wonder if we will see articles worried that this provide an easy way for a paedophile to gain access to a child? NYT to call for licensing of parents?
Mind you, "internet enables child abuse" makes for a good scare story. I don't suppose the headline "Families enable child abuse" is going to sell so many newspapers.
Part of the conservatism that tends to arrive with age stems from the sure knowledge that you are going to get old, decay and die - that your body is starting to fail you. With this knowledge comes a desire to play it safe, to keep the status quo and to avoid new and unknown things for fear they may go pear shaped.
If you knew you weren't going to decay and die, and that your body could be kept in trim and good health, would the same conservatism arise?
I suspect that immortality would not lead to social stagnation but to some radical changes in the political landscape.
Except that, to stop the spam, the spammers need to actually realise that you apply rel="nofollow" attribute to links. Somehow, I suspect they won't bother examining previous comments on your site to see. They'll just spam you anyway on the off chance.
This will only work if everyone does it. We need a critical mass of sites that apply rel="nofollow" to user submitted links, so that there is no longer any profit in spamming sites.
Whereas American films consist of:
85% explosions and car chases
10% sex
5% product placement
I added some information to the wikipedia article about my home town a while ago. Some time later, I revisited it to discover that the article had become rather innacurate.
This wasn't the result of malicious action. What had happened was that a succession of well meaning people, despite knowing little about the subject, had edited the article in an attempt to improve the language. Each edit had subtly changed various sentences until, eventually, facts had become transposed and confused. The net result was that the article contained incorrect information.
I corrected the errors, but it did make me wonder how many other articles had suffered a similar fate. I guess this is a problem when you allow anyone to edit an entry, even when they have no expertise in that area. For popular articles it is not really an issue as the problems will be quickly spotted. But the inaccuracies in the article about my home town had stood for quite a while before I happened to spot them.
According to this report (a pdf) produced by the United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime:
Of course, since the fall of the brutal Taliban regime in Afghanistan, opium poppy production has exploded in that country. I don't think you can blame the Iranians though.
"I dunno if Bush would go for it. After all, I'm not sure if there's oil to conquest in Iran"
h ttp://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0872966.html
Never fear, Iran has extensive reserves of both oil and natural gas. The country possesses about 913 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 100 billion barrels of oil. These figures represent a significant chunk of the world's reserves.
However, destabilising such an important and reliable source of oil and gas by invading it (or "conquesting" it, if you prefer) may not make for sound economic policy.
http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0872964.html
What King of England? And I suspect it might be the nuclear weapons, immense armies and, um, friendship that provide a more significant deterrent to invasion of America.
Scientists get awarded knighthoods and OBEs too.
Given your reference to diabetes, for example there is Sir Philip Cohen, Director of the MRC Protein and Phosphorylation Unit at Dundee University who has done a lot of work to advance understanding of how insulin acts in the body.
This isn't America, it's looks more like Britain to me. ;-)
Anyway, I should have said that people are supposed to honour KBEs with the prefix "Sir". Unless the KBE is not from a Commonwealth coutry, in which case they don't have to.
Of course, anyone may choose not to do so but it would be a terrible faux pas.
You get a medal, the Queen taps your shoulder with a sword and, if you are a citizen of a Commonwealth country, you would become Sir Samir.
Not Sir Steven Spielberg. As Mr Spielberg is not a citizen of a Commonwealth country he can only receive an honorary knighthood. This means he can append the "KBE" (Knight of the British Empire) suffix to his name but cannot claim the honorary prefix of "Sir".
It's Peter Molyneux OBE, rather than Sir Peter. He wasn't awarded a knighthood. Well done him though.
And it might be worth mentioning that Her Majesty is Queen of an awful lot of other places as well as England.
"I haven't had time to look at the published paper"
When I heard this reported on the BBC this morning they mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the research in question was unpublished. Cue the ringing of alarm bells in my head. Dissemination by press release is not an ideal way to do science.
"yet consensus science tends to be used to support it" ... by the media. An important caveat.
A large part of the media doesn't understand science (hence the appeal to consensus). Nor, it seems, do you - hence the complaint that global warming is unproven. Scientific theories are never proven, the accepted ones have merely withstood attempts to falsify them.
A valid point. But, unfortunately, it is also true that many news outlets are filled with misinformation too. Generally people need a critical sensibility, some common sense and a large pinch of salt to filter out the crap.
Taking your sample from visitors to one particular live website is never going to be representative of web users as a whole. A decent statistical study has to take great care over the selection of its sample. Picking this or that bunch of visitors to website x (even if x equals general sites such as ebay or the bbc) just doesn't cut the mustard.
It would be interesting to see a proper statistical study of web use rather than all these pseudo-news reports quoting visitor stats from one website or another.
If it is the case that "liberals" and "conservatives" have different brains, why don't similar divisions of political views exist all over the planet. Perhaps you Americans really are a breed apart...