It'd be nice if that was true, but all too many patents these days are patents of what is for all intents and purposes an idea (a.k.a. "business method".)
The problem is that with the lapse of the "working example provided to the patent office" rule, people have been slipping in things that they don't necessarily have working examples of.
Working examples won't prevent patents that are *bad* from being granted; e.g., the Amazon one-click. However, they will prevent submarine patents and "patenting an idea for the sake of forcing everyone who might someday do something similar to license our idea".
Require a working example. Maybe not delivered to the patent office, but at the time of filing, it should be proven that your technique works, and that you've made it work.
Never heard the term composite impedance used. I've always heard it described as complex impedance (to convey the fact that it's a combination of the purely imaginary reactance and the purely real resistance). Good term, though.
The other point to make is regarding wavelength - unless a wire is at least lambda/10 in length, transmission line effects can generally be ignored. They're there, but not significant. At audio frequencies, this means you can have a wire of on the order of a half kilometer before you see TL effects. At FM frequencies, you're looking at around a quarter of a meter. When you start talking GHz chip clocks, you'll see serious TL effects at around 1 cm; modern chip design has developed methods to work around the fact that clock lines are usually transmission lines.
Uhm... yeah, actually. The government gave the contract to manage the phone number space to NeuStar, who then manage the phone space for the telcos. They have to pay Neustar for phone numbers.
What do you want to bet Europe has something similar? You do it with your IPs, I'm willing to bet you do it with your phone numbers.
(this is shamelessly ripped from other posters, who will likely get overlooked due to the fact that they have bad or no karma - read at 0, you twits.)
Actually, I want that feature too, but for a totally different reason: I want to do artificial books on tape. I want to load a text file into the iPod and have it read it to me.
It really shouldn't be that hard to pack a text-to-speech engine into a chip; I'd even have paid a little bit extra for that feature to be included in my iPod.
The fact that you think government is not of and for the people shows how hopeless you are. You believe that the people aren't responsible for their government, and that they haven't gotten exactly the government they wanted.
Do you ever expect the government to *change* if everyone says "Well, it isn't my government, they aren't doing what I want"? It IS your government (assuming you live in the US) and it is YOUR responsibility to help make it do what the people want.
1) Like I said - with the world at our back. I think that if most of the world agrees something is wrong, it probably is; at the very least, its a decent attempt at making sure something genuinely is wrong. Someone has to make the judgement as to what is evil; the best we can do is do the best we can to make sure we're right about evil. If no one is willing to judge what is evil, no one will ever do anything, and we're right back with Burke.
2) True. How certain are you that they didn't do these other things? Can you see Saddam succumbing to economic pressure? We tried that one already. A targeted assassination? One of his sons would have stepped up, and from all accounts they were just as bad, if not worse. The problems with the Iraq war had nothing to do with exhaustion of options, and everything to do with lying about the reasons (WMD? Bullshit) and the lack of accord around the world. If we had gone in saying "He's killing his own people" with the UN behind us, then I couldn't find much wrong with it.
So you have no issue with innocent people being killed as long as it is for a "good cause"? How is the attack on Afghanastan different from the Iraq one? They both imply bombs falling on people's heads.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke.
We should do our utmost to avoid the deaths of innocents, but we can't allow that possibility to prevent us from acting to restrain evil. Saddam was evil. Should we have gone into Iraq the way we did, for the reasons we did? No. But should we have gone in, with the world behind us, because Saddam tortured and murdered his own people? Absolutely.
Industrial design has more to do with the visual appeal than with the things under the core. My 286 example might have been a bit hyperbolic, but you don't see any Opteron systems on their list of design awards, do you?
Re:Games don't have to be old to be good.
on
Retro Gaming Gets Hot
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· Score: 2, Informative
Haven't played Gish, but ChronicLogic's other game that I've played (Bridge Construction Set) is *awesome*.
Introversion's "Uplink" is also a lot of fun. And I see that they're in the process of a second game; probably have to buy that one too. Uplink is a "hacking simulator"; best part is that like in the real world, it has a GUI and a CLI, and some things are *much* faster once you learn the CLI. Second one is called Darwinia, and appears to be an RTS - a sentence I like from its website is "combining fast paced action with strategic battle planning, the game features a novel and intuitive control mechanism, a graphical style ripped from 80's retro classics, and a story concerning a tribe of video game sprites trapped in a modern 3d game world." How can you not like something involving retro sprites in the 3d world?
Indie games publishers put out some really good stuff sometimes.
I'm not arguing that its impossible, simply that working with Linux in your product isn't necessarily any easier/cheaper than working with a proprietary system.
The GPL's problem is that nearly all of its legal terms require technical definitions - derivative being the most prominent of the bunch. Modifications, "part of a whole", "mere aggregation", incorporation. These are all legal terms whose importance to the GPL relies on their technical interpretation. And yeah, the GPL is a particularly complex free license. But it's like people who say Linux is $free; it isn't. It's freedom, not $free.
(Technical terms I say: medium, software, running a program - we don't necessarily think of them as technical since we work with them daily, but they are.)
I'll lay you dollars to donuts that you can find a candidate who has your views. Odds are good they'll be from one of the two major parties. How about, for example, Masachussetts State Sen. Marian Walsh, who describes herself as pro-life and pro-gay? Oh, and she's a Democrat. The parties don't set their members views; they don't set their members positions. Vote for the person, not the party.
(Exactly what do you mean, you don't like either side in gun control? Either you think gun control is acceptable or you think it isn't; you can argue about how *much* you want, but it's like the old joke - you're just haggling over the price)
1) They're punishing you for being godless commies.
2) We protected you from the red menace for so long, this is our payoff.
3) English is just a naturally superior language; as a result, English speakers don't deserve DRM.
4) French people. Enough said.
5) George W Bush threatened to nuke EMI if they didn't keep "those godless Eurotrash from pirating our hard-earned American IP".
6) Barbara Boxer threatened to sue EMI if they didn't keep "those wonderful European scamps from pirating the music industries rightfully earned profits".
7) Orrin Hatch's head exploded; as a result, the US no longer has to deal with stupid copy protection efforts.
8) French people.
9) Specifically to piss off the Europeans; I mean, that's what American corporations live for, right?
10) They think if they make the scheme illogical enough, all the computer nerds who pirate their music will have their brains ignite in a collective bonfire of confusion.
Uhm, I can use it without looking at it at all. You memorize the positional relationship of the 4 buttons - back, menu, playpause, forward. The scroll wheel is just that. Since they're indented into the case, you can feel their locations. Someone who's blind wouldn't have any trouble using the buttons.
The bigger problem for a blind person is one I don't believe any MP3 player has solved - they all rely on an LCD. How do you navigate when you can't *see* the navigation interface?
What does that have to do with anything? Alphatop and the like are contract manufacturers; you give them a blueprint (well, CAD files these days) and they build your design. Apple's *design* is still better; no one claims their manufacturing is.
You're thinking of the unbranded OEMs that sell their designs into the US, where multiple brands stick their name on them with minor changes. That's totally different from a contract manufacturer.
Learn to fucking think, then come back and post, okay?
There's a lot of difference between them on social issues that corporations don't care about. Really, there are significant differences between them on issues corporations do care about, but you'll never listen to me if I try to convince you of that, so let's stick to the social issues.
Things like gay marriage, abortion rights, gun control. I consider those issues to be more than a dime's worth.
You need to get over your paranoid anti-corporate viewpoint and understand that while they have a lot of influence, they don't run the world. Kerry and Bush are not the same person by any means, and you demean yourself to claim they are.
Prisons are long term facilities; everyone in a prison has been convicted of a felony crime. They aren't used as holding cells for people who haven't been convicted, and are nearly never occupied by prisoners with sentences under a year. Also, they are always seperate facilities. A jail can be a seperate facility, but is just as often attached to a courthouse, sheriff's building, or other law enforcement institution. Drunk tanks and the like are always in jails, as are the cells used for most prisoners who have been arrested but not yet convicted. Its rare for someone to be in jail for more than a year; generally jails are used for misdemeanor and minor felony convictions, those lasting under a year's sentence. Basically, get busted with a joint, go to jail, get busted for selling pounds, go to prison after the trial.
A significant proportion of US defendants are found to be not guilty. However, the government balances the probability of innocence against the risk of a guilty party fleeing. This is where the institution of allowing bail came from; in theory, if someone has assets on the line that will be seized if they run, they're less likely to try to avoid trial. If someone is deemed a significant enough flight risk, they're denied bail altogether. But most people have relatively minor bails set, their bond is posted and they go home while the trial is occurring. Bail is set at the arraignment, which is nearly always within a few days of arrest.
I never said US trials are speedy. They aren't. The 72 hour rule I referred to refers to arraignments; they can arrest you and hold you, but if they aren't going to charge you with a crime, they have to let you go relatively soon. However, a good portion of US defendants are out on bail during their trials, living their lives relatively normally. You want a high profile example? Look at Kobe Bryant. He's in the middle of a rape trial and still found the time to go lose an NBA championship.
How long does your Dell take to come up from sleep? Mine takes about 15-30 seconds, depending on the attached peripherals (if I sleep it undocked, dock it and wake it up, it takes longer to wake up, if its just open close its usually 15). My Powerbook takes roughly 2 seconds.
The Dell is a 1.2GHZP3. The Powerbook is a 400 MHz G3.
I'm no fanboy; I own more PCs than Macs and mostly use PCs. But I give credit where credit is due.
I have two sets of management. My real management, who wouldn't use HTML if it bit them and send me things I need to see, and HR/corporate management, who send me HTML-laden monstrosities I could care less if I read.
In the real world, important email is only rarely HTMLized.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be nice if that was true, but all too many patents these days are patents of what is for all intents and purposes an idea (a.k.a. "business method".)
The problem is that with the lapse of the "working example provided to the patent office" rule, people have been slipping in things that they don't necessarily have working examples of.
Working examples won't prevent patents that are *bad* from being granted; e.g., the Amazon one-click. However, they will prevent submarine patents and "patenting an idea for the sake of forcing everyone who might someday do something similar to license our idea".
Simple fix:
Require a working example. Maybe not delivered to the patent office, but at the time of filing, it should be proven that your technique works, and that you've made it work.
Oh, when you said "buy a bike" and immediately said mpg, I got confused.
:)
I bought a bike. I get about 15-20 miles per exhaustion of my legs.
Never heard the term composite impedance used. I've always heard it described as complex impedance (to convey the fact that it's a combination of the purely imaginary reactance and the purely real resistance). Good term, though.
The other point to make is regarding wavelength - unless a wire is at least lambda/10 in length, transmission line effects can generally be ignored. They're there, but not significant. At audio frequencies, this means you can have a wire of on the order of a half kilometer before you see TL effects. At FM frequencies, you're looking at around a quarter of a meter. When you start talking GHz chip clocks, you'll see serious TL effects at around 1 cm; modern chip design has developed methods to work around the fact that clock lines are usually transmission lines.
What's new about it is that it's from a manufacturer, not a homebrew.
Lot of these coming, from what I know - Nokia, Motorola both have GSM/802.11 stuff coming.
Uhm... yeah, actually. The government gave the contract to manage the phone number space to NeuStar, who then manage the phone space for the telcos. They have to pay Neustar for phone numbers.
What do you want to bet Europe has something similar? You do it with your IPs, I'm willing to bet you do it with your phone numbers.
(this is shamelessly ripped from other posters, who will likely get overlooked due to the fact that they have bad or no karma - read at 0, you twits.)
Actually, I want that feature too, but for a totally different reason: I want to do artificial books on tape. I want to load a text file into the iPod and have it read it to me.
It really shouldn't be that hard to pack a text-to-speech engine into a chip; I'd even have paid a little bit extra for that feature to be included in my iPod.
The fact that you think government is not of and for the people shows how hopeless you are. You believe that the people aren't responsible for their government, and that they haven't gotten exactly the government they wanted.
Do you ever expect the government to *change* if everyone says "Well, it isn't my government, they aren't doing what I want"? It IS your government (assuming you live in the US) and it is YOUR responsibility to help make it do what the people want.
1) Like I said - with the world at our back. I think that if most of the world agrees something is wrong, it probably is; at the very least, its a decent attempt at making sure something genuinely is wrong. Someone has to make the judgement as to what is evil; the best we can do is do the best we can to make sure we're right about evil. If no one is willing to judge what is evil, no one will ever do anything, and we're right back with Burke.
2) True. How certain are you that they didn't do these other things? Can you see Saddam succumbing to economic pressure? We tried that one already. A targeted assassination? One of his sons would have stepped up, and from all accounts they were just as bad, if not worse. The problems with the Iraq war had nothing to do with exhaustion of options, and everything to do with lying about the reasons (WMD? Bullshit) and the lack of accord around the world. If we had gone in saying "He's killing his own people" with the UN behind us, then I couldn't find much wrong with it.
So you have no issue with innocent people being killed as long as it is for a "good cause"? How is the attack on Afghanastan different from the Iraq one? They both imply bombs falling on people's heads.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke.
We should do our utmost to avoid the deaths of innocents, but we can't allow that possibility to prevent us from acting to restrain evil. Saddam was evil. Should we have gone into Iraq the way we did, for the reasons we did? No. But should we have gone in, with the world behind us, because Saddam tortured and murdered his own people? Absolutely.
Industrial design has more to do with the visual appeal than with the things under the core. My 286 example might have been a bit hyperbolic, but you don't see any Opteron systems on their list of design awards, do you?
Haven't played Gish, but ChronicLogic's other game that I've played (Bridge Construction Set) is *awesome*.
Introversion's "Uplink" is also a lot of fun. And I see that they're in the process of a second game; probably have to buy that one too. Uplink is a "hacking simulator"; best part is that like in the real world, it has a GUI and a CLI, and some things are *much* faster once you learn the CLI. Second one is called Darwinia, and appears to be an RTS - a sentence I like from its website is "combining fast paced action with strategic battle planning, the game features a novel and intuitive control mechanism, a graphical style ripped from 80's retro classics, and a story concerning a tribe of video game sprites trapped in a modern 3d game world." How can you not like something involving retro sprites in the 3d world?
Indie games publishers put out some really good stuff sometimes.
Bah. Meant to say "saw", not "say", referring to the terms I saw in the GPL.
I'm not arguing that its impossible, simply that working with Linux in your product isn't necessarily any easier/cheaper than working with a proprietary system.
The GPL's problem is that nearly all of its legal terms require technical definitions - derivative being the most prominent of the bunch. Modifications, "part of a whole", "mere aggregation", incorporation. These are all legal terms whose importance to the GPL relies on their technical interpretation. And yeah, the GPL is a particularly complex free license. But it's like people who say Linux is $free; it isn't. It's freedom, not $free.
(Technical terms I say: medium, software, running a program - we don't necessarily think of them as technical since we work with them daily, but they are.)
Hey, guess what?
I'll lay you dollars to donuts that you can find a candidate who has your views. Odds are good they'll be from one of the two major parties. How about, for example, Masachussetts State Sen. Marian Walsh, who describes herself as pro-life and pro-gay? Oh, and she's a Democrat. The parties don't set their members views; they don't set their members positions. Vote for the person, not the party.
(Exactly what do you mean, you don't like either side in gun control? Either you think gun control is acceptable or you think it isn't; you can argue about how *much* you want, but it's like the old joke - you're just haggling over the price)
I see about 2s for OS X. The times I gave for my Dell are for Windows; it's a work machine, it has to be a Windows machine.
But the point was - you buy an iBook, it comes with OS X. There's no need to go installing something new.
Options:
1) They're punishing you for being godless commies.
2) We protected you from the red menace for so long, this is our payoff.
3) English is just a naturally superior language; as a result, English speakers don't deserve DRM.
4) French people. Enough said.
5) George W Bush threatened to nuke EMI if they didn't keep "those godless Eurotrash from pirating our hard-earned American IP".
6) Barbara Boxer threatened to sue EMI if they didn't keep "those wonderful European scamps from pirating the music industries rightfully earned profits".
7) Orrin Hatch's head exploded; as a result, the US no longer has to deal with stupid copy protection efforts.
8) French people.
9) Specifically to piss off the Europeans; I mean, that's what American corporations live for, right?
10) They think if they make the scheme illogical enough, all the computer nerds who pirate their music will have their brains ignite in a collective bonfire of confusion.
(laugh, its supposed to be funny)
Uhm, I can use it without looking at it at all. You memorize the positional relationship of the 4 buttons - back, menu, playpause, forward. The scroll wheel is just that. Since they're indented into the case, you can feel their locations. Someone who's blind wouldn't have any trouble using the buttons.
The bigger problem for a blind person is one I don't believe any MP3 player has solved - they all rely on an LCD. How do you navigate when you can't *see* the navigation interface?
It's a DESIGN award, not a technology award.
The whole point is that things that look nice win; if someone had a beautiful box with a 286 in it that served some function, it would be considered.
What does that have to do with anything? Alphatop and the like are contract manufacturers; you give them a blueprint (well, CAD files these days) and they build your design. Apple's *design* is still better; no one claims their manufacturing is.
You're thinking of the unbranded OEMs that sell their designs into the US, where multiple brands stick their name on them with minor changes. That's totally different from a contract manufacturer.
Learn to fucking think, then come back and post, okay?
There's a lot of difference between them on social issues that corporations don't care about. Really, there are significant differences between them on issues corporations do care about, but you'll never listen to me if I try to convince you of that, so let's stick to the social issues.
Things like gay marriage, abortion rights, gun control. I consider those issues to be more than a dime's worth.
You need to get over your paranoid anti-corporate viewpoint and understand that while they have a lot of influence, they don't run the world. Kerry and Bush are not the same person by any means, and you demean yourself to claim they are.
Prisons are long term facilities; everyone in a prison has been convicted of a felony crime. They aren't used as holding cells for people who haven't been convicted, and are nearly never occupied by prisoners with sentences under a year. Also, they are always seperate facilities. A jail can be a seperate facility, but is just as often attached to a courthouse, sheriff's building, or other law enforcement institution. Drunk tanks and the like are always in jails, as are the cells used for most prisoners who have been arrested but not yet convicted. Its rare for someone to be in jail for more than a year; generally jails are used for misdemeanor and minor felony convictions, those lasting under a year's sentence. Basically, get busted with a joint, go to jail, get busted for selling pounds, go to prison after the trial.
A significant proportion of US defendants are found to be not guilty. However, the government balances the probability of innocence against the risk of a guilty party fleeing. This is where the institution of allowing bail came from; in theory, if someone has assets on the line that will be seized if they run, they're less likely to try to avoid trial. If someone is deemed a significant enough flight risk, they're denied bail altogether. But most people have relatively minor bails set, their bond is posted and they go home while the trial is occurring. Bail is set at the arraignment, which is nearly always within a few days of arrest.
I never said US trials are speedy. They aren't. The 72 hour rule I referred to refers to arraignments; they can arrest you and hold you, but if they aren't going to charge you with a crime, they have to let you go relatively soon. However, a good portion of US defendants are out on bail during their trials, living their lives relatively normally. You want a high profile example? Look at Kobe Bryant. He's in the middle of a rape trial and still found the time to go lose an NBA championship.
How long does your Dell take to come up from sleep? Mine takes about 15-30 seconds, depending on the attached peripherals (if I sleep it undocked, dock it and wake it up, it takes longer to wake up, if its just open close its usually 15). My Powerbook takes roughly 2 seconds.
The Dell is a 1.2GHZP3. The Powerbook is a 400 MHz G3.
I'm no fanboy; I own more PCs than Macs and mostly use PCs. But I give credit where credit is due.
I have two sets of management. My real management, who wouldn't use HTML if it bit them and send me things I need to see, and HR/corporate management, who send me HTML-laden monstrosities I could care less if I read.
In the real world, important email is only rarely HTMLized.
In technical usage, "open source" means licensed under an OSI approved license meeting the Open Source Definition.
You mean, like the CPL?
You do know the article was talking about MS's truely open-sourced programs (both of them), and not the shared source initiative, right?
Wait. No, you don't, because you didn't RTFA.
Easier.
Get an iBook/Powerbook. Don't load Linux. Open everything you want. Close the lid.
Come back a day later, open the lid. Apps! OS X ain't so shabby either.