In meatspace, this would be called "vigilante justice," but I'm not sure that large corporations qualify for that label.
Actually, "vigilante justice" would require that they were only damaging the property of the people who they knew have actually stolen from them but can't prove it. In this, they're messing with everyone's property on the justification that some of those people might steal from them in the future. That's just bald-faced malice.
And all those papers I filed, did they go to God too?
Well, surely not all of them. I think God gets the goldenrod copies, the puce copies go to HR, and you're supposed to keep the chartreuse copies for your records.
No you inept shithead, he is providing people with the boxes in return for a "donation".
In point of actual fact, he isn't. Nowhere does he say or imply that he'll send you anything if you give him a donation. Unless you can find somewhere on his site that indicates otherwise, I'm afraid it's still double-dumbass on you.
Wow -- let he who is not half a dumbass cast the first stone. If the man is asking you for money, and is not offering anything in return, it is a donation, even if that fact is inconvenient to your uninformed yammerings.
What, is he selling you some nothing? Well, at least he's got some FedEx boxes so he can ship it to you.
I'll grant that I didn't read the paper this morning, but I'm pretty sure that the military isn't coextensive with the government just yet. I think there's a special name for the form of government where the military is the ruling body, and "democratic republic" isn't it.
That aside, are you saying that if a museum accepts a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, they're then obligated to set up an Army recruitment kiosk in their lobby?
Parts, yes, and as another poster mentioned, there are some independent contractors. However, if every last one of those suppliers and contractors decided that they were taking their marbles and going home, that doesn't remove from the US the ability to park an aircraft carrier in somebody's harbor until such time as the contract was honored.
Or, taking the hypothetical case further, if (for example) a military supplier in China decided to break a contract with the US military, don't you suppose that this would (pretty accurately) be described as a threat to national security? Here's your Fox News soundbite: "Foreign Nuclear Power Threatens to Cripple US Military".
What do we expect will happen? Why will we "own" everything? Because a piece of paper says we own it. What happens when the people that actually do the work tear up the piece of paper?
You will note that there are no current plans to outsource the military.
the original trilogy never had enough Jedi action to satisfy me. That alone makes the new trilogy worthwhile.
Honestly, that's one of the few good things I took away with me from Phantom Menace. In the original trilogy, yeah, okay, Yoda was pretty cool and Luke eventually became so, but I just didn't understand why everyone was so impressed with Jedi knights.
Then, in Menace, you have a pair of Jedi who can just mow down cadres of droids, and prove to be essentially unhittable no matter how many blasters are firing at them at the same time. Oh, okay, now I see why Jedi filled the bad guys with butt-puckering terror.
1) the invention has to be novel 2) the invention must not be ovious, there has to be an inventive step 3) the specification has to be detailed enough for persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention, that is to say, build the apparatus... The problem with the patent system today is that the patent offices are hopelessly understaffed...
I don't think that failing to notice that 1/3 of the required elements is entirely missing can be brushed off as understaffing. Not finding some obscure prior art -- okay, it happens, though I don't think they're really trying all that hard. Questions of the invention being inobvious are often open to argument, especially after you've already seen the invention and had a chance to say "oh, yeah, I coulda done that." But failing to notice that there's not anything that even pretends to be an actual physical apparatus or any idea how to design one? Sorry -- that's incompetence.
Sony hasn't yet built a device that works based on the ideas presented in the patent, so this is all theoretical. In fact, according to the New Scientist, Sony hasn't even conducted any experiments to see if this works.
So, they've got a patent on something that they not only haven't built, but that they have no particular evidence could even work at all?
I'm starting to wonder what you'd have to throw together to get rejected by the patent office at this point. "Um, yeah, I think that, like, maybe you could make someone remember something by, you know, setting up a magnetic field around a specific part of their brain. Sounds like it could work, right? Can I have a patent?"
Man, what I wouldn't give to be "Special Agent Lazarus." Everything you do sounds cool -- I mean, it might be an utterly boring document about e-mail usage, but you still get to call it "the Lazarus Report."
Hmm so if you can't jam the system what do you do? Yes! You make a fake terrorist attack, send a mailbomb or something to the white house, with some luck they will take that as a terrorist attack and shut down the system.
With apologies to Hans Gruber: "Systems which cannot be shut down are shut down automatically in response to a terrorist incident. You ask for miracles, Theo... I give you the Office of Homeland Security."
It's unlikely Oracle could convince a company to switch their PeopleSoft software from DB2 to Oracle DB, if all of their other applications run on DB2.
That depends on how heavily the company is into PeopleSoft. If they are, for example, a school, and have their payroll, student information system, financial resource system, and grants package manager all on PeopleSoft, and PeopleSoft says that the next revision is only going to support Oracle, there's going to be a strong tendency to migrate (or add an Oracle box), even if there are a lot of other packages running on DB2. PeopleSoft can be a huge part of a company's administrative system.
I'm not buying either until there's either a single, unified standard, or a dual format player at a reasonable (~$150) price. It's just too expensive being an early adopter.
Oh, and I'm not buying one until I have a television system supporting hi-def also.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
I doubt it; this is precisely what I'm thinking. I have no intention of buying any of the current incarnations of high definition television -- I keep hearing about all these new technologies gearing up for the market (OLED, grating light valve) which will have monstrous resolution, amazing contrast, and refresh rates that will make you cry. I'm waiting for them, and, further, I don't plan on paying the early adopter markup on them, so it's going to be a couple of years, I think. And, until that time, I'm going to be sticking with my current TV, and that TV simply can't take advantage of any of these high-definition anythings.
Noise pollution is endemic. It doesn't help that their infernal language consists of abrupt rapid fire tones that is a cacophony for any human ear to bear.
This was a great troll, but this bit was my favorite; the 1850's "great white hunter" style was dead-on.
Given that cops have the most experience in the field, this is something I'd prefer to get their input on.
According to other articles I've read on the law, backlash from law enforcement resulted in the law very specifically not applying to police, federal agents, and similar.
So, it would seem that, while cops are very much down with the idea of not being able to be shot with their own firearms, they're notso-hotso on the idea of making the gun less reliable to do so.
Just look at the "security" of the Linux kernel. Users are limited to 16 groups?? Only one group can have permissions applied to a file? And no group nesting allowed?
Yeah, there's a security system I'd be proud of.
You can mod this comment down, but you can't propose a security system like THAT to a company interested in protecting their assets. WAKE UP SLASHDOT.
IHBT. Still:
First off, lots of large companies protect their assets using the standard UNIX security scheme, so that part of your argument is a non-starter.
Further, if you require a more flexible ACL scheme for some reason, you can always use SGI's XFS filesystem, which has had fairly good support for ACLs for quite awhile.
Or use IBM's JFS, which likewise has ACL support.
I believe that there are patches available which will add ACL support the ext2 and ext3.
So, in summary: Plenty of folks get by without problems with UNIX permissions, but if you want ACLs, they're readily available. Go ye forth and troll no more.
I've read a couple of vague attempts at explanations of what (eg) ATi might find in an nVidia driver that would be useful to them in terms of hardware development. None of them were particularly detailed.
There are lots of sharp folks around here, so I'll put the question: Can anyone provide an actual, specific example of what a competitor could find in an nVidia driver which would allow them to learn a hardware "secret" which (1) they couldn't learn as fast or faster by looking at the silicon and (2) in enough time to incorporate it into their hardware in a timeframe that would be competitive?
In meatspace, this would be called "vigilante justice," but I'm not sure that large corporations qualify for that label.
Actually, "vigilante justice" would require that they were only damaging the property of the people who they knew have actually stolen from them but can't prove it. In this, they're messing with everyone's property on the justification that some of those people might steal from them in the future. That's just bald-faced malice.
And all those papers I filed, did they go to God too?
Well, surely not all of them. I think God gets the goldenrod copies, the puce copies go to HR, and you're supposed to keep the chartreuse copies for your records.
No you inept shithead, he is providing people with the boxes in return for a "donation".
In point of actual fact, he isn't. Nowhere does he say or imply that he'll send you anything if you give him a donation. Unless you can find somewhere on his site that indicates otherwise, I'm afraid it's still double-dumbass on you.
Wow -- let he who is not half a dumbass cast the first stone. If the man is asking you for money, and is not offering anything in return, it is a donation, even if that fact is inconvenient to your uninformed yammerings.
What, is he selling you some nothing? Well, at least he's got some FedEx boxes so he can ship it to you.
If you can show that the big labels are colluding to offer everybody lousy terms, then you've got a case.
It's often called "tacit collusion," and it doesn't leave a paper trail.
I'll grant that I didn't read the paper this morning, but I'm pretty sure that the military isn't coextensive with the government just yet. I think there's a special name for the form of government where the military is the ruling body, and "democratic republic" isn't it.
That aside, are you saying that if a museum accepts a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, they're then obligated to set up an Army recruitment kiosk in their lobby?
Do they ever tell us how good the player ended up being?
Dude -- they taught a mail filter to play chess. "It doesn't matter if the bear dances well or not, it's that he dances at all."
So I have to ask... "What's the Delio?"
You so did not have to ask that. Indeed, a workable system of ethics might be founded upon not asking that.
The article also has pictures of the programmed E. coli.
"Oh, come on, you just pulled those numbers out of your ass."
"Well, that's where I keep my computing resources. If you pass me that bowl of brussels sprouts, I'll show you how far I've gotten on MP3 playback."
My post was about 85% quip, but still:
Parts, yes, and as another poster mentioned, there are some independent contractors. However, if every last one of those suppliers and contractors decided that they were taking their marbles and going home, that doesn't remove from the US the ability to park an aircraft carrier in somebody's harbor until such time as the contract was honored.
Or, taking the hypothetical case further, if (for example) a military supplier in China decided to break a contract with the US military, don't you suppose that this would (pretty accurately) be described as a threat to national security? Here's your Fox News soundbite: "Foreign Nuclear Power Threatens to Cripple US Military".
What do we expect will happen? Why will we "own" everything? Because a piece of paper says we own it. What happens when the people that actually do the work tear up the piece of paper?
You will note that there are no current plans to outsource the military.
the original trilogy never had enough Jedi action to satisfy me. That alone makes the new trilogy worthwhile.
Honestly, that's one of the few good things I took away with me from Phantom Menace. In the original trilogy, yeah, okay, Yoda was pretty cool and Luke eventually became so, but I just didn't understand why everyone was so impressed with Jedi knights.
Then, in Menace, you have a pair of Jedi who can just mow down cadres of droids, and prove to be essentially unhittable no matter how many blasters are firing at them at the same time. Oh, okay, now I see why Jedi filled the bad guys with butt-puckering terror.
1) the invention has to be novel ...
2) the invention must not be ovious, there has to be an inventive step
3) the specification has to be detailed enough for persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention, that is to say, build the apparatus
The problem with the patent system today is that the patent offices are hopelessly understaffed...
I don't think that failing to notice that 1/3 of the required elements is entirely missing can be brushed off as understaffing. Not finding some obscure prior art -- okay, it happens, though I don't think they're really trying all that hard. Questions of the invention being inobvious are often open to argument, especially after you've already seen the invention and had a chance to say "oh, yeah, I coulda done that." But failing to notice that there's not anything that even pretends to be an actual physical apparatus or any idea how to design one? Sorry -- that's incompetence.
Sony hasn't yet built a device that works based on the ideas presented in the patent, so this is all theoretical. In fact, according to the New Scientist, Sony hasn't even conducted any experiments to see if this works.
So, they've got a patent on something that they not only haven't built, but that they have no particular evidence could even work at all?
I'm starting to wonder what you'd have to throw together to get rejected by the patent office at this point. "Um, yeah, I think that, like, maybe you could make someone remember something by, you know, setting up a magnetic field around a specific part of their brain. Sounds like it could work, right? Can I have a patent?"
How long it will take someone to build a complete (may be 90%) databese of all americans...
Das some phat data, yo.
Frankly, I'm not horribly impressed.
But, he's got technology that, once he gets it to work, will be very nearly useless! How can you not be impressed?
Man, what I wouldn't give to be "Special Agent Lazarus." Everything you do sounds cool -- I mean, it might be an utterly boring document about e-mail usage, but you still get to call it "the Lazarus Report."
Hmm so if you can't jam the system what do you do?
... I give you the Office of Homeland Security."
Yes! You make a fake terrorist attack, send a mailbomb or something to the white house, with some luck they will take that as a terrorist attack and shut down the system.
With apologies to Hans Gruber: "Systems which cannot be shut down are shut down automatically in response to a terrorist incident. You ask for miracles, Theo
It's unlikely Oracle could convince a company to switch their PeopleSoft software from DB2 to Oracle DB, if all of their other applications run on DB2.
That depends on how heavily the company is into PeopleSoft. If they are, for example, a school, and have their payroll, student information system, financial resource system, and grants package manager all on PeopleSoft, and PeopleSoft says that the next revision is only going to support Oracle, there's going to be a strong tendency to migrate (or add an Oracle box), even if there are a lot of other packages running on DB2. PeopleSoft can be a huge part of a company's administrative system.
I'm not buying either until there's either a single, unified standard, or a dual format player at a reasonable (~$150) price. It's just too expensive being an early adopter.
Oh, and I'm not buying one until I have a television system supporting hi-def also.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
I doubt it; this is precisely what I'm thinking. I have no intention of buying any of the current incarnations of high definition television -- I keep hearing about all these new technologies gearing up for the market (OLED, grating light valve) which will have monstrous resolution, amazing contrast, and refresh rates that will make you cry. I'm waiting for them, and, further, I don't plan on paying the early adopter markup on them, so it's going to be a couple of years, I think. And, until that time, I'm going to be sticking with my current TV, and that TV simply can't take advantage of any of these high-definition anythings.
Noise pollution is endemic. It doesn't help that their infernal language consists of abrupt rapid fire tones that is a cacophony for any human ear to bear.
This was a great troll, but this bit was my favorite; the 1850's "great white hunter" style was dead-on.
And the big rule at my place: Never do anything major on a Friday afternoon.
This is actually a formal rule where I work, and we need to give very good reasons for overriding it.
Given that cops have the most experience in the field, this is something I'd prefer to get their input on.
According to other articles I've read on the law, backlash from law enforcement resulted in the law very specifically not applying to police, federal agents, and similar.
So, it would seem that, while cops are very much down with the idea of not being able to be shot with their own firearms, they're notso-hotso on the idea of making the gun less reliable to do so.
Just look at the "security" of the Linux kernel. Users are limited to 16 groups?? Only one group can have permissions applied to a file? And no group nesting allowed?
Yeah, there's a security system I'd be proud of.
You can mod this comment down, but you can't propose a security system like THAT to a company interested in protecting their assets. WAKE UP SLASHDOT.
IHBT. Still:
First off, lots of large companies protect their assets using the standard UNIX security scheme, so that part of your argument is a non-starter.
Further, if you require a more flexible ACL scheme for some reason, you can always use SGI's XFS filesystem, which has had fairly good support for ACLs for quite awhile.
Or use IBM's JFS, which likewise has ACL support.
I believe that there are patches available which will add ACL support the ext2 and ext3.
So, in summary: Plenty of folks get by without problems with UNIX permissions, but if you want ACLs, they're readily available. Go ye forth and troll no more.
I've read a couple of vague attempts at explanations of what (eg) ATi might find in an nVidia driver that would be useful to them in terms of hardware development. None of them were particularly detailed.
There are lots of sharp folks around here, so I'll put the question: Can anyone provide an actual, specific example of what a competitor could find in an nVidia driver which would allow them to learn a hardware "secret" which (1) they couldn't learn as fast or faster by looking at the silicon and (2) in enough time to incorporate it into their hardware in a timeframe that would be competitive?