true, but now that there's a solid OpenGL to DirectX adapter (there was something on/. about that in the past week or two) it seems like OpenGL would become preferable, as the "write once, run more places" factor comes in. (Substitute "wishful thinking" for "factor" if you wish:)
at this point I pretty much assume ubiquitous surveillance. My only gripe is that I can't see the surveillance of the authorities as easily as they can see the surveillance of me.
the ones I've used all just have a "don't put too much attention on this while driving" screen with an "OK" button. I don't know whether that's a feature to let the passenger do stuff or slackness in not hooking the code to disable the screen if calculated MPH is nonzero (though I would tend to suspect it's a feature).
looking solely at the sunlight->electricity aspect, that's true, but in the plant process you also get CO2->O2 conversion, which solar cells don't do, and plants may require less energy input to cultivate and harvest (or at least less _new_ energy input, if we can use waste material from other plant-using processes like agriculture). After all, isn't one of the perennial gripes about solar panels the amount of energy and materials it takes to manufacture them?
Don't get me wrong, I love solar panels as a concept, and I love this as a concept. They're useful for different things, though. The great strengths of gasoline have always been portability and high energy density. Hydrogen has less energy density (by volume, maybe not by mass) and is less portable, but if it's easier to produce, it may still be worthwhile.
assuming it gets widespread, it'll probably be something like: pop hood, pull out 25 pound aluminum block A, pull out 25 pound aluminum block B, put in two new 25 pound blocks, close hood. Faster than pumping gas, once you've gotten the guy manning the station to unlock the block rack. Kind of like the Blue Rhino propane swap stations.
The key factor is that the trait being tested is rare; only one in 500 people has it. In this case, the false positives can still be (substantially) more frequent than true positives.
Say you test 50,000 people. 100 have it, 49,900 don't. Of the 100 who have it, there will be 99 correct 'yes' results and one incorrect 'no' result. And of the 49900 who don't have it, there will be 49401 correct 'no' results and 499 incorrect 'yes' results.
So total, we have 598 'yes' results. But 499 of those are false positives, which is 83.4444%; only 16.5555% of the folks who test positive are really positive.
Oh, and patents are for twenty years, not forever minus epsilon.
And that is in fact a key factor in the ruling: the patent _does_ end in 20 years, rather than 20 + 20 because we used a levorotatory protein + 20 because we added this binding agent that releases more smoothly over time + 20 because we adjusted the gel coating to resist acid better and deliver more of the drug to the intestines + 20 because...
very true. But until we have nice fusion reactors that doesn't really help with how much energy you can get out of a kilogram of hydrogen for household use, and once we do have fusion reactors we can afford to be inefficient at electrolysis.
yeah, when I got to this point I was wondering if splitting water more easily would improve water+CO2 -> hydrocarbon efficiency. (guessing probably some but maybe not much)
That's pretty sweet. I see you use a reprap-type printer. What modelling software do you use? For character setup I like daz studio or poser but those are both designed for rendering, not for watertight solids, and my attempts to come up with something to generate a real solid have been... less than effective so far.
that's some serious detail. I'd have thought 200 microns would be good enough. though admittedly I haven't actually gotten one printed yet; it may suck after all.
eh. As long as he's right about it being a safe speed, no problem. And that's substantially better than the folks who will do the speed limit on a wet/icy road in the dark...
what you'd really find that was useful is things that don't appear to have been patented yet. Then you just whip up an application for the particular set of buzzwords in question, file it, and voila! Patent war chest.
I suspect the PTO tries very hard (too hard, perhaps) to avoid tagging as 'obvious' things that are obvious in hindsight but not beforehand. To distinguish between "well duh" and "of course, why didn't I think of that?", as it were. They really need to come up with a better method (I've seen several suggestions on/. over time) but for now the best they can probably do is "okay, it seems ingenious rather than obvious to me, so I'll let it go".
last time I bought something through paypal, there was a (not very obvious) option at paypal's site to use my card without creating an account. It may not have been there (or have been better hidden) when you went, though.
Ah, thank you! I remembered hearing about this model and wanting to use it but not who had it available or what it was called. Now to go talk to BoA about a credit card.
There is. If it can be proven that you were acting in bad faith, then you can be dinged for damages and court costs. However, being stupid is not the same as bad faith, so you pretty much have to have documentation of the filer saying "yeah, we know it's BS but it'll get them offline for a while".
imho, if the app is worth using, 5 bucks isn't enough pain to make me take the time to find a pirated version. If it's not worth using, it's not worth taking the time to find a pirated versions. Of course, that threshold is user-dependent.
It doesn't violate the copyright clause because the copyright is still of a limited duration. The government has the right, through the interstate commerce clause, to regulate anything you do that affects what you buy. The original (stupid) decision was about a guy who was growing wheat on his own land to feed his own animals; it was ruled that because this affected how much wheat he bought from others, it impacted interstate commerce. In theory, format shifting means you don't have to buy extra copies; that affects interstate commerce at least as much.
I agree completely with your opinion of the DMCA, and I think the decisions that underpin it are stupid. But there they are. If I had a time machine I could spend quite a lot of subjective time just going back and telling people who write rules what the unintended consequences of leaving any vagueness are. I think my first two would be the interstate commerce clause and the copyright clause, but the railroad tax decision into which the 'corporations have the same rights as people' statement was slipped would probably be next.
Slashdot Mirror
true, but now that there's a solid OpenGL to DirectX adapter (there was something on /. about that in the past week or two) it seems like OpenGL would become preferable, as the "write once, run more places" factor comes in. (Substitute "wishful thinking" for "factor" if you wish :)
at this point I pretty much assume ubiquitous surveillance. My only gripe is that I can't see the surveillance of the authorities as easily as they can see the surveillance of me.
how expensive it is depends heavily on how long you have to get it done, no?
A warrant is a form of court order, yes. But not all court orders are warrants.
unplug the kinect from the back of the xbox when not in use?
the ones I've used all just have a "don't put too much attention on this while driving" screen with an "OK" button. I don't know whether that's a feature to let the passenger do stuff or slackness in not hooking the code to disable the screen if calculated MPH is nonzero (though I would tend to suspect it's a feature).
looking solely at the sunlight->electricity aspect, that's true, but in the plant process you also get CO2->O2 conversion, which solar cells don't do, and plants may require less energy input to cultivate and harvest (or at least less _new_ energy input, if we can use waste material from other plant-using processes like agriculture). After all, isn't one of the perennial gripes about solar panels the amount of energy and materials it takes to manufacture them?
Don't get me wrong, I love solar panels as a concept, and I love this as a concept. They're useful for different things, though. The great strengths of gasoline have always been portability and high energy density. Hydrogen has less energy density (by volume, maybe not by mass) and is less portable, but if it's easier to produce, it may still be worthwhile.
assuming it gets widespread, it'll probably be something like: pop hood, pull out 25 pound aluminum block A, pull out 25 pound aluminum block B, put in two new 25 pound blocks, close hood. Faster than pumping gas, once you've gotten the guy manning the station to unlock the block rack. Kind of like the Blue Rhino propane swap stations.
The key factor is that the trait being tested is rare; only one in 500 people has it. In this case, the false positives can still be (substantially) more frequent than true positives.
Say you test 50,000 people. 100 have it, 49,900 don't. Of the 100 who have it, there will be 99 correct 'yes' results and one incorrect 'no' result. And of the 49900 who don't have it, there will be 49401 correct 'no' results and 499 incorrect 'yes' results.
So total, we have 598 'yes' results. But 499 of those are false positives, which is 83.4444%; only 16.5555% of the folks who test positive are really positive.
Oh, and patents are for twenty years, not forever minus epsilon.
And that is in fact a key factor in the ruling: the patent _does_ end in 20 years, rather than 20 + 20 because we used a levorotatory protein + 20 because we added this binding agent that releases more smoothly over time + 20 because we adjusted the gel coating to resist acid better and deliver more of the drug to the intestines + 20 because...
very true. But until we have nice fusion reactors that doesn't really help with how much energy you can get out of a kilogram of hydrogen for household use, and once we do have fusion reactors we can afford to be inefficient at electrolysis.
yeah, when I got to this point I was wondering if splitting water more easily would improve water+CO2 -> hydrocarbon efficiency. (guessing probably some but maybe not much)
That's pretty sweet. I see you use a reprap-type printer. What modelling software do you use? For character setup I like daz studio or poser but those are both designed for rendering, not for watertight solids, and my attempts to come up with something to generate a real solid have been... less than effective so far.
that's some serious detail. I'd have thought 200 microns would be good enough. though admittedly I haven't actually gotten one printed yet; it may suck after all.
If drinking water while stopped at a light is distraction, adjusting an air vent is probably equally distracting. Better not.
eh. As long as he's right about it being a safe speed, no problem. And that's substantially better than the folks who will do the speed limit on a wet/icy road in the dark...
what you'd really find that was useful is things that don't appear to have been patented yet. Then you just whip up an application for the particular set of buzzwords in question, file it, and voila! Patent war chest.
I suspect the PTO tries very hard (too hard, perhaps) to avoid tagging as 'obvious' things that are obvious in hindsight but not beforehand. To distinguish between "well duh" and "of course, why didn't I think of that?", as it were. They really need to come up with a better method (I've seen several suggestions on /. over time) but for now the best they can probably do is "okay, it seems ingenious rather than obvious to me, so I'll let it go".
Ah, I misunderstood. That does seem odd. Oh well; hope you found what you were looking for elsewhere :)
last time I bought something through paypal, there was a (not very obvious) option at paypal's site to use my card without creating an account. It may not have been there (or have been better hidden) when you went, though.
Ah, thank you! I remembered hearing about this model and wanting to use it but not who had it available or what it was called. Now to go talk to BoA about a credit card.
There is. If it can be proven that you were acting in bad faith, then you can be dinged for damages and court costs. However, being stupid is not the same as bad faith, so you pretty much have to have documentation of the filer saying "yeah, we know it's BS but it'll get them offline for a while".
imho, if the app is worth using, 5 bucks isn't enough pain to make me take the time to find a pirated version. If it's not worth using, it's not worth taking the time to find a pirated versions. Of course, that threshold is user-dependent.
It doesn't violate the copyright clause because the copyright is still of a limited duration. The government has the right, through the interstate commerce clause, to regulate anything you do that affects what you buy. The original (stupid) decision was about a guy who was growing wheat on his own land to feed his own animals; it was ruled that because this affected how much wheat he bought from others, it impacted interstate commerce. In theory, format shifting means you don't have to buy extra copies; that affects interstate commerce at least as much.
I agree completely with your opinion of the DMCA, and I think the decisions that underpin it are stupid. But there they are. If I had a time machine I could spend quite a lot of subjective time just going back and telling people who write rules what the unintended consequences of leaving any vagueness are. I think my first two would be the interstate commerce clause and the copyright clause, but the railroad tax decision into which the 'corporations have the same rights as people' statement was slipped would probably be next.
and once again we get to DeBeers :)