You can't limit how long someone has to explain the objection, it might be just citing a prior patent, but it might be more involved than that.
Its not a matter of it being "ok as long as the little guy gets it" its a matter of pre-grant opposition vastly favoring the larger entity. Say I am an individual inventor or small startup, I only have a few patent applications, and I may need those to turn into patents to get funding or to have any hope of keeping my product from being copied by big existing companies. The moment the giant corp becomes aware of me they search my handful of applications and send their lawyers to file any objection they can think of. And they are likely to become aware of me as a threat while most or all of my applications are still pending. Now I can't get funding or I can't get my patent to issue quickly so I can stop people from copying me, and I go out of business.
Also the examiner is not going to be able to just ignore the large company's "BS" objection, if they could then they could just ignore everything, or they could ignore the little guys and favor the big guys, you never want to allow a bureaucrat to be able to exercise arbitrary judgement, if you think thats ok or desirable you have never had to get something you needed from an government agency before.
Turn it around, I am the little startup, I have no idea which patents from which companies are going to be a problem, and from the existing companies in the field only a fraction of their patents are pending, most are issued, so there is almost no ability for the little guy to take advantage of this.
If the patent sucks then it can be dealt with after issue, pre-grant opposition is just an invitation for people to make the already too slow process of getting a patent even slower.
While I hate all this ACTA and related types of laws (DMCA, etc) the summary for this article is not accurate, for example it says it would forbid third party opposition to patents, which it doesn't say, what it actually says is that it prohibits them prior to the grant of a patent. And as someone with a bunch of patents from little startups, thats a good thing actually, as it would be way to easy for big corporations to make small inventors and startups waste money by filling all sorts of third party opposition during the patent prosecution.
In any case, don't believe the summary article, if you care about a particular point follow the links to the full text and read it in the original.
Actually it is a way to subvert the public's knowledge. Calling them "undocumented" implies that the only deficiency with their presence in this country is the lack of some paperwork. The people in question have entered in violation of the law, no amount of paperwork will alter the fact that they are now criminals.
To answer your follow on question, a local radio talk show host doesn't use the term "illegal alien", he refers to them as "criminal aliens", which I think you should approve of, since the answer to your question is, we call most people who commit crimes "criminal citizens" or just "criminals" for short... although given the growing prison population who are not citizens, perhaps we should stop shortening it to just "criminal" since while in the past it was a generally valid simplification that most criminals were (unfortunately) our fellow citizens, it now seems perhaps it is time to be explicit about the citizenship status of those who chose to flaunt the laws of our country.
either you meant to say FULLY automatic weaponry, in which case you probably need to the FBI and the ATF involved, or your police are cowards and need to be replaced.
or do you think that most burglars are still packing single shot muzzle loaders?
The addition of the spike to get through insulated lines is a nice addition, but I don't know that its really needed, some how I imagine the places where this will get used don't bother with such things as insulation. Its a common practice to steal power in 3rd world countries to just toss a cable over the nearest powerline. I've seen pictures of streets in slums where the powerlines just look like spaghetti from all the cables just draped over them.
Striping doesn't make sequential writes become random. It just interleaves them across multiple devices.
Sorry I wasn't clear enough, assume you are not making gigantic sequential accesses, but just say 64K writes that are otherwise "randomly" distributed. But 64K might be large enough to get you the sequential write performance speed. If you stripe that 64K access over 4 SDDs it might turn out that the performance you see for 16K "random" writes to each SDD is less than 1/4th the performance you were getting doing 64K "random" writes to one SSD. Which results in lower over all performance, which was my original point.
Also, for any SSD controller you'd care to use.....
I was just trying to simplify the explanation, I actually design those controllers for my day job so I don't really want to get into the details because a) it would take all day b) then I would have to kill you:)
But the essence of what I said is still true regardless of how the data is written down by the controller because while it can control where it writes data you give it, it can't control which old data it was that becomes "stale" and that is what will effect the cost of performing the garbage collection.
Actually your understanding is quite incorrect. The problem most SSDs have with random access is not that there is any time spent moving the head around over the disk, but the fact that random, or rather non-sequential writes lead to fragmentation of the flash array requiring expensive garbage collection to compact all the live data to free space for more writes. When the writes are largely sequential when data is re-written it means the areas of the flash holding live data are contiguous and easier to compact.
Fine it's a secret test, but why on Earth would you do it near the coast? Why not just do it out in the ocean where it's substantially less public? I mean, it's supposed to be secret, why do it in plain view?
Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
Actually if you notice they only give "sequential" performance numbers for these products. Depending on what you are using it for you could see your performance go *down* if you striped it because the random write performance could easily be worse than the sequential write performance by a factor that is greater than the number of them you have striped together.
For SSDs the performance numbers quoted have to be viewed in the same light as supercomputer benchmark numbers, these are "guaranteed not to exceed" numbers, what you get for your own use pattern can be very hard to predict in advance.
Actually in the very coastie state I live in we have the same lovely optical scanners for our voting.
However we only scan ballots with machines we don't bother with anything as time wasting as say having the poll worker scan your ID with their eyes.
It wouldn't matter how great an e-voting system we installed if I can just go from polling site to polling site voting in the place of anyone I know is out of town, dead, planning to vote later in the day, etc
Even worse depending on your definition of "better" the voting systems may only server to make corruption worse.
With all the stories of machines starting pre-loaded with votes, or selecting different candidates that what the voter pressed, or machines that produce no hard copy of the results that will be subject to random sampling, is there any reason to believe that e-voting machines are anything but a mechanism that most politicians support because they hope to be able to use them to fraudulently record votes.?
Oh - and your blame for Fannie and Freddie fails to explain how there can also have been a housing bubble in the UK, where FNMC and FNMA don't operate and there is no UK equivalent.
Your logic is flawed, I did not say that "the ONLY thing that can cause a housing bubble is..X", I said that "the primary cause of THIS the bubble and financial crisis was X", that somewhere else there can also be a bubble and crisis for different reasons has no bearing on the validity of my statement.
Please can we keep the nonsensical rhetoric down just a little, the investment banks didn't cause the current clusterfuck as you so aptly put it, the policy of pushing people into owning homes they couldn't afford on the basis that they government in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would back those loans put us in the current situation. You want someone to put in jail? Have a little chat with Barny Frank, but leave the stupid evil bankers are the cause of all the wrong in the world crap outside. I'm not saying investment bankers are paragons of virtue, but anyone who doesn't understand that it was people not paying mortgages they couldn't afford that were offered to them because of government policies designed to increase low income home ownership, regardless of whether of not they could really afford those home is the one whose lips are chapped from smoking something too hard.
If you want to argue a point, then produce some evidence and act like a civilized person, if you want to be an anonymous coward and call me names I can play that game too, your call.
but something seems unexpected about this level of concern by the Justice Department.
Obviously they know that "pay no attention to the computer behind the curtain" isn''t going to cut it. One suspects that the government is less interested in protecting Goldman's trade secrets than in making sure the public doesn't find out just how badly computerized trading has made it impossible for normal people to compete in todays stock market.
Or maybe the massive drop off in political contributions from Wall Street following all the tar and feathering they have been getting from the current administration (far beyond the taring and feathering that they DO deserve) has gotten some peoples attention and they really are concerned with their ability to fund raise, I mean the ability of companies not to be unjustifiably victimized just because they happen to be *gasp* profitable.
The problem is when you ARE in a hurry... because you are in fast moving traffic, or you have to decide if THIS is the street you are supposed to turn on or its the next street. For such situations I find that only fully accurate maps AND a GPS receiver that isn't lagging 2 seconds behind or not able to figure out that they street it says is 300 feet ahead is actually the one that I am stopped at the light of work.
I do very much like the voice instructions, particularly when they give a sequence, e.g. "that they next right turn on Main Street and then keep left", since that helps reduce the lag of the information as well as the number of times I have to consult the display. but the claim in the linked story that;
"The trouble is that the optic nerve just does not have the bandwidth to handle great gobs of visual information thrown at it."
is just abject nonsense, there is no sensory organ you have that is better equipped to handle both great gobs of bandwidth as well as to process it all in parallel than the optic nerve.
what you want to avoid is a display cluttered with *useless* information, not a display stripped of *useful* information
We could never pick up a radio signal from an alien civilization because the power of a signal from a point source drops off exponentially..
Umm..... its not a "point source" its a spherical reflector..... the whole point of the construction of big antennas is to allow you to do precisely what it is you friend appears to believe is impossible.
Is this of any surprise that the companies don't really care where their materials come from as long as they are getting what they want at a price they want?
Public exposure and "naming names" is the only way to have an effect on this behavior, both so people know the effect of buying a product from certain companies as well as making the companies fearful of the bad PR that will come from using such materials
Why? Why a random sampling? If you're going to serve up 61 MB zipped, it might as well be 61 GB zipped. Why not release both sets ("the good stuff.tar.gz" and "everything including the inane 'what's for lunch today?' e-mails.tar.gz")?
so you can keep letting out more and more damning pieces of email over time so the story never dies
Obviously you think this line of jokes is wearing.... out (oh come on you didn't really think I was going to say 'wearing thin" did you).. but I'm afraid that around here people like to lay it on thick... asking for this to stop might turn heads in other forums but around here its just going to lead to a long drawn out conversation where whatever the original subject was gets stretched and mangled to the point that the end result hardly resembles the starting point. You are going to have to get your head around the fact that trying to draw some 'line in the sand' about endlessly long digressions into bad jokes is hipless...er hopeless, we crossed that line long long long ago.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't limit how long someone has to explain the objection, it might be just citing a prior patent, but it might be more involved than that.
Its not a matter of it being "ok as long as the little guy gets it" its a matter of pre-grant opposition vastly favoring the larger entity. Say I am an individual inventor or small startup, I only have a few patent applications, and I may need those to turn into patents to get funding or to have any hope of keeping my product from being copied by big existing companies. The moment the giant corp becomes aware of me they search my handful of applications and send their lawyers to file any objection they can think of. And they are likely to become aware of me as a threat while most or all of my applications are still pending. Now I can't get funding or I can't get my patent to issue quickly so I can stop people from copying me, and I go out of business.
Also the examiner is not going to be able to just ignore the large company's "BS" objection, if they could then they could just ignore everything, or they could ignore the little guys and favor the big guys, you never want to allow a bureaucrat to be able to exercise arbitrary judgement, if you think thats ok or desirable you have never had to get something you needed from an government agency before.
Turn it around, I am the little startup, I have no idea which patents from which companies are going to be a problem, and from the existing companies in the field only a fraction of their patents are pending, most are issued, so there is almost no ability for the little guy to take advantage of this.
If the patent sucks then it can be dealt with after issue, pre-grant opposition is just an invitation for people to make the already too slow process of getting a patent even slower.
While I hate all this ACTA and related types of laws (DMCA, etc) the summary for this article is not accurate, for example it says it would forbid third party opposition to patents, which it doesn't say, what it actually says is that it prohibits them prior to the grant of a patent. And as someone with a bunch of patents from little startups, thats a good thing actually, as it would be way to easy for big corporations to make small inventors and startups waste money by filling all sorts of third party opposition during the patent prosecution.
In any case, don't believe the summary article, if you care about a particular point follow the links to the full text and read it in the original.
Actually it is a way to subvert the public's knowledge. Calling them "undocumented" implies that the only deficiency with their presence in this country is the lack of some paperwork. The people in question have entered in violation of the law, no amount of paperwork will alter the fact that they are now criminals.
To answer your follow on question, a local radio talk show host doesn't use the term "illegal alien", he refers to them as "criminal aliens", which I think you should approve of, since the answer to your question is, we call most people who commit crimes "criminal citizens" or just "criminals" for short... although given the growing prison population who are not citizens, perhaps we should stop shortening it to just "criminal" since while in the past it was a generally valid simplification that most criminals were (unfortunately) our fellow citizens, it now seems perhaps it is time to be explicit about the citizenship status of those who chose to flaunt the laws of our country.
"hauling semiautomatic weaponry"????
either you meant to say FULLY automatic weaponry, in which case you probably need to the FBI and the ATF involved, or your police are cowards and need to be replaced.
or do you think that most burglars are still packing single shot muzzle loaders?
Demonstrating the truth of the saying
"You're not paranoid if people really are out to get you"
You post this on Veterans day? Pitty I already posted in this thread and can't use my mod points :(
the post "Prior art?" has exactly the image I was thinking of
The addition of the spike to get through insulated lines is a nice addition, but I don't know that its really needed, some how I imagine the places where this will get used don't bother with such things as insulation. Its a common practice to steal power in 3rd world countries to just toss a cable over the nearest powerline. I've seen pictures of streets in slums where the powerlines just look like spaghetti from all the cables just draped over them.
Striping doesn't make sequential writes become random. It just interleaves them across multiple devices.
Sorry I wasn't clear enough, assume you are not making gigantic sequential accesses, but just say 64K writes that are otherwise "randomly" distributed. But 64K might be large enough to get you the sequential write performance speed. If you stripe that 64K access over 4 SDDs it might turn out that the performance you see for 16K "random" writes to each SDD is less than 1/4th the performance you were getting doing 64K "random" writes to one SSD. Which results in lower over all performance, which was my original point.
Also, for any SSD controller you'd care to use.....
I was just trying to simplify the explanation, I actually design those controllers for my day job so I don't really want to get into the details because a) it would take all day b) then I would have to kill you :)
But the essence of what I said is still true regardless of how the data is written down by the controller because while it can control where it writes data you give it, it can't control which old data it was that becomes "stale" and that is what will effect the cost of performing the garbage collection.
Actually your understanding is quite incorrect. The problem most SSDs have with random access is not that there is any time spent moving the head around over the disk, but the fact that random, or rather non-sequential writes lead to fragmentation of the flash array requiring expensive garbage collection to compact all the live data to free space for more writes. When the writes are largely sequential when data is re-written it means the areas of the flash holding live data are contiguous and easier to compact.
Fine it's a secret test, but why on Earth would you do it near the coast? Why not just do it out in the ocean where it's substantially less public? I mean, it's supposed to be secret, why do it in plain view?
Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
How many movies are there where the villain sets out to start a war by launching an attack meant to look like it came from one of the super powers?
But seriously.... a SLBM was fired a few miles off our coast and we don't know where it came from?
Is the area around that launch site full of planes dropping SONAR buoys? It better damn well be if we don't know where this came form.
Actually if you notice they only give "sequential" performance numbers for these products. Depending on what you are using it for you could see your performance go *down* if you striped it because the random write performance could easily be worse than the sequential write performance by a factor that is greater than the number of them you have striped together.
For SSDs the performance numbers quoted have to be viewed in the same light as supercomputer benchmark numbers, these are "guaranteed not to exceed" numbers, what you get for your own use pattern can be very hard to predict in advance.
Actually in the very coastie state I live in we have the same lovely optical scanners for our voting.
However we only scan ballots with machines we don't bother with anything as time wasting as say having the poll worker scan your ID with their eyes.
It wouldn't matter how great an e-voting system we installed if I can just go from polling site to polling site voting in the place of anyone I know is out of town, dead, planning to vote later in the day, etc
Even worse depending on your definition of "better" the voting systems may only server to make corruption worse.
With all the stories of machines starting pre-loaded with votes, or selecting different candidates that what the voter pressed, or machines that produce no hard copy of the results that will be subject to random sampling, is there any reason to believe that e-voting machines are anything but a mechanism that most politicians support because they hope to be able to use them to fraudulently record votes.?
Agreed, E-voting is the classic solution in search of a problem.
Oh - and your blame for Fannie and Freddie fails to explain how there can also have been a housing bubble in the UK, where FNMC and FNMA don't operate and there is no UK equivalent.
Your logic is flawed, I did not say that "the ONLY thing that can cause a housing bubble is..X", I said that "the primary cause of THIS the bubble and financial crisis was X", that somewhere else there can also be a bubble and crisis for different reasons has no bearing on the validity of my statement.
Please can we keep the nonsensical rhetoric down just a little, the investment banks didn't cause the current clusterfuck as you so aptly put it, the policy of pushing people into owning homes they couldn't afford on the basis that they government in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would back those loans put us in the current situation. You want someone to put in jail? Have a little chat with Barny Frank, but leave the stupid evil bankers are the cause of all the wrong in the world crap outside. I'm not saying investment bankers are paragons of virtue, but anyone who doesn't understand that it was people not paying mortgages they couldn't afford that were offered to them because of government policies designed to increase low income home ownership, regardless of whether of not they could really afford those home is the one whose lips are chapped from smoking something too hard.
If you want to argue a point, then produce some evidence and act like a civilized person, if you want to be an anonymous coward and call me names I can play that game too, your call.
but something seems unexpected about this level of concern by the Justice Department.
Obviously they know that "pay no attention to the computer behind the curtain" isn''t going to cut it. One suspects that the government is less interested in protecting Goldman's trade secrets than in making sure the public doesn't find out just how badly computerized trading has made it impossible for normal people to compete in todays stock market.
Or maybe the massive drop off in political contributions from Wall Street following all the tar and feathering they have been getting from the current administration (far beyond the taring and feathering that they DO deserve) has gotten some peoples attention and they really are concerned with their ability to fund raise, I mean the ability of companies not to be unjustifiably victimized just because they happen to be *gasp* profitable.
The problem is when you ARE in a hurry... because you are in fast moving traffic, or you have to decide if THIS is the street you are supposed to turn on or its the next street. For such situations I find that only fully accurate maps AND a GPS receiver that isn't lagging 2 seconds behind or not able to figure out that they street it says is 300 feet ahead is actually the one that I am stopped at the light of work.
I do very much like the voice instructions, particularly when they give a sequence, e.g. "that they next right turn on Main Street and then keep left", since that helps reduce the lag of the information as well as the number of times I have to consult the display. but the claim in the linked story that;
"The trouble is that the optic nerve just does not have the bandwidth to handle great gobs of visual information thrown at it."
is just abject nonsense, there is no sensory organ you have that is better equipped to handle both great gobs of bandwidth as well as to process it all in parallel than the optic nerve.
what you want to avoid is a display cluttered with *useless* information, not a display stripped of *useful* information
We could never pick up a radio signal from an alien civilization because the power of a signal from a point source drops off exponentially..
Umm..... its not a "point source" its a spherical reflector..... the whole point of the construction of big antennas is to allow you to do precisely what it is you friend appears to believe is impossible.
We now return you to your usual /. chaos
Is this of any surprise that the companies don't really care where their materials come from as long as they are getting what they want at a price they want?
Public exposure and "naming names" is the only way to have an effect on this behavior, both so people know the effect of buying a product from certain companies as well as making the companies fearful of the bad PR that will come from using such materials
Why? Why a random sampling? If you're going to serve up 61 MB zipped, it might as well be 61 GB zipped. Why not release both sets ("the good stuff.tar.gz" and "everything including the inane 'what's for lunch today?' e-mails.tar.gz")?
so you can keep letting out more and more damning pieces of email over time so the story never dies
Thats very odd, I was logged in, so how did that wind up as an AC post?
Obviously you think this line of jokes is wearing.... out (oh come on you didn't really think I was going to say 'wearing thin" did you).. but I'm afraid that around here people like to lay it on thick... asking for this to stop might turn heads in other forums but around here its just going to lead to a long drawn out conversation where whatever the original subject was gets stretched and mangled to the point that the end result hardly resembles the starting point. You are going to have to get your head around the fact that trying to draw some 'line in the sand' about endlessly long digressions into bad jokes is hipless...er hopeless, we crossed that line long long long ago.