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User: NoSig

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Comments · 635

  1. Re:One industry 3D printers are going to destroy.. on 3D Printing May Face Legal Challenges · · Score: 1

    Prices aren't directly based on expenses, they are based on what price will yield the highest return. Since expenses such as designers are not a per-item expense, those expenses are irrelevant for the price the product will be sold at. All that matters is how many people are willing to pay what price, compared to how much it costs to produce the thing. Well, maybe designer expenses are not completely irrelevant in that they act as a barrier to competition, in that a competitor will have to pay those expenses to enter the market and so there will be less competitors and hence higher prices. Still, when you pay some price, you are not being offered that price because it is reasonable in any way except that it maximizes profit for the seller.

  2. Re:Careful with those quotation marks on Sophos Researcher Suggests Password 'Free' to Spur Wi-Fi Encryption · · Score: 1

    Theirs are a points to conventionals, examples of thissss ist thats you probabilty objectes to thes santenca. By your argument I should start writing like that if I believe English would be a better language for using those spellings. I'm not sure I agree with that, but even if we grant that you are right about that, you are still objecting to something other than what I wrote in that I didn't say that people must use correct English, my objection was that correcting people for using correct English is a bit silly, even if you'd like English to work some other way, and that's what the poster I responded to did.

  3. Re:Careful with those quotation marks on Sophos Researcher Suggests Password 'Free' to Spur Wi-Fi Encryption · · Score: 1

    In English punctuation is supposed to go before closing quotation marks, so it is never "free", but instead "free." Now granted that's completely stupid, but it is correct English and the sensible thing you are advocating is incorrect English.

  4. Re:Enough already!! on Google Give Searchers 'Instant Previews' of Result Pages · · Score: 1

    Stop wasting my time with YOUR idea of what YOU think I wanted.

    A search engine is exactly about putting in a query and having the engine show you what IT thinks you want to see. In any case you can tell it what you want by turning these features off.

  5. Re:SSD's are awesome, but the cost... on Toshiba Begins Selling MacBook Air SSD · · Score: 1

    I don't know if it is a factor, but I imagine that all of that wasted space could have a function in cooling the drive, so when you take that space out, you have to be more careful about how heat gets dissipated.

  6. Re:You don't need to be technical to test on Bethesda Criticized Over Buggy Releases · · Score: 1

    I think that non-technical people testing is valuable and important because they are more likely to trigger the kind of bugs that other non-technical people are most likely to trigger. Still, technical people are going to have an edge on the total volume of bugs they can find, if for no other reason then because they understand a concept such as "test combinations" e.g. they understand more intuitively that the game has a state and that the same action carried out when the game is in a different state, even subtly, can impact what happens and reveal bugs.

  7. Re:You don't need to be technical to test on Bethesda Criticized Over Buggy Releases · · Score: 1

    I don't know what geekoid had in mind, but I will agree that you every combination testing will work pretty well, though you also have to do every combination of hardware. At the same time, every combination testing is impossible, because the number of possible combinations at least double with every independent choice, and in most any game (and certainly all that allow infinite time play) there is a literally infinite number of combinations because you can make an infinite number of choices. E.g. "go around the pillar one way, then again that way, then the other way, then ..." or "run into the wall for 1 second, run into the wall for 2 seconds, run into the wall for 3 seconds, ...". The problem is that running into the wall for 5 days might trigger a bug when running into the wall for 4 days did not. More fundamentally, you cannot use testing to prove the absence of bugs, and so no amount of testing will ensure you that no bugs are left.

  8. Re:Internet2 was great for academia.. on Net Pioneers Say Open Internet Should Be Separate · · Score: 2, Informative

    The problem here would be your power company who promised both you and the guy next door to provide more electricity than the power company is capable of providing.

  9. Re:Just you wait... on Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Generates a 'Mini-Big Bang' · · Score: 1

    That smaller universe may have its own scale that is much smaller than our scale, so that energy could be broken down into smaller bits than in our universe.

  10. Re:Another Nail... on Scientists Turn Skin Into Blood · · Score: 1

    Reading comprehension, I recommend it.

  11. Re:Operationalize obviousness on USPTO Decides To Lower Obviousness Standards · · Score: 1

    I agree. The problem is that it is quite expensive to hire a team of experts for more than a day. Probably the idea is a non-starter because it is too expensive to hire a team of experts for even one day. Do note that the suggestion is that if a team can come up with the idea in a day, given the problem to solve, then the idea is too obvious. I do not propose that if the team don't solve the problem in a day, then the idea is non-obvious. Still, the ideas generated and certainly the opinions of the team on the patent should be able to significantly inform the decision of the patent examiner in a way outside just prior art.

  12. Operationalize obviousness on USPTO Decides To Lower Obviousness Standards · · Score: 1

    Part of the problem here is that it is very hard to talk about what is obvious after you've been told the idea. This is the problem of the Egg of Columbus. Challenge someone to make an egg stand on end with no tools and they are likely to fail. Show them someone smash one end of the egg and then make it stand, and they are going to say that making an egg stand on its end is obvious. One the other hand this kind of reasoning can be used to argue that some stupidly obvious things are actually deserving of a patent. So what should happen is not an argument about what is obvious to someone who has already been told, because obviousness is too hard to determine in hindsight.

    Instead, pose the problem that the patent is proposing to solve to a team of experts. If they come up with the same or a pretty much as good solution within a day or so, then the patent is not the sort of thing that should be granted. Patents are supposed to incentivize expensive development of technology and reward the people who at great effort come up with solutions to problems that otherwise wouldn't get solved. If a team of experts can solve the problem in a day, then there is no need for patents to incentivize the creation of such solutions. On the contrary experts in the field can already solve the problem without patents and so having patents is enabling nothing but leeching. Even if this is not the end-all be-all solution to low quality patents, I think that having such a procedure available would greatly inform patent examiners as to the state of the field any particular patent is in and what is obvious to practitioners in that field.

    Another thing that might be done is to ask the team to read the actual patent after they tried to solve the problem and consider if they think it is obvious and, most importantly, if they can reasonably understand the language of the patent. If they can't understand it, then again patents are not serving the role of disseminating information that inventors would otherwise keep secret, and so the patent must be improved to be understandable to an expert in the field that it is in.

  13. Re:wtf? on USPTO Decides To Lower Obviousness Standards · · Score: 1

    I'd say that it is and certainly should be the person applying for a patent who has the burden to argue convincingly that the patent should be granted. New ideas are certainly not necessarily non-obvious - to have a new idea it suffices merely to consider a problem that hasn't been considered before. Even the most straight forward solution is then going to be new, but it might well be obvious. The originality there is solely in considering a new problem, but problems aren't patentable, or at least they shouldn't be.

  14. Re:As a U of A alumni, I find this hard to believe on Former Student Gets 30 Months For Political DDoS Attacks · · Score: 1

    I'm confused. Shouldn't that be a compliment to the university? If we assume that there is any sort of advanced know how needed for this sort of thing, then that know how would have as a basis an understanding of how computers work. If your university education in Computer Science did not give you that, then and only then would your university's reputation be impugned. It would be like an engineer that is unable to devise a devastating terrorist attack - that means they are completely incompetent. It's not that engineers generally do that sort of thing, but if they aren't able to do so... now that means their education sucked.

  15. Re:Facebook invites ? on Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books · · Score: 1

    Oh, I thought he was talking about friend invites. I didn't know you can ask people not on Facebook to get there through an automated system. Damn that's one annoying misfeature.

  16. Re:Misleading summary on Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits · · Score: 1

    I also find US products to have many more warnings than UK ones. Americans will refuse to drive reasonably sized cars for fear that they are unsafe, while I've heard no such complaint in the UK. I don't know that you are wrong, it's just that I've never seen it to be true.

  17. Re:hip replacement really lows QoL on Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits · · Score: 1

    This debate is impossible if people resort to cheap, meaningless and defamatory sound-bites rather than reasoned argument.

    And thence it is impossible :(

  18. Re:Misleading summary on Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits · · Score: 1

    or the US's greater acceptance of personal risk.

    From flying in the US and the UK, I'd say there is a much more relaxed understanding of risks in the UK. The UK's terrorism problem has even been much worse than that of the US too, and that's before correcting for population.

  19. Re:Politics on Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits · · Score: 1

    I would love to see the death rates for younger people.

    You may not want to say things like that in public (though I would like to know too! I didn't say that!).

  20. Re:Well, duh, it's when Medicare kicks in! on Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits · · Score: 1

    That could explain it right there. Some people have enough money for health care, so those aren't much of a difference. Of the rest, the weak die and so don't make it to 65. So the superior health at 65 could be explained by simply killing those people off who would have died at that time before they get there through lack of health care. So medicare could be vastly inferior to the British system and still provide better outcomes at 65. It's like a poor teacher who lets the stupider half of the class die to make the class place better on tests.

  21. Re:Facebook invites ? on Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You already signed up with them on that email address and IIRC you had to confirm a code sent to the email.

  22. Re:Recipes aren't necessarily copyrightable on Cook's Magazine Claims Web Is Public Domain · · Score: 1

    we need a concept for when something like this happens, where are person who himself didn't get it is implying that someone else didn't get it. The best I can think of is "double whoosh", which isn't very good.

    Oh, and tip: The GGP said that "you can't mix legally acquired software", the grand parent then pointed out that in fact GPL software is usually legally acquired and you can indeed mix it. It was a bad joke but no whoosh involved.

  23. Re:Recipes aren't necessarily copyrightable on Cook's Magazine Claims Web Is Public Domain · · Score: 1

    It's not about taking Mickey Mouse away from Disney, it is about ceasing to punish people other than Disney for making use of him. Intellectual "property" is not like actual property. Many of Disney's best selling products have been based on taking stories from the past, and now they are burning the bridge that they themselves walked on to get where they are.

  24. Re:I'm no expert, but as I see it on Will Netflix Destroy the Internet? · · Score: 1

    That people use unequal amounts would precisely be an argument against unlimited plans, I think, because otherwise the people who use little bandwidth are paying for the people who use a lot. The main thing about paying per GB is that it suddenly changes the incentives for the ISPs. They suddenly have an incentive to give me all the bandwidth in the world that I can use and build out their infrastructure instead of having an incentive to throttle everyone so that they don't have to invest in new infrastructure.

  25. Re:I'm no expert, but as I see it on Will Netflix Destroy the Internet? · · Score: 1

    I'd much rather be charged for data and get the max bandwidth that the ISPs system can provide at the time. So the sale would be "X mbps min, Y mbps avg, Z $/GB" where X is total bandwidth/users and the Y is the average bandwidth actually offered (as measured by some independent entity) and Z is the cost per gigabyte. Now the problem with this is that most users probably don't know how much space a Youtube video or other things take up, so the pricing is to them is for a magic number that the have no understanding of. So I don't think we are going to see it soon, but it is the better model. Imagine how much more expensive your electricity bill would be if electricity was sold on unlimited plans.