Determining that dimples are a good idea for the very first time is great. However, optimizing the dimple pattern in particular seems to be a fairly "obvious" extension once its been determined that dimples as a general principle are a good idea.
Same with material properties -- maybe the material itself could be patented, but "use better materials" as a patent on the ball is again pretty obvious.
But as GP noted, they'd probably still be accepted these days, especially in East Texas. The modern patent system is only slightly closer to its original intent than the copyright system is from its own.
I'd say that's a symptom more than a problem. The 1/4 full cartridge that comes with your $70 printer is also massively overpriced.
The problem is that for whatever reasons, printer makers decided to go with a razor blade sales model a couple decades ago and now there's no easy way out of it. Any company who tries to escape the cycle will simply be out of business because they'll be trying to sell $200 printers that are equivalent to their $70 competition and consumers are, by and large, too lazy or too stupid to look at the long-term total costs. They'll pick the lowest immediate price 99 times out of 100 even if it bites them in the ass a year or two down the road.
I'm not entirely sure I draw the line from A to B here. Why does that result in favoring expansive patent law? Just so that they have something to do with their time? Seems like SCOTUS or whoever should be smacking them around a lot harder if they're continually making judgements based on how bored they are (or whatever you think is causing the favoritism) rather than the actual merits of each case.
Depends on how you define "need." You definitely don't need a streaming service in the same way you need food and clothing.. but social and cultural needs are pretty important as well in our modern society where we no longer have to spend most of our time trying to simply survive.
And a lot of our social and cultural needs are related to TV and movies. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable, but its a fact nonetheless. If you're the only dude standing around the water cooler wondering what a Lannister or a Targaryen is, you're going to get ostracized in short order. Not through any maliciousness of your coworkers, but simply because you won't be able to keep up with half of the conversations.
Now sure missing any one show probably won't knock you out of the club, even one as big as Game of Thrones, but if you're in that situation constantly for show after show after show, people are just going to simply stop bothering since talking to you is kind of like talking to a child -- missing all the idioms and phrases and having to have everything explained all the time. Its annoying.
If you're old enough, think back 10 or 15 years and try to remember that guy who didn't "get" any Simpsons quotes. Yikes. That was just.. uncool. If you were that guy, try to remember what it felt like to be effectively cut out of 10-20% of every conversation and having to fill in the blanks as best you could.
Then multiply that by the technology our younger generations are almost required to use these days. Imagine not understanding a Jon Snow image macro!
Sacrilege!
Money is a magnet for a lot of great acting talent. If Netflix pays well, they will get their actors no matter where they're located.
What Hollywood will have in abundance that other places lack is things like agents and other such middlemen that can help in finding actors and matching them to available roles. I suspect Netflix in particular has enough backing to work around that. Like they probably could do something crazy and have a casting office in Hollywood even if that's not where their main studios are.
Yes and no. Hollywood due to its nature as the center of the motion picture universe, tends to draw a lot of two very separate factions -- the actors and other artist types on one side, and the businessfolk on the other.
Artists in general tend to be less money-driven and more left-leaning, for whatever reason, while business people tend to be the opposite, for a much more obvious reason.
So its kind of a breeding ground for far-reachers on both sides of the spectrum. The difference though is in perception. Actors get a lot of screen time and publicity and therefore have lots of opportunity to make their views known. The people running the show (har!) on the other hand tend to stay behind the scenes (har, again!)
So there's a bit of a perception issue at play there making it seem like Hollywood is strongly left-leaning but that's mostly due to the fact that you only ever hear half the story for the most part.
Why not? Web browsers are ubiquitous and well-supported across most platforms.
If they wanted to build a standalone app for PCs, right off the bat they'd have to make separate versions for Windows and Mac. Linux users would probably get a version since Netflix seems like running everywhere, but as with most things they'd probably be last in line after the "major" platforms had been released. Smaller platforms like BSD would likely just be screwed whereas with the current system, any OS that supports an HTML5-capable browser can run Netflix (at least in principle. They of course still only officially support a selection of "common" OS/browser combinations.)
And it works just fine. Better than the apps in my opinion. Definitely better than the Win10 app. So what exactly makes no sense about doing something that's easier and works just as well if not better?
You're failing to account for the younger generation, many of whom do everything on their phone. And they're savvy enough to go out to the living room when they have more than one or two friends over and turn on their parent's xbox if they have more friends over than can squeeze together to share a 5" screen.
Why is it a stupid idea? It works great and for those of us who DO watch Netflix on our PC, its awesome.
But that doesn't stop YOU from watching it on your laptop, your game console(s), your TV box, your phone, your tablet, your smart TV itself.. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix ran on overly complicated toasters by now.
And that's a great model. One account and you can use Netflix in any way you want. Just because you personally don't use one of their particular systems doesn't mean its "stupid" or that a million other people don't totally disagree with you.
You can mix and match though, and many good shows do. Basically the A plot is the typical problem-of-the-day but instead of the B plot just being a smaller problem-of-the-day, focus it on moving the overarching story forward. That gives you a little progress each episode (so its worth watching them all) but generally not TOO much progress (so if you miss one you can still catch up easily, though missing 2 or 3 might be troublesome.)
I imagine that's a hard line to walk though. Breaking the story up into small enough chunks to mix in as the B plot, while still keeping it interesting AND having enough time to fully tell the bigger story as the subplots of 10 or 11 episodes (plus being the main plot of the season start and season finale episodes) is, I'm sure, not an easy task as a writer. At least not easy to do it well.
Firefly is pretty good for that. Every episode was essentially self-contained, but you almost always got a little bit more of Simon and River's story and often a bit of extra backstory on Malcolm and Zoey's war -- even if its only a line or two of dialog -- with a couple of episodes much more focused on each of those larger stories.
We'll of course never know how far they could have taken that given how quickly it was cancelled but its at least part of why the series was so good.
There's a lot of people who like reality TV. I'm not one of them, but they exist.
I don't see a problem with Netflix attempting to appease the reality audience. As long as they don't go down the "cheap and good enough to get viewers" route and stop making other things.
Netflix has a bit of a leg up on traditional TV in that regard though. Because they're an on-demand service, they don't have to time share. A TV channel has to decide whether to play the $10k-per-episode reality show or the $50k-per-episode sitcom or the $200k-per-episode scifi show in any given time slot. They can't choose all three.
And for the most part, the choice is simple: The reality show only has to make 20% of the sitcom and only 5% of the scifi in order to break even. Sure the scifi, or even the sitcom, is likely to be more culturally interesting and even the guy making the decision would probably agree with that -- but he's deciding based on bottom lines, not value to society.
Netflix doesn't have that problem. They can make and "air" all three shows simultaneously. That means not only are the shows not competing with each other (or at least, not in the same sense of sharing an extremely limited resource like airtime,) but they can also do things like direct measurements of actual viewer interest which for traditional TV can only be done by comparing different stations' offerings during any particular time slot.
So yeah, TL;DR.. as long as Netflix continues to also make shows you like, its probably not worth getting pissy about them making shows other people like at the same time.
What we get annoyed with is when some faceless company you sold your rights to for a (relative) pittance wants to get paid for what you created 70+ years after your death.
And as it stands, DRM'd works can technically never be released into the public domain even after their copyright expires unless someone with an unencrypted original decides to release it, because decrypting it is illegal under the DMCA.
It's an open question whether or not someone (illegally) breaking the DRM and releasing a copyright-expired work will allow that ripped version to remain in the public domain or if only a legitimately released version will qualify. And it'll remain an open question for another 60ish years since nothing released (only) with DRM can possibly expire until around 2070.. assuming the copyright terms aren't extended yet again by that point (and Mickey Mouse is set to expire again in another few years, so we can bet that issue will be hitting congress again fairly soon.)
This is your problem. We're redefining "population" to mean "big companies." In the same way that the Romans only cared about people who owned land (well, men who owned land,) we're running headlong into only caring only about people who run giant companies.
I suppose we're one step up on the Romans though -- we treat women as 82% of a person instead of 0%.
There's a huge difference between being the "de facto" standard due to rubberstamping in favor of the plaintiff (who usually gets to decide where they file their complains,) and being explicitly designed with the intent of treating cases fairly ie: not favoring the plaintiff by default.
The sad thing is that it actually is cost effective to replace the cartridge -- the ones that come with the printer in the first place usually only have about 1/4 to 1/3 of the ink that the replacement cartridges start with. So one replacement cartridge keeps you running around as long as 3-4 printer replacements (assuming you use your printer enough that the ink doesn't just dry out or something of course.)
Its still a fault of the manufacturers. They do absolutely nothing to advertise that fact, and the cartridge replacement being priced higher than the printer itself just seems stupid to consumers -- most of us don't stop to think that maybe there's a reason for that. We just compare the raw price tags and buy the thing that appears cheapest.
The whole business model is stupid. It works for razors because its easy to see that you only get 2 blades included while they sell replacements in packs of 5 or 10.
People can do that math and see that its still (slightly) cheaper to buy the replacements. Its not so easy to see when you're looking at two externally-identical ink cartridges that one is only 1/3 full.
I just don't see any way for manufacturers to dig their way out of that hole. They could go a long way by actually informing consumers that the included cartridges aren't "full." That's not as good as being able to actually see it for themselves but its better than nothing.
Unfortunately turning around the business model in general would probably require all manufacturers to get together and decide to change all at once -- if a single manufacturer tries to go it alone they'll just find themselves trying to sell a $250 printer beside the $75 equivalents and consumers won't be looking far enough ahead to realize that the ink is only $30 instead of $80 and that the TCO will be similar or lower in the long run.
Then again, even my thought for informing customers about the non-full initial cartridges might be enough to drive customers to the competition. Just ugh.
I'm thinking there must be more depth than TFA leads on.
If the cartridges or the ink was the patented item, it would be a simple matter to block reproduction -- that would be the most standard patent enforcement possible. So that's probably not what's happening.
If it was breaking first sale doctrine, then you think it would be Impression suing Lexmark rather than the other way around. But as it stands, as best I can tell, you're perfectly free to do whatever you want with your printer -- fill the cartridges with oatmeal, replace them with a well-carved piece of wood, smash the whole thing Office Space style, etc. They're not trying to block you as an end-user from doing what you want but trying to block Impression as a manufacturer from selling you specific items (that happen to make doing what you want actually useful.)
I'm assuming I'm missing something (I'm not lawyery enough to read through the actual documents) but it sounds like Lexmark is trying to use their patent on the printer to enforce patent restrictions against third parties selling (presumably) unpatented cartridges and ink.
If under "natural" circumstances, we use and the earth replenishes 0.1% of the worlds oxygen in balance, and then you stop replenishing it.. at 28% that means you have ~280 years before its gone.
Obviously its not a simple multiply like that but nobody anywhere is claiming that its all just going to magically vanish all at once one day.
Of course there's always another side to the story -- plant life actually flourishes more when CO2 levels are higher (its their food, after all.) But that only helps the species that survive the expected mass extinction.
GW is (fairly) unlikely to end all life on earth. What its almost certainly to do though is end life as we know it.
We tend to trust QM as the more likely solution primarily because its much, much, much better tested than GR.
I also saw somewhere years ago a proof something along the lines that quantum systems mathematically couldn't be built on top of non-quantum systems. I wish I could find that again. Though its possibly-to-likely that it wasn't as solid as it sounded at the time or it (and similar proofs) would be pasted all over the internet.
I wouldn't say its uncontroversial since it relies on a) the universe being actually infinite and b) the laws of physics being identical across the entire universe.
We're pretty sure (though not entirely without question) that (b) is true. (a) is a lot more speculative. We already know the universe is bigger than the chunk we can observe, but exactly how much bigger and what (if anything) is at the ends is up for grabs.
We've measured flatness and determined that the universe is (essentially) flat in the parts we can see.. but that could mean its truly flat or it could just mean that we're on a sphere/saddle that's just so large that the curvature is too small to be measured in the same way that a square kilometer field will tell you essentially nothing about the curvature of the earth (and also brings up another point -- if the universal fabric is malleable it could be that something has just artificially flattened our section of it in the same way that you can flatten out the dirt in that field.)
And even if it is totally flat, there's nothing saying it can't just.. end.. if you go out far enough. What exactly that would mean from a physical standpoint is pretty questionable and the idea is certainly unlikely compared to the other possibilities, but it can't (ever) be 100% ruled out unless we manage to figure out FTL travel and go start taking measurements across much vaster sections of space (and that still only puts greater constraints on the question. The only ways to actually answer it is to either find an actual universal end or manage to loop around a giant sphere universe.)
Not really. Simulations typically set up the world before the simulation starts. So we (as observers) would see it start from "nothing" but any entity within the simulation would see it start from whatever state we had initialized before we hit the go button.
EVERY SIMULATION also has a speed limit
Same logic as before. We as outside observers would see outside time take place, but entities within the simulation would just see "++timestep."
In EVERY SIMULATION new things come into being, where nothing like them existed before.
Not really. I could simulate a frictionless pool table without pockets and nothing would ever come into or leave the simulation without my direct involvement, such as when I set up the initial conditions. I mean it would be a pretty boring simulation, but its still a simulation.
Of course that's not to say you couldn't start a simulation with a blank slate (though exactly what you'd be simulating is a question in that case) nor is it saying that you couldn't implement a (simulated) speed of light -- just that neither of those things are necessary.
I don't know what computers you're used to, but our modern digital computers are really bad at all those things you say are benefits:
1) A single large object is always easier to simulate that billions of small components. A circle can be simulated with two data points (center and radius) but to draw one it can take hundreds or thousands of individual pixels, depending on how big you draw it.
2) Fuzzy logic is horribly computationally-intensive compared to simple binary logic. We add fuzzy logic not to simplify the simulation, but to make it more complex in order to better approximate the complexities of the real world.
3) Why? Is there any real reason why a pure Newtonian universe couldn't be simulated? We do so regularly in our own simulations!
I would argue that none of your points are true -- or at least are only true within some fairly strong constraints -- by the standard of our own technology, and trying to claim they're true in the realm of some unknown superbeing's unknown technology is a pretty baseless assertion, never mind taking that to the next claim that we're "very likely" in a simulation.
People who say stupid things like this are exactly why they tried changing the name to "climate change."
GW goes way beyond simply getting nicer winters in the north and a bit of flooding on the coastal regions. I've mentioned it a few times in this thread already but significant GW has the potential to cause serious damage to basically all ecosystems on earth, whether through increased acidification or increased average temperatures or changing currents (both oceanic and atmospheric) or any of a host of other issues.. yes, including higher average temperatures and ocean levels.
The trouble is when those "implementation costs" are $20k for the base platform, another $10-15k in addons/extensions/plugins/whatever and then $100-300/hr for consultants to set it all up and suddenly you're looking at 6-12 months and $100k in cost to get it going.
That's out of the price range of many small to mid sized businesses. You have to be pushing the higher end of "mid sized" before that becomes a plausible cost.
To compare with Postgres: Yes, if you need a massive database to handle multiple terabytes of data and thousands of concurrent connections, you're probably going to want someone who knows what the hell they're doing to set it up, and it will cost you.
On the other hand, if you just want a couple dozen small tables to be used internally by your 5-person staff, pretty much anyone with even minimal DB experience can get that up and running.
That's the difference -- PG handles basically any size of operation. Yes bigger is costlier of course, but smaller is possible which is not really something you get with SF. If you can't afford $50-100k up front costs plus who knows how much over the long term in maintenance and support, you're left with good old Excel spreadsheets and other hackjob "systems," which is what many many companies still use.
Like I said, I'm sure there are CRMs (including, though not specifically, open source ones) that are more reasonable but none of them have taken enough market share to be really well-known and common in the same way that Postgres and MySQL have done in the database market.
Slashdot Mirror
Determining that dimples are a good idea for the very first time is great. However, optimizing the dimple pattern in particular seems to be a fairly "obvious" extension once its been determined that dimples as a general principle are a good idea.
Same with material properties -- maybe the material itself could be patented, but "use better materials" as a patent on the ball is again pretty obvious.
But as GP noted, they'd probably still be accepted these days, especially in East Texas. The modern patent system is only slightly closer to its original intent than the copyright system is from its own.
I'd say that's a symptom more than a problem. The 1/4 full cartridge that comes with your $70 printer is also massively overpriced.
The problem is that for whatever reasons, printer makers decided to go with a razor blade sales model a couple decades ago and now there's no easy way out of it. Any company who tries to escape the cycle will simply be out of business because they'll be trying to sell $200 printers that are equivalent to their $70 competition and consumers are, by and large, too lazy or too stupid to look at the long-term total costs. They'll pick the lowest immediate price 99 times out of 100 even if it bites them in the ass a year or two down the road.
I'm not entirely sure I draw the line from A to B here. Why does that result in favoring expansive patent law? Just so that they have something to do with their time? Seems like SCOTUS or whoever should be smacking them around a lot harder if they're continually making judgements based on how bored they are (or whatever you think is causing the favoritism) rather than the actual merits of each case.
Depends on how you define "need." You definitely don't need a streaming service in the same way you need food and clothing.. but social and cultural needs are pretty important as well in our modern society where we no longer have to spend most of our time trying to simply survive.
And a lot of our social and cultural needs are related to TV and movies. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable, but its a fact nonetheless. If you're the only dude standing around the water cooler wondering what a Lannister or a Targaryen is, you're going to get ostracized in short order. Not through any maliciousness of your coworkers, but simply because you won't be able to keep up with half of the conversations.
Now sure missing any one show probably won't knock you out of the club, even one as big as Game of Thrones, but if you're in that situation constantly for show after show after show, people are just going to simply stop bothering since talking to you is kind of like talking to a child -- missing all the idioms and phrases and having to have everything explained all the time. Its annoying.
If you're old enough, think back 10 or 15 years and try to remember that guy who didn't "get" any Simpsons quotes. Yikes. That was just.. uncool. If you were that guy, try to remember what it felt like to be effectively cut out of 10-20% of every conversation and having to fill in the blanks as best you could.
Then multiply that by the technology our younger generations are almost required to use these days. Imagine not understanding a Jon Snow image macro!
Sacrilege!
Money is a magnet for a lot of great acting talent. If Netflix pays well, they will get their actors no matter where they're located.
What Hollywood will have in abundance that other places lack is things like agents and other such middlemen that can help in finding actors and matching them to available roles. I suspect Netflix in particular has enough backing to work around that. Like they probably could do something crazy and have a casting office in Hollywood even if that's not where their main studios are.
Yes and no. Hollywood due to its nature as the center of the motion picture universe, tends to draw a lot of two very separate factions -- the actors and other artist types on one side, and the businessfolk on the other.
Artists in general tend to be less money-driven and more left-leaning, for whatever reason, while business people tend to be the opposite, for a much more obvious reason.
So its kind of a breeding ground for far-reachers on both sides of the spectrum. The difference though is in perception. Actors get a lot of screen time and publicity and therefore have lots of opportunity to make their views known. The people running the show (har!) on the other hand tend to stay behind the scenes (har, again!)
So there's a bit of a perception issue at play there making it seem like Hollywood is strongly left-leaning but that's mostly due to the fact that you only ever hear half the story for the most part.
Why not? Web browsers are ubiquitous and well-supported across most platforms.
If they wanted to build a standalone app for PCs, right off the bat they'd have to make separate versions for Windows and Mac. Linux users would probably get a version since Netflix seems like running everywhere, but as with most things they'd probably be last in line after the "major" platforms had been released. Smaller platforms like BSD would likely just be screwed whereas with the current system, any OS that supports an HTML5-capable browser can run Netflix (at least in principle. They of course still only officially support a selection of "common" OS/browser combinations.)
And it works just fine. Better than the apps in my opinion. Definitely better than the Win10 app. So what exactly makes no sense about doing something that's easier and works just as well if not better?
You're failing to account for the younger generation, many of whom do everything on their phone. And they're savvy enough to go out to the living room when they have more than one or two friends over and turn on their parent's xbox if they have more friends over than can squeeze together to share a 5" screen.
Why is it a stupid idea? It works great and for those of us who DO watch Netflix on our PC, its awesome.
But that doesn't stop YOU from watching it on your laptop, your game console(s), your TV box, your phone, your tablet, your smart TV itself.. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix ran on overly complicated toasters by now.
And that's a great model. One account and you can use Netflix in any way you want. Just because you personally don't use one of their particular systems doesn't mean its "stupid" or that a million other people don't totally disagree with you.
You can mix and match though, and many good shows do. Basically the A plot is the typical problem-of-the-day but instead of the B plot just being a smaller problem-of-the-day, focus it on moving the overarching story forward. That gives you a little progress each episode (so its worth watching them all) but generally not TOO much progress (so if you miss one you can still catch up easily, though missing 2 or 3 might be troublesome.)
I imagine that's a hard line to walk though. Breaking the story up into small enough chunks to mix in as the B plot, while still keeping it interesting AND having enough time to fully tell the bigger story as the subplots of 10 or 11 episodes (plus being the main plot of the season start and season finale episodes) is, I'm sure, not an easy task as a writer. At least not easy to do it well.
Firefly is pretty good for that. Every episode was essentially self-contained, but you almost always got a little bit more of Simon and River's story and often a bit of extra backstory on Malcolm and Zoey's war -- even if its only a line or two of dialog -- with a couple of episodes much more focused on each of those larger stories.
We'll of course never know how far they could have taken that given how quickly it was cancelled but its at least part of why the series was so good.
There's a lot of people who like reality TV. I'm not one of them, but they exist.
I don't see a problem with Netflix attempting to appease the reality audience. As long as they don't go down the "cheap and good enough to get viewers" route and stop making other things.
Netflix has a bit of a leg up on traditional TV in that regard though. Because they're an on-demand service, they don't have to time share. A TV channel has to decide whether to play the $10k-per-episode reality show or the $50k-per-episode sitcom or the $200k-per-episode scifi show in any given time slot. They can't choose all three.
And for the most part, the choice is simple: The reality show only has to make 20% of the sitcom and only 5% of the scifi in order to break even. Sure the scifi, or even the sitcom, is likely to be more culturally interesting and even the guy making the decision would probably agree with that -- but he's deciding based on bottom lines, not value to society.
Netflix doesn't have that problem. They can make and "air" all three shows simultaneously. That means not only are the shows not competing with each other (or at least, not in the same sense of sharing an extremely limited resource like airtime,) but they can also do things like direct measurements of actual viewer interest which for traditional TV can only be done by comparing different stations' offerings during any particular time slot.
So yeah, TL;DR.. as long as Netflix continues to also make shows you like, its probably not worth getting pissy about them making shows other people like at the same time.
Most people don't deny that.
What we get annoyed with is when some faceless company you sold your rights to for a (relative) pittance wants to get paid for what you created 70+ years after your death.
And as it stands, DRM'd works can technically never be released into the public domain even after their copyright expires unless someone with an unencrypted original decides to release it, because decrypting it is illegal under the DMCA.
It's an open question whether or not someone (illegally) breaking the DRM and releasing a copyright-expired work will allow that ripped version to remain in the public domain or if only a legitimately released version will qualify. And it'll remain an open question for another 60ish years since nothing released (only) with DRM can possibly expire until around 2070.. assuming the copyright terms aren't extended yet again by that point (and Mickey Mouse is set to expire again in another few years, so we can bet that issue will be hitting congress again fairly soon.)
very large portion of a population
This is your problem. We're redefining "population" to mean "big companies." In the same way that the Romans only cared about people who owned land (well, men who owned land,) we're running headlong into only caring only about people who run giant companies.
I suppose we're one step up on the Romans though -- we treat women as 82% of a person instead of 0%.
25 years is also more than 10% of the entire history of US law. That's not insignificant.
There's a huge difference between being the "de facto" standard due to rubberstamping in favor of the plaintiff (who usually gets to decide where they file their complains,) and being explicitly designed with the intent of treating cases fairly ie: not favoring the plaintiff by default.
Frankly don't know why they aren't already in East Texas.. its not like patent trolls have a lot of equipment or manpower to relocate.
Though I imagine they probably locate wherever taxes are cheapest at the moment and perhaps East Texas doesn't have that particular benefit.
The sad thing is that it actually is cost effective to replace the cartridge -- the ones that come with the printer in the first place usually only have about 1/4 to 1/3 of the ink that the replacement cartridges start with. So one replacement cartridge keeps you running around as long as 3-4 printer replacements (assuming you use your printer enough that the ink doesn't just dry out or something of course.)
Its still a fault of the manufacturers. They do absolutely nothing to advertise that fact, and the cartridge replacement being priced higher than the printer itself just seems stupid to consumers -- most of us don't stop to think that maybe there's a reason for that. We just compare the raw price tags and buy the thing that appears cheapest.
The whole business model is stupid. It works for razors because its easy to see that you only get 2 blades included while they sell replacements in packs of 5 or 10.
People can do that math and see that its still (slightly) cheaper to buy the replacements. Its not so easy to see when you're looking at two externally-identical ink cartridges that one is only 1/3 full.
I just don't see any way for manufacturers to dig their way out of that hole. They could go a long way by actually informing consumers that the included cartridges aren't "full." That's not as good as being able to actually see it for themselves but its better than nothing.
Unfortunately turning around the business model in general would probably require all manufacturers to get together and decide to change all at once -- if a single manufacturer tries to go it alone they'll just find themselves trying to sell a $250 printer beside the $75 equivalents and consumers won't be looking far enough ahead to realize that the ink is only $30 instead of $80 and that the TCO will be similar or lower in the long run.
Then again, even my thought for informing customers about the non-full initial cartridges might be enough to drive customers to the competition. Just ugh.
I'm thinking there must be more depth than TFA leads on.
If the cartridges or the ink was the patented item, it would be a simple matter to block reproduction -- that would be the most standard patent enforcement possible. So that's probably not what's happening.
If it was breaking first sale doctrine, then you think it would be Impression suing Lexmark rather than the other way around. But as it stands, as best I can tell, you're perfectly free to do whatever you want with your printer -- fill the cartridges with oatmeal, replace them with a well-carved piece of wood, smash the whole thing Office Space style, etc. They're not trying to block you as an end-user from doing what you want but trying to block Impression as a manufacturer from selling you specific items (that happen to make doing what you want actually useful.)
I'm assuming I'm missing something (I'm not lawyery enough to read through the actual documents) but it sounds like Lexmark is trying to use their patent on the printer to enforce patent restrictions against third parties selling (presumably) unpatented cartridges and ink.
No, but its cumulative.
If under "natural" circumstances, we use and the earth replenishes 0.1% of the worlds oxygen in balance, and then you stop replenishing it.. at 28% that means you have ~280 years before its gone.
Obviously its not a simple multiply like that but nobody anywhere is claiming that its all just going to magically vanish all at once one day.
Of course there's always another side to the story -- plant life actually flourishes more when CO2 levels are higher (its their food, after all.) But that only helps the species that survive the expected mass extinction.
GW is (fairly) unlikely to end all life on earth. What its almost certainly to do though is end life as we know it.
We tend to trust QM as the more likely solution primarily because its much, much, much better tested than GR.
I also saw somewhere years ago a proof something along the lines that quantum systems mathematically couldn't be built on top of non-quantum systems. I wish I could find that again. Though its possibly-to-likely that it wasn't as solid as it sounded at the time or it (and similar proofs) would be pasted all over the internet.
I wouldn't say its uncontroversial since it relies on a) the universe being actually infinite and b) the laws of physics being identical across the entire universe.
We're pretty sure (though not entirely without question) that (b) is true. (a) is a lot more speculative. We already know the universe is bigger than the chunk we can observe, but exactly how much bigger and what (if anything) is at the ends is up for grabs.
We've measured flatness and determined that the universe is (essentially) flat in the parts we can see.. but that could mean its truly flat or it could just mean that we're on a sphere/saddle that's just so large that the curvature is too small to be measured in the same way that a square kilometer field will tell you essentially nothing about the curvature of the earth (and also brings up another point -- if the universal fabric is malleable it could be that something has just artificially flattened our section of it in the same way that you can flatten out the dirt in that field.)
And even if it is totally flat, there's nothing saying it can't just.. end.. if you go out far enough. What exactly that would mean from a physical standpoint is pretty questionable and the idea is certainly unlikely compared to the other possibilities, but it can't (ever) be 100% ruled out unless we manage to figure out FTL travel and go start taking measurements across much vaster sections of space (and that still only puts greater constraints on the question. The only ways to actually answer it is to either find an actual universal end or manage to loop around a giant sphere universe.)
EVERY SIMULATION always starts from nothing
Not really. Simulations typically set up the world before the simulation starts. So we (as observers) would see it start from "nothing" but any entity within the simulation would see it start from whatever state we had initialized before we hit the go button.
EVERY SIMULATION also has a speed limit
Same logic as before. We as outside observers would see outside time take place, but entities within the simulation would just see "++timestep."
In EVERY SIMULATION new things come into being, where nothing like them existed before.
Not really. I could simulate a frictionless pool table without pockets and nothing would ever come into or leave the simulation without my direct involvement, such as when I set up the initial conditions. I mean it would be a pretty boring simulation, but its still a simulation.
Of course that's not to say you couldn't start a simulation with a blank slate (though exactly what you'd be simulating is a question in that case) nor is it saying that you couldn't implement a (simulated) speed of light -- just that neither of those things are necessary.
I don't know what computers you're used to, but our modern digital computers are really bad at all those things you say are benefits:
1) A single large object is always easier to simulate that billions of small components. A circle can be simulated with two data points (center and radius) but to draw one it can take hundreds or thousands of individual pixels, depending on how big you draw it.
2) Fuzzy logic is horribly computationally-intensive compared to simple binary logic. We add fuzzy logic not to simplify the simulation, but to make it more complex in order to better approximate the complexities of the real world.
3) Why? Is there any real reason why a pure Newtonian universe couldn't be simulated? We do so regularly in our own simulations!
I would argue that none of your points are true -- or at least are only true within some fairly strong constraints -- by the standard of our own technology, and trying to claim they're true in the realm of some unknown superbeing's unknown technology is a pretty baseless assertion, never mind taking that to the next claim that we're "very likely" in a simulation.
the Chinese probably *want* global warming
People who say stupid things like this are exactly why they tried changing the name to "climate change."
GW goes way beyond simply getting nicer winters in the north and a bit of flooding on the coastal regions. I've mentioned it a few times in this thread already but significant GW has the potential to cause serious damage to basically all ecosystems on earth, whether through increased acidification or increased average temperatures or changing currents (both oceanic and atmospheric) or any of a host of other issues.. yes, including higher average temperatures and ocean levels.
The trouble is when those "implementation costs" are $20k for the base platform, another $10-15k in addons/extensions/plugins/whatever and then $100-300/hr for consultants to set it all up and suddenly you're looking at 6-12 months and $100k in cost to get it going.
That's out of the price range of many small to mid sized businesses. You have to be pushing the higher end of "mid sized" before that becomes a plausible cost.
To compare with Postgres: Yes, if you need a massive database to handle multiple terabytes of data and thousands of concurrent connections, you're probably going to want someone who knows what the hell they're doing to set it up, and it will cost you.
On the other hand, if you just want a couple dozen small tables to be used internally by your 5-person staff, pretty much anyone with even minimal DB experience can get that up and running.
That's the difference -- PG handles basically any size of operation. Yes bigger is costlier of course, but smaller is possible which is not really something you get with SF. If you can't afford $50-100k up front costs plus who knows how much over the long term in maintenance and support, you're left with good old Excel spreadsheets and other hackjob "systems," which is what many many companies still use.
Like I said, I'm sure there are CRMs (including, though not specifically, open source ones) that are more reasonable but none of them have taken enough market share to be really well-known and common in the same way that Postgres and MySQL have done in the database market.