How could you possibly decide whether something was obvious without using prior art?
You don't ignore prior art, but you also don't ignore prior art just because it isn't exactly the same as the patented idea. Yeah, you show someone who's skilled in that area a piece of prior art and ask them, "in your opinion, is this an obvious modification of this prior art?"
Hell, you want something less subjective? Maybe you give them a specific enough description of the problem they need to solve, and see if they come up with the same solution on their own. If so, it's obvious.
Don't forget that GIMP's palette mode only supports up to 256 colors
So do indexed PNGs, so I don't understand what the big deal is. Indexed PNGs can contain a full 24 bits per palette entry but only 8 bits per pixel, so you're limited to a palette size of 256. Unless the Wikipedia article was wrong about that...
The way I'd have attempted to do that is separating the 3 channels (hide two then shift-ctrl-c to copy the visible image), then separately dither them either to custom palettes with 32/64 shades of R/G/B or use the levels tool to quantize them (0-255 -> 0-32/64 -> 0-255), depending on whether or not I wanted them dithered or just plain converted. Then recombine them into a single image using layer mode "addition".
I'm not sure why you're going to the trouble, though, if you're saving them as JPEG. It's lossy compression... it doesn't save 8 bits per channel anyhow.
There are lots of errors and other assorted silliness in the article. For example: "But because the USPTO focuses much more on "prior art" (i.e., "is this new?" rather than, "is this obvious?") all sorts of obvious stuff gets patented."
In fact, obviousness rejections are extremely common. In my experience they are the most common kind of rejection.
So? Those are not mutually exclusive scenarios. A large number of patents denied for obviousness doesn't mean there aren't also a large number of obvious patents being approved.
Moreover, the obviousness analysis is based on prior art.
Great, so you just proved the original point, the point you were trying to argue with. The USPTO focuses too much on prior art. Even when they deny a patent for "obviousness", all they're focused on is prior art.
How else do I get the lines stroked, if not by going through the "Stroke Path.." dialog?
Ah, you meant a dialog for every path. I was trying to figure out how you were managing to get a dialog for every line segment in the path. Point duly noted and accepted. Still, it remembers your previous settings - and you don't have to make all the points in a path connected. Hold Shift to set a point that isn't connected to the previous point. Then you just have one dialog at the end to stroke the entire disconnected path.
And that gives a proper circle exactly how?
By using the ellipse select tool? I've never noticed the result looking broken. Or convert the selection to a path, then stroke the path as you typically would.
Which, of course, would have been more helpful if they hadn't somehow reset the VA earthquake's stats. But give it some time and I suppose it will fill back in. And I really meant to paste the links to the distance vs. intensity plots, not just the city maps, but I hit Submit instead of Continue Editing.
So you have to switch the procedure complete, instead of drawing the line directly, you draw the line on the selection mask, then create a new transparent layer, fill that layer by using the mask, adjust opacity and then merge it down.
*facepalm*
No... if the "shift to draw a straight line" afterthought feature of the paintbrush tool isn't good enough, the proper way to draw a line in GIMP is with the path tool. You can then stroke along the path using whatever brush settings you want.
I have BetterPrivacy configured to delete all flash cookies that haven't changed in the last 20 minutes. The only time I had a problem with it was in an online training app that used Flash and stored its progress in a flash cookie. I added an exclusion for it and had no further problems.
I wonder if somebody could hack exiftool into a GIMP plugin.
Personally, I've just snapped a picture of the inside of my lens cap and then edited it in GIMP on the rare occasion when I wanted to have EXIF data in something I'd created.
I cleaned the Ask toolbar off one of my friends computers after it broke the new tab shortcut and menu item in Firefox. Yeah. "...huh?" The only way to get a new tab was to drag something into the tab bar or open a link in a new tab.
(found that Ask was the culprit by disabling extensions one at a time until the Ctrl-T shortcut started working again)
Oh well, nothing of value was lost. I probably would have cleaned it off anyway, but I wanted to know why the shortcut was broken. And it actually surprised me that it was so poorly written that it broke stuff like that.
It's vague because it only requires the school districts to come up with policies about it. The policies written by the school districts should be clear enough that there's no confusion.
SECTION 162.069 - By January 1, 2012, every school district must develop a written policy concerning teacher-student communication and employee-student communications. Each policy must include appropriate oral and nonverbal personal communication...
The law isn't written to mandate what teachers can or can't do. It just makes some suggestions of things that need to be addressed in the written policy.
I'd really have hoped that school districts would already have policies like this in place, but if they needed a kick in the pants to get them moving, this is it.
Obviously their policies need to make provisions for things like students who are related to their teachers, etc.
On a side note, I'm going to have to figure out how to put spaces in between my paragraphs.
If you're posting in HTML mode, HTML tags work fine. If you're posting in plain text mode, putting spaces between paragraphs works fine (and most HTML also works). Set your default posting mode here.
There most certainly is. Here is the immediately following sentence, which was for some reason omitted in the original quotation:
SECTION 162.069 - By January 1, 2012, every school district must develop a written policy concerning teacher-student communication and employee-student communications. Each policy must include appropriate oral and nonverbal personal communication... Teachers cannot establish, maintain, or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child's legal custodian, physical custodian, or legal guardian. Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student. Former student is defined as any person who was at one time a student at the school at which the teacher is employed and who is eighteen years of age or less and who has not graduated.
No... the law doesn't make it illegal. The law simply says that schools must write school policies to govern what's acceptable and what isn't acceptable online interaction between students and teachers, and lists some examples which would become the framework on which the school policy would be drafted. Violating a school policy != violating the law. And the school policy could and hopefully would be written to include exemptions for common-sense scenarios such as teachers who are related to their students.
I think you'll find that most creationists accept that evolution, in some form, does take place and is partly responsible for the genetic diversity that we see today. However they don't agree that this process is capable of creating new kinds of animals, no matter how many millions of years it's given (where "kinds" is somewhat loosely defined and might depend on who you're talking to), and believe it to be generally destructive, not constructive. Evolution is part of the curse; without it we would presumably all have perfect copies of Adam and Eve's perfect DNA.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction-of-your-correction: fracking.
How could you possibly decide whether something was obvious without using prior art?
You don't ignore prior art, but you also don't ignore prior art just because it isn't exactly the same as the patented idea. Yeah, you show someone who's skilled in that area a piece of prior art and ask them, "in your opinion, is this an obvious modification of this prior art?"
Hell, you want something less subjective? Maybe you give them a specific enough description of the problem they need to solve, and see if they come up with the same solution on their own. If so, it's obvious.
Don't forget that GIMP's palette mode only supports up to 256 colors
So do indexed PNGs, so I don't understand what the big deal is. Indexed PNGs can contain a full 24 bits per palette entry but only 8 bits per pixel, so you're limited to a palette size of 256. Unless the Wikipedia article was wrong about that...
*facepalm* obviously I meant 0-31/63, not 0-32/64.
The way I'd have attempted to do that is separating the 3 channels (hide two then shift-ctrl-c to copy the visible image), then separately dither them either to custom palettes with 32/64 shades of R/G/B or use the levels tool to quantize them (0-255 -> 0-32/64 -> 0-255), depending on whether or not I wanted them dithered or just plain converted. Then recombine them into a single image using layer mode "addition".
I'm not sure why you're going to the trouble, though, if you're saving them as JPEG. It's lossy compression... it doesn't save 8 bits per channel anyhow.
There are lots of errors and other assorted silliness in the article. For example: "But because the USPTO focuses much more on "prior art" (i.e., "is this new?" rather than, "is this obvious?") all sorts of obvious stuff gets patented."
In fact, obviousness rejections are extremely common. In my experience they are the most common kind of rejection.
So? Those are not mutually exclusive scenarios. A large number of patents denied for obviousness doesn't mean there aren't also a large number of obvious patents being approved.
Moreover, the obviousness analysis is based on prior art.
Great, so you just proved the original point, the point you were trying to argue with. The USPTO focuses too much on prior art. Even when they deny a patent for "obviousness", all they're focused on is prior art.
How else do I get the lines stroked, if not by going through the "Stroke Path.." dialog?
Ah, you meant a dialog for every path. I was trying to figure out how you were managing to get a dialog for every line segment in the path. Point duly noted and accepted. Still, it remembers your previous settings - and you don't have to make all the points in a path connected. Hold Shift to set a point that isn't connected to the previous point. Then you just have one dialog at the end to stroke the entire disconnected path.
And that gives a proper circle exactly how?
By using the ellipse select tool? I've never noticed the result looking broken. Or convert the selection to a path, then stroke the path as you typically would.
Which, of course, would have been more helpful if they hadn't somehow reset the VA earthquake's stats. But give it some time and I suppose it will fill back in. And I really meant to paste the links to the distance vs. intensity plots, not just the city maps, but I hit Submit instead of Continue Editing.
This vs. this.
So you have to switch the procedure complete, instead of drawing the line directly, you draw the line on the selection mask, then create a new transparent layer, fill that layer by using the mask, adjust opacity and then merge it down.
*facepalm*
No... if the "shift to draw a straight line" afterthought feature of the paintbrush tool isn't good enough, the proper way to draw a line in GIMP is with the path tool. You can then stroke along the path using whatever brush settings you want.
An estimated 5.8 magnitude in Virginia about 10 minutes ago, yeah...
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/at00lqe6x3.php
I have BetterPrivacy configured to delete all flash cookies that haven't changed in the last 20 minutes. The only time I had a problem with it was in an online training app that used Flash and stored its progress in a flash cookie. I added an exclusion for it and had no further problems.
I wonder if somebody could hack exiftool into a GIMP plugin.
Personally, I've just snapped a picture of the inside of my lens cap and then edited it in GIMP on the rare occasion when I wanted to have EXIF data in something I'd created.
It hasn't been called "The GIMP" for quite some time.
I've found that InfraRecorder is pretty good, and its FOSS. Get it from http://infrarecorder.org/, not CNet.
I cleaned the Ask toolbar off one of my friends computers after it broke the new tab shortcut and menu item in Firefox. Yeah. "...huh?" The only way to get a new tab was to drag something into the tab bar or open a link in a new tab.
(found that Ask was the culprit by disabling extensions one at a time until the Ctrl-T shortcut started working again)
Oh well, nothing of value was lost. I probably would have cleaned it off anyway, but I wanted to know why the shortcut was broken. And it actually surprised me that it was so poorly written that it broke stuff like that.
I was actually a little bit surprised that they haven't done Street View of Venice's canals.
It's vague because it only requires the school districts to come up with policies about it. The policies written by the school districts should be clear enough that there's no confusion.
SECTION 162.069 - By January 1, 2012, every school district must develop a written policy concerning teacher-student communication and employee-student communications. Each policy must include appropriate oral and nonverbal personal communication...
The law isn't written to mandate what teachers can or can't do. It just makes some suggestions of things that need to be addressed in the written policy.
I'd really have hoped that school districts would already have policies like this in place, but if they needed a kick in the pants to get them moving, this is it.
Obviously their policies need to make provisions for things like students who are related to their teachers, etc.
On a side note, I'm going to have to figure out how to put spaces in between my paragraphs.
If you're posting in HTML mode, HTML tags work fine. If you're posting in plain text mode, putting spaces between paragraphs works fine (and most HTML also works). Set your default posting mode here.
There most certainly is. Here is the immediately following sentence, which was for some reason omitted in the original quotation:
SECTION 162.069 - By January 1, 2012, every school district must develop a written policy concerning teacher-student communication and employee-student communications. Each policy must include appropriate oral and nonverbal personal communication ... Teachers cannot establish, maintain, or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child's legal custodian, physical custodian, or legal guardian. Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student. Former student is defined as any person who was at one time a student at the school at which the teacher is employed and who is eighteen years of age or less and who has not graduated.
I suggest people go and read the bill itself.
No... the law doesn't make it illegal. The law simply says that schools must write school policies to govern what's acceptable and what isn't acceptable online interaction between students and teachers, and lists some examples which would become the framework on which the school policy would be drafted. Violating a school policy != violating the law. And the school policy could and hopefully would be written to include exemptions for common-sense scenarios such as teachers who are related to their students.
I think you'll find that most creationists accept that evolution, in some form, does take place and is partly responsible for the genetic diversity that we see today. However they don't agree that this process is capable of creating new kinds of animals, no matter how many millions of years it's given (where "kinds" is somewhat loosely defined and might depend on who you're talking to), and believe it to be generally destructive, not constructive. Evolution is part of the curse; without it we would presumably all have perfect copies of Adam and Eve's perfect DNA.
It wasn't a science classroom.
There should be outrage over this kind of thing and where it could possibly lead mankind.
Better?
Those with a 33 (like me) need not apply, I guess.
he was not espousing any religious belief
He was espousing an anti-religious belief.
He was just talking about bloody science
He was a history teacher.
European history, to be exact.