Does a Book count as prior art? Or does someone already have a patent on "method for emulating real life object behavior using animated graphical artifacts"?
A lot of people think that because they pay for something, there should be no advertisements. The fact is, the advertisements do help to offset the cost of bringing you the game. How much more would you be willing to pay for a game with no advertisements?
Telling the agent not to shine the laser in his eyes doesn't imply that he understands the laser and the danger to pilots. He could be thinking of it as a really powerful flashlight -- dangerous to shine in your eyes, but becoming much safer after a relatively short distance.
This is actually standard practice in Slashdot postings. So, apparently not a no-no to many people. Not saying it's right, only that I see it all the time.
I think you're missing one important point: If the OS were never bundled with PC's there wouldn't be such a huge consumer market for PC's. The bar would still be too high for many people who had never chosen or installed an OS, and didn't know someone who could do it for them.
Pre-installing software isn't anti-competitive as long as your competitors are free to do it too.
I've been inside one of these. The tellers stand at floating mini-kiosks instead of being inside a secure area. Instead of handing you cash, they hand you a receipt with a code to type into a machine that gives you cash. The tellers all have gigantic smiles and tons of patience and understanding to help the confused customers who expected to walk into a bank. It's actually pretty funny. Turns out we walked in the back door and couldn't see the line on the other side of the mini-kiosks, so we couldn't figure out where to wait without walking around the store a bit.
I did a bit of reading on this a month or so back on hashcash and computational postage. Microsoft seems to have it right on this one with their Pennyblack project: Choose a computational postage that is memory-intensive to compute. The theory is that memory bandwidth is relatively constant, even across otherwise disparate systems. If the computation is limited by memory bandwidth rather than CPU speed, then you bring some equality between systems with vastly different CPU speeds.
Great strides were made for crazy people when cell phone users started walking around with headsets appearing to talk to themselves. Now it will be even more difficult to tell the difference between technophiles and crazy people!
Slashdot Mirror
Does a Book count as prior art? Or does someone already have a patent on "method for emulating real life object behavior using animated graphical artifacts"?
A lot of people think that because they pay for something, there should be no advertisements. The fact is, the advertisements do help to offset the cost of bringing you the game. How much more would you be willing to pay for a game with no advertisements?
Telling the agent not to shine the laser in his eyes doesn't imply that he understands the laser and the danger to pilots. He could be thinking of it as a really powerful flashlight -- dangerous to shine in your eyes, but becoming much safer after a relatively short distance.
This is actually standard practice in Slashdot postings. So, apparently not a no-no to many people. Not saying it's right, only that I see it all the time.
I think you're missing one important point: If the OS were never bundled with PC's there wouldn't be such a huge consumer market for PC's. The bar would still be too high for many people who had never chosen or installed an OS, and didn't know someone who could do it for them.
Pre-installing software isn't anti-competitive as long as your competitors are free to do it too.
I've been inside one of these. The tellers stand at floating mini-kiosks instead of being inside a secure area. Instead of handing you cash, they hand you a receipt with a code to type into a machine that gives you cash. The tellers all have gigantic smiles and tons of patience and understanding to help the confused customers who expected to walk into a bank. It's actually pretty funny. Turns out we walked in the back door and couldn't see the line on the other side of the mini-kiosks, so we couldn't figure out where to wait without walking around the store a bit.
I did a bit of reading on this a month or so back on hashcash and computational postage. Microsoft seems to have it right on this one with their Pennyblack project: Choose a computational postage that is memory-intensive to compute. The theory is that memory bandwidth is relatively constant, even across otherwise disparate systems. If the computation is limited by memory bandwidth rather than CPU speed, then you bring some equality between systems with vastly different CPU speeds.
Great strides were made for crazy people when cell phone users started walking around with headsets appearing to talk to themselves. Now it will be even more difficult to tell the difference between technophiles and crazy people!
"The signal to noise ratio here on the Internet has never been higher."
:)
I guess that means everything you've heard about the Playstation 2 is true.