Cue MPEG-LA calling for a patent portfolio to be created and licensed for hard cash, under their gracious auspices, of course.
File patent-troll suits proactively, a-la-The Minority Report, "Our mutants predict you will be violating our property rights in 5 years, so you can start paying now."
to those who are itchy to mark me troll - why? i expressed an honestly held conviction in a calm and rational matter, and supported my modest claims. c'mon, i'm just trying to be part of the slashdot community. why give me a hard time?
probably unpopular to take that tone - someone thinks you are an Apple or RIAA apologist. For my money, I too, buy the junk I listen to or watch. I may always be on the right side of things, but that never stops someone suing me if they feel they oughta and their lawyers are all sitting around the office with nowt to do.
The majority of US politicians often have a legal background. Many whom have worked at a law firm. They are (by design) an entirely different class of people. So of course they are the winners. What politician would have it any other way?
And when it doesn't work in their favor, they find ways to deregulate or subsidize which ultimately works very, very well for them later.
The only winners here are the law firms. The customers suffer limited feature availibility rather than a enjoy a robust market of the best each manufacturer can produce. It's a pretty rotten system. "You can only buy what our lawyers and patent portfolio will allow you to from out competitors" Really makes the patent system look like a tool of would-be monopolists.
perhaps the solution to rollover deaths is to make cars that are safer in that type of accident? like maybe some sort of re-enforcement could be added, and we could call it a "roll cage"... just a thought.
How about the car won't run without the driver's seatbelt on?
People refuse to obey the speed limits because the speed limits are retarded. Take any major highway in North America and you'll find massive stretches of more or less completely straight road where there's no reason you couldn't drive all day at your car's top speed, except, the posted speed limit is a third (or less) of said top speed.
This will never change because the government strongly prefers to keep everyone a criminal, they're much easier to control that way. If speed limits were strictly enforced (and not increased to sane values), there would be riots in the streets.
The science behind the building of the Autobahn lead to frequent bends in American highways. Ever notice they go a few miles, then suddenly veer a few degrees, then a stretch and veer back? It's to keep you alert because driving, at any speed, is metally fatiguing, moreso at night.
Not unusual to see in the news someone fell asleep while driving and rolled a few times. The faster you are going when you roll the less likely you are going to be in a happy alive state when coming to rest.
Speed limits also are well thought out as the average driver does not possess the skills of Mario Andretti, they're more along the lines of Ma and Pa Kettle. If your reaction time is poor at 65 MPH, going faster isn't going to help anything.
This story makes it sound like you're in the burbs. Sunnyvale is a city in the heart of Silicon Valley. It borders both Cupertino (home of Apple) and Mountain View (home of Google) and has more residents than both of those put together. Would you read a story on slashdot relating how Cupertino is a town 45 miles from San Francisco?
Weird.
They didn't likely bring it, if your read through TFA, she complained of suffering pain back in the 1980's when she imigrated. Patient worm. The probably was when her immune system tried to work out what to do with the dead worm.
Sunnyvale is about as squeaky clean as you're going to find anywhere in the USA. You might find some suspect vegetables in a supermarket (anywhere in the USA) which is why you should cook pretty much everything.
I don't get it. The immigrants are transmitting tapeworms to Californian pigs? Or directly transmitting them to purebred but presumably cannibalistic Californians? Or people are eating immigrants' lunches?
Transmitting between people, not so hard if you live in undeveloped conditions. If your toilet is close to where you grow/raise your own food you're going to get something eventually. This is why proper disposal of human waste is important and using uncomposted manure for fertilizer is such a bad idea.
After RTFA I, for one, DO NOT welcome our new brain parasite overloards
...the trouble with tapeworms occurs when they reproduce. The host expels thousands of the tapeworms' larvae out of their anus, possibly infecting other people.
Don't walk around bare foot.
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Don't eat raw meat.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
There is a tapeworm that comes from cow meet also, although it is less aggressive and rarer than the pork one. So yeah, I agree the most likely cause if poorly cooked pork meat.
Cows?!? How dare you... oh, wait you didn't mention mad cow disease in Texas. Nemmind.
As California is a gateway, thanks to its border with Latin America and many international airports (plus a few containers brought to shore filled with asian imigrants, one was found abandoned at sea a few years ago) we gots lots of happy little bugs.
It's not difficult in some corners of the world to buy a false health certification, which allows someone with rampant Tuberculosis to come on in and cough among us. (thanks to this I went on a 9 month course of Isoniazid as a preventative meausre, 9 months of total suck) Further there are people coming from rural backgrounds in SE Asia who have various gut and blood parasites, they move to the big city, get a leg up and move to the US. There's some pretty graphic examples of what peasants could have in their guts in the way of big worms thanks to eating food grown in fields fertilized by raw manure from infected oxen, goats, etc., and walking around in same fields bare footed. A mobile population in the world means this is going to happen more often, everywhere.
Don't like it? Maybe mandatory health screenings for visitors to the US, but if you even start talking about it you'll be called all sorts of names by various groups and who is going to pay for it?
LBO - Private Equity - aka Corporate Raider: buy a company with little money down, load acquired company up with debt, charge acquired company millions of dollars in "fees" for "consulting", and then if company is still successful sucker the....do an IPO and if the acquired company goes belly up, stick the...put the company into bankruptcy and let the creditors eat it after siphoning millions of dollars out of the company. In the meantime, honest hardworking people - people who actually have to work for a living - get canned without so much as a handshake and the Private Equity guys walk away with millions or billions of dollars of equity that was sucked out of the company.
A great illustration of this technique was the bar that Paulie bought in the movie GoodFellas: run up the restaurant's credit, buy Cutty Sark, sell the booze at a discount, and when the restaurant goes bankrupt, burn it down the for insurance money. The only difference is that the Private Equity guys do the legal version.
That's how Mitt Romney made his millions: by fucking over small investors and banks.
And the private equity people usually are using someone else's money, rarely putting their own into the mix, but collecting their wages as "administrative fee" Our LBO people leveraged our own assets to buy us, plus some investor money. They're rule of thum was 1 in 5 companies go bust anyway, no matter what you do, so they work on keeping 4 companies going, hoping to spin them off or sell assets for a profit, while they draw "administrative fees" from the 5th company until it's fully wound down and dies, leaving the bank and their own investors with a loss. Not particularly the sort of success story you'll hear Mitt going on about.
How can they not understand that volunteers are exactly that: someone volunteering. And their volunteering can cease at any time. They should be countersued for abuse of legal procedures.
Well, a little background on who Internet Brands is and what their business model is might help....
From wikipedia: The company was founded in 1998 as CarsDirect.com, launched from the business incubator Idealab. The company invented a consumer-advocacy approach to selling cars "haggle-free" online, an approach it continues to employ.[9] In 2000, Roger Penske invested in the company and joined the Board of Directors. In 2002, Time Magazine voted the site one of the 50 best in the world.[10] The company changed its name to Internet Brands in 2005.[11] The company's IPO was in November 2007 on the NASDAQ exchange.[12] INET was added to the NASDAQ Internet Index on March 22, 2010.[13] Internet Brands is headquartered in El Segundo, California; Autodata is headquartered in London, Ontario. Internet Brands agreed to be acquired for $640 million by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman in September 2010,[14][15] and was thus delisted from NASDAQ.
Might be more interesting now to find out who Hellman & Friedman are...
Also from wikipedia: Hellman & Friedman LLC (H&F) is a private equity firm, founded in 1984 by Warren Hellman[2][3] and Tully Friedman,[note 1] that makes investments primarily through leveraged buyouts and minority growth capital investments.
Dunno about you, but LBO people don't set well with me after an LBO killed a company I worked for, which would have been worth at least a billion $ annually, had they invested in us rather than suck us dry like a bunch of leeches. YMMV
Streaming services have been around for YEARS. And Apple since the release of the iPod has been making a mint releasing technology and services that have been around for years.
It's the fanboi tax.
and they are more than happy to pay it and defend their right to pay it!
The same people will not question how their smart phone works or the wonders of physics, electronics, ergonomics, materials and programming they represent, let alone the fact you can't see the radio waves, but the thing works.
Selective science is what people are all about these days. We'll pick and choose what we'll accept, let our children be taught, but we won't let our eye stray to the advances of science which have brought us the vehicles, clothing, entertainment and electronic devices we take for granted.
I am going to Japan in October, so in addition to earthquakes, tsunamis, radiation, ninjas, and godzilla, I now also have to worry about lava??? Damn...
I've seen Autobahn drivers - they're mostly courtious, follow the rules, and usually don't do anything stupid.
Here we're talking about Americans - specifically Texans. Expect to see many many shoot outs, accidents, law suits and fatalities.
In Texas you will see beat up old 1970's pickup trucks trying to do 100 mph. Things weren't geared for it and generally don't have speed rated tires. Probably more fatalities from blow-outs at speed than any other non-alcohol/drug related incidents.
Slashdot Mirror
I have so much desire to order from Alibaba, but I can't quite figure out how to verify that I won't be screwed. It seems almost guaranteed.
Considered them myself. There's some sort of vetting, but I don't know how much I trust *it*.
Cue MPEG-LA calling for a patent portfolio to be created and licensed for hard cash, under their gracious auspices, of course.
File patent-troll suits proactively, a-la-The Minority Report, "Our mutants predict you will be violating our property rights in 5 years, so you can start paying now."
What's wrong with Bill the Cat?
if they'd pay some of that massive advertising budget to competent employees, quality software and proper maintenance. ... naw, bring on the chick ads.
So that's, what, two big hits for Go Daddy this year?
to those who are itchy to mark me troll - why? i expressed an honestly held conviction in a calm and rational matter, and supported my modest claims. c'mon, i'm just trying to be part of the slashdot community. why give me a hard time?
probably unpopular to take that tone - someone thinks you are an Apple or RIAA apologist. For my money, I too, buy the junk I listen to or watch. I may always be on the right side of things, but that never stops someone suing me if they feel they oughta and their lawyers are all sitting around the office with nowt to do.
The majority of US politicians often have a legal background. Many whom have worked at a law firm. They are (by design) an entirely different class of people. So of course they are the winners. What politician would have it any other way?
And when it doesn't work in their favor, they find ways to deregulate or subsidize which ultimately works very, very well for them later.
The only winners here are the law firms. The customers suffer limited feature availibility rather than a enjoy a robust market of the best each manufacturer can produce. It's a pretty rotten system. "You can only buy what our lawyers and patent portfolio will allow you to from out competitors" Really makes the patent system look like a tool of would-be monopolists.
Yay!! Patents are awesome!!!
I have the patent upon First Posts - you'll hear from my lawyers; Dewey, Skruem & Howe
perhaps the solution to rollover deaths is to make cars that are safer in that type of accident? like maybe some sort of re-enforcement could be added, and we could call it a "roll cage"... just a thought.
How about the car won't run without the driver's seatbelt on?
..just f****ng pathing...for both parties.
This is where you wish judges could just order one side of lawyers or both to 20 years hard labor.
People refuse to obey the speed limits because the speed limits are retarded. Take any major highway in North America and you'll find massive stretches of more or less completely straight road where there's no reason you couldn't drive all day at your car's top speed, except, the posted speed limit is a third (or less) of said top speed.
This will never change because the government strongly prefers to keep everyone a criminal, they're much easier to control that way. If speed limits were strictly enforced (and not increased to sane values), there would be riots in the streets.
The science behind the building of the Autobahn lead to frequent bends in American highways. Ever notice they go a few miles, then suddenly veer a few degrees, then a stretch and veer back? It's to keep you alert because driving, at any speed, is metally fatiguing, moreso at night.
Not unusual to see in the news someone fell asleep while driving and rolled a few times. The faster you are going when you roll the less likely you are going to be in a happy alive state when coming to rest.
Speed limits also are well thought out as the average driver does not possess the skills of Mario Andretti, they're more along the lines of Ma and Pa Kettle. If your reaction time is poor at 65 MPH, going faster isn't going to help anything.
This story makes it sound like you're in the burbs. Sunnyvale is a city in the heart of Silicon Valley. It borders both Cupertino (home of Apple) and Mountain View (home of Google) and has more residents than both of those put together. Would you read a story on slashdot relating how Cupertino is a town 45 miles from San Francisco?
Weird.
They didn't likely bring it, if your read through TFA, she complained of suffering pain back in the 1980's when she imigrated. Patient worm. The probably was when her immune system tried to work out what to do with the dead worm.
Sunnyvale is about as squeaky clean as you're going to find anywhere in the USA. You might find some suspect vegetables in a supermarket (anywhere in the USA) which is why you should cook pretty much everything.
I don't get it. The immigrants are transmitting tapeworms to Californian pigs? Or directly transmitting them to purebred but presumably cannibalistic Californians? Or people are eating immigrants' lunches?
Transmitting between people, not so hard if you live in undeveloped conditions. If your toilet is close to where you grow/raise your own food you're going to get something eventually. This is why proper disposal of human waste is important and using uncomposted manure for fertilizer is such a bad idea.
After RTFA I, for one, DO NOT welcome our new brain parasite overloards
...the trouble with tapeworms occurs when they reproduce. The host expels thousands of the tapeworms' larvae out of their anus, possibly infecting other people.
Don't walk around bare foot.
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Don't eat raw meat.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
There is a tapeworm that comes from cow meet also, although it is less aggressive and rarer than the pork one. So yeah, I agree the most likely cause if poorly cooked pork meat.
Cows?!? How dare you ... oh, wait you didn't mention mad cow disease in Texas. Nemmind.
As California is a gateway, thanks to its border with Latin America and many international airports (plus a few containers brought to shore filled with asian imigrants, one was found abandoned at sea a few years ago) we gots lots of happy little bugs.
It's not difficult in some corners of the world to buy a false health certification, which allows someone with rampant Tuberculosis to come on in and cough among us. (thanks to this I went on a 9 month course of Isoniazid as a preventative meausre, 9 months of total suck) Further there are people coming from rural backgrounds in SE Asia who have various gut and blood parasites, they move to the big city, get a leg up and move to the US. There's some pretty graphic examples of what peasants could have in their guts in the way of big worms thanks to eating food grown in fields fertilized by raw manure from infected oxen, goats, etc., and walking around in same fields bare footed. A mobile population in the world means this is going to happen more often, everywhere.
Don't like it? Maybe mandatory health screenings for visitors to the US, but if you even start talking about it you'll be called all sorts of names by various groups and who is going to pay for it?
Not just West Nile that's getting around.
LBO - Private Equity - aka Corporate Raider: buy a company with little money down, load acquired company up with debt, charge acquired company millions of dollars in "fees" for "consulting", and then if company is still successful sucker the....do an IPO and if the acquired company goes belly up, stick the...put the company into bankruptcy and let the creditors eat it after siphoning millions of dollars out of the company. In the meantime, honest hardworking people - people who actually have to work for a living - get canned without so much as a handshake and the Private Equity guys walk away with millions or billions of dollars of equity that was sucked out of the company.
A great illustration of this technique was the bar that Paulie bought in the movie GoodFellas: run up the restaurant's credit, buy Cutty Sark, sell the booze at a discount, and when the restaurant goes bankrupt, burn it down the for insurance money. The only difference is that the Private Equity guys do the legal version.
That's how Mitt Romney made his millions: by fucking over small investors and banks.
And the private equity people usually are using someone else's money, rarely putting their own into the mix, but collecting their wages as "administrative fee" Our LBO people leveraged our own assets to buy us, plus some investor money. They're rule of thum was 1 in 5 companies go bust anyway, no matter what you do, so they work on keeping 4 companies going, hoping to spin them off or sell assets for a profit, while they draw "administrative fees" from the 5th company until it's fully wound down and dies, leaving the bank and their own investors with a loss. Not particularly the sort of success story you'll hear Mitt going on about.
How can they not understand that volunteers are exactly that: someone volunteering. And their volunteering can cease at any time. They should be countersued for abuse of legal procedures.
Well, a little background on who Internet Brands is and what their business model is might help....
From wikipedia: The company was founded in 1998 as CarsDirect.com, launched from the business incubator Idealab. The company invented a consumer-advocacy approach to selling cars "haggle-free" online, an approach it continues to employ.[9] In 2000, Roger Penske invested in the company and joined the Board of Directors. In 2002, Time Magazine voted the site one of the 50 best in the world.[10]
The company changed its name to Internet Brands in 2005.[11] The company's IPO was in November 2007 on the NASDAQ exchange.[12] INET was added to the NASDAQ Internet Index on March 22, 2010.[13]
Internet Brands is headquartered in El Segundo, California; Autodata is headquartered in London, Ontario.
Internet Brands agreed to be acquired for $640 million by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman in September 2010,[14][15] and was thus delisted from NASDAQ.
Might be more interesting now to find out who Hellman & Friedman are...
Also from wikipedia: Hellman & Friedman LLC (H&F) is a private equity firm, founded in 1984 by Warren Hellman[2][3] and Tully Friedman,[note 1] that makes investments primarily through leveraged buyouts and minority growth capital investments.
Dunno about you, but LBO people don't set well with me after an LBO killed a company I worked for, which would have been worth at least a billion $ annually, had they invested in us rather than suck us dry like a bunch of leeches. YMMV
Streaming services have been around for YEARS. And Apple since the release of the iPod has been making a mint releasing technology and services that have been around for years.
It's the fanboi tax.
and they are more than happy to pay it and defend their right to pay it!
Apple launches a service that further degrades your rights to 'own' something that you've bought.
You mean I won't be able to leave my music streaming enjoyment to my heirs? Curses!
Many will question science.
The same people will not question how their smart phone works or the wonders of physics, electronics, ergonomics, materials and programming they represent, let alone the fact you can't see the radio waves, but the thing works.
Selective science is what people are all about these days. We'll pick and choose what we'll accept, let our children be taught, but we won't let our eye stray to the advances of science which have brought us the vehicles, clothing, entertainment and electronic devices we take for granted.
Speaking of Darwinism... how many of those vehicles are pickup trucks with people sitting the bed?
In some parts of Texas that's known as Air Conditioning
I am going to Japan in October, so in addition to earthquakes, tsunamis, radiation, ninjas, and godzilla, I now also have to worry about lava??? Damn...
Don't forget vorpal bunnies
My mountain asplode!
I've seen Autobahn drivers - they're mostly courtious, follow the rules, and usually don't do anything stupid.
Here we're talking about Americans - specifically Texans. Expect to see many many shoot outs, accidents, law suits and fatalities.
In Texas you will see beat up old 1970's pickup trucks trying to do 100 mph. Things weren't geared for it and generally don't have speed rated tires. Probably more fatalities from blow-outs at speed than any other non-alcohol/drug related incidents.