Having read their site talking about the power of leveraging their synergistic object oriented database paradigm in the enterprise front end situational operation, I can feel my brains melting, and I still don't know what the hell "real" object oriented databases are and why they're so different from the table->row->field used by relational databases. I'm glad they can draw pretty 3D pictures to represent my data (does it really? its hard to tell what they're talking about).
The stock market is up 165% from 1995 with a compounded return of 10% annually
Good thing I graduated and got a job and started investing in 1995.
Oh wait I didn't!
Nice of you to throw out totally bullshit numbers like that. I graduated in 2002. Since I got a job in 2002, the Dow Jones fell straight into the shitter and only recently started to climb back out. I'm only recently starting to see the stability I'd want before I start investing even in diverse funds.
Hahah, wanna bet that IF the tax disappears tomorrow, 90% of the employees of this country won't see an increase in take-home pay past 7%? You ascribe such malfesance to the government but ignore the fact that your company considers their 7% to be a cost of employing you, not part of your salary.
You can't tell me that an additional 12% of the paychecks of people working below the poverty line equals "several grand a year".
Come back when we have a minimum wage that guarantees that people who make the effort to work, are rewarded by not living in poverty. Then we'll talk about setting up personal savings accounts for the hard workers of America.
While its an easy answer, its not a very favored one at the moment. My savings account brings me a whopping 0.4% interest. While I'd make more if I put more money in (I made exactly $1 over the last year, do the math), its not so much more that its compelling or in my mind worthwhile.
Mandating people to stash money in low-yield accounts isn't going to fly. And with the current half-assed legislation (sure, Sarbine-Oxley will tighten audit controls, but theres a good chance the Worldcom CEO will walk scot-free by simply claiming he's a stupid incompetent idiot who wasn't doing his job and didn't have a clue as to what was going on), any insistence that we invest in the stock market is going to be met with memories of Enron and Worldcom.
I mean let's bring all the greatest OS-programs to the Windows platform.
You say that like its a bad thing but put it this way:
Your company runs OO.o, Evolution, and Firefox on Windows. You're asked to cut costs, so you point out that you can deploy the exact same thing on Linux. Minimal retraining will be required (quite possibly in the form of "If you can't figure it out, you're fired!") You get a pat on the back, and the CEO gets himself a nice fat bonus check. Problem solved!
as for "Triggers", debian's got the better way, with the/directory.d/ concept outlined by someone else, as well as update-foo, and install scripts that do whats needed for them to work together. Or would you rather enumerate every possible package you'd want something special to happen on?
You cite the.spec file as magical goodness as if it comes with everything. I call debian/rules as even more magical goodness, since it can do most of what you claim (architecture-dependent builds, multiple patches, etc), and it comes with approximately the same number of tarballs (what, 3?). It expects you to know what you're doing, which is why Debian has a package maintainer for every package, and the Policy to tell them what to do. Additionally, you can use debian/rules to build only certain packages out from a multi-package source (like, say, just the php4-pgsql package from the php4 source).
The only thing I really don't like about the debian format is that by default they build packages with everything turned on, requiring that I install every possible library out there (a problem for something like PHP with 50 extensions I'll never use). Something like Gentoo's USE variable, without the arcane syntax and having to know what each library considers itself to be used as would be pretty cool (like say an ncurses list of checkboxes or just "build with libfoo? (Y/n).)
Not exactly sure what "%changelog" means to you, but debian's packaging system enforces having proper changelog entries.
So to wrap it up, the things that.rpm can do that.deb can't (or can't do in other, arguably better ways): -Active use of package signing support (its supported, just not used in the current stable or testing distribution) -Single.spec control file (Debian uses a directory of scripts and control files) -More than one source tarball (I suspect Debian Policy probably prohibits this anyway - witness the number of pkgname-data packages for games and the like, and if the source cannot be built standalone, the maintainer would just include the other source in the debian.diff) -Automatically build nonstripped library packages. (maintainer must specify this specifically) -Verify script by default (some packages implement this on their own)
I'm so confused these days. I thought that we're supposed to be doing what we love and enjoying it. Why do asshats like you have to come along and make it hard? Why can't we do what we love for companies that appreciate our work and who are as loyal to us as we are to them?
You realize that that article proves everything I've had to say about software patents?
From the article: HyperCard created expectations that Zoomracks could not meet, and other companies began to develop HyperCard clones. Meanwhile, I asserted my rights, sued and settled with Apple
Reads, word for word, as: "Oh shit! My technology is 6 years old and at the end of the product cycle. I better start suing rather than innovating a new product because my inferior crap is protected for another 10 years!"
So tell me, how exactly does software patents create innovation again?
Picture how the world would have been if IBM patented the BIOS? Brother patented the Word Processor?
You say that patents are "overall an economic good and a necessity" but what innovation has come out of Microsoft since 1998's State Street decision establishing "Business Process" patents? Just years before that they radically changed the look and feel their operating systems. Of course, according to you that must have been trivial, since NOBODY would have invested any work in software if it couldn't be patented. People wrote whole operating systems with nothing more than copyright protection, and made money off of it!
The purpose of a patent is twofold: protect a temporary monopoly, with the people of this country (or in this day and age, the world) receiving the benefit of that creation when the patent expires. How about we call for all patented software to be opensourced when the patent expires? As it is, even after the patent expires the code is still protected by copyright. If you don't like that plan, don't patent it. Thats why the government created copyright and trade secret classes of intellectual property.
apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.
These aren't wheels. They're NOT interchangable.
You're whining about a problem that doesn't exist. How about we send you to China to administer a school full of 486s with 4MB of RAM each and gentoo. Lets see how long you last with emerge until your head fries from watching shit compile.
That is, if you can even get gentoo started. You'll probably need debian's sleek and, well, skimpy installer to get it started on a machine with 4MB.
Or what if its not a PC at all? Debian's installer runs on what... 8? 12 platforms? I've lost count.
Or, if you're clueless or just need everything detected for you because you can't tell your video card from your monitor model, you want a redhat or mandrake install that supports a few architectures, but has automatic hardware detection, and so on.
Maybe up until six years ago it wasn't a big issue.
You're right, after all, if it weren't for patents protecting innovation, we'd still be stuck with DOS 98 instead of Windows 98... or something like that.
My point was that the computer world made massive huge leaps and bounds without that protection. One of the largest non-governmental monopolies ever known to mankind was born and rose to power in that environment, and they seem to have gotten there just fine without having to smack down IBM and others with patents.
And now? Now we have SCO. We have companies paying people $200 for inventions that bring in billions of dollars. Venture Capitalists that are more than happy to listen to your idea, then start their own company doing exactly that, now that they know you had a great idea and no money to hire the lawyers to defend it.
Rather than "going back to an archaic system" as you put it, look at it this way: In 1998, we started doing something. Now, when we do this, we complain "Doctor, it hurts when we do this!". What's the obvious answer?
Or if you're a database or JFS fan, consider it rolling back to a known good state;)
Civilians don't get to do things that cops do all the time.
If the government establishes that there is no expectation of privacy on the open road, then you cannot say "well I expect privacy from other people but not from cops".
Privacy is dead. Get over it. But if you don't like it, don't look to the constitution for a right to it, because it ain't there.
Good thing you're not my lawyer.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
--The Ninth Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
--The Tenth Amendment
Two nice, short quotes from the constitution that tell me 1) The constitution does not grant the federal government the right to take away my privacy. 2) If my state constitution does not grant the state government the right to take away my privacy, then I still have a right to privacy. As evidenced by several Supreme Court rulings.
Oh, and I paid for my car, it is therefore among my "effects". While planting a bug on it may not count as a "search", the car in the story was "seized" and impounded for the purpose of removing the bug. What if the person being bugged was innocent? They'd have to make up a fake crime just so they'd have justification to get the bug back.
I'll bite: Someone criticizes a mayor "anonymously" by cell phone, say by calling into a radio show and telling the truth about what REALLY happened that night who then pulls a few strings with his police chief buddy who he appointed, who then talks SBC into releasing the phone records. They work out your number and discover you've got a cellphone with GPS. They then use their newfound power to make your life a living hell: everywhere you go, a cop is there. "Seems your taillight is out, hold on a few minutes while I write you a ticket" "My light's not out" *crunch* "Are you talking back to me sonny? And is that a dog in your back seat? I'm going to have to ask you to step out of your car so I can shoot it."
I'm sure you're going to say "aww, nobody'd EVER abuse their power", but you'd be more than happy to ignore that apparently the email in the above refernced story must have been the truth or the defamation case wouldn't have been dismissed. The whole case was specifically to try to harass John Doe.
prevents time warner from revealing Doe's idenity.
You forgot "Without a warrant, subpoena or otherwise obeying due process of law."
The whole damn thing is because Fitch wants to know the guy's name, but just like the RIAA, instead of actually filing a John Doe lawsuit or filing criminal identity theft charges and having a judge issue a demand for the persons' name, he wants to just throw his own weight around because he seems to think he's more special (perhaps in the short-bus sense) than everyone else.
The problem here is that he has set the precedent that your salary is if you do nothing; if you invent something cool, you sue the company to get MORE.
I DO work for a large company who owns my inventions, I DO have patents in my name but assigned to my employer
Once upon a time there was a man whose job it was to put a cog on a spoke and hit it with a hammer. All day long. He was paid hourly to swing the hammer. After years of doing this, he realized that if the cog was replaced by a widget, the device he was working on would run 50% more efficiently with %10 less noise. The company patented the idea, went on to make billions off of the invention, and continued to pay the inventor his hourly wage.
Now, you either are paid to create patentable things, or you're incredibly altruistic to be giving your company your proceeds above and beyond your job description (what you are paid your salary for doing, not "nothing") for free.
why not prove to the patent office that your process is different.
In other words, feed the system more by having someone write the patent and file it and adding yet another patent to the pile?
My preferred solution is to require:
1) software patents that expire within the usual software life cycle (of about 4-8 years) 2) require some form of structured pseudocode that clearly describes the process being claimed 3) Similar to a Design patent, only one process can be claimed per patent, none of this "The system in 1, 3 and 8343 whereby the operator is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch while entering data with his/her left pinky" that plagues the system now. 4) Titles and abstracts will be written by the reviewer to accurately describe what is being patented, NOT the misleading gibberish and shoutoutz that show up in the patents these days. 5) 2+4 require more qualified personnel as you say. 6) In the absense of 3, date each claim individually to prevent submarine patents (real ones, not the "zomg you sued us from nowhere" we hear about often here) where people claim a flagrantly invalid process just to get a starting date, and then bounce the patent against the patent office repeatedly while adding new (sometimes their own, often other peoples') innovations to the claims, resulting in a patent that may expire sooner, but for which all prior art must beat the original filing deadline, even if it had been in use a whole year before the actual claim had been added. 7) Better beats older. If you invent a sort process that sorts in O(n log (n/2)), and patent it, and I read the patent and see that by changing a line in your pseudocode it becomes O(n), I win. People who wish to use my O(n) patent come to me for licensing, even though your patent may have been heavily used. People who only want to use O(n log (n/2)) can go to you for your silly patent, but you have no right to challenge mine for one-upping you.
Of course, eliminating the "business method" patent that software uses now would be the far superior model. Businesses ran fine for over 200 years (Ending in 1998 with the State Street case) here in the US without patenting their "methods", and even longer in Europe.
When you establish a connection, one IP address is used for the source of that connection, and after that, thats the path the traffic runs.
If you had two cable modems doing 5Mbps, you could download 2 things at 5Mbps (one using each modem) but you could not directly download 1 thing at 10Mbps (if its http or ftp, you could cheat and use the "resume" feature to have one cable modem download the first half while the second downloaded the second have, and then your specially written client would assemble these together.)
Channel bonding can be done with the appropriate hardware and ISP, but I'm willing to bet that your cable provider is both unwilling and incapable of setting this up. (With bonding, only one IP address is used, and the hardware passes traffic down whichever wire is free/not broken.)
Wasn't the purpose of patents to allow us little guys to profit from a good idea without having to risk our future on it?
From where I stand, its not doing that. Not even close. I'm working with a startup, and we thought about patenting our software, and the first thing we did was run into someone else who has patented something similar (the only difference is that their patent calls for two databases to do what we can do with one database and logic). Having spent more than it would have cost to file a patent ourselves on a lawyer, search, and the reactive scramble, we decided it wasn't worth it.
Even as it is, externally our program shows no difference at all to the patented algorithm, since it does essentially the same thing in an internally different way. Eventually we'll probably be sued, and millions of dollars in fees and legal expenses later, finally convince a jury that no, two databases are not the same as one database and a handful of user-supplied rules. And thats if we're not forced to open our codebase to our competitor, after which we'd pretty much be dead. It'd be what, two days? a week? Before they update their software with new rule-based operation that they just "thought of" and we'd never be able to prove they stole.
Yes, thanks to the TCP/IP protocol, this is the case more often than not.
Because the TCP/IP protocol requires you to ACK everything you download, if you cram your upstream pipe full of junk, your ACK packets are going to be delayed a nice long time, causing your download to stop while the other end wonders what happened to you.
Fixing this is as simple as limiting your upload rate. Or if you want to discover the internet as it was really meant to be on broadband, implement a Quality of Service setup that prioritizes ACK packets and watch in amazement as everything seems to go faster when under load.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say he's not bright enough to go back to school, but he certainly does lack some level of common sense. (Then again, he'd probably fit right into academia...)
I would have kept the job while I was looking for a school that would take me, but whatever floats his boat (really, you know he just wanted to spend his days playing video games and occasionally checking the mail to see if a university sent him anything)
Slashdot Mirror
Having read their site talking about the power of leveraging their synergistic object oriented database paradigm in the enterprise front end situational operation, I can feel my brains melting, and I still don't know what the hell "real" object oriented databases are and why they're so different from the table->row->field used by relational databases. I'm glad they can draw pretty 3D pictures to represent my data (does it really? its hard to tell what they're talking about).
The stock market is up 165% from 1995 with a compounded return of 10% annually
Good thing I graduated and got a job and started investing in 1995.
Oh wait I didn't!
Nice of you to throw out totally bullshit numbers like that. I graduated in 2002. Since I got a job in 2002, the Dow Jones fell straight into the shitter and only recently started to climb back out. I'm only recently starting to see the stability I'd want before I start investing even in diverse funds.
Hahah, wanna bet that IF the tax disappears tomorrow, 90% of the employees of this country won't see an increase in take-home pay past 7%? You ascribe such malfesance to the government but ignore the fact that your company considers their 7% to be a cost of employing you, not part of your salary.
You can't tell me that an additional 12% of the paychecks of people working below the poverty line equals "several grand a year".
Come back when we have a minimum wage that guarantees that people who make the effort to work, are rewarded by not living in poverty. Then we'll talk about setting up personal savings accounts for the hard workers of America.
While its an easy answer, its not a very favored one at the moment. My savings account brings me a whopping 0.4% interest. While I'd make more if I put more money in (I made exactly $1 over the last year, do the math), its not so much more that its compelling or in my mind worthwhile.
Mandating people to stash money in low-yield accounts isn't going to fly. And with the current half-assed legislation (sure, Sarbine-Oxley will tighten audit controls, but theres a good chance the Worldcom CEO will walk scot-free by simply claiming he's a stupid incompetent idiot who wasn't doing his job and didn't have a clue as to what was going on), any insistence that we invest in the stock market is going to be met with memories of Enron and Worldcom.
I mean let's bring all the greatest OS-programs to the Windows platform.
You say that like its a bad thing but put it this way:
Your company runs OO.o, Evolution, and Firefox on Windows. You're asked to cut costs, so you point out that you can deploy the exact same thing on Linux. Minimal retraining will be required (quite possibly in the form of "If you can't figure it out, you're fired!") You get a pat on the back, and the CEO gets himself a nice fat bonus check. Problem solved!
RPM has better source rebuild than DEB.
/directory.d/ concept outlined by someone else, as well as update-foo, and install scripts that do whats needed for them to work together. Or would you rather enumerate every possible package you'd want something special to happen on?
.spec file as magical goodness as if it comes with everything. I call debian/rules as even more magical goodness, since it can do most of what you claim (architecture-dependent builds, multiple patches, etc), and it comes with approximately the same number of tarballs (what, 3?). It expects you to know what you're doing, which is why Debian has a package maintainer for every package, and the Policy to tell them what to do. Additionally, you can use debian/rules to build only certain packages out from a multi-package source (like, say, just the php4-pgsql package from the php4 source).
.rpm can do that .deb can't (or can't do in other, arguably better ways): .spec control file (Debian uses a directory of scripts and control files) .diff)
(as part of apt-get source -b blender:)
dpkg-checkbuilddeps: Unmet build dependencies: ftgl-dev (>= 2.0.9-1) libglut-dev libopenal-dev (>= 0.2003011300-1) libsdl-dev python-dev scons
as for "Triggers", debian's got the better way, with the
You cite the
The only thing I really don't like about the debian format is that by default they build packages with everything turned on, requiring that I install every possible library out there (a problem for something like PHP with 50 extensions I'll never use). Something like Gentoo's USE variable, without the arcane syntax and having to know what each library considers itself to be used as would be pretty cool (like say an ncurses list of checkboxes or just "build with libfoo? (Y/n).)
Not exactly sure what "%changelog" means to you, but debian's packaging system enforces having proper changelog entries.
So to wrap it up, the things that
-Active use of package signing support (its supported, just not used in the current stable or testing distribution)
-Single
-More than one source tarball (I suspect Debian Policy probably prohibits this anyway - witness the number of pkgname-data packages for games and the like, and if the source cannot be built standalone, the maintainer would just include the other source in the debian
-Automatically build nonstripped library packages. (maintainer must specify this specifically)
-Verify script by default (some packages implement this on their own)
I'm so confused these days. I thought that we're supposed to be doing what we love and enjoying it. Why do asshats like you have to come along and make it hard? Why can't we do what we love for companies that appreciate our work and who are as loyal to us as we are to them?
I want to know what happens in the year 2525, if Man is still alive.
You realize that that article proves everything I've had to say about software patents?
From the article:
HyperCard created expectations that Zoomracks could not meet, and other companies began to develop HyperCard clones. Meanwhile, I asserted my rights, sued and settled with Apple
Reads, word for word, as: "Oh shit! My technology is 6 years old and at the end of the product cycle. I better start suing rather than innovating a new product because my inferior crap is protected for another 10 years!"
So tell me, how exactly does software patents create innovation again?
Picture how the world would have been if IBM patented the BIOS? Brother patented the Word Processor?
You say that patents are "overall an economic good and a necessity" but what innovation has come out of Microsoft since 1998's State Street decision establishing "Business Process" patents? Just years before that they radically changed the look and feel their operating systems. Of course, according to you that must have been trivial, since NOBODY would have invested any work in software if it couldn't be patented. People wrote whole operating systems with nothing more than copyright protection, and made money off of it!
The purpose of a patent is twofold: protect a temporary monopoly, with the people of this country (or in this day and age, the world) receiving the benefit of that creation when the patent expires. How about we call for all patented software to be opensourced when the patent expires? As it is, even after the patent expires the code is still protected by copyright. If you don't like that plan, don't patent it. Thats why the government created copyright and trade secret classes of intellectual property.
apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.
These aren't wheels. They're NOT interchangable.
You're whining about a problem that doesn't exist. How about we send you to China to administer a school full of 486s with 4MB of RAM each and gentoo. Lets see how long you last with emerge until your head fries from watching shit compile.
That is, if you can even get gentoo started. You'll probably need debian's sleek and, well, skimpy installer to get it started on a machine with 4MB.
Or what if its not a PC at all? Debian's installer runs on what... 8? 12 platforms? I've lost count.
Or, if you're clueless or just need everything detected for you because you can't tell your video card from your monitor model, you want a redhat or mandrake install that supports a few architectures, but has automatic hardware detection, and so on.
Completely different target markets here.
Maybe up until six years ago it wasn't a big issue.
;)
You're right, after all, if it weren't for patents protecting innovation, we'd still be stuck with DOS 98 instead of Windows 98... or something like that.
My point was that the computer world made massive huge leaps and bounds without that protection. One of the largest non-governmental monopolies ever known to mankind was born and rose to power in that environment, and they seem to have gotten there just fine without having to smack down IBM and others with patents.
And now? Now we have SCO. We have companies paying people $200 for inventions that bring in billions of dollars. Venture Capitalists that are more than happy to listen to your idea, then start their own company doing exactly that, now that they know you had a great idea and no money to hire the lawyers to defend it.
Rather than "going back to an archaic system" as you put it, look at it this way: In 1998, we started doing something. Now, when we do this, we complain "Doctor, it hurts when we do this!". What's the obvious answer?
Or if you're a database or JFS fan, consider it rolling back to a known good state
Civilians don't get to do things that cops do all the time.
If the government establishes that there is no expectation of privacy on the open road, then you cannot say "well I expect privacy from other people but not from cops".
Good thing you're not my lawyer.
Two nice, short quotes from the constitution that tell me
1) The constitution does not grant the federal government the right to take away my privacy.
2) If my state constitution does not grant the state government the right to take away my privacy, then I still have a right to privacy. As evidenced by several Supreme Court rulings.
Oh, and I paid for my car, it is therefore among my "effects". While planting a bug on it may not count as a "search", the car in the story was
"seized" and impounded for the purpose of removing the bug. What if the person being bugged was innocent? They'd have to make up a fake crime just so they'd have justification to get the bug back.
what's the problem here?
I'll bite: Someone criticizes a mayor "anonymously" by cell phone, say by calling into a radio show and telling the truth about what REALLY happened that night who then pulls a few strings with his police chief buddy who he appointed, who then talks SBC into releasing the phone records. They work out your number and discover you've got a cellphone with GPS. They then use their newfound power to make your life a living hell: everywhere you go, a cop is there. "Seems your taillight is out, hold on a few minutes while I write you a ticket" "My light's not out" *crunch* "Are you talking back to me sonny? And is that a dog in your back seat? I'm going to have to ask you to step out of your car so I can shoot it."
I'm sure you're going to say "aww, nobody'd EVER abuse their power", but you'd be more than happy to ignore that apparently the email in the above refernced story must have been the truth or the defamation case wouldn't have been dismissed. The whole case was specifically to try to harass John Doe.
prevents time warner from revealing Doe's idenity.
You forgot "Without a warrant, subpoena or otherwise obeying due process of law."
The whole damn thing is because Fitch wants to know the guy's name, but just like the RIAA, instead of actually filing a John Doe lawsuit or filing criminal identity theft charges and having a judge issue a demand for the persons' name, he wants to just throw his own weight around because he seems to think he's more special (perhaps in the short-bus sense) than everyone else.
The problem here is that he has set the precedent that your salary is if you do nothing; if you invent something cool, you sue the company to get MORE.
I DO work for a large company who owns my inventions, I DO have patents in my name but assigned to my employer
Once upon a time there was a man whose job it was to put a cog on a spoke and hit it with a hammer. All day long. He was paid hourly to swing the hammer. After years of doing this, he realized that if the cog was replaced by a widget, the device he was working on would run 50% more efficiently with %10 less noise. The company patented the idea, went on to make billions off of the invention, and continued to pay the inventor his hourly wage.
Now, you either are paid to create patentable things, or you're incredibly altruistic to be giving your company your proceeds above and beyond your job description (what you are paid your salary for doing, not "nothing") for free.
why not prove to the patent office that your process is different.
In other words, feed the system more by having someone write the patent and file it and adding yet another patent to the pile?
My preferred solution is to require:
1) software patents that expire within the usual software life cycle (of about 4-8 years)
2) require some form of structured pseudocode that clearly describes the process being claimed
3) Similar to a Design patent, only one process can be claimed per patent, none of this "The system in 1, 3 and 8343 whereby the operator is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch while entering data with his/her left pinky" that plagues the system now.
4) Titles and abstracts will be written by the reviewer to accurately describe what is being patented, NOT the misleading gibberish and shoutoutz that show up in the patents these days.
5) 2+4 require more qualified personnel as you say.
6) In the absense of 3, date each claim individually to prevent submarine patents (real ones, not the "zomg you sued us from nowhere" we hear about often here) where people claim a flagrantly invalid process just to get a starting date, and then bounce the patent against the patent office repeatedly while adding new (sometimes their own, often other peoples') innovations to the claims, resulting in a patent that may expire sooner, but for which all prior art must beat the original filing deadline, even if it had been in use a whole year before the actual claim had been added.
7) Better beats older. If you invent a sort process that sorts in O(n log (n/2)), and patent it, and I read the patent and see that by changing a line in your pseudocode it becomes O(n), I win. People who wish to use my O(n) patent come to me for licensing, even though your patent may have been heavily used. People who only want to use O(n log (n/2)) can go to you for your silly patent, but you have no right to challenge mine for one-upping you.
Of course, eliminating the "business method" patent that software uses now would be the far superior model. Businesses ran fine for over 200 years (Ending in 1998 with the State Street case) here in the US without patenting their "methods", and even longer in Europe.
The answer is no.
When you establish a connection, one IP address is used for the source of that connection, and after that, thats the path the traffic runs.
If you had two cable modems doing 5Mbps, you could download 2 things at 5Mbps (one using each modem) but you could not directly download 1 thing at 10Mbps (if its http or ftp, you could cheat and use the "resume" feature to have one cable modem download the first half while the second downloaded the second have, and then your specially written client would assemble these together.)
Channel bonding can be done with the appropriate hardware and ISP, but I'm willing to bet that your cable provider is both unwilling and incapable of setting this up. (With bonding, only one IP address is used, and the hardware passes traffic down whichever wire is free/not broken.)
Wasn't the purpose of patents to allow us little guys to profit from a good idea without having to risk our future on it?
From where I stand, its not doing that. Not even close. I'm working with a startup, and we thought about patenting our software, and the first thing we did was run into someone else who has patented something similar (the only difference is that their patent calls for two databases to do what we can do with one database and logic). Having spent more than it would have cost to file a patent ourselves on a lawyer, search, and the reactive scramble, we decided it wasn't worth it.
Even as it is, externally our program shows no difference at all to the patented algorithm, since it does essentially the same thing in an internally different way. Eventually we'll probably be sued, and millions of dollars in fees and legal expenses later, finally convince a jury that no, two databases are not the same as one database and a handful of user-supplied rules. And thats if we're not forced to open our codebase to our competitor, after which we'd pretty much be dead. It'd be what, two days? a week? Before they update their software with new rule-based operation that they just "thought of" and we'd never be able to prove they stole.
I find it to be the case more often than not
Yes, thanks to the TCP/IP protocol, this is the case more often than not.
Because the TCP/IP protocol requires you to ACK everything you download, if you cram your upstream pipe full of junk, your ACK packets are going to be delayed a nice long time, causing your download to stop while the other end wonders what happened to you.
Fixing this is as simple as limiting your upload rate. Or if you want to discover the internet as it was really meant to be on broadband, implement a Quality of Service setup that prioritizes ACK packets and watch in amazement as everything seems to go faster when under load.
If you take California or New York City and treat them as a separate country, the rate of broadband access would be quite competitive with the others.
Show me the website of someone offering 24MB/1MB DSL in New York. This guy gets that in Tokyo. Show me the website of a company providing VDSL to a New York apartment for $50 a month like you can get in South Korea.
I'm sure its nothing to fret about, after all 11th place is respectable for a country that didn't even bother to show up.
Second step, if that really is the truth...
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say he's not bright enough to go back to school, but he certainly does lack some level of common sense. (Then again, he'd probably fit right into academia...)
I would have kept the job while I was looking for a school that would take me, but whatever floats his boat (really, you know he just wanted to spend his days playing video games and occasionally checking the mail to see if a university sent him anything)
I had to recall the exact time offset and rewind to there
;)
Every VCR I've had automatically rewound to the point where the tape was when it was inserted if you hit the rewind button.
I guess porn drove that innovation too