I believe that is the Japanese standard for digital broadcasts, which is why the previous/. article about the blu-ray HDTV recorders mentioned that they would not work in the US at all.
Punching it into google gets me a lot of hits for satellite pages, so I suspect that it means that it can be used with a satellite signal as well as terrestrial signals.
IANAL, but does this mean that any language which wasn't BASIC derived would be free to implement this?
No, because 1 stands alone, you can't use it anywhere. 3 combines with 1, but isn't affected by 2, so if you wrote your own language that wasn't basic but used the word isnot, you'd still be infringing 1 and 3 (and any other claims that might apply)
Read the application, the patent is claiming "3. The system of claim 1, wherein the operator is IsNot.", and doesn't even describe its operation at all. In fact, it appears that they're attempting to patent the use of the word "isnot" in a language.
In fact, the whole patent is bogus, the primary claim is
1. A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory
Which is what Perl's != operator does, which is why for string comparisons you have to use "eq" and "ne", since a constant and a variable will never point to the same location.
The problem is that the original law was not written with this technology in mind
Therin lies the problem: Copyright law starts by making every living being a criminal, then has poorly defined grey areas of vague exemptions like "fair use" that more often than not have been defined through court cases that cost people money and livelihoods. It wasn't made with any technology in mind, the authors were lawyers who realized they could make money by making sure that every new advance and situation would require lawsuits to hash it out.
It is because of this that Copyright law is one of the (if not THE) most poorly written laws on the books. EVERYTHING in the US is copyrighted. This post is copyrighted. By looking at this sentence you have infringed upon my copyright, but since I posted this in a public forum, its assumed that its "okay" for you to read this (depending on the number of lawyers I can throw at you: witness the number of people that post private things on public webservers then sue, successfully, when people download them).
Valve doesn't ransack anyone, they just disable your account.
Pretend that my watch had a remote control that let me turn it off. If you stole my watch, using the remote control to turn off my watch would be well within my rights. Thats all Valve is doing, making the time and effort you went to to warez their game meaningless.
Typically you get an abstract free, then pay for the paper. I suspect that google won't charge for the search itself, but will repeat this tried and true business method somehow (maybe they can make arrangements for a commission from the sale of the paper by the site they found for the person. Searching for nonfree content doesn't count as an ad)
Well damn me, I assumed that since nowhere in the windows update configuration did it mention that an admin has to be logged in for the automatic installation to work, that it would either just do it or log the user out (since it typically has to reboot anyway).
More like "self-updating windows systems = don't work". Sure, it works most of the time, but of the computers I'm responsible for (about 10 of them) 1 has yet to fetch SP2, 2 has no problems fetching updates, but when I visit that satellite office I end up having to install several months worth of updates since despite being set to install automatically, it doesn't. My own workstation had the windows update icon in the task bar for nearly 4 weeks after the release of SP2, with its tooltip reading "Downloading Update: 0%" the entire time.
So, if you're a member of the group of people who think "false sense of security due to broken software is evil", then yes, windows update=evil. Jury's still out on linux, since this company doesn't exist yet and therefore hasn't written a self-updater or shown whether it can get critical patches out in a timely manner while minimizing damage to the system.
And THAT is exactly whats wrong with the world today. RFID is merely a tiny band-aid on a gaping wound of idiot parents who believe they are so holy that their kid's deviations from perfection could not possibly be THEIR fault (for the deviation, or for holding them to an impossible ideal).
Yeah, well when your HMO pays them $25 to see you, they have to push a lot of people through their offices to afford their $500k/year malpractice insurance payments (and thats low end, my boss's wife pays over a million, though she's an OB).
Of course, the $5m mansions and the fancy cars have to be paid for as well.
Inevitably you end up with an artificially rigid language structure that sounds like something that nobody would EVER say. Perfectly easy to read, after all, who wouldn't understand what "ADD VAR1 TO VAR2 GIVING VARX", but who the hell would use the word "giving" in such a way. It's a nightmare to learn or write, at least for English-speaking people who would have to constantly fight years of learning to speak real English to make up for the fake english in the language.
Well, my idea would be specifically for a credit card type replacement, not for a general purpose credit card. I could make up my own stuff, as long as it was able to magnetize the stripe surface correctly on demand, it would work with any CC reader.
BTW, most medical plans cover eye diseases (such as glaucoma). Vision plans are typically just for getting glasses or contacts and checking how bad your vision is in the first place.
When I was a little kid, I had a solar powered calculator that was about the same size as a credit card. The touch sensitive surface from that could be used on the surface of the smartcard.
In fact, if I was developing this, I'd use a fake magnetic strip and work it like those fake cassete tapes you use to plug in a cd player into your car tape deck. When you don't type the pin in, theres nothing on the strip. When you type the pin in, you get 30 seconds to swipe the card.
I would willingly pay %0.50-$1.00 to guarantee that I'm actually taking what I think I'm taking.
So would I, but tell me how you think this is going to guarantee that the drug is actually what you think you're taking? The article mentioned nothing about how it would be used, just that if the same ID showed up in the system twice or at the wrong pharmacy, then it would know something suspicious happened. Nothing about making sure the drug inside is correct, or anything like that.
Sounds more like theft deterrent than anything else to me. (Even the people claiming that this will stop Canadian drugs... the machines don't have arms to pin down anyone who tries selling a bottle without a tag on it)
Also, is the picture on the article correct? The anti-tinfoil folks here are insisting that these tags will only be used on the bulk shipments, yet the picture shows a regular pillbottle. Or is the picture just a mock up to look good for the ignorant public?
I think this 1) isn't going to happen and 2) isn't going to fix the larger problem at hand, that being that patents are being approved and fought out in court at great expense to everyone involved. Your plan in fact helps to encourage the latter, as now everyone, valid patent/infringement claim or not has to hash it out and throw lawyers at a technology problem.
Let's say I'm using bit torrent and I forget to turn on my IP blocker
I don't understand what this IP blocker thing does. All the RIAA/MPAA has to do is connect to the tracker and ask it for the list of people who are currently seeding. Your client settings can't do anything to stop this.
And then we had the UN start sanctioning Iraq. We set off political and religious turmoil in the region that would burn for decades just to try and counter Saddam's growing influence (not to mention that WE put the bastard there in the first place). Now fundie Muslims are in power, and everyone around the world is worse for it.
As for your "do you think they would care" bit of WTFery, take a real hard look at Bush's elite "base" as he calls them. I bet every one of those rich business owners were quite free to go and vote, and most certainly they voted for Bush this year.
if someone wants to choose to do a job for 80 hours a week and make a lot of money at it, they should have that right also.
If the company wants to pay me a salary worth working 80 hours a week, then I'd be happy to do so.
If the company wants to pay me a salary worth working 40 hours a week and tell me that the difference will be made up with comp time, then mid-crunch time after I've put several weeks of 80 hours in tell me that they've decided to end comp time and cancel the comp time I've earned, then I'd be happy to sue them.
The other way to get their attention is to sue the company for breaking the law when they break the law and announce after months of overtime that the comp time that the employees have accrued will be cancelled.
If you think thats legal, you can come work for me. I pay $1 million a month, except from the second before payday to the second after payday, you make $5 a month, retroactively. Hey, it balances out to over minimum wage, right?
EA has a terrible reputation within the industry for treating it's people like shit.
Theres a HUGE difference between treating your employees like shit and literally robbing them of their compensation by annoucing towards the end of the project that their comp time for the overtime they've already put in is void.
Let the lawsuit go on. This goes beyond some "wah my life sucks" complaint, this is basically theft. If you could arrest a corporation, it should be thrown in jail to think about what its done.
If these replies are really from him, he's just Yet Another Scumbag Lawyer. He doesn't give a shit if anyone "reformed", in fact it would be killing his source for very golden eggs.
Its simple. If I choose to disbelieve the "priests" in the white labcoats, I can simply repeat their experiment for myself to see if I can obtain the same outcome. Otherwise, I can find a number of other "priests" who have repeated the same experiments for themselves, who have assembled papers describing how this can be repeated, who have had it reviewed and then published in one of many journals.
Thus, I can observe genetics at work by watching the coloring patterns of generations of an animal. I can see microevolution in the breeding history of my little brother's miniature doberman (doberman x italian greyhound, for those who care.) Macroevolution is a little harder for me to swallow personally, but until someone either demonstrates to me speciation in progress, or demonstrates the creation of a fully-featured new lifeform from nothing, I'll chose to regard all comers to the task as what they are: unproven theories about the origin of the modern state of life.
If it is truly a contract position, then the contract is whats making it so hard to quit.
Now, lying about the amount of crunch time in order to get the hapless fool to sign the contract is probably grounds to dissolve the contract without penalty to the programmer, but thats going to take a lawyer. And that will take the money that this guy isn't getting paid for all this work, as well as the possibility that nobody's going to hire him again having sued his previous employer.
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I believe that is the Japanese standard for digital broadcasts, which is why the previous /. article about the blu-ray HDTV recorders mentioned that they would not work in the US at all.
Punching it into google gets me a lot of hits for satellite pages, so I suspect that it means that it can be used with a satellite signal as well as terrestrial signals.
IANAL, but does this mean that any language which wasn't BASIC derived would be free to implement this?
No, because 1 stands alone, you can't use it anywhere. 3 combines with 1, but isn't affected by 2, so if you wrote your own language that wasn't basic but used the word isnot, you'd still be infringing 1 and 3 (and any other claims that might apply)
Read the application, the patent is claiming "3. The system of claim 1, wherein the operator is IsNot.", and doesn't even describe its operation at all. In fact, it appears that they're attempting to patent the use of the word "isnot" in a language.
In fact, the whole patent is bogus, the primary claim is
1. A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory
Which is what Perl's != operator does, which is why for string comparisons you have to use "eq" and "ne", since a constant and a variable will never point to the same location.
The problem is that the original law was not written with this technology in mind
Therin lies the problem: Copyright law starts by making every living being a criminal, then has poorly defined grey areas of vague exemptions like "fair use" that more often than not have been defined through court cases that cost people money and livelihoods. It wasn't made with any technology in mind, the authors were lawyers who realized they could make money by making sure that every new advance and situation would require lawsuits to hash it out.
It is because of this that Copyright law is one of the (if not THE) most poorly written laws on the books. EVERYTHING in the US is copyrighted. This post is copyrighted. By looking at this sentence you have infringed upon my copyright, but since I posted this in a public forum, its assumed that its "okay" for you to read this (depending on the number of lawyers I can throw at you: witness the number of people that post private things on public webservers then sue, successfully, when people download them).
Valve doesn't ransack anyone, they just disable your account.
Pretend that my watch had a remote control that let me turn it off. If you stole my watch, using the remote control to turn off my watch would be well within my rights. Thats all Valve is doing, making the time and effort you went to to warez their game meaningless.
Typically you get an abstract free, then pay for the paper. I suspect that google won't charge for the search itself, but will repeat this tried and true business method somehow (maybe they can make arrangements for a commission from the sale of the paper by the site they found for the person. Searching for nonfree content doesn't count as an ad)
Well damn me, I assumed that since nowhere in the windows update configuration did it mention that an admin has to be logged in for the automatic installation to work, that it would either just do it or log the user out (since it typically has to reboot anyway).
More like "self-updating windows systems = don't work". Sure, it works most of the time, but of the computers I'm responsible for (about 10 of them) 1 has yet to fetch SP2, 2 has no problems fetching updates, but when I visit that satellite office I end up having to install several months worth of updates since despite being set to install automatically, it doesn't. My own workstation had the windows update icon in the task bar for nearly 4 weeks after the release of SP2, with its tooltip reading "Downloading Update: 0%" the entire time.
So, if you're a member of the group of people who think "false sense of security due to broken software is evil", then yes, windows update=evil. Jury's still out on linux, since this company doesn't exist yet and therefore hasn't written a self-updater or shown whether it can get critical patches out in a timely manner while minimizing damage to the system.
the vast majority of parents will.
And THAT is exactly whats wrong with the world today. RFID is merely a tiny band-aid on a gaping wound of idiot parents who believe they are so holy that their kid's deviations from perfection could not possibly be THEIR fault (for the deviation, or for holding them to an impossible ideal).
Yeah, well when your HMO pays them $25 to see you, they have to push a lot of people through their offices to afford their $500k/year malpractice insurance payments (and thats low end, my boss's wife pays over a million, though she's an OB).
Of course, the $5m mansions and the fancy cars have to be paid for as well.
Inevitably you end up with an artificially rigid language structure that sounds like something that nobody would EVER say. Perfectly easy to read, after all, who wouldn't understand what "ADD VAR1 TO VAR2 GIVING VARX", but who the hell would use the word "giving" in such a way. It's a nightmare to learn or write, at least for English-speaking people who would have to constantly fight years of learning to speak real English to make up for the fake english in the language.
Well, my idea would be specifically for a credit card type replacement, not for a general purpose credit card. I could make up my own stuff, as long as it was able to magnetize the stripe surface correctly on demand, it would work with any CC reader.
BTW, most medical plans cover eye diseases (such as glaucoma). Vision plans are typically just for getting glasses or contacts and checking how bad your vision is in the first place.
Then we need to fix this.
When I was a little kid, I had a solar powered calculator that was about the same size as a credit card. The touch sensitive surface from that could be used on the surface of the smartcard.
In fact, if I was developing this, I'd use a fake magnetic strip and work it like those fake cassete tapes you use to plug in a cd player into your car tape deck. When you don't type the pin in, theres nothing on the strip. When you type the pin in, you get 30 seconds to swipe the card.
I like it as it is, since I never plug in the PC speaker unless I need it to see why the computer isn't booting anymore.
I would willingly pay %0.50-$1.00 to guarantee that I'm actually taking what I think I'm taking.
So would I, but tell me how you think this is going to guarantee that the drug is actually what you think you're taking? The article mentioned nothing about how it would be used, just that if the same ID showed up in the system twice or at the wrong pharmacy, then it would know something suspicious happened. Nothing about making sure the drug inside is correct, or anything like that.
Sounds more like theft deterrent than anything else to me. (Even the people claiming that this will stop Canadian drugs... the machines don't have arms to pin down anyone who tries selling a bottle without a tag on it)
Also, is the picture on the article correct? The anti-tinfoil folks here are insisting that these tags will only be used on the bulk shipments, yet the picture shows a regular pillbottle. Or is the picture just a mock up to look good for the ignorant public?
I think this 1) isn't going to happen and 2) isn't going to fix the larger problem at hand, that being that patents are being approved and fought out in court at great expense to everyone involved. Your plan in fact helps to encourage the latter, as now everyone, valid patent/infringement claim or not has to hash it out and throw lawyers at a technology problem.
Let's say I'm using bit torrent and I forget to turn on my IP blocker
I don't understand what this IP blocker thing does. All the RIAA/MPAA has to do is connect to the tracker and ask it for the list of people who are currently seeding. Your client settings can't do anything to stop this.
Wow.
Just... wow.
OK, I don't know where you went to school or what they taught you, but do you know what they had before we fucked the middle east over?
Iraq had a Christian prime minister. Openly Christian. Back then, they didn't kill people for practicing their faith. Women equal rights with men, and could hold jobs, vote, and even run for office.
And then we had the UN start sanctioning Iraq. We set off political and religious turmoil in the region that would burn for decades just to try and counter Saddam's growing influence (not to mention that WE put the bastard there in the first place). Now fundie Muslims are in power, and everyone around the world is worse for it.
As for your "do you think they would care" bit of WTFery, take a real hard look at Bush's elite "base" as he calls them. I bet every one of those rich business owners were quite free to go and vote, and most certainly they voted for Bush this year.
if someone wants to choose to do a job for 80 hours a week and make a lot of money at it, they should have that right also.
If the company wants to pay me a salary worth working 80 hours a week, then I'd be happy to do so.
If the company wants to pay me a salary worth working 40 hours a week and tell me that the difference will be made up with comp time, then mid-crunch time after I've put several weeks of 80 hours in tell me that they've decided to end comp time and cancel the comp time I've earned, then I'd be happy to sue them.
The other way to get their attention is to sue the company for breaking the law when they break the law and announce after months of overtime that the comp time that the employees have accrued will be cancelled.
If you think thats legal, you can come work for me. I pay $1 million a month, except from the second before payday to the second after payday, you make $5 a month, retroactively. Hey, it balances out to over minimum wage, right?
EA has a terrible reputation within the industry for treating it's people like shit.
Theres a HUGE difference between treating your employees like shit and literally robbing them of their compensation by annoucing towards the end of the project that their comp time for the overtime they've already put in is void.
Let the lawsuit go on. This goes beyond some "wah my life sucks" complaint, this is basically theft. If you could arrest a corporation, it should be thrown in jail to think about what its done.
If these replies are really from him, he's just Yet Another Scumbag Lawyer. He doesn't give a shit if anyone "reformed", in fact it would be killing his source for very golden eggs.
Its simple. If I choose to disbelieve the "priests" in the white labcoats, I can simply repeat their experiment for myself to see if I can obtain the same outcome. Otherwise, I can find a number of other "priests" who have repeated the same experiments for themselves, who have assembled papers describing how this can be repeated, who have had it reviewed and then published in one of many journals.
Thus, I can observe genetics at work by watching the coloring patterns of generations of an animal. I can see microevolution in the breeding history of my little brother's miniature doberman (doberman x italian greyhound, for those who care.) Macroevolution is a little harder for me to swallow personally, but until someone either demonstrates to me speciation in progress, or demonstrates the creation of a fully-featured new lifeform from nothing, I'll chose to regard all comers to the task as what they are: unproven theories about the origin of the modern state of life.
If it is truly a contract position, then the contract is whats making it so hard to quit.
Now, lying about the amount of crunch time in order to get the hapless fool to sign the contract is probably grounds to dissolve the contract without penalty to the programmer, but thats going to take a lawyer. And that will take the money that this guy isn't getting paid for all this work, as well as the possibility that nobody's going to hire him again having sued his previous employer.