the same person that is against government b/c it is by definition incompetent and can't do anything as good as the private sector AT THE SAME TIME firmly believes the government runs secret programs
Clearly, they are planted by the government to discredit the groups working against the government by having other people planted by the government point out the crazy contradictions that they believe in.
The law against facial recognition is a nice idea that will never happen for one simple reason, it's potentially more useful to the authorities than the problems it creates.
That just means that the law will make an exception for cops, just like every other law. Like those laws that let cops film whoever they please (if you aren't doing anything wrong...), but if you film a cop, they get to rough you up, drop your camera a few times then accidentally run it over with a squad car.
Your patent for a warp drive that glows blue and goes "whoosh" is every bit a stinking pile of bullshit as Apple's patent for a black, thin rectangular tablet with narrow bezel and a flat back.
When Paint.NET allows me to scroll past the edge of the canvas so I can get to the corners of my image without having to either drag all the toolbars into the center of the window or turn them all off, then we'll talk about great interfaces.
Of course, I suppose I COULD drag the Paint.net toolboxes out of the main window so they're not in the way, but that's BLASPHEMY, isn't it?
It seems you've actually missed the whole point of free enterprise. If someone buys all the companies that do "x", then that opens the market for a lot of NEW companies that do "x".
You're assuming that Al Gore (along with everyone else) is rational. As for other people opening oil companies to fill the vacuum, you'd probably have a few try, but as the price of oil really takes off, the cost of prospecting will probably reach the point where people would rather just pay fines for trespassing on Gore's property than spend a lot of money to drill yet another dry well.
If you don't like my example, it'd certainly be much cheaper to buy all the property surrounding your house and set up toll booths demanding $1000 each way. With municipalities hurting so much these days, they'd probably even sell the right-of-ways and the street itself to anyone with enough cash.
If you take that away, why should I invest all that time and money?
You shouldn't. Leave getting rich to people like Bill Gates, or the other people and companies that made computer software up through the 90's (especially the 1998 State Street decision) before software became generally patentable. They seemed to do just fine without them.
the majority of your countrymen seem to believe it's beneficial.
Polls say no.
The problem is that thanks to the representative nature of the representative democracy, people have to decide which issues are actually important to them and support people who will vote the right way on those issues. Everything else gets thrown under the bus.
Thus, we have 500+ people in Washington DC who haven't got a fucking clue how to run a country, but damned if they won't vote the "right" way on abortions.
It must cast out the excess in order for the society to survive, and in order to be able to cast out the excess there must be a larger society with which to absorb these outcasts
Or kill them. Or in the case of polygamy, castrate them.
Charities may help the poorest in society in the short term, but a new country with true freedom may do far more in the long term.
Well, we can wait and see how these floating societies deal with bankruptcy. It's easy enough to keep a high standard of living when anyone not keeping up the standard takes a long walk off the short pier.
Hating this man for the way that he spends his wealth
While this particular use of wealth is quite benign, I can think of many ways that people could spend their wealth to piss me off. For instance, what if Al Gore got all his buddies together and they bought up all the oil companies and shut them down just to prove a point? Would you really think "oh, well, he was fully within his rights to do that, and I don't begrudge his actions one bit" as you starved to death? Resources are finite, and a shrinking pool of people have an increasing ability to control an increasing portion of those resources. As long as that control is not exercised in a way that harms others, everyone is fine with it, but how long will the rich uphold that promise?
If you're developing a web browser you probably have a lot of other things going on that have nothing to do with the internal API that might merit changing the version number.
Imagine if my local gas station pumps were so stupid as to only support certain named car brands, going to great effort to ensure I can't buy gas unless my vehicle is on the approved list
Better yet, that the model year needs to be on the supported list, and then every year getting all defensive when patrons start showing up in the newest model and asking why they can't get gas. They tell them that they can't have gas until it's tested in that model year car because "who knows, maybe the 2012 Ford Focus runs on hydrogen", before finally blaming Ford for changing the year number even though the fuel didn't change.
What's really needed is an engine (API) version number that gas stations (addon developers) can target, and that only changes when the engine (API) changes. A well designed number would capture both added features and removed features in a way that a plugin can be marked with a range of versions that provide the required API features.
This is true for freshwater. Most of the ice is freshwater, however the ocean most certainly is not. The ocean saltwater is far more dense than the ice, therefore the ice displaces less than its volume.
The difference is a few percent at most, as other people have pointed out, greenland losing its ice cover will dwarf whatever tiny rise the floating ice will cause.
lets program the chips thousands of times to detect bleed over voltages and reduce the life of the device by 1000 fold to get a unique fingerprint for the flash chip. that will certainly help eliminate counterfeits. and recude the life of the device by a factor of many thousands so consumers will have to replace the entire device more frequently. win win all around!
That reminds me of ye olde heade knocke on 1541 floppy drives while the game checks to see if the right errors are on the disk to verify that you're not playing from a copy. I'd even imagine that these people are planning to sell this as a copy-protection feature. No more CDs/DVDs: sell your sofware on a uniquely identified 16GB stick and check to make sure they haven't copied it to a different thumbdrive.
If only google had access to some kind of electronic system for organizing and sifting through thousands of patents to pick out ones for further review by humans....
You completely missed microlith's point. Even if you figured out every single patent that looks like your software might infringe on, and worked out ways around every last one of them, you'll still get blindsided by some troll suing you with a bullshit patent that you had no way of knowing applied. Like being sued by Lodsys because they claim that their patent on "providing feedback" covers all apps with a "buy" button.
To put it into perspective, if I have the patent on amusing cats with laser pointers, no matter what you are doing, I can sue you and demand discovery (all of your emails, source code, documentation and so on) to try and prove that whatever you're doing is violating my patent. After all, if Lodsys can redefine "feedback" however it pleases, why not "cat" and "laser pointer"? If you're lucky, the judge will throw it out before you have to spend more than a few thousand dollars in lawyer-hours. If you're not... well, that's why I'd offer to settle out of court for a few thousand dollars plus whatever my costs were.
First to file doesn't eliminate the "within one year of publication" rule. If you've got prior art over a year before the patent was filed, it's still fair game. In fact, it doesn't really change much since under "first to invent" everyone declared that they invented it 364 days prior to filing the patent just to make sure they got as much "prior" art edged out as possible, no matter how quickly they scribbled out a patent application after looking at a competitor's demo.
"Though the description hereinbefore may refer to terms commonly used in describing particular computer systems and software, such as IBM personal computer and Windows95 operation system, the concepts equally apply to other systems and software," it reads.
Well fuck. I'm totally going to go get a patent claiming:
1. The method for using a whatsit to perform a thingamabobber. The description hereinbefore may refer to terms commonly used in describing specific things, but the concepts equally apply to everything
A general collapse of the traditional family, respect for authority, and the Puritan work ethic not major factors?
What. The. Fuck?
Let's start with "respect for authority". Depsite the recession, across the board crime has been at an ALL TIME LOW, with new lows reached in most metropolitan areas year-over-year for several years now. If that isn't respect for the authority of law even in the face of adversity, I don't know what you're going on about.
The so-called Puritan Work Ethic hasn't existed for decades. "Work hard and you will be rewarded?" There is not one person who works so hard that no manager can steal the credit for it. Employee of the Year means nothing when you work for Enron, Worldcom, or any other company where one person at the helm can profit handsomely as they destroy the entire enterprise in a flash.
Finally, what does "a general collapse of the traditional family" have to do with anything? Are gays using their gayification beams on Congress to force them to spend money? Mommy and Daddy working full time to keep the family off the dole is giving you an aneurysm?
Sure, unions became too powerful and regulatory capture is strangling small business, but your theocratic fantasies have nothing at all to do with fiscal responsibility.
How many jobless recoveries have we had in a row now? Whether you believe in his economics or not, Keynes's statement "in the long run, we are all dead" is indisputable fact. Bush's tax cuts have been continued, no new taxes were imposed this week, your "eventual" business growth and jobs needs to step up its game, because those of us who are unwilling to wait until we're all dead are getting impatient for some results.
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the same person that is against government b/c it is by definition incompetent and can't do anything as good as the private sector AT THE SAME TIME firmly believes the government runs secret programs
Clearly, they are planted by the government to discredit the groups working against the government by having other people planted by the government point out the crazy contradictions that they believe in.
We're on to you!
The law against facial recognition is a nice idea that will never happen for one simple reason, it's potentially more useful to the authorities than the problems it creates.
That just means that the law will make an exception for cops, just like every other law. Like those laws that let cops film whoever they please (if you aren't doing anything wrong...), but if you film a cop, they get to rough you up, drop your camera a few times then accidentally run it over with a squad car.
Nope. Even when zoomed in, the edge of the canvas stops at the edge of the window.
Your patent for a warp drive that glows blue and goes "whoosh" is every bit a stinking pile of bullshit as Apple's patent for a black, thin rectangular tablet with narrow bezel and a flat back.
When Paint.NET allows me to scroll past the edge of the canvas so I can get to the corners of my image without having to either drag all the toolbars into the center of the window or turn them all off, then we'll talk about great interfaces.
Of course, I suppose I COULD drag the Paint.net toolboxes out of the main window so they're not in the way, but that's BLASPHEMY, isn't it?
It seems you've actually missed the whole point of free enterprise. If someone buys all the companies that do "x", then that opens the market for a lot of NEW companies that do "x".
You're assuming that Al Gore (along with everyone else) is rational. As for other people opening oil companies to fill the vacuum, you'd probably have a few try, but as the price of oil really takes off, the cost of prospecting will probably reach the point where people would rather just pay fines for trespassing on Gore's property than spend a lot of money to drill yet another dry well.
If you don't like my example, it'd certainly be much cheaper to buy all the property surrounding your house and set up toll booths demanding $1000 each way. With municipalities hurting so much these days, they'd probably even sell the right-of-ways and the street itself to anyone with enough cash.
If you take that away, why should I invest all that time and money?
You shouldn't. Leave getting rich to people like Bill Gates, or the other people and companies that made computer software up through the 90's (especially the 1998 State Street decision) before software became generally patentable. They seemed to do just fine without them.
the majority of your countrymen seem to believe it's beneficial.
Polls say no.
The problem is that thanks to the representative nature of the representative democracy, people have to decide which issues are actually important to them and support people who will vote the right way on those issues. Everything else gets thrown under the bus.
Thus, we have 500+ people in Washington DC who haven't got a fucking clue how to run a country, but damned if they won't vote the "right" way on abortions.
It must cast out the excess in order for the society to survive, and in order to be able to cast out the excess there must be a larger society with which to absorb these outcasts
Or kill them. Or in the case of polygamy, castrate them.
Charities may help the poorest in society in the short term, but a new country with true freedom may do far more in the long term.
Well, we can wait and see how these floating societies deal with bankruptcy. It's easy enough to keep a high standard of living when anyone not keeping up the standard takes a long walk off the short pier.
Hating this man for the way that he spends his wealth
While this particular use of wealth is quite benign, I can think of many ways that people could spend their wealth to piss me off. For instance, what if Al Gore got all his buddies together and they bought up all the oil companies and shut them down just to prove a point? Would you really think "oh, well, he was fully within his rights to do that, and I don't begrudge his actions one bit" as you starved to death? Resources are finite, and a shrinking pool of people have an increasing ability to control an increasing portion of those resources. As long as that control is not exercised in a way that harms others, everyone is fine with it, but how long will the rich uphold that promise?
You mean like a major version number?
Sure. If you're developing xulrunner.
If you're developing a web browser you probably have a lot of other things going on that have nothing to do with the internal API that might merit changing the version number.
Monetizing is a goal for those that need to get rich; not all of us need to get rich at all. "Rich" has its own problems.
I've got a few ideas on how to take care of those problems, but I'm going to need a few million dollars to test them...
Imagine if my local gas station pumps were so stupid as to only support certain named car brands, going to great effort to ensure I can't buy gas unless my vehicle is on the approved list
Better yet, that the model year needs to be on the supported list, and then every year getting all defensive when patrons start showing up in the newest model and asking why they can't get gas. They tell them that they can't have gas until it's tested in that model year car because "who knows, maybe the 2012 Ford Focus runs on hydrogen", before finally blaming Ford for changing the year number even though the fuel didn't change.
What's really needed is an engine (API) version number that gas stations (addon developers) can target, and that only changes when the engine (API) changes. A well designed number would capture both added features and removed features in a way that a plugin can be marked with a range of versions that provide the required API features.
This is true for freshwater. Most of the ice is freshwater, however the ocean most certainly is not. The ocean saltwater is far more dense than the ice, therefore the ice displaces less than its volume.
The difference is a few percent at most, as other people have pointed out, greenland losing its ice cover will dwarf whatever tiny rise the floating ice will cause.
lets program the chips thousands of times to detect bleed over voltages and reduce the life of the device by 1000 fold to get a unique fingerprint for the flash chip.
that will certainly help eliminate counterfeits. and recude the life of the device by a factor of many thousands so consumers will have to replace the entire device more frequently. win win all around!
That reminds me of ye olde heade knocke on 1541 floppy drives while the game checks to see if the right errors are on the disk to verify that you're not playing from a copy. I'd even imagine that these people are planning to sell this as a copy-protection feature. No more CDs/DVDs: sell your sofware on a uniquely identified 16GB stick and check to make sure they haven't copied it to a different thumbdrive.
If only google had access to some kind of electronic system for organizing and sifting through thousands of patents to pick out ones for further review by humans....
You completely missed microlith's point. Even if you figured out every single patent that looks like your software might infringe on, and worked out ways around every last one of them, you'll still get blindsided by some troll suing you with a bullshit patent that you had no way of knowing applied. Like being sued by Lodsys because they claim that their patent on "providing feedback" covers all apps with a "buy" button.
To put it into perspective, if I have the patent on amusing cats with laser pointers, no matter what you are doing, I can sue you and demand discovery (all of your emails, source code, documentation and so on) to try and prove that whatever you're doing is violating my patent. After all, if Lodsys can redefine "feedback" however it pleases, why not "cat" and "laser pointer"? If you're lucky, the judge will throw it out before you have to spend more than a few thousand dollars in lawyer-hours. If you're not... well, that's why I'd offer to settle out of court for a few thousand dollars plus whatever my costs were.
Try and figure out how to make healthcare affordable enough that you don't need the government or some other insurance company to pay for it for you?
Is that true, in an absolute way?
Only sometimes.
Since when are you able to measure force in mass per area squared
Since some idiot converted psi to kgscm.
Says the guy with the username "EasyTarget".
First to file doesn't eliminate the "within one year of publication" rule. If you've got prior art over a year before the patent was filed, it's still fair game. In fact, it doesn't really change much since under "first to invent" everyone declared that they invented it 364 days prior to filing the patent just to make sure they got as much "prior" art edged out as possible, no matter how quickly they scribbled out a patent application after looking at a competitor's demo.
Well fuck. I'm totally going to go get a patent claiming:
A general collapse of the traditional family, respect for authority, and the Puritan work ethic not major factors?
What. The. Fuck?
Let's start with "respect for authority". Depsite the recession, across the board crime has been at an ALL TIME LOW, with new lows reached in most metropolitan areas year-over-year for several years now. If that isn't respect for the authority of law even in the face of adversity, I don't know what you're going on about.
The so-called Puritan Work Ethic hasn't existed for decades. "Work hard and you will be rewarded?" There is not one person who works so hard that no manager can steal the credit for it. Employee of the Year means nothing when you work for Enron, Worldcom, or any other company where one person at the helm can profit handsomely as they destroy the entire enterprise in a flash.
Finally, what does "a general collapse of the traditional family" have to do with anything? Are gays using their gayification beams on Congress to force them to spend money? Mommy and Daddy working full time to keep the family off the dole is giving you an aneurysm?
Sure, unions became too powerful and regulatory capture is strangling small business, but your theocratic fantasies have nothing at all to do with fiscal responsibility.
resulting in eventual business growth, jobs
How many jobless recoveries have we had in a row now? Whether you believe in his economics or not, Keynes's statement "in the long run, we are all dead" is indisputable fact. Bush's tax cuts have been continued, no new taxes were imposed this week, your "eventual" business growth and jobs needs to step up its game, because those of us who are unwilling to wait until we're all dead are getting impatient for some results.
Right now, the US and other western countries are suffering from high unemployment which suggests that their productivity is very low
It may "suggest" that, but the reality is that per-employee productivity is at an all-time high and continues to climb.
If my workforce does all the work I need it to do, why should I hire another person, and what would they do? Sit on their thumbs all day?