Last time I ran a Google Adwords campaign, they'd drop your advert if you get less than a threshold clickthrough rate. I think it was 0.5%. It was certainly higher than 0.16%. So how did they do this? Have Google dropped that restriction?
I don't think so. If a different token is used instead of the credit card there's an extra level of indirection, and that seems to me to make a substantial difference to the nature of the invention.
Err, no it shouldn't. Saying "A is braver than B" is perfectly grammatical. "A is braver than B is" is reduntant, and generally frowned upon. Following "than" in the former case should be an indirect pronoun, in this case "me".
Your grammar-nazi status has been hereby revoked. Heil Fowler!
1 click requires one to store the credit card information in database.
Only in as much as the credit card information must be stored in a database somewhere/anyway/. Many payment service providers (i.e., the people who keep your card on their database whatever the vendor does with it) offer a repeat billing service. They're not hard to use. I have never heard of a reputable payment service provider being hacked.
You want prior art for 1 click? What about those old-style vending machines - you only had to press the button once to get the chocolate bar or can of soda.
What they didn't do was remember your credit card details to charge you on and recognise you via a token that you presented back to them as identification when you wanted to complete a transaction. These are important parts of Amazon's patent that would have to be present for something to be prior art. #
I thought when you mentioned vending machines that you might be thinking of Klix Key, but that is apparently a prepayment token system, with records of the amount of money deposited stored on the token, which is probably different enough that it doesn't count. Amazon's implementation is certainly significantly improved from a resistence-to-fraud standpoint, which may be enough to allow Amazon's patent even if this is considered prior art. I'm also not certain that it predates Amazon's one-click implementation.
you'd need to mine like 50+ carats worth of coal (accounting for impurities, etc) to get your half-carat of C-13. Then you'd have to use some sort of centrifuge to separate out the C-13.
I'm not certain, but I'd guess neutron bombardment turns C-12 into C-13.
My guess is that this is likely to make the process expensive enough to be impractical.
Even if you do have to go to such lengths, the volumes required are tiny. The quoted amount needed for our current data archival rate is 10 milligrams per annum -- increasing to 600 grams per annum if we record all experiences of everyone on the planet. 300 grams of C-13 would, by your figures, require 30 kilograms of source carbon. That doesn't sound too expensive to me. Your one carat of data diamond stores 10^21 bits, or around 100,000 petabytes. It doesn't sound too expensive to me.
Let's get rid of all those pesky indicators on car dashboards, too.
They already have gotten rid of most of them. The first car I ever drove had an oil pressure guage and a battery voltage display; my current car has neither of these. Neither does it have the vacuum ("economy") guage that my second car had. I've seen many cars over the last ten years that don't have a rev counter, either (my current car does, despite being automatic and therefore having less need of one than my previous manual car that didn't).
Agreed. I've never had a problem with LEDs, except my latest PC (manufactured by "eSys") came with a stupidly bright blue power LED that illuminates about a square metre of wall on the opposite side of the room brightly enough that you can actually read by it, if your eyes are adjusted. WTF?!
1. With enough gadgets, the collective LEDs provide just enough glow so that I can make out the darks shapes of furniture etc., so that I can get to the bathroom in the middle of the night without turning on the lights and waking my wife (believe me, you don't wanna wake my wife).
I've actually installed additional LEDs in my house for just this purpose. I got four ultrabright yellows and hooked 'em up in to an old DC power supply from some equipment that no longer functions. Just enough light to navigate by, not enough to wake anyone up.
I'm still using acrobat 5. It opens in less than half a second, uses only 12 megabytes of disk space, doesn't have a notification area icon, and just seems to me to work better than more recent versions. I've yet to find a PDF file I wanted to read that doesn't work (although it has now reached the point that almost all pop up a message saying they might not work properly, yet they always do).
Or, as other posters suggest, use an entirely different program.
Why is it unlikely to affect its commercial value? If people were able to read OT III when they were just joining then Scientology would practically collapse.
Because, as far as I understand the matter, the courts haven't interpreted this kind of thing as an impediment to fair use. If a critic writes an article about (say) a reference book, quoting from it to show that it contains things that are blatantly untrue, is that a violation of fair use? AFAIK, courts tend to think it is. Yet it does affect commercial value.
The narrow interpretation of 'affecting commercial value' that I alluded to in my original post is something along the lines of "people will use this as a replacement, rather than buying the original". This seems unlikely to apply in this case: first, this document isn't all you get as a scientologist; second, the church would be quick to suggest, I think, that these documents are not actually sold to their suckers, sorry I mean adherents, but simply given to them once they have made enough donations -- no, that's wrong again isn't it? -- reached a state of sufficient clarity to understand them, I mean. While it does affect the likelihood of somebody wanting to be a scientologist, it doesn't affect how much somebody who does want to become a scientologist is likely to fork over for access to this kind of thing.
OK, so it can detect the existence of substances by polymer size (i.e. molecular weight)? But there are thousands of substances that can assume any of a very wide range of values for this number, so doesn't this render it useless for any practical application...?
So? There's nothing stopping you from making an artificial diamond with equal quantities, as described, as long as you have the tech to make the diamond atom-by-atom. Or did I miss something?
My calculations put the figure at 31.5 million seconds per annum, which is well within an order of magnitude. Actually, it's within half an order of magnitude.
The NDIS network card driver api is well documented, and is supported by projects for Linux and FreeBSD.
Not to mention orginally having been designed to be OS-independent, so that vendors only had to supply a single driver for MSDOS, OS/2, Netware and Windows. OK, so MS have extended it since then, but it still builds on that original base.
Really it isn't hard. Identify the code you own, replace the code you don't, put on a GPL header and release.
Of course, in a significant software project, step 1 might take a month of lawyer's time ($35,000), and step 2 might take a man-year (or maybe even more) of software engineer's time ($80,000). If you think financing a $115,000 operation "isn't hard", I'd like to have your bank account.
The UK is referenced because we STILL can't have stores be open more than 6 hours on a Sunday because of some fictional character in some fictional pile of cod-swallop from 2000 years ago
Just wanted to let you know that the primary reason behind current sunday-trading laws is actually "protecting the family" and not religiously motivated. Religious concerns dictated the choice of sunday as the day, but the primary motivation was purely secular.
It's most likely here because scientology nutjobs have sent Slashdot a cease and desist in the past, and made them pull down posts with copyrighted material (I'm fine with that)
I'm not fine with that. If Scientology-copyrighted material has been posted at Slashdot, it is:
* Noncommercial in nature. Posters at slashdot are not generally rewarded financially for their posts. * Likely to have been a small excerpt. Seriously, you're not going to post the entirity of whatever you're quoting from, and you're likely to only have a summary anyway, as Scientology guards their original documents pretty well. * For the purposes of criticism, and therefore protected speech. * Unlikely to affect the commercial value of the copyrighted material (at least via the mechanisms US courts seem to recognise as performing this function).
It would therefore, in my (non-lawyery) opinion, be fair use.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, forgot a word. Indirect object pronoun, I meant to say.
Anyone confused about why playpen balls and velociraptors should see:
Grownups
Velociraptors
It's really cruel to tell someone that *after* they finish reading it all.
(Yeah, it happened to me, too...)
Yep. California is one fucked-up place.
Last time I ran a Google Adwords campaign, they'd drop your advert if you get less than a threshold clickthrough rate. I think it was 0.5%. It was certainly higher than 0.16%. So how did they do this? Have Google dropped that restriction?
Consider that click through rates to a relevant ad are typically less than 3%. This represents 5% of people who would normally click on an advert.
I don't think so. If a different token is used instead of the credit card there's an extra level of indirection, and that seems to me to make a substantial difference to the nature of the invention.
because you would say "braver than I am".
Err, no it shouldn't. Saying "A is braver than B" is perfectly grammatical. "A is braver than B is" is reduntant, and generally frowned upon. Following "than" in the former case should be an indirect pronoun, in this case "me".
Your grammar-nazi status has been hereby revoked. Heil Fowler!
1 click requires one to store the credit card information in database.
/anyway/. Many payment service providers (i.e., the people who keep your card on their database whatever the vendor does with it) offer a repeat billing service. They're not hard to use. I have never heard of a reputable payment service provider being hacked.
Only in as much as the credit card information must be stored in a database somewhere
You want prior art for 1 click? What about those old-style vending machines - you only had to press the button once to get the chocolate bar or can of soda.
What they didn't do was remember your credit card details to charge you on and recognise you via a token that you presented back to them as identification when you wanted to complete a transaction. These are important parts of Amazon's patent that would have to be present for something to be prior art. #
I thought when you mentioned vending machines that you might be thinking of Klix Key, but that is apparently a prepayment token system, with records of the amount of money deposited stored on the token, which is probably different enough that it doesn't count. Amazon's implementation is certainly significantly improved from a resistence-to-fraud standpoint, which may be enough to allow Amazon's patent even if this is considered prior art. I'm also not certain that it predates Amazon's one-click implementation.
you'd need to mine like 50+ carats worth of coal (accounting for impurities, etc) to get your half-carat of C-13. Then you'd have to use some sort of centrifuge to separate out the C-13.
I'm not certain, but I'd guess neutron bombardment turns C-12 into C-13.
My guess is that this is likely to make the process expensive enough to be impractical.
Even if you do have to go to such lengths, the volumes required are tiny. The quoted amount needed for our current data archival rate is 10 milligrams per annum -- increasing to 600 grams per annum if we record all experiences of everyone on the planet. 300 grams of C-13 would, by your figures, require 30 kilograms of source carbon. That doesn't sound too expensive to me. Your one carat of data diamond stores 10^21 bits, or around 100,000 petabytes. It doesn't sound too expensive to me.
Let's get rid of all those pesky indicators on car dashboards, too.
They already have gotten rid of most of them. The first car I ever drove had an oil pressure guage and a battery voltage display; my current car has neither of these. Neither does it have the vacuum ("economy") guage that my second car had. I've seen many cars over the last ten years that don't have a rev counter, either (my current car does, despite being automatic and therefore having less need of one than my previous manual car that didn't).
Agreed. I've never had a problem with LEDs, except my latest PC (manufactured by "eSys") came with a stupidly bright blue power LED that illuminates about a square metre of wall on the opposite side of the room brightly enough that you can actually read by it, if your eyes are adjusted. WTF?!
1. With enough gadgets, the collective LEDs provide just enough glow so that I can make out the darks shapes of furniture etc., so that I can get to the bathroom in the middle of the night without turning on the lights and waking my wife (believe me, you don't wanna wake my wife).
I've actually installed additional LEDs in my house for just this purpose. I got four ultrabright yellows and hooked 'em up in to an old DC power supply from some equipment that no longer functions. Just enough light to navigate by, not enough to wake anyone up.
I'm still using acrobat 5. It opens in less than half a second, uses only 12 megabytes of disk space, doesn't have a notification area icon, and just seems to me to work better than more recent versions. I've yet to find a PDF file I wanted to read that doesn't work (although it has now reached the point that almost all pop up a message saying they might not work properly, yet they always do).
Or, as other posters suggest, use an entirely different program.
Why is it unlikely to affect its commercial value? If people were able to read OT III when they were just joining then Scientology would practically collapse.
Because, as far as I understand the matter, the courts haven't interpreted this kind of thing as an impediment to fair use. If a critic writes an article about (say) a reference book, quoting from it to show that it contains things that are blatantly untrue, is that a violation of fair use? AFAIK, courts tend to think it is. Yet it does affect commercial value.
The narrow interpretation of 'affecting commercial value' that I alluded to in my original post is something along the lines of "people will use this as a replacement, rather than buying the original". This seems unlikely to apply in this case: first, this document isn't all you get as a scientologist; second, the church would be quick to suggest, I think, that these documents are not actually sold to their suckers, sorry I mean adherents, but simply given to them once they have made enough donations -- no, that's wrong again isn't it? -- reached a state of sufficient clarity to understand them, I mean. While it does affect the likelihood of somebody wanting to be a scientologist, it doesn't affect how much somebody who does want to become a scientologist is likely to fork over for access to this kind of thing.
OK, so it can detect the existence of substances by polymer size (i.e. molecular weight)? But there are thousands of substances that can assume any of a very wide range of values for this number, so doesn't this render it useless for any practical application...?
So? There's nothing stopping you from making an artificial diamond with equal quantities, as described, as long as you have the tech to make the diamond atom-by-atom. Or did I miss something?
My calculations put the figure at 31.5 million seconds per annum, which is well within an order of magnitude. Actually, it's within half an order of magnitude.
No, it translates to being able to store all the porn you could ever watch in your lifetime in the palm of your hand.
Err... Wait.
Your other hand, I mean.
^---- Mod parent up. This *is* Charlie Stross.
The NDIS network card driver api is well documented, and is supported by projects for Linux and FreeBSD.
Not to mention orginally having been designed to be OS-independent, so that vendors only had to supply a single driver for MSDOS, OS/2, Netware and Windows. OK, so MS have extended it since then, but it still builds on that original base.
Really it isn't hard. Identify the code you own, replace the code you don't, put on a GPL header and release.
Of course, in a significant software project, step 1 might take a month of lawyer's time ($35,000), and step 2 might take a man-year (or maybe even more) of software engineer's time ($80,000). If you think financing a $115,000 operation "isn't hard", I'd like to have your bank account.
The UK is referenced because we STILL can't have stores be open more than 6 hours on a Sunday because of some fictional character in some fictional pile of cod-swallop from 2000 years ago
Just wanted to let you know that the primary reason behind current sunday-trading laws is actually "protecting the family" and not religiously motivated. Religious concerns dictated the choice of sunday as the day, but the primary motivation was purely secular.
It's most likely here because scientology nutjobs have sent Slashdot a cease and desist in the past, and made them pull down posts with copyrighted material (I'm fine with that)
I'm not fine with that. If Scientology-copyrighted material has been posted at Slashdot, it is:
* Noncommercial in nature. Posters at slashdot are not generally rewarded financially for their posts.
* Likely to have been a small excerpt. Seriously, you're not going to post the entirity of whatever you're quoting from, and you're likely to only have a summary anyway, as Scientology guards their original documents pretty well.
* For the purposes of criticism, and therefore protected speech.
* Unlikely to affect the commercial value of the copyrighted material (at least via the mechanisms US courts seem to recognise as performing this function).
It would therefore, in my (non-lawyery) opinion, be fair use.