Re:Too many goddamn wireless standards.
on
IEEE Approves 802.11i
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why can't they just settle on one standard and go from there?
That's essentially what's happening already. They settle on a standard, people adopt it. The trouble comes with the "go from there" part. Whenever you "go" anywhere new with a standard, the old stuff is non-compliant, thus requiring a new standard.
OED? Mind telling us what it is? Sounds interesting.
The Oxford English Dictionary. The definitive record of the english language. Started in 1879, the OED was intended to catalogue every word in the english language and contains quoted excerpts of the earliest written usages of each word. The history of it is pretty interesting. There's a few good books about it's compilation too.May favorite was The Professor and the Madman.
You could have criteria such as creating a product or a prototype within 3-6 months of patent grant, or making a product generally available for purchase within 6-9 months.
The prototype (or model demonstrating the principle) requirement makes sense, I think, but not so much the "product generally available" part. If you come up with something truly innovative that only (say) four or five companies have the capability of producing on an affordable scale (or, in fact, are the only companies that could benefit from said patent), what incentive do these companies have for licensing the design or agreeing to produce the item for you under contract? They'd only need to sit on their ass for those 6-9 months, knowing that there's no way you'll get it made and marketed in time, then make their own version license-free. Say you develop (just making shit up here!) a better silicon doping process for CPU manufacture. You demonstrate actual feasibility with a small sample done in a lab. You can't fab chips in a lab in suitable quatities for manufature, so you need to find a chip foundry to produce it. But then the CPU fabs hear your price for licensing the process and see "gee, that's pretty steep; we'll let you know". If everybody says that, then 6-9 months later they get it for free! I someone does license it, come back to you and say "yeah, great idea; here's your check". They have nothing really to lose.
I should also add that "tit" as a slang for a woman's breast did not show up in print until 1928, making it doubly unlikely that "titbit" was changed by Americans because they considered it obscene. In fact, it appears that the slang usage of "tit" originated in the US. Earliest recorded print usage:
1928 in A. W. Read Classical Amer. Graffiti (1935) 80 A girl may sit & finger her tits and play with her cunt all day.
Finally getting my money's worth out of this dang OED thing!
Or mount it on the ceiling and lay in bed and watch it.
You couldn't pay me enough to sleep under one of those. I met the guy who installed one like that for Shaquille O'Neil, and although he claimed it was mounted good n' solid, I noticed that the man never had his shoes tied. I'd never hang a 300 pound flat screen over my head in earthquake country, trusting that the guy assembling 500 TV mounts an hour for ten cents a day was doing a good job, and trusting that a guy who can't figure out simple shoelace knots knows enough not to hang such a thing with 2" drywall screws.
Get this - Americans changed the English word TITBIT to TIDBID because the original was too obscene!!!
Nonsense. Both were considered proper spelling variations early on, and eventually "tidbit" became the accepted one.
c1640 J. Smyth Lives Berkeleys (1885) III. 25 A tyd bit, i.e. a speciall morsell reserved to eat at last.
1701 Collier M. Aurel. (1726) 13 To be always loading the table, and eating of tid-bits.
As you can see from the above OED excerpts, the "tidbit" variation predates not only the american revolution, but much of the continents colonization as well.
BetaMax was ruined by the rental market and its short tape-time. i.e. it sucked for movies.
BetaMax was drowned in a sea of affordable VHS machines because the only manufacturer of Beta was Sony. Sony founder Akio Morita himself later admitted that the biggest mistake was refusing to license the format to others. The fact that Beta was consistently behind VHS in max record time was just a few more nails in the coffin.
Re:In case of emergency... break IP rights.
on
Open Source Life?
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· Score: 1
Ummm... no, I think you mean the right to choice, right to liberty, and right to property. Choice (a.k.a. convenience) trumps life, at least here in the US.
No that's not the case. All people have the right to life. The dispute to which you refer is actually a debate over at what point a fertilized egg becomes a "person". Crap on someone else's debate, troll.
Re:In case of emergency... break IP rights.
on
Open Source Life?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Isn't "property" merely a set of rights granted by law that can also be repealed?
No, rights exist on their own. All people have certain inalienable rights. THe canonical three basic ones are the right to life, right to liberty, and right to property. Ideally, government exists by the consent of the governed as a method of protecting those rights. "Intellectual property" rights aren't actually property rights in the traditional sense. They're a societal compromise implemented by governments in the interest of promoting (as the US Constitution says it) "Science and Useful arts", wherein the country as a whole temporarily permits someone to have a monopoly on a work (copyright) or a method/process (patent) in exchange for the open publication of that work or method. Really there's no natural right to "intellectual property", as it isn't actually property but ideas. The term "intellectual property" was invented in the 19th century as part of a "PR campaign" of sorts to lobby for extension of copyright terms and strengthening of protections. In fact, none of these things are actually property, as they fail the basic definition of property: tangible items that can be physically posessed.
It is possible to trespass on public property, you know.
Like when you grab hold of ostensibly "public" airwaves that someone is using for commercial purposes?
No. The equivalent to "trespass" on public airwaves would be broadcasting without a license. Receiving radio signals (as covered ad nauseum in previous posts) does not diminish anyone's ability to use the frequencies one is receiving.
Do you not understand the basic priciples of the rights of man? You seem to be unclear on the distinctions between rights and law. May I suggest a little Thomas Paine?
Anyone thought about the fact that Methanol is highly toxic? I can see the headline:
"Small child dies in tragedy involving laptop".
I've not seen any discussion of this aspect of direct methanol fuel cells on the web, but it's an important one.
(shrug) Methanol is no more toxic than many housholdcleaners, and when sealed in a fuel cell it's probably a bit harder to get at. When's the last time someone let a child chew on their laptop battery? Even if we end up with bottles of methanol lying around, it'll certainly be no worse than having bottles of ammonia and bleach.
Nope, soccer moms do become more careless in SUV because they think they (and of course the children) are invincble.
[sarcasm]
Gee I guess THAT settles it! A summary declaration without supporting evidence (or even supporting reasoning) from an AC is obviously the last word on the subject!
[/sarcasm]
Got anything other than personal, anecdotal examples to support this claim?
Actually, SUVs are not safer for those who drive them.
Cripes, I never said they were! Here's a paraphrasing of what was said:
Original Poster: "Soccer moms drive bad because they think their SUVs are safer"
Me: "No, Soccer moms have ALWAYS driven badly, it's just that SUVs aren't as forgiving of bad driving as their Volvos and Audis were, hence more accidents"
Talk to this guy. He's the only one who thinks they actually are safer. Me, I'm just talking about how these crazy, paranoid, protect-my-children-no-matter-what-the-cost suburban mothers think. Personally, I couldn't care less whether they're actually safer in an accident or not. Their lessened ability to avoid an accident is enough for me to consider them more dangerous overall.
It's been said before, and I'll say iot again because it bear repeating:
Use a hardware firewall!
There is no excuse not to. You've obviously got the know-how to operate a $10 Linksys router/firewall. Plug one in and with the default configuration you can install at your leisure. Honestly, whenever I hear someone complain "I can't install XP on a machine plugged directly into a cable modem without getting 0wnz0rd", it sounds like someone complaining that their wallet gets stolen every time they leave it on the roof of their car in the supermarket parking lot!
So if Boston has such great mass transit, why are they undertaking the most expensive highway project ever?
Because the interstate was running right through the middle of the city and was a big-ass mess. You're not going to improve traffic on an interstate highway with a subway system.
They're not going to build them; they're trying to get the big automotive companies to build them. So far they have had some success getting companies to adopt some of the technologies they designed, especially with Hybrids.
I thought the idea of the Hypercar was to roll ALL the latest technology together in a "synergistic" application. To "adopt some of the technologies" seems like exactly what the Hypercar people were complaining about.
Don't even try to pull this one. Huge bulky cars are only safer for those that *drive* them
Pull WHAT? I never said they were safer for those being hit. I was speaking about the mindset of SUV drivers. Do you really think they're thinking of the safety of anyone except themselves and their precious children?
the idea that they have likely spent as much [as would've been necessary to lower emissions by 30%] and are likely to derive the required result is very high.
The article's from February. Here's the January Slashdot Discussion. Has anything new happened?
No, same old crap. The only difference here is that Timothy read "American Radio Relay League", didn't know that that means "ham radio", and thought it was someone new complaining.
There is a model out there, one that has been out for 10 years now: the Hypercar. It started as a concept by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and eventually a company by the same name (Hypercar Inc.)
So where's an actual Hypercar? They promised a prototype would be out a couple years ago. I refuse to believe anything from a company whose website says they leverage "synergies" unless I see a working prototype. I can't even find a photo of a mockup. The best I can find is a few CAD views.
I think we're already there. The majority of accidents I've seen or heard about lately involve a soccer mom or someone else in their SUV that felt so safe in that they were careless.
Those soccer moms aren't more careless because they drive SUVs. They've always been careless drivers. The problem is that those large, heavy, tall vehicles, while arguably safer when in an accident, are less forgiving when trying to avoid an accident.
It's the "if they can put a man on the moon..." fallacy. It assumes that the problem they solved is as hard or harder than the one they didn't solve. Development of a nano-coated windshield does not logically suggest that they could've reduced emissions by 30% by applying their resources there instead.
Slashdot Mirror
That's essentially what's happening already. They settle on a standard, people adopt it. The trouble comes with the "go from there" part. Whenever you "go" anywhere new with a standard, the old stuff is non-compliant, thus requiring a new standard.
The Oxford English Dictionary. The definitive record of the english language. Started in 1879, the OED was intended to catalogue every word in the english language and contains quoted excerpts of the earliest written usages of each word. The history of it is pretty interesting. There's a few good books about it's compilation too.May favorite was The Professor and the Madman.
The prototype (or model demonstrating the principle) requirement makes sense, I think, but not so much the "product generally available" part. If you come up with something truly innovative that only (say) four or five companies have the capability of producing on an affordable scale (or, in fact, are the only companies that could benefit from said patent), what incentive do these companies have for licensing the design or agreeing to produce the item for you under contract? They'd only need to sit on their ass for those 6-9 months, knowing that there's no way you'll get it made and marketed in time, then make their own version license-free. Say you develop (just making shit up here!) a better silicon doping process for CPU manufacture. You demonstrate actual feasibility with a small sample done in a lab. You can't fab chips in a lab in suitable quatities for manufature, so you need to find a chip foundry to produce it. But then the CPU fabs hear your price for licensing the process and see "gee, that's pretty steep; we'll let you know". If everybody says that, then 6-9 months later they get it for free! I someone does license it, come back to you and say "yeah, great idea; here's your check". They have nothing really to lose.
1928 in A. W. Read Classical Amer. Graffiti (1935) 80 A girl may sit & finger her tits and play with her cunt all day.
Finally getting my money's worth out of this dang OED thing!
Heh. Dunno if it was level-headedness so much as it was me finally seeing a chance to use the OED2 on CDROM that I paid several hundred dollars for. :)
You couldn't pay me enough to sleep under one of those. I met the guy who installed one like that for Shaquille O'Neil, and although he claimed it was mounted good n' solid, I noticed that the man never had his shoes tied. I'd never hang a 300 pound flat screen over my head in earthquake country, trusting that the guy assembling 500 TV mounts an hour for ten cents a day was doing a good job, and trusting that a guy who can't figure out simple shoelace knots knows enough not to hang such a thing with 2" drywall screws.
Nonsense. Both were considered proper spelling variations early on, and eventually "tidbit" became the accepted one.
c1640 J. Smyth Lives Berkeleys (1885) III. 25 A tyd bit, i.e. a speciall morsell reserved to eat at last.
1701 Collier M. Aurel. (1726) 13 To be always loading the table, and eating of tid-bits.
As you can see from the above OED excerpts, the "tidbit" variation predates not only the american revolution, but much of the continents colonization as well.
Wow, imagine never again having to say "Not for dogs!" when a dog-inappropriate show comes on.
Or perhaps it was supposed to be a "specie filter", i.e. an innovative device that actually separates you from your money.
BetaMax was drowned in a sea of affordable VHS machines because the only manufacturer of Beta was Sony. Sony founder Akio Morita himself later admitted that the biggest mistake was refusing to license the format to others. The fact that Beta was consistently behind VHS in max record time was just a few more nails in the coffin.
No that's not the case. All people have the right to life. The dispute to which you refer is actually a debate over at what point a fertilized egg becomes a "person". Crap on someone else's debate, troll.
No, rights exist on their own. All people have certain inalienable rights. THe canonical three basic ones are the right to life, right to liberty, and right to property. Ideally, government exists by the consent of the governed as a method of protecting those rights. "Intellectual property" rights aren't actually property rights in the traditional sense. They're a societal compromise implemented by governments in the interest of promoting (as the US Constitution says it) "Science and Useful arts", wherein the country as a whole temporarily permits someone to have a monopoly on a work (copyright) or a method/process (patent) in exchange for the open publication of that work or method. Really there's no natural right to "intellectual property", as it isn't actually property but ideas. The term "intellectual property" was invented in the 19th century as part of a "PR campaign" of sorts to lobby for extension of copyright terms and strengthening of protections. In fact, none of these things are actually property, as they fail the basic definition of property: tangible items that can be physically posessed.
No. The equivalent to "trespass" on public airwaves would be broadcasting without a license. Receiving radio signals (as covered ad nauseum in previous posts) does not diminish anyone's ability to use the frequencies one is receiving.
Do you not understand the basic priciples of the rights of man? You seem to be unclear on the distinctions between rights and law. May I suggest a little Thomas Paine?
"Small child dies in tragedy involving laptop".
I've not seen any discussion of this aspect of direct methanol fuel cells on the web, but it's an important one.
(shrug) Methanol is no more toxic than many houshold cleaners, and when sealed in a fuel cell it's probably a bit harder to get at. When's the last time someone let a child chew on their laptop battery? Even if we end up with bottles of methanol lying around, it'll certainly be no worse than having bottles of ammonia and bleach.
[sarcasm]
Gee I guess THAT settles it! A summary declaration without supporting evidence (or even supporting reasoning) from an AC is obviously the last word on the subject!
[/sarcasm]
Got anything other than personal, anecdotal examples to support this claim?
Cripes, I never said they were! Here's a paraphrasing of what was said:
Original Poster: "Soccer moms drive bad because they think their SUVs are safer"
Me: "No, Soccer moms have ALWAYS driven badly, it's just that SUVs aren't as forgiving of bad driving as their Volvos and Audis were, hence more accidents"
Talk to this guy. He's the only one who thinks they actually are safer. Me, I'm just talking about how these crazy, paranoid, protect-my-children-no-matter-what-the-cost suburban mothers think. Personally, I couldn't care less whether they're actually safer in an accident or not. Their lessened ability to avoid an accident is enough for me to consider them more dangerous overall.
It's been said before, and I'll say iot again because it bear repeating:
Use a hardware firewall!
There is no excuse not to. You've obviously got the know-how to operate a $10 Linksys router/firewall. Plug one in and with the default configuration you can install at your leisure. Honestly, whenever I hear someone complain "I can't install XP on a machine plugged directly into a cable modem without getting 0wnz0rd", it sounds like someone complaining that their wallet gets stolen every time they leave it on the roof of their car in the supermarket parking lot!
Because the interstate was running right through the middle of the city and was a big-ass mess. You're not going to improve traffic on an interstate highway with a subway system.
I thought the idea of the Hypercar was to roll ALL the latest technology together in a "synergistic" application. To "adopt some of the technologies" seems like exactly what the Hypercar people were complaining about.
Pull WHAT? I never said they were safer for those being hit. I was speaking about the mindset of SUV drivers. Do you really think they're thinking of the safety of anyone except themselves and their precious children?
So you claim, but present no evidence.
No, same old crap. The only difference here is that Timothy read "American Radio Relay League", didn't know that that means "ham radio", and thought it was someone new complaining.
So where's an actual Hypercar? They promised a prototype would be out a couple years ago. I refuse to believe anything from a company whose website says they leverage "synergies" unless I see a working prototype. I can't even find a photo of a mockup. The best I can find is a few CAD views.
Those soccer moms aren't more careless because they drive SUVs. They've always been careless drivers. The problem is that those large, heavy, tall vehicles, while arguably safer when in an accident, are less forgiving when trying to avoid an accident.
??? Last time I checked, exhaust came out of cars in Boston too.
Last time I checked, you could hop in the T in Boston instead of driving.
It's the "if they can put a man on the moon..." fallacy. It assumes that the problem they solved is as hard or harder than the one they didn't solve. Development of a nano-coated windshield does not logically suggest that they could've reduced emissions by 30% by applying their resources there instead.