Just in case you forgot the title of the story. "Small Firm Claims Patents On e-Banking Processes" I'll refrain from the glaring obvious, but the audiance just might see it.
The issue here was the size of the victim, i.e. who suffers in an atmosphere of parasites. The size of the parasite itself is irrelevant.
Unless you are actually proposing we build an economy based on a core of major technology firms that do all the research and actually implement technology, who continually fend off lawsuits from "small firm" parasites that hire geeks and lawyers to produce nothing but patents?
I figured I'd chime in to point out that The Lathe of Heaven was also converted to a Made-for-TV movie, and I thought the transition was quite well done.
Are you talking about the one from the 70s or the new one they made about two years ago?
There's nothing wrong with using hydrogen for this purpose. The Hindenberg did not explode because of the hydrogen. The fabric was a cotton substrate with an aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate dopant.
Since there are no passengers, and this thing will spend most of its time in the stratosphere, hydrogen is probably a better choice.
Are we going to be stupid enough to let people like MS manuiplate patent law and bitch when someone little gets his?
Yeah.
If Microsoft loses, and is forced to change their browser, whatever they change to will quickly become the standard and you can kiss interoperability and standards goodbye. There is a reason the W3C has urged the USPTO to reexamine the 906 patent.
Unfortunately, we don't get to pick an arbitrary fitness evaluation. If spyware does damage to our network infrastructure, and yet delivers the most advertising, spamming and phishing revenue, it is fit as spyware.
Actually it only needs to deliver advertising/spamming/phishing revenue. If it hitches a ride on a worm, that would make it even more fit. Damage to the network is a "neutral" trait until it starts to interfere with spyware downloads.
Chlorine is very effective in catalyzing the decomposition of O3 into O2 faster than UV can turn O2 into O3. Given a constant flux of UV, the equilibrium concentration of ozone relative to normal oxygen is much lower in the presence of chlorine radicals.
Wow, that's an impressive wall you've constructed around your mind to avoid confronting the truth.
First you start with "There you go again, implying that only those that question global warming could be influenced by vested interests. That's just plain naive." So I'm reading this, and I figure I'll be conciliatory, and grant that, yeah, even though that's not what I said, it's a big world, billions of people, lots of vested interests in it, so I'm sure there are at least some vested interests to be found on both sides of any issue, even a severely lopsided issue like this one where all the scientists in the world are on one side. I don't want to appear "naive", you know.
But that was a mistake, because then you shift right into "gotcha" mode: "So there are vested interests behind the neutral observers and scientists? Just how neutral and scientific are these people supposed to be when they are backed by vested interests? That's kind of like expecting a Microsoft employee to be vocally supporting Linux."
Your argument is ridiculous. If scientists really behaved in the way that is projected onto them, you'd find more of them willing to stake their reputation on lucrative and silly ideas like missile defense.
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
Now there's critical thinking. Disinterested observers can't be trusted if those with vested interests publicly disagree with them.
No, you're looking at the timestamps from a post processing session, when he took the screen captures from his time lapse series in whatever video editing software he was using. Since the "flash" frame is more interesting he grabbed that one first (hence its earlier timestamp), then grabbed the surrounding two a few minutes later which makes sense.
The second set of timestamps are obviously the ones from the camera that took the original time lapse images since they're separated from each other by 15 seconds in both cases. Although "before" and "after" are clearly mislabeled- before should be after and vice versa.
Anything XML must be good. I'm not being smart, I'm absolutely serious. XML is the best thing since sliced bread.
I am beginning to hate XML. Not that there's anything technically wrong with it. Parsing documents is generally a difficult multi-step process. XML formalizes the initial steps of transforming the actual characters into a logical tree of nodes. It does a good job at this and I have no complaints with XML as far as it's used for what it's capable of doing. What I don't like about XML is the magical attributes that people seem to assign to it- that XML can accomplish anything more than what it's good for.
Parsing the actual text is generally the easiest part of parsing a document. The hard work comes afterwards, with the semantics- i.e. how do you interpret a logical tree of XML nodes into the appropriate data structures for an application? While XML facilitates the first step of parsing, a bad XML format can make the truly difficult steps that follow even harder.
I saw a working group in one of the sciences come up with an XML format that was designed to facilitate sharing of data among scientists, by encapsulating every piece of information that you might put in a lab notebook. (It was even covered on Slashdot, with expected spin.) In theory you can convert anyone's lab notebook into one of these XML documents, and everyone will be able to read everyone else's data.
Except it doesn't work that way. Once you get a logical tree of elements, then how do you proceed? It isn't always clear, depending on the format. This format was about as easy to generate and parse as this (I'm not kidding):
Well, it's not even as easy as that. What I typed above makes English easier to machine-parse because it identifies the parts of speech, and it at least doesn't completely destroy the original human-readable quality of the text. But you can see how XML does not magically remove the difficulty in interpreting the semantics of a document.
In this particular XML format you were supposed to take information in a natural language like English and convert it into this boneheaded domain specific natural language they came up with that fits into XML. It's machine parseable to an extent in that transformation from gibberish XML to logical trees of gibberish is easily automatable. But beyond that it's useless, since it still retains the problems of a natural language even though it's in XML. It's machine parseable but not machine interpretable or machine generatable. It's not human readable at all. And the only thing it had going for it was groupthink.
This particular working group got several prestigious scientific journals to announce a policy that they would not accept any papers in this area unless they were accompanied with XML documents in this format. This terrified everybody and for a while it looked like the journals were actually going to enforce it until it became abundantly clear to almost everybody that nobody was able to generate valid documents- not even bright people like scientists. The journals received fewer papers, of less quality, and generally from the "clique" who had obviously been spending their time coming up with the format in the first place and prosetlyzing its virtues instead of doing any real research. It seems the requirement was quietly dropped.
There were many reasons it failed. Generating the documents required h
The bike doesn't have to be ferrous. It just has to conduct electicity. Aluminum is actually better than iron for tripping a road sensor. The trouble with bikes is their geometry. The bike's shape offers little capacitance for current flowing perpendicular to the wheels, so only a little bit of induced current flows before an electrostatic field builds up to counter the induced emf.
My idea for a while has been to require everyone who wants on the net to have a license, You need a license to drive on a highway, why not the information super highway?
The Internet is not an "information super highway". This unfortunate term originated in the early nineties in a misguided attempt to explain to people what the Internet was, and it seems some people still take it seriously. A superhighway is a centralized structure built with public funds with well-defined entrances and exits and rules for what can and can't get onto it. And people on the superhighway aren't talking to each other, they're driving from one point to another. Your idea is less like "not letting people on" as much as closing certain on ramps and off ramps. The Internet is a decentralized, locally configured network of machines with a self-assembled topology. The only common thread running through it is that the hardware and software is conformant to several standardized agreed-upon protocols- IP, TCP, IMCP, HTTP, etc. Charging a license to get on the net would be like requiring permits to speak English.
I think people should need to read some simple internet etiquette and then take a simple test making sure they know what they are in for, and to make sure that they will help contribute, instead of burden the internet.
You can't do this on the Internet proper. It requires immediate and total cooperation from everyone at once- including the people you are about to kick off. Do you think they will meekly accept a life without connectivity (or run out to buy new, "trusted" machines) if they fail your test? Do you think the alternate ghetto networks they will migrate to will remain separate from or less popular than than your censored network? Do you think nobody will be interested in doing online business with these people? And do you really think there is a spammer, cracker, or script kiddie in the world who won't pass your etiquette test with flying colors?
This may be a feasible approach for a private network, like the military's, or a company Intranet. (Not for a commercial network- most ISPs would go out of business if their customers were prescreened for common sense or secure computer configurations.) But even these private networks will have limited utility by themselves since people on it will want to communicate with the users of the main Internet who have not taken your test, and you'll have to build a gateway. Which makes the end result of your idea seem not too different from what we have today.
Which is fortunate, since outsourcing is a net benefit to the economy.
I clicked on your link. It asks "For every dollar that a US company spends on outsourcing a service job to India, how much net value is returned to the US?" And the answer is supposed to be $1.13 according to the Milken Institute.
This is an example of lying with a meaningless statistic. It may be true. But it means that if a company lays off a worker who used to make $70000 and replaces him with a worker making, say, 1/16 of that (i.e. $4400), at a cost of $X spent on the entire outsourcing, a "net value" of 1.13 times that is "returned to the U.S." What does that mean, when they say a "net value" is "returned to the U.S."?
According to the Milken Institute,
The net value generated by the outsourcing is returned to the US through several different channels. The outsourcing company can immediately recognize cost savings through lower wages.
Oh.
So the true cost of the foreign employee is $70000/1.13=$62000 after you factor in the costs involved in the transfer. So it's actually quite ironic that even though they make less than 10% of what we do, we come very close to being competitive with them simply because it costs so much to transfer your workforce overseas. The actual $4400 paid to the foreign employee is practically a rounding error compared to the costs of bringing the job over to him- the infrastructure, training, taxes, transportation, consultants, etc. Although it seems that the $70000 that the U.S. worker was making was assumed to immediately be leaving the U.S. somehow, since now only $62000 is leaving the U.S. Hooray! I wonder what he was doing with all that money. Perhaps he mailed it all to relatives in Cuba.
Between the first quarter of 2001 and the third quarter of 2004, the portion of GDP funneled into wages and salaries dropped from 49.5 percent to 45.4 percent. Meanwhile, between the first quarter of 2001 and the second quarter of 2004, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP rose sharply from 7.8 percent to 10.1 percent.
So overall, more wealth is entering into the country than is leaving. Unfortunately most of it is going into the hands of corporations, while the median standard of living continues to plummet like a rock.
Yeah but this would solve a not-too-serious problem (the few meter feeders out there, who sometimes get ticketed for meter feeding anyway) and removes an incidental benefit of the coin-based system which municipalities have gotten addicted to. Your infrared/microcontroller idea might have gained traction if it were available in 1935. The only reason parking meters originally took coins at all, instead of requiring you to do something simple like turn a crank on a timer, was to prevent people from walking down the street cranking everyone's meters. The coin requirement effectively prevented "obstruction" from altruistic bystanders. Altrusim goes away if it costs money.
Sounds like a nice theory, but I don't believe it. If the goal is to prevent somebody from hogging a space all day, then a parking meter doesn't do the job; I can defeat the "goal" by feeding the meter.
This is the typical propellorhead thinking that programmers are known for. A solution doesn't have to be perfect to be viable. If it works most of the time, that might still be OK. Usually people don't feed the meter, and most of the spaces clear out after a few hours. The parking meter was invented in 1935, and is probably the best solution for this problem that uses 1930s technology. Nowadays we might come up with a system where photos of your license plate are relayed to a central computer. The fact that nobody is working on this shows how well parking meters do their job despite the problem of the occasional meter feeder. (That and the fact that municipalities have gotten addicted to nickel and diming us as you observe.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just in case you forgot the title of the story.
"Small Firm Claims Patents On e-Banking Processes"
I'll refrain from the glaring obvious, but the audiance just might see it.
The issue here was the size of the victim, i.e. who suffers in an atmosphere of parasites. The size of the parasite itself is irrelevant.
Unless you are actually proposing we build an economy based on a core of major technology firms that do all the research and actually implement technology, who continually fend off lawsuits from "small firm" parasites that hire geeks and lawyers to produce nothing but patents?
That's 336 K for physicists.
Or 0.03 eV for the real physicists.
I figured I'd chime in to point out that The Lathe of Heaven was also converted to a Made-for-TV movie, and I thought the transition was quite well done.
Are you talking about the one from the 70s or the new one they made about two years ago?
There's nothing wrong with using hydrogen for this purpose. The Hindenberg did not explode because of the hydrogen. The fabric was a cotton substrate with an aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate dopant.
Since there are no passengers, and this thing will spend most of its time in the stratosphere, hydrogen is probably a better choice.
But the astronomers are going to hate it.
On the other hand, if I'll infringe your copyright right now, in order to protect your rights you would have to commence a quite costly legal hassle.
Posting a comment in response is fair use and does not infringe the copyright.
I once found one of my Slashdot posts in a technical book. I made the guy send me a free copy.
With patents, it's the other way round. They are indeed harder to get than copyright, but they are incredibly easy to defend (once acquired).
They're still too hard to get. This proposal will cause most software development to cease.
When I type "loose" it doesn't suggest "lose".
It does suggest "loose women".
Are we going to be stupid enough to let people like MS manuiplate patent law and bitch when someone little gets his?
Yeah.
If Microsoft loses, and is forced to change their browser, whatever they change to will quickly become the standard and you can kiss interoperability and standards goodbye. There is a reason the W3C has urged the USPTO to reexamine the 906 patent.
Missed this one:
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
Unfortunately, we don't get to pick an arbitrary fitness evaluation. If spyware does damage to our network infrastructure, and yet delivers the most advertising, spamming and phishing revenue, it is fit as spyware.
Actually it only needs to deliver advertising/spamming/phishing revenue. If it hitches a ride on a worm, that would make it even more fit.
Damage to the network is a "neutral" trait until it starts to interfere with spyware downloads.
What spyware writers need to do now is add the following features to their code:
- Random mutations
- Breeding and crossover with other spyware programs so that chunks of similar malicious code are exchanged
- A fitness evaluation function
The fitness evaluation should take into account:The ozone either breaks down in time, or absorbs some more UV, and breaks apart again. The real defense against UV is the O2, NOT the 03!
Did they teach you about two things called rate and equilibrium?
You are correct in remembering that
3 02 + UV -> 2 03
but also
CFC + UV -> Cl* (Cl radicals)
and then
Cl* + O3 -> ClO* + O2
ClO* + ClO* -> Cl2O2
Cl2O2 + UV -> 2Cl* + O2
overall: 2O3 -> 3O2
Chlorine is very effective in catalyzing the decomposition of O3 into O2 faster than UV can turn O2 into O3. Given a constant flux of UV, the equilibrium concentration of ozone relative to normal oxygen is much lower in the presence of chlorine radicals.
Wow, that's an impressive wall you've constructed around your mind to avoid confronting the truth.
First you start with "There you go again, implying that only those that question global warming could be influenced by vested interests. That's just plain naive." So I'm reading this, and I figure I'll be conciliatory, and grant that, yeah, even though that's not what I said, it's a big world, billions of people, lots of vested interests in it, so I'm sure there are at least some vested interests to be found on both sides of any issue, even a severely lopsided issue like this one where all the scientists in the world are on one side. I don't want to appear "naive", you know.
But that was a mistake, because then you shift right into "gotcha" mode: "So there are vested interests behind the neutral observers and scientists? Just how neutral and scientific are these people supposed to be when they are backed by vested interests? That's kind of like expecting a Microsoft employee to be vocally supporting Linux."
You guys are like unsinkable rubber ducks.
There you go again,
What are you talking about? That was my first post in the thread.
implying that only those that question global warming could be influenced by vested interests. That's just plain naive.
I said no such thing. There are vested interests on both sides, but one side has a noticeable lack of scientists and neutral observers.
Your argument is ridiculous. If scientists really behaved in the way that is projected onto them, you'd find more of them willing to stake their reputation on lucrative and silly ideas like missile defense.
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
Now there's critical thinking. Disinterested observers can't be trusted if those with vested interests publicly disagree with them.
No, you're looking at the timestamps from a post processing session, when he took the screen captures from his time lapse series in whatever video editing software he was using. Since the "flash" frame is more interesting he grabbed that one first (hence its earlier timestamp), then grabbed the surrounding two a few minutes later which makes sense.
The second set of timestamps are obviously the ones from the camera that took the original time lapse images since they're separated from each other by 15 seconds in both cases. Although "before" and "after" are clearly mislabeled- before should be after and vice versa.
Actually, it looks to me like something behind the trees could be causing the smoke which is then rising up beside the pole.
It looks like the pole is just in the way, and the flash and the "smoke" are both on the water.
they just get a new computer. wtf is with that?
People like to buy computers.
They're fun purchases and whenever you buy one it's nicer than the last one you had. The spyware is just an excuse.
That's not going to work. Transparent aluminum doesn't conduct electricity.
Anything XML must be good. I'm not being smart, I'm absolutely serious. XML is the best thing since sliced bread.
I am beginning to hate XML. Not that there's anything technically wrong with it. Parsing documents is generally a difficult multi-step process. XML formalizes the initial steps of transforming the actual characters into a logical tree of nodes. It does a good job at this and I have no complaints with XML as far as it's used for what it's capable of doing. What I don't like about XML is the magical attributes that people seem to assign to it- that XML can accomplish anything more than what it's good for.
Parsing the actual text is generally the easiest part of parsing a document. The hard work comes afterwards, with the semantics- i.e. how do you interpret a logical tree of XML nodes into the appropriate data structures for an application? While XML facilitates the first step of parsing, a bad XML format can make the truly difficult steps that follow even harder.
I saw a working group in one of the sciences come up with an XML format that was designed to facilitate sharing of data among scientists, by encapsulating every piece of information that you might put in a lab notebook. (It was even covered on Slashdot, with expected spin.) In theory you can convert anyone's lab notebook into one of these XML documents, and everyone will be able to read everyone else's data.
Except it doesn't work that way. Once you get a logical tree of elements, then how do you proceed? It isn't always clear, depending on the format. This format was about as easy to generate and parse as this (I'm not kidding):
<sentence> <interjection>Hooray!</interjection>
<preposition >Now</preposition> <pronoun>we</pronoun> <verb>can</verb> <adjective>all</adjective> <verb>read</verb> <pronoun>each</pronoun> <pronoun>other's</pronoun> <noun>data</noun> <conjunction>because<conjunction> <pronoun>it</pronoun> <verb>is</verb> <preposition>in</preposition> <article>an</article> <noun>XML format.</noun> </sentence>
Well, it's not even as easy as that. What I typed above makes English easier to machine-parse because it identifies the parts of speech, and it at least doesn't completely destroy the original human-readable quality of the text. But you can see how XML does not magically remove the difficulty in interpreting the semantics of a document.
In this particular XML format you were supposed to take information in a natural language like English and convert it into this boneheaded domain specific natural language they came up with that fits into XML. It's machine parseable to an extent in that transformation from gibberish XML to logical trees of gibberish is easily automatable. But beyond that it's useless, since it still retains the problems of a natural language even though it's in XML. It's machine parseable but not machine interpretable or machine generatable. It's not human readable at all. And the only thing it had going for it was groupthink.
This particular working group got several prestigious scientific journals to announce a policy that they would not accept any papers in this area unless they were accompanied with XML documents in this format. This terrified everybody and for a while it looked like the journals were actually going to enforce it until it became abundantly clear to almost everybody that nobody was able to generate valid documents- not even bright people like scientists. The journals received fewer papers, of less quality, and generally from the "clique" who had obviously been spending their time coming up with the format in the first place and prosetlyzing its virtues instead of doing any real research. It seems the requirement was quietly dropped.
There were many reasons it failed. Generating the documents required h
The bike doesn't have to be ferrous. It just has to conduct electicity. Aluminum is actually better than iron for tripping a road sensor.
The trouble with bikes is their geometry. The bike's shape offers little capacitance for current flowing perpendicular to the wheels, so only a little bit of induced current flows before an electrostatic field builds up to counter the induced emf.
"Hello, I'd like to order ten plain cheeze pizzas..."
My idea for a while has been to require everyone who wants on the net to have a license, You need a license to drive on a highway, why not the information super highway?
The Internet is not an "information super highway". This unfortunate term originated in the early nineties in a misguided attempt to explain to people what the Internet was, and it seems some people still take it seriously. A superhighway is a centralized structure built with public funds with well-defined entrances and exits and rules for what can and can't get onto it. And people on the superhighway aren't talking to each other, they're driving from one point to another. Your idea is less like "not letting people on" as much as closing certain on ramps and off ramps. The Internet is a decentralized, locally configured network of machines with a self-assembled topology. The only common thread running through it is that the hardware and software is conformant to several standardized agreed-upon protocols- IP, TCP, IMCP, HTTP, etc. Charging a license to get on the net would be like requiring permits to speak English.
I think people should need to read some simple internet etiquette and then take a simple test making sure they know what they are in for, and to make sure that they will help contribute, instead of burden the internet.
You can't do this on the Internet proper. It requires immediate and total cooperation from everyone at once- including the people you are about to kick off. Do you think they will meekly accept a life without connectivity (or run out to buy new, "trusted" machines) if they fail your test? Do you think the alternate ghetto networks they will migrate to will remain separate from or less popular than than your censored network? Do you think nobody will be interested in doing online business with these people? And do you really think there is a spammer, cracker, or script kiddie in the world who won't pass your etiquette test with flying colors?
This may be a feasible approach for a private network, like the military's, or a company Intranet. (Not for a commercial network- most ISPs would go out of business if their customers were prescreened for common sense or secure computer configurations.) But even these private networks will have limited utility by themselves since people on it will want to communicate with the users of the main Internet who have not taken your test, and you'll have to build a gateway. Which makes the end result of your idea seem not too different from what we have today.
I clicked on your link. It asks "For every dollar that a US company spends on outsourcing a service job to India, how much net value is returned to the US?" And the answer is supposed to be $1.13 according to the Milken Institute.
This is an example of lying with a meaningless statistic. It may be true. But it means that if a company lays off a worker who used to make $70000 and replaces him with a worker making, say, 1/16 of that (i.e. $4400), at a cost of $X spent on the entire outsourcing, a "net value" of 1.13 times that is "returned to the U.S." What does that mean, when they say a "net value" is "returned to the U.S."?
According to the Milken Institute,Oh.
So the true cost of the foreign employee is $70000/1.13=$62000 after you factor in the costs involved in the transfer. So it's actually quite ironic that even though they make less than 10% of what we do, we come very close to being competitive with them simply because it costs so much to transfer your workforce overseas. The actual $4400 paid to the foreign employee is practically a rounding error compared to the costs of bringing the job over to him- the infrastructure, training, taxes, transportation, consultants, etc. Although it seems that the $70000 that the U.S. worker was making was assumed to immediately be leaving the U.S. somehow, since now only $62000 is leaving the U.S. Hooray! I wonder what he was doing with all that money. Perhaps he mailed it all to relatives in Cuba.
Between the first quarter of 2001 and the third quarter of 2004, the portion of GDP funneled into wages and salaries dropped from 49.5 percent to 45.4 percent. Meanwhile, between the first quarter of 2001 and the second quarter of 2004, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP rose sharply from 7.8 percent to 10.1 percent.
So overall, more wealth is entering into the country than is leaving. Unfortunately most of it is going into the hands of corporations, while the median standard of living continues to plummet like a rock.
Yeah but this would solve a not-too-serious problem (the few meter feeders out there, who sometimes get ticketed for meter feeding anyway) and removes an incidental benefit of the coin-based system which municipalities have gotten addicted to.
Your infrared/microcontroller idea might have gained traction if it were available in 1935. The only reason parking meters originally took coins at all, instead of requiring you to do something simple like turn a crank on a timer, was to prevent people from walking down the street cranking everyone's meters. The coin requirement effectively prevented "obstruction" from altruistic bystanders. Altrusim goes away if it costs money.
Sounds like a nice theory, but I don't believe it. If the goal is to prevent somebody from hogging a space all day, then a parking meter doesn't do the job; I can defeat the "goal" by feeding the meter.
This is the typical propellorhead thinking that programmers are known for. A solution doesn't have to be perfect to be viable. If it works most of the time, that might still be OK. Usually people don't feed the meter, and most of the spaces clear out after a few hours.
The parking meter was invented in 1935, and is probably the best solution for this problem that uses 1930s technology. Nowadays we might come up with a system where photos of your license plate are relayed to a central computer. The fact that nobody is working on this shows how well parking meters do their job despite the problem of the occasional meter feeder. (That and the fact that municipalities have gotten addicted to nickel and diming us as you observe.)