I like this kind of software patent. This isn't like most of these annoying software patents on elementary algorithms that any student of computer science would be expected to discover. This is a patent on an algorithm we would expect only to be discovered by assholes.
What is unfortunate is the fact that asshole companies like Xerox (and its licensees) intend to engage in this particular form of assholish behavior in the first place. But a patent is basically an instrument for preventing people from doing things. If Xerox were granted this one by the PO, it would only play a positive role in the world. It would put Xerox in the position of being able to prevent other asshole companies from mining your browser history for personal data (at least in the fashion described) except under the terms they specify. Conceivably Xerox could prevent anyone from doing it at all simply by not granting licenses. If the EFF had filed this patent with those intentions, none of you would be complaining.
A stupid site like Youtube can complement any current mechanism for "ensuring fairness" that has been set up by the city of Tokyo. How can you be more fair than Youtube? Does one of the candidates lack an Internet connection? Are some of them ugly? Let all the candidates upload their stupid videos to Youtube and maybe Tokyo can sell ad space on the skin of the monsters that invade the city on a regular basis, instead of wasting that space on political ads. Plus, just because someone has a funny Youtube video doesn't mean you'll vote to put him in charge of your city. Tokyo elections aren't like American Idol...right?
Mobile data centers are nothing new for Microsoft. I know a guy who drove a Luxury Car (forget what kind) and this car was sooooo wonderful it needed an operating system: Windows CE.
It didn't broadcast Bill Gates speeches on the road, but it had the same problem as all Microsoft software- features you didn't ask for, that don't work, that can't easily be removed or disabled. He would park this thing in his garage, and once a month some process would turn on at 3 AM to condition the battery or something silly. It would crash midway through and he kept waking up in the morning to a BSOD and a dead battery powering the dim blue glow of the pixels with its last gasp.
He kept having to take his car to the shop for patches. We loved hearing about this stuff at work, because the car always crashed for something different, but he was getting sick of it, like everyone else at the dealership. Finally one day it screwed something up again- left his windshield washer pump going all night or something- and he took it in for the last patch. The ride home was Linux powered and the fun stories came to an end.
IIRC the Java spec requires a 32-bit von Neumann architecture supported by a filesystem that can support long filenames. If you're smart enough, in principle you can (inefficiently) simulate all these features yourself with a pencil, lots of scrap paper, the information in library JAR files, and the JVM spec. So if the artificial neurons can implement the functionality of the natural ones in intelligent people, you get Java support "for free" and you can avoid "reinventing the wheel" (investors love to hear that one).
shit fuck cunt dick asshole vagina motherfucker censorware porn pornography sex gay homosexual marijuana bong meth methamphetamine chat "so... how old r u?" "I have a puppy" cam "over 18" atheism poopy "birth control" asshole cervical cancer personals "Ted Haggard" password crack "parental controls" N2H2 Norton "Secure Computing"
Yeah, the widening of the DST period at its other endpoint, in October, was only done to make daylight trick-or-treating possible. Search the congressional record for it. They changed it by one week just to get Halloween in there. American candy makers had been lobbying for the change for decades.
So stupid. I was never molested when trick-or-treating as a child because the predators couldn't see me in the dark.
Are you serious? Because my wife has one of these clocks by her bed. I can't bear to hear her complain about the wonderful 109th Congress four times a year.
These people in Arizona are going to have NO EXCUSE for oversleeping with all the used alarm clocks they're going to get.
I rescued a little 5 year old Shuttle barebones system this weekend that had been on ice a few years because of its habit of freezing up unpredictably. Now I have a nice little headless server with an Ubuntu OS, LAMP stack, Tomcat, etc., and the freezing problem seems to be gone (I'm hoping it was either XP or the video card, since both got removed). And at this point I'm like the apocryphal dog that catches the car and doesn't know what to do with it. I don't yet trust this thing enough to use it as a file server or for storing anything important, I can set up a personal web site anywhere, I don't need a proxy for surfing porn sites at work, I don't play video games or need a game server, and it's hot with loud fans even by 2002 standards so I don't want to leave it on all the time for no good reason. I'd be responsible for an iceberg calving off a glacier somewhere. I already get a mental image of Al Gore every time I hear it start up. All the other computers around here- laptops of more recent vintage- are quietly running more modern, efficient, and powerful (x86-based) processors and they really put this thing to shame. But, they are not stationary. I'm trying to think of a nice little web programming side project- something fun to sharpen the skillz not being gained at work- that wouldn't kill a 5 year old AMD 2000 processor or saturate a crappy ASDL cable connection (at least for a little while), but that would still be interesting enough to justify the electric bill. Mailinator for example would have been a good idea. That guy set the whole thing up on a box just like this. I hate seeing cool things I could have done.
I don't like overexplaining either... let me use my imagination a little bit during those two hours.
Blade Runner would have truly sucked balls if they actually showed how the replicants were created by Tyrell Corporation. Steven Spielberg (who specializes in pleasing dumb audiences) would certainly have wasted screen time showing you every disgusting gooey detail. Just look at what he did with his movie based on a Philip K. Dick story, Minority Report. Despite the presence of Tom Cruise in the cast, that could have been a good movie. It just needed more deleted scenes.
Oh but Linux supports animated cursors, therefore they are the source of all goodness. But Linux doesn't have buffer overflows anywhere, so it's fine.
Merely being able to support a stupid feature on an OS platform, if someone chooses to install it, isn't quite the same as bundling the stupid feature into the operating system itself- i.e. into a browser that was forcefully (and without too much foresight) jammed up the OS hard to bamboozle a judge. All other operating systems allow you to uninstall a piece of software like that if it introduces security holes into the system. Try doing that with IE. A security flaw in IE is an issue for the entire OS. Windows pulls IE out of its ass to render stuff all the time. Not only can't you uninstall IE from Windows, you have to keep applying security patches to IE on a regular basis even if you would really like to uninstall it.
Now quit defending yourself on Slashdot, get back to your cubicle, and fix your browser slash operating system, security gnome.
Can't believe the trailer compared it to Blade Runner.
I saw this movie when it came out and immediately thought of Blade Runner. Although my wife liked it and she did not like BR.
Every negative review I've seen is basically a long complaint about the premise being unbelievable. If you can suspend your belief long enough to watch a movie about a big round space station, then unexplained worldwide infertility should be no problem.
My first thought was that this is an APPLICATION! NOT an issued patent. It says so on the first line of text./.ers need to use their eyes and brain before their fingers.
Analogous to: "Your mother hasn't been convicted, only charged with witchcraft. So chill out!"
One might argue that the general public is the "customer", but the patent office sees itself as beholden to applicants, not the American public at large. The office receives no money from the federal government anymore and has to meet all its expenses now through patent fees. A patent application nets them $380 from their "customer". If approved, they end up with $3000. Since then there has been an explosion of patents. Managers there are telling examiners to approve anything they don't understand.
Microsoft's security gnomes have been working round the clock to produce and test a fix and explains the rationale for Redmond's unusual (but far from unprecedented) decision to publish an out-of-sequence fix.
Dear Microsoft, Why did your "security gnomes" not speak up in the first place about such a stupid feature? Why are these things always sneaking in through cursors and screensavers? Are you keeping them busy implementing crap like this in the first place, instead of having security gnomes look at your existing code? People will continue to leave Windows in droves because it's getting loaded with troublesome features like this that backfire even for people who aren't using them or aren't aware of them. Nobody is interested in this junk aside from malware writers and teeny boppers, but everyone is exposed to the vulnerabilities in these features anyway nonetheless because they're bundled into the OS. The vast majority of users are not interested in having their stupid mouse cursors animate. And this chronic habit of running code that arrives over the Internet from unknown sources is getting really old.
this is merely an algorithm and should be unpatentable...
If it's an algorithm, it's been firmly established legally that it is patentable. It transforms a computer from a "general purpose device" into a "specific invention". Any lawyer will tell you this. Patents are granted for algorithms all the time and they cannot be challenged on that basis.
If you write a book, you transform hundreds of sheets of blank pages into a device for keeping you absorbed for a few hours, but they won't let you patent that for some reason having nothing to do with "prior art" since there is no prior art if you're the first to write a book with the given plot, premise, or subject. I can claim copyright no matter what I write (as long as I don't plagiarize) but if I'm the first to come up with a book about a superhero who gets his superpowers only when he smokes pot (so running out of money is like "kryptonite"), you'd think I'd be able to get a patent on all books involving serial killers who have to smoke quickly in phone booths to save people. But nooooooo, they'll let you schmucks rewrite my book.
It's very much in the current government's interest to make sure that the American streets in Google Maps are paved with gold. Especially in New Orleans, since focus groups seem to indicate that the public is unhappy with the appearance the city has had since the hurricane.
You want something with a bit of fluorish, like George W Bush landing on a jet carrier wearing a flight suit, or a trip to Mars or something. Maybe if enough people look at Google Earth, we can save money on all this gold and just tell Google to show different images of New Orleans, like the ones before the hurricane that actually look pretty good. You have to learn to think like a PR person.
I wouldn't put too much stock in any "science" from anyone at the Dept. of the Interior. Interior is a haven for folks who all share the same opinions and work towards the same agenda.
Although it provides no evidence and cites no sources other than Republican politicians, Republican political operatives, anonymous Bush appointees, a "third generation logger", and a taxidermist, your 5 year old story about some low level government employees planting lynx hairs in national forests is quite compelling. This Republican investigation of environmental malfeasance in the Bush-era EPA has had years to get rolling and has surely netted some troublesome environmentalists. But the Republicans should watch their step here- the public has "scandal fatigue". I personally just want these investigations of corruption on the part of public officials to stop so I can concentrate on paying my bills again.
Clearly this all fits into the larger pattern of career EPA employees purging all political operatives from sensitive policy positions and having them replaced with more nonpolitical people.
The problem is usually that most companies don't hire any more D&D players than it takes to just barely put fires out. You wouldn't be putting out fires all the time if your employer would hire more wizards, although wizardry doesn't come cheap.
You can get four or five wizards for the price of one, but the catch is, the wizards come with the curse that Rutger Hauer and his girlfriend Michelle Pfeiffer had in that movie Ladyhawke. He was a wolf at night and his girlfriend Michelle Pfeiffer turned into a hawk during the day. A simple email conversation would have taken them days and days!
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I like this kind of software patent. This isn't like most of these annoying software patents on elementary algorithms that any student of computer science would be expected to discover. This is a patent on an algorithm we would expect only to be discovered by assholes.
What is unfortunate is the fact that asshole companies like Xerox (and its licensees) intend to engage in this particular form of assholish behavior in the first place. But a patent is basically an instrument for preventing people from doing things. If Xerox were granted this one by the PO, it would only play a positive role in the world. It would put Xerox in the position of being able to prevent other asshole companies from mining your browser history for personal data (at least in the fashion described) except under the terms they specify. Conceivably Xerox could prevent anyone from doing it at all simply by not granting licenses. If the EFF had filed this patent with those intentions, none of you would be complaining.
Vladimir must have liked what he was seeing too or else Bush might have gotten an eyeful of dioxin.
A stupid site like Youtube can complement any current mechanism for "ensuring fairness" that has been set up by the city of Tokyo. How can you be more fair than Youtube? Does one of the candidates lack an Internet connection? Are some of them ugly? Let all the candidates upload their stupid videos to Youtube and maybe Tokyo can sell ad space on the skin of the monsters that invade the city on a regular basis, instead of wasting that space on political ads. ...right?
Plus, just because someone has a funny Youtube video doesn't mean you'll vote to put him in charge of your city. Tokyo elections aren't like American Idol
Well WTF do you want from me? It's what the guy told me. He was just repeating what they told him at the garage.
He also said the car used to blue screen occasionally while he was driving it but it didn't affect the driving.
Mobile data centers are nothing new for Microsoft. I know a guy who drove a Luxury Car (forget what kind) and this car was sooooo wonderful it needed an operating system: Windows CE.
It didn't broadcast Bill Gates speeches on the road, but it had the same problem as all Microsoft software- features you didn't ask for, that don't work, that can't easily be removed or disabled. He would park this thing in his garage, and once a month some process would turn on at 3 AM to condition the battery or something silly. It would crash midway through and he kept waking up in the morning to a BSOD and a dead battery powering the dim blue glow of the pixels with its last gasp.
He kept having to take his car to the shop for patches. We loved hearing about this stuff at work, because the car always crashed for something different, but he was getting sick of it, like everyone else at the dealership. Finally one day it screwed something up again- left his windshield washer pump going all night or something- and he took it in for the last patch. The ride home was Linux powered and the fun stories came to an end.
IIRC the Java spec requires a 32-bit von Neumann architecture supported by a filesystem that can support long filenames. If you're smart enough, in principle you can (inefficiently) simulate all these features yourself with a pencil, lots of scrap paper, the information in library JAR files, and the JVM spec. So if the artificial neurons can implement the functionality of the natural ones in intelligent people, you get Java support "for free" and you can avoid "reinventing the wheel" (investors love to hear that one).
shit fuck cunt dick asshole vagina motherfucker censorware porn pornography sex gay homosexual marijuana bong meth methamphetamine chat "so... how old r u?" "I have a puppy" cam "over 18" atheism poopy "birth control" asshole cervical cancer personals "Ted Haggard" password crack "parental controls" N2H2 Norton "Secure Computing"
Is there anyone else here who thinks this is an indication that we need more Visas?
We? Who's "we"?
Yeah, the widening of the DST period at its other endpoint, in October, was only done to make daylight trick-or-treating possible. Search the congressional record for it. They changed it by one week just to get Halloween in there. American candy makers had been lobbying for the change for decades.
So stupid. I was never molested when trick-or-treating as a child because the predators couldn't see me in the dark.
Are you serious? Because my wife has one of these clocks by her bed. I can't bear to hear her complain about the wonderful 109th Congress four times a year.
These people in Arizona are going to have NO EXCUSE for oversleeping with all the used alarm clocks they're going to get.
I rescued a little 5 year old Shuttle barebones system this weekend that had been on ice a few years because of its habit of freezing up unpredictably.
Now I have a nice little headless server with an Ubuntu OS, LAMP stack, Tomcat, etc., and the freezing problem seems to be gone (I'm hoping it was either XP or the video card, since both got removed). And at this point I'm like the apocryphal dog that catches the car and doesn't know what to do with it.
I don't yet trust this thing enough to use it as a file server or for storing anything important, I can set up a personal web site anywhere, I don't need a proxy for surfing porn sites at work, I don't play video games or need a game server, and it's hot with loud fans even by 2002 standards so I don't want to leave it on all the time for no good reason. I'd be responsible for an iceberg calving off a glacier somewhere. I already get a mental image of Al Gore every time I hear it start up. All the other computers around here- laptops of more recent vintage- are quietly running more modern, efficient, and powerful (x86-based) processors and they really put this thing to shame. But, they are not stationary.
I'm trying to think of a nice little web programming side project- something fun to sharpen the skillz not being gained at work- that wouldn't kill a 5 year old AMD 2000 processor or saturate a crappy ASDL cable connection (at least for a little while), but that would still be interesting enough to justify the electric bill. Mailinator for example would have been a good idea. That guy set the whole thing up on a box just like this. I hate seeing cool things I could have done.
I don't like overexplaining either... let me use my imagination a little bit during those two hours.
Blade Runner would have truly sucked balls if they actually showed how the replicants were created by Tyrell Corporation. Steven Spielberg (who specializes in pleasing dumb audiences) would certainly have wasted screen time showing you every disgusting gooey detail. Just look at what he did with his movie based on a Philip K. Dick story, Minority Report. Despite the presence of Tom Cruise in the cast, that could have been a good movie. It just needed more deleted scenes.
Oh but Linux supports animated cursors, therefore they are the source of all goodness. But Linux doesn't have buffer overflows anywhere, so it's fine.
Merely being able to support a stupid feature on an OS platform, if someone chooses to install it, isn't quite the same as bundling the stupid feature into the operating system itself- i.e. into a browser that was forcefully (and without too much foresight) jammed up the OS hard to bamboozle a judge. All other operating systems allow you to uninstall a piece of software like that if it introduces security holes into the system. Try doing that with IE. A security flaw in IE is an issue for the entire OS. Windows pulls IE out of its ass to render stuff all the time. Not only can't you uninstall IE from Windows, you have to keep applying security patches to IE on a regular basis even if you would really like to uninstall it.
Now quit defending yourself on Slashdot, get back to your cubicle, and fix your browser slash operating system, security gnome.
Can't believe the trailer compared it to Blade Runner.
I saw this movie when it came out and immediately thought of Blade Runner. Although my wife liked it and she did not like BR.
Every negative review I've seen is basically a long complaint about the premise being unbelievable. If you can suspend your belief long enough to watch a movie about a big round space station, then unexplained worldwide infertility should be no problem.
Analogous to: "Your mother hasn't been convicted, only charged with witchcraft. So chill out!"One might argue that the general public is the "customer", but the patent office sees itself as beholden to applicants, not the American public at large. The office receives no money from the federal government anymore and has to meet all its expenses now through patent fees. A patent application nets them $380 from their "customer". If approved, they end up with $3000. Since then there has been an explosion of patents. Managers there are telling examiners to approve anything they don't understand.
Why did your "security gnomes" not speak up in the first place about such a stupid feature? Why are these things always sneaking in through cursors and screensavers? Are you keeping them busy implementing crap like this in the first place, instead of having security gnomes look at your existing code?
People will continue to leave Windows in droves because it's getting loaded with troublesome features like this that backfire even for people who aren't using them or aren't aware of them. Nobody is interested in this junk aside from malware writers and teeny boppers, but everyone is exposed to the vulnerabilities in these features anyway nonetheless because they're bundled into the OS. The vast majority of users are not interested in having their stupid mouse cursors animate. And this chronic habit of running code that arrives over the Internet from unknown sources is getting really old.
this is merely an algorithm and should be unpatentable...
If it's an algorithm, it's been firmly established legally that it is patentable. It transforms a computer from a "general purpose device" into a "specific invention". Any lawyer will tell you this. Patents are granted for algorithms all the time and they cannot be challenged on that basis.
If you write a book, you transform hundreds of sheets of blank pages into a device for keeping you absorbed for a few hours, but they won't let you patent that for some reason having nothing to do with "prior art" since there is no prior art if you're the first to write a book with the given plot, premise, or subject. I can claim copyright no matter what I write (as long as I don't plagiarize) but if I'm the first to come up with a book about a superhero who gets his superpowers only when he smokes pot (so running out of money is like "kryptonite"), you'd think I'd be able to get a patent on all books involving serial killers who have to smoke quickly in phone booths to save people. But nooooooo, they'll let you schmucks rewrite my book.
You don't understand PR.
It's very much in the current government's interest to make sure that the American streets in Google Maps are paved with gold. Especially in New Orleans, since focus groups seem to indicate that the public is unhappy with the appearance the city has had since the hurricane.
You want something with a bit of fluorish, like George W Bush landing on a jet carrier wearing a flight suit, or a trip to Mars or something. Maybe if enough people look at Google Earth, we can save money on all this gold and just tell Google to show different images of New Orleans, like the ones before the hurricane that actually look pretty good. You have to learn to think like a PR person.
If it weren't for lavishly funded free-market think tanks the truth might have never come out and anti-endangered species activists in the 109th Congress such as Richard Pombo would have been put in the awkward position of having to make up politically convenient but dubious anecdotes on their own. It's a relief they didn't have to do that.
Clearly this all fits into the larger pattern of career EPA employees purging all political operatives from sensitive policy positions and having them replaced with more nonpolitical people.
Maybe too subtle.
I was referring to one of the other 999 guys from Tikrit with the name "Saddam Hussein".
...by preventing a terrorist from getting any money to repair his car, then of course I'm all for it.
What if we let him fix his car and then he drives it into a skyscraper?
The problem is usually that most companies don't hire any more D&D players than it takes to just barely put fires out. You wouldn't be putting out fires all the time if your employer would hire more wizards, although wizardry doesn't come cheap.
You can get four or five wizards for the price of one, but the catch is, the wizards come with the curse that Rutger Hauer and his girlfriend Michelle Pfeiffer had in that movie Ladyhawke. He was a wolf at night and his girlfriend Michelle Pfeiffer turned into a hawk during the day. A simple email conversation would have taken them days and days!