The big problem I have with the endless barracking that Amazon and other companies are constantly given for their patenting policies is that I just don't know who precisely decides if an idea is 'obvious' or not.
It would seem to me that the arbiter of that decision should be the average man in the street. Although it such matters may seem obvious to the/. community, they is by no means obvious to the common man. Isn't that what really matters?
No, because the 'common man' is not the one hindered by the licensing restrictions of this
advertising practice. The 'common man' would not need to license this 'technology'. It will affect anyone who
attempts to enter the free ISP market. I would venture that to the 'common ISP entrepreneur', this would be a fairly obvious business option.
Whether Joe Schmoe on the street would consider this as 'obvious' or not is a non-issue -- he's not running an ISP, and probably doesn't even have the faintest idea how to implement something like this, let alone have the notion that it could actually be done.
Besides, giving stuff (be it a product or a sevice) away for free, but plastering it with advertising (whose revenues cover the cost of the freebie) is by no means a new concept. Probably the best example of a service like this would be broadcast television.
Hell with all these fancy-shmancy keyboards. PC keyboard manufacturers can't even get a normal key layout right. CTRL goes above the left Shift key and Caps Lock goes below that Shift. Toss
a Compose under the right Shift, add a few Metas
to either side of the space bar, and I'll not have to readjust to a PC keyboard when I'm forced to use one. Oh, and stop making Enter/Return so huge - you're hogging up the space where Backspace should go, so we can fit tilde in the upper right and bring Esc back down next to 1, where it belongs.
Of the 3.4 billion chemical building blocks that make up the human DNA strand, scientists believe only 3 to 5 percent represent actual instructions that make some people tall, some blue-eyed and some prone to heart disease.
/*... the rest is comments and a copy of the GPL */
Clarification: 300MHz is the lower bound of microwave radiation (it runs from 300MHz to 300GHz and includes not only the frequencies used to cook foods, but also radio/TV frequencies.) The magnetrons in most microwave ovens produce microwave radiation with frequencies of 3GHz and up (2.45GHz is the lowest I've come across, but only once.)
3GHz is the frequency at the lower bound of the microwave radiation portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Does this means that a 3GHz PC will be able to double as a microwave oven unless the processor is shielded in lead?
Um... portscanning involves probing more than one port. All possible ports are probed in a typical portscan, one right after another, in rapid succession - hence the term 'scanning'.
If you really want to find out, quite a few portscanners will do OS detection for you - by identifying subtle differences in the TCP/IP packets (like sequence number choices, etc.) Privided that they haven't written their own OSes, you could always just nmap the DoD's machines and find out. It's only one more portscan to add to their pile...
Re:EULAs of the future
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 1
You may not reverse engineer this comment to attempt to discover the source code of this comment for use in your own products.
Intel Engineer: A new processor built by my company boots up somewhere
running at 1.3GHz. A hardware glitch causes Windows to lock up. The
computer crashes and burns, taking a mission-critical database with
it. Now: should we initiate a recall? Take the number of processors
in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply
by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals
X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Woman: Are there a lot of these kinds of crashes?
Intel Engineer: You wouldn't believe.
Woman: Which computer company do you work for?
Intel Engineer: A major one.
Ack! No one told me this was a superhero movie!
on
Review: "Unbreakable"
·
· Score: 1
Anybody who loved (or loves) comic books will grasp its fidelity and complexity, and love it. Anybody who loves movies and comic books will love it all the more. (Note: this review gives away no plot elements not shown in the ads and trailers.)
Am I the only one who didn't see any previews or trailers that indicated that this was a comic book superhero movie? I was expecting some kind of serious psychological drama. Had I know it was going to be this type of movie, I would have skipped it.
On second thought, I would have just stayed in the lobby and played Konami's Simpsons Bowling for two more hours. I have to say, showing up early and playing that game for 45 minutes was the best thing about going to this movie.
I couldn't watch this. I tried, but I had to turn
it off after suffering through the first hour.
The scene where they rescue the Spice miners from
the worm was almost completely CGI, and it looked it. I groaned aloud at the way the worm was rendered. It didn't look organic whatsoever. All the teeth in nice nearly-perfect concentric circles, etc... The ships themselves looked atrocious, and the Harvester looked like a simple box-and-wedge contraption with texture-mapped surfaces. Titan A.E. was supposed to look animated -- Dune wasn't.
The acting in this remake is abyssmal. Not a single one of the players has a tenth of the charisma of the original actors in the Lynch adaptation. Everyone delivers their lines in a monotone, completely devoid of any emotion or inflection. No one moves when they speak, they just stand there, almost rigid, and deliver their lines to another equally immobile actor/actress. Where's Sting when you need him?
The costume designer for this miniseries should be taken out and shot. The butterfly dress? What in the Hell was that? None of the uniforms seemed to be put together very well, and they looked as if they were rented from a cut-rate costume shop. I've seen better costumes made by soccer moms for their kids' school plays.
I give this thing zero stars and two thumbs up the asses of everyone involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, giving stuff (be it a product or a sevice) away for free, but plastering it with advertising (whose revenues cover the cost of the freebie) is by no means a new concept. Probably the best example of a service like this would be broadcast television.
Hell with all these fancy-shmancy keyboards. PC keyboard manufacturers can't even get a normal key layout right. CTRL goes above the left Shift key and Caps Lock goes below that Shift. Toss a Compose under the right Shift, add a few Metas to either side of the space bar, and I'll not have to readjust to a PC keyboard when I'm forced to use one. Oh, and stop making Enter/Return so huge - you're hogging up the space where Backspace should go, so we can fit tilde in the upper right and bring Esc back down next to 1, where it belongs.
Clarification: 300MHz is the lower bound of microwave radiation (it runs from 300MHz to 300GHz and includes not only the frequencies used to cook foods, but also radio/TV frequencies.) The magnetrons in most microwave ovens produce microwave radiation with frequencies of 3GHz and up (2.45GHz is the lowest I've come across, but only once.)
3GHz is the frequency at the lower bound of the microwave radiation portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Does this means that a 3GHz PC will be able to double as a microwave oven unless the processor is shielded in lead?
scan: n, To look over quickly and systematically.
Um... portscanning involves probing more than one port. All possible ports are probed in a typical portscan, one right after another, in rapid succession - hence the term 'scanning'.
If you really want to find out, quite a few portscanners will do OS detection for you - by identifying subtle differences in the TCP/IP packets (like sequence number choices, etc.) Privided that they haven't written their own OSes, you could always just nmap the DoD's machines and find out. It's only one more portscan to add to their pile...
View -> Page Source
Oops.
Intel Engineer: A new processor built by my company boots up somewhere running at 1.3GHz. A hardware glitch causes Windows to lock up. The computer crashes and burns, taking a mission-critical database with it. Now: should we initiate a recall? Take the number of processors in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Woman: Are there a lot of these kinds of crashes?
Intel Engineer: You wouldn't believe.
Woman: Which computer company do you work for?
Intel Engineer: A major one.
Am I the only one who didn't see any previews or trailers that indicated that this was a comic book superhero movie? I was expecting some kind of serious psychological drama. Had I know it was going to be this type of movie, I would have skipped it.
On second thought, I would have just stayed in the lobby and played Konami's Simpsons Bowling for two more hours. I have to say, showing up early and playing that game for 45 minutes was the best thing about going to this movie.
I couldn't watch this. I tried, but I had to turn it off after suffering through the first hour.
The scene where they rescue the Spice miners from the worm was almost completely CGI, and it looked it. I groaned aloud at the way the worm was rendered. It didn't look organic whatsoever. All the teeth in nice nearly-perfect concentric circles, etc... The ships themselves looked atrocious, and the Harvester looked like a simple box-and-wedge contraption with texture-mapped surfaces. Titan A.E. was supposed to look animated -- Dune wasn't.
The acting in this remake is abyssmal. Not a single one of the players has a tenth of the charisma of the original actors in the Lynch adaptation. Everyone delivers their lines in a monotone, completely devoid of any emotion or inflection. No one moves when they speak, they just stand there, almost rigid, and deliver their lines to another equally immobile actor/actress. Where's Sting when you need him?
The costume designer for this miniseries should be taken out and shot. The butterfly dress? What in the Hell was that? None of the uniforms seemed to be put together very well, and they looked as if they were rented from a cut-rate costume shop. I've seen better costumes made by soccer moms for their kids' school plays.
I give this thing zero stars and two thumbs up the asses of everyone involved.