It's pretty scary when/. stories show up alongside actual professional journalism...
I don't even find it surprising.
Technically slashdot is "professial journalism" - the slashdot editors get paid after all. The process used to create both is very similar, and they're both subject to the same amount of scrutiny before being published. But on slashdot, you usually get both sides of the story, (and several sides you didn't even think existed).
Newspaper stories might be more polished, but I haven't noticed them being any more accurate.
That's crap. Most people simply don't care whether their car lasts 10 years or 30, because they are going to replace it sooner anyway. If there was demand for long-lasting cars, some manufacturers would produce them and conquer the market. The fact that this didn't happen means that there basically is no demand for it.
Maybe, but people don't have any reasonable way to evaluate the life time of a car. If the only observable difference between two cars is the sticker price, most people buy the cheaper one. If people didn't care how long their car lasted, they wouldn't get an extended warrenty.
I also doubt the claims of the original poster that a galvanizied body would make cars last longer. It might make the body last longer (and even that's questionable) but it wouldn't protect the engine, which wears out faster than the frame even now.
what amazes me is why the VAST MAJORITY of people continue to use hotmail...
The vast majority of people use the "free as in included in the package" email provided by their ISP.
If you eliminate those, then the next largest block is people who have a vanity domain, and use the "free as in included in the package" email that comes from their hosting provider.
It's not until you are talking about "free as in paid for with advertising" that hotmail becomes a contender, and even then I'd bet that enough people use yahoo that few would call hotmail the "vast majority"
Personally, I've created dozens of hotmail accounts for the sole purpose of registering with sites that insist on an email address. I bet I'm not alone in that, though probably not in the vast majority.
It is dangerous to assume that you are protected when your language is inflammatory and misleading, though narrowly truthful in detail.
Yep, it's possible to slander by making true statements. "The president calls all his female employees whores" is a true statement of any company with no female employees, but I'd still find against anyone who tried to claim it was "truth" as a defense.
You know, with MIT offering their classes online for free, and this service providing the textbooks for free, what's stopping us from getting a free diploma?
All it takes is a printer, a graphics program, and a little imagination and you too can have a diploma - not quite free, but close.
Diplomas from an accredited university don't certify that learned anything, just that you've spent four years working hard at menial tasks without pissing off the arrogant bastards that work at that university enough to get expelled.
This is an important qualification for most jobs, which is why those diplomas are so valuable to have.
Cancel your health insurance; make you uninsurable for the rest of your life; make it so your children cannot get health insurance.
They don't need access to a database for that, just access to your DNA. They could refuse to insure you if you won't give them a DNA sample, or give you a greatly reduced rate if you agree to give them one.
The only thing stopping them from doing it now, is that they don't have a way to tell if you're a health risk by looking at your DNA.
I think a better option is a meta tag that lets search engines know that there's user contributed content on the page. (Or maybe something in robots.txt)
Google could still index the page, but weigh links on the page lower.
In light of the Windowes System Requirements, is this really that big?
Compared with Stalin, Manson was a pretty nice guy.
Here are some other points for comparison; The Starpath version of Frogger fit in 6272 bytes. Unix runs multi-user on a standard PDP-11/70 - 256K of ram. The 80Megahertz Cray-I supercomputer typically shiped with 4 megabytes of ram.
The question isn't "Is this better (or worse) than Microsoft Windows?". The question is "Can't we do better?".
IMHO, publishing industries have four main functions: 1 - facilitate origination - In the case of music or movies, this is the studio. In the case of publication, it's standards/guidelines and perhaps personal assistance. 2 - editorial review - Make sure what gets published is worth publishing. 3 - promotion - The word needs to get out, about any given work. This isn't necessarily advertising. 4 - distribution - This is what we commonly think of as publishing. Get the dead trees, CDs, and DVDs on the shelves and in the bins.
All of these things involve work. For all it's faults, the legacy publishing system is good at extracting money from those that benefit from the work, and a so-so job of redistributing that money to those that do the work.
Internet publishing greatly reduces the cost of distribution, but it also greatly reduces the amount of money people are willing to pay.
What's needed most IMO isn't a better way to do the work, but a better way to get paid for doing it.
Not bad, but I think rather than eliminating the initial examination, you should reduce it to a minimal read-through. Think of it as a clairity requirement - the examiner must be able to understand what the patent says before it's accepted.
I think you're stretching it. It's obvious that their compound filters are supposed to contain a variety of possible combinations of filtering rules, not all of them at once.
He's not stretching it. The keyword in claim 1 is "comprising" which in a patent claim mean "including all of the following elements but not excluding others"
In order to violate claims 1, you have to do everything listed in claim 1. Claims 2-13 are dependant on claim 1 - in other words, they #include claim 1.
14-17 are independant, but it looks to me like it's sufficent to simply pay attention to the first and last paragraph of the email and you aren't in violation of any of the claims.
While I agree that adding "bayes rule" to the list of requirements is on par with saying "the chair must be made of matter", it doesn't broaden the patent because it's an additional requirement.
For a more detailed explaination of how to read a patent claim, see this page
As someone else has pointed out, the real challenge is getting a reliable means of producing panels with consistent degradation of all pixels over time.
Seems simple enough given modern digital processing capabilities. All you would need is a single receptor, and a willingness to run a calibration test periodically. Multiply the brightness of each pixel by 1/(the amount of light that reaches the receptor).
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Why the hell is this thing still on trial? If I were the judge I would have ruled the act unconstitutional so fast that the defendant wouldn't even have time to say "national security".
last time I checked you could have multiple records, you arent limited to a single TXT.
Yes, that's true, and there are ways to get around the 512 byte limit too. You could for example have a "continued=rec2.example.com" field or some such.
The point is that saying "we'll store RSA keys in DNS records" isn't enough. They need to describe exactly how RSA keys will be converted to ASCII, how keys longer than 127 characters will be handled, and how keys longer than 512 will be handled. And a few dozen other bookkeeping details too - verisons codes, key size, exponent. None of these things are hard to specify, but exactly how they are to be specified needs to be specified.
At this point, if they want me to take them seriously, then they're going to need to provide a working example.
Execute the lazy/ignorant sysadmins and infrastructure guys who fail to keep their servers patched, have their firewalls set to "Allow all" and who leave the default passwords on their systems.
Are you claiming that a single unpatched server causes over $100 million in damage?
If creating a worm is makes one worthy of death, then being one of a million contributors to the worms spread is only worth one millionth of death. I'd approximate that at a slip on the wrist.
... they can block that port on individual cable modems-a sort of surgical strike.
Blocking port 25 (surgically or otherwise) wouldn't prevent zombies DDoS attacks.
The problem is that the machine is infected. Blocking just hides the infection from the rest of the internet.
I think most people would remove the zombies if they knew it was there, and they knew how. And it's often the case that somebody knows a machine is infected and someone probably knows how to fix it too. The key is to get that information to the user.
Imagine if most of the web sites visited checked your IP against a central server of infected IPs, and redirected them to a "your computer is infected, get it fixed - here's how" web page when appropriate.
Yes. A small but growing revenue stream. Specific dollar amounts are confidential.
So they haven't made a profit - i.e. the plant hasn't produced more money than it took to construct it, but they are making money. I believe they expect it to not only make enough money to pay for the construction, but to also be a reasonable investement.
According to bloomberg crude oil futures are $35-$40 a barrel. It seems reasonable to assume that the mysterious "No. 4 oil" would sell for approximately the same.
Assuming a raw materials cost of zero, no maintence, the plant makes 500 barrels a day, and runs continuously, that's 500 * $35 or $17,500 a day. At that rate, it would take 3-4 years to break even, and about 6-10 years before it's has a reasonable return rate given the initial $20,000,000 investment cost.
If you assume a high maintenance cost, a high repair bill, a high interest loan, only 100 barrels a day, and constant interuptions (which is much closer to current conditions) then it would take considerably longer to break even - over 40 years. It would never achieve a reseaonable return rate - even if it makes money you'd be better off putting the money in the bank.
Prognosticating is fruaght with error, but I'd say oil prices and the cost of waste disposal is going to go up, while the cost of building and running these plants is going to go down.
Wow, since daily US oil consumption is what, 20 *million* barrels per day, I'm sure it will be no problem to set up another 10,000 of these plants, and there will be absolutely no government or corporate resistance, and the oil will be just as good as what comes out of the ground and just as cheap!
Yep, you've got it about right.
US demand is closer to 11 million barrels per day, and with over 20,000 factory farms in the US that could apply the technology, 10,000 is optimistic but not impossible. 5 million barrels a day won't supply all the demand, but it could reduce it 50% which means a lot.
Of course, since the net effect is to reduce the waste produced by factory farms, the government might actually mandate the building of the plants, but since the plants make money they'd probably be built anyway - government involvement will just make it happen faster. American oil is mostly in the oil refining business so they won't really mind have a second source for raw materials. The only companies likely to dislike it would are the oil drillers, oil shippers and of course OPEC.
And while the price will naturally be the same as the stuff that comes out of the ground, the price of both is likely to be lower than it would be without the plants online.
As for quality, it's supposedly the same, but since most oil is simply burned, I doubt it matters much if it's little higher or lower.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even find it surprising.
Technically slashdot is "professial journalism" - the slashdot editors get paid after all.
The process used to create both is very similar, and they're both subject to the same amount of scrutiny before being published.
But on slashdot, you usually get both sides of the story, (and several sides you didn't even think existed).
Newspaper stories might be more polished, but I haven't noticed them being any more accurate.
-- not a
I've often wondered how they would react if you asked for the same rights that they ask of you -
.sig
to tape, edit, and broadcast the performance.
-- not a
Maybe, but people don't have any reasonable way to evaluate the life time of a car.
If the only observable difference between two cars is the sticker price, most people buy the cheaper one.
If people didn't care how long their car lasted, they wouldn't get an extended warrenty.
I also doubt the claims of the original poster that a galvanizied body would make cars last longer.
It might make the body last longer (and even that's questionable) but it wouldn't protect the engine, which wears out faster than the frame even now.
-- not a
The vast majority of people use the "free as in included in the package" email provided by their ISP.
If you eliminate those, then the next largest block is people who have a vanity domain, and use the "free as in included in the package" email that comes from their hosting provider.
It's not until you are talking about "free as in paid for with advertising" that hotmail becomes a contender, and even then I'd bet that enough people use yahoo that few would call hotmail the "vast majority"
Personally, I've created dozens of hotmail accounts for the sole purpose of registering with sites that insist on an email address.
I bet I'm not alone in that, though probably not in the vast majority.
-- not a
Yep, it's possible to slander by making true statements.
"The president calls all his female employees whores" is a true statement of any company with no female employees,
but I'd still find against anyone who tried to claim it was "truth" as a defense.
-- not a
Can't we just set up a foundation to buy the rights to existing books, and then release them into the public domain?
.sig
Or if we really need a new book, why not create them using the same methods we use now, but paid for by that textbooks-to-public-domain foundation?
-- not a
All it takes is a printer, a graphics program, and a little imagination and you too can have a diploma - not quite free, but close.
Diplomas from an accredited university don't certify that learned anything, just that you've spent four years working hard at menial tasks without pissing off the arrogant bastards that work at that university enough to get expelled.
This is an important qualification for most jobs, which is why those diplomas are so valuable to have.
-- not a
They don't need access to a database for that, just access to your DNA.
They could refuse to insure you if you won't give them a DNA sample,
or give you a greatly reduced rate if you agree to give them one.
The only thing stopping them from doing it now, is that they don't have a way to tell if you're a health risk by looking at your DNA.
-- not a
Imagine that there was a complete DNA database and it was available to the "wrong" types.
.sig
What's the worst thing they could do?
I.e. what is it that they could do with the data that they can't do without it?
-- not a
I think a better option is a meta tag that lets search engines know that there's user contributed content on the page.
.sig
(Or maybe something in robots.txt)
Google could still index the page, but weigh links on the page lower.
-- not a
Compared with Stalin, Manson was a pretty nice guy.
Here are some other points for comparison;
The Starpath version of Frogger fit in 6272 bytes.
Unix runs multi-user on a standard PDP-11/70 - 256K of ram.
The 80Megahertz Cray-I supercomputer typically shiped with 4 megabytes of ram.
The question isn't "Is this better (or worse) than Microsoft Windows?".
The question is "Can't we do better?".
-- not a
All of these things involve work.
For all it's faults, the legacy publishing system is good at extracting money from those that benefit from the work, and a so-so job of redistributing that money to those that do the work.
Internet publishing greatly reduces the cost of distribution, but it also greatly reduces the amount of money people are willing to pay.
What's needed most IMO isn't a better way to do the work, but a better way to get paid for doing it.
-- not a
Not bad, but I think rather than eliminating the initial examination, you should reduce it to a minimal read-through.
.sig
Think of it as a clairity requirement - the examiner must be able to understand what the patent says before it's accepted.
-- not a
He's not stretching it.
The keyword in claim 1 is "comprising" which in a patent claim mean "including all of the following elements but not excluding others"
In order to violate claims 1, you have to do everything listed in claim 1.
Claims 2-13 are dependant on claim 1 - in other words, they #include claim 1.
14-17 are independant, but it looks to me like it's sufficent to simply pay attention to the first and last paragraph of the email and you aren't in violation of any of the claims.
While I agree that adding "bayes rule" to the list of requirements is on par with saying "the chair must be made of matter", it doesn't broaden the patent because it's an additional requirement.
For a more detailed explaination of how to read a patent claim, see this page
-- not a
Seems simple enough given modern digital processing capabilities.
All you would need is a single receptor, and a willingness to run a calibration test periodically.
Multiply the brightness of each pixel by 1/(the amount of light that reaches the receptor).
-- not a
Why the hell is this thing still on trial?
If I were the judge I would have ruled the act unconstitutional so fast that the defendant wouldn't even have time to say "national security".
No problem then -- he can return the education he got and the school will return his money.
-- not a
Yes, that's true, and there are ways to get around the 512 byte limit too.
You could for example have a "continued=rec2.example.com" field or some such.
The point is that saying "we'll store RSA keys in DNS records" isn't enough.
They need to describe exactly how RSA keys will be converted to ASCII, how keys longer than 127 characters will be handled, and how keys longer than 512 will be handled.
And a few dozen other bookkeeping details too - verisons codes, key size, exponent.
None of these things are hard to specify, but exactly how they are to be specified needs to be specified.
At this point, if they want me to take them seriously, then they're going to need to provide a working example.
-- not a
Are you claiming that a single unpatched server causes over $100 million in damage?
If creating a worm is makes one worthy of death,
then being one of a million contributors to the worms spread is only worth one millionth of death.
I'd approximate that at a slip on the wrist.
-- not a
Blocking port 25 (surgically or otherwise) wouldn't prevent zombies DDoS attacks.
The problem is that the machine is infected. Blocking just hides the infection from the rest of the internet.
I think most people would remove the zombies if they knew it was there, and they knew how.
And it's often the case that somebody knows a machine is infected and someone probably knows how to fix it too.
The key is to get that information to the user.
Imagine if most of the web sites visited checked your IP against a central server of infected IPs,
and redirected them to a "your computer is infected, get it fixed - here's how" web page when appropriate.
-- this is not a
If the patent was only for the algorithm you describe, then I might agree.
But claim 1 essentially claims any form of reading "unistrokes", converting them to letters, and then displaying them.
Would someone skilled in the art find it easier to build such a device after reading claim 1?
I don't think so.
-- this is not a
They think they know of 100 people who are violating the CANSPAM act, and there's only potential for prosecution?
Why do I feel like this is just election year politicing at it's typical bad?
-- this is not a
Well, yes and no.
From the FAQ
So they haven't made a profit - i.e. the plant hasn't produced more money than it took to construct it, but they are making money.
I believe they expect it to not only make enough money to pay for the construction, but to also be a reasonable investement.
According to bloomberg crude oil futures are $35-$40 a barrel.
It seems reasonable to assume that the mysterious "No. 4 oil" would sell for approximately the same.
Assuming a raw materials cost of zero, no maintence, the plant makes 500 barrels a day, and runs continuously, that's 500 * $35 or $17,500 a day.
At that rate, it would take 3-4 years to break even, and about 6-10 years before it's has a reasonable return rate given the initial $20,000,000 investment cost.
If you assume a high maintenance cost, a high repair bill, a high interest loan, only 100 barrels a day, and constant interuptions (which is much closer to current conditions) then it would take considerably longer to break even - over 40 years. It would never achieve a reseaonable return rate - even if it makes money you'd be better off putting the money in the bank.
Prognosticating is fruaght with error, but I'd say oil prices and the cost of waste disposal is going to go up, while the cost of building and running these plants is going to go down.
-- not a
Yep, you've got it about right.
US demand is closer to 11 million barrels per day, and with over 20,000 factory farms in the US that could apply the technology, 10,000 is optimistic but not impossible. 5 million barrels a day won't supply all the demand, but it could reduce it 50% which means a lot.
Of course, since the net effect is to reduce the waste produced by factory farms, the government might actually mandate the building of the plants, but since the plants make money they'd probably be built anyway - government involvement will just make it happen faster. American oil is mostly in the oil refining business so they won't really mind have a second source for raw materials. The only companies likely to dislike it would are the oil drillers, oil shippers and of course OPEC.
And while the price will naturally be the same as the stuff that comes out of the ground, the price of both is likely to be lower than it would be without the plants online.
As for quality, it's supposedly the same, but since most oil is simply burned, I doubt it matters much if it's little higher or lower.
-- not a
It's false
-- not a