"We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
However, the spokesman never said they weren't going to implement this technology. They are trying to downplay the patent because of the sensitivity of people about their privacy. Classic misdirection. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".
Other statements of misdirection.
"Nobody beats our safety record." Yup, you and eight other companies have the same top safety record.
"Best crash test score in the industry." You and 42 other models have 5 stars. Can't get any better.
"I got the top score in the class." Yeah, you and sixteen other people in the class got A's so you also got the top score possible.
"John and I were in a race. I came in second but John was next to last." John actually won the race, but there were only two people racing so the statement is technically correct.
"Best warranty in the industry." Yeah, it is the same 10 year/100,000 mile warranty that five other companies offer.
"Top car in its class." Of course they define that "class" as narrowly as possible. Read the fine print. "Class is defined as all SUVs from the same manufacturer with less than 5000lbs payload."
Calling smoking "freedom" is just bullshit. You are a smoker yourself, right? Then it is not logic that talks, but addiction.
As long as you smoke in a public space where others may be, you risk exposing them to smoke.
And it is by exposure to nicotine (in smoke or vape) that people get addicted to it.
You don't have an inalienable right to create more addicts.
But if you want to inject yourself with nicotine, use a path, gum, tablet or inhaler. Then that's perfectly fine by me. That is your right.
So you are OK with banning cigarettes because that's what you see most often? It's OK to allow pat(c)h, gum, tablet, or inhaler (vape?) because that doesn't inconvenience YOU as much? A very little percentage of smoking is done in public but because THAT portion of a affects you the most, banning ALL smoking is your solution?
So, let me sum up your argument. Freedom is OK as long as YOU are not inconvenienced.
They should do the same with alcohol. Ban all flavors. The only legal alcohol would be grain alcohol. Studies show that virtually no teenage drinking starts with grain alcohol so it must have the benefit of stopping all teenage drinking. (/s)
Because 54% of teen smoking starts with menthol cigarettes banning menthol must lower teen smoking by more than half. If the only flavor of cigarettes are regular flavor, then 100% of teen smoking will start with regular flavor. There is no evidence that banning menthol will lower the number of teen smokers.
Your solution makes about as much sense as using a shotgun to blow the tires off a car parked in a loading only zone. Or a bicyclist that rides down a pedestrian-only walkway so you demolish his bike with a baseball bat. Just because something is against the law doesn't give another person the right to turn vigilante.
Surprise! Gmail doesn't have folders. It has Labels. If you're using labels as simple replacements for folders, you are missing one of the benefits of Gmail.
For example, imagine you receive a new email that has to do with a proposed shipping contract of snowshoes to Alaska. If you have labels for Proposals, Contracts, Snowshoes, and Alaska you apply these labels to the email and remove the inbox label. Now it is easy to click on the Alaska label to see all correspondence that deals with Alaska. You can also click on Proposals and see all proposed contracts for multiple states and items. Clicking on Snowshoes would show you all orders for Alaska, Montana, Maine, etc.
You can color code labels so they stand out when viewing a list of emails. (I have a label named !Urgent that I color red to track urgent emails even after I have filed them.) You can also apply the labels to Sent messages to easily find them, even if you delete the original email.
With folders you would be limited to putting the email into a single folder and relying on the search feature to find all the emails that deal with snowshoes across a wide variety of folders.
Using multiple labels can combine the functions of folders, keywords, flags, and task lists into a single system.
Just like the recent bad decision to delete descriptions from bookmarks. It was a perfect place to put notes about the site, login information, date joined, interesting keywords on the site, membership numbers, etc.
I have turned off automatic updates and will stay with the previous version until they fix this or someone creates an add-on to restore this functionality.
In hindsight it would have been nice if the three solar panel sections could be lowered down to near vertical during dust storms. At least one of the panels would still be in sunlight after the storm and could recharge the batteries. Still, that would add one more item that could fail or jam. The fact that the 90-day rover survived for over 14 years is a testament to the engineering excellence of the design team at NASA.
Pure oxygen is NOT poisonous, unless you are underwater below 40 feet. Hospitals, ambulances, and EMTs all carry oxygen masks to provide 100% oxygen (unpressurized). Scuba divers will not dive deeper than 30 feet on pure O2. Deeper dives can be done on normal air mix, Nitrox, or Trimix.
Except you don't have to bomb the interior of the burned area. The purpose is to CONTAIN the file so the goal is to extinguish the fire at the periphery.
Dropping fuel-air explosive (FAE) bombs along the edge of a fire, assuming a radius of 100 meters and dropping outside the burning area so the flames are pushed inward toward the burned area, should give each bomb a 100 meter front. You would then need 16 bombs per mile to blow the flames inward. Since a typical bomb load can be 84 bombs, each bomber could blow out a five mile stretch of the fire.
These bombs would probably need to be made with fiberglass or other resin/fabric mix so the entire casing is burned during the explosion. Using an air inflated retarder and an altitude trigger would allow the bombs to detonate at about tree-top level to get the best blast effect.
I guess they didn't learn from their ill-received JPEG2000 format that not everyone appreciates messing with a near-universal standard. Maybe they will call the Blockchain version JPEG2020 so we can ignore it too.
"When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability.
So if the government mail service was used to send letters with fake news, the mail service would be accountable for any harm the misinformation caused? If you call someone on a cell and give them incorrect rumors that cause riots, the phone company is responsible for the content of the voice conversation? If you nail a flyer with misinformation to a power pole is the electric company accountable for "hosting" the message?
The communication method used by criminals can't be held responsible for the content of private and protected conversation if the service has no way to monitor every communication. If this was true, the cell phone providers would be just as culpable as WhatsApp for these false rumors.
I thought the days of delivering different content depending on the brand of browser was over. I guess some companies still think it is OK to provide different content to different platforms.
The White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency should swap his twitter phone during the night and reload all his previous tweets so he doesn't see anything different.
By design, security is ALWAYS inconvenient -- hopefully more inconvenient to the bad guys than to the users.
will save about 8 hours of forecaster time a day -- and about $1 million a year at NWS
Okay, I see that this is in Alaska. But a million dollars a year for one FTE? No wonder the union is squawking.
From the article:
Now, Buchanan says, NWS will need just one person [instead of three] at each remote site, to serve as a community liaison and to reload the autolauncher every 12 days. The other staff will relocate to bigger offices, like the ones in Anchorage or Fairbanks, where they can retrain for missions such as forecasting sea ice conditions and volcanic ash hazards, she says. The agency also plans to scale back office space and housing at the remote sites.
So the mistake is trying to connect the 8 hours of forecaster time and the $1M in savings. They are two different things. The savings from the 8 hours of forecaster time might not be monetized and could just free the forecasters to do more needed work. The $1M saving could be from reductions in leasing office space, leasing permanent housing in a remote area, travel costs, recruiting and hiring costs, background checks, etc.
What a weak argument. Ignoring the fact that the inventor of the file format declared he pronounced it "JIF" when he created it, there are plenty of acronyms where the sound of the word in the acronym and the way we pronounce it aren't the same.
AWOL = Absent Without Leave (long A/short A)
AIDS = Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (long A/short A)
UFO = Unidentified Flying Object (OOFO?)
CAP = Civil Air Patrol (SAP?)
GEOS = Graphical Environment Operating System (normally sounds like "JEOS)
GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program (NIMP?)
GPG = GNU Privacy Guard (NPG?)
Even the letter "G" is pronounced with a "J" sound. It is pronounced "Jee" not "Gee".
This is one of the oldest arguments on the internet (and Compuserve before that). We were pronouncing it "JIF" on Compuserve long before the internet WAS the internet.
Subsidizing Amazon because it refuses to pay its employees enough to live is not working "reasonably well."
How did you get the idea that Amazon is being subsidized because it refuses to pay its employees enough to live? That grammatical or logical error aside, this subsidy you are talking about is from the state or local municipality that is trying to encourage Amazon to build its warehouses in their area to attract new jobs. This subsidy is being paid to attract big businesses to a particular area to increase the number of jobs, not the high salaries of new jobs. Do you imagine the public would support construction subsidies for a research center that would hire only PhDs and pay 100K+ in salaries? These municipalities want more entry level jobs, not professional ones.
As for wages, the wage they pay their warehouse workers is the same as the typical person working across the street in a discount tire store. Both are being paid the Federal Minimum Wage because both businesses can find enough workers willing to work for those wages. If the labor market in those areas can find 10 people willing to work for every job posting, why would they pay higher wages? If you want to punish Amazon for paying their employees minimum wage in that area, you must be willing to punish ALL the businesses in that same area that are also paying minimum wage. Otherwise your argument becomes "punish Amazon because they are a big business and can afford it." That argument was silly in the 70s and it is still silly today.
It isn't fair to the workers, and it isn't fair to me, and it isn't fair to business that pay their workers enough to live.
It isn't fair to the workers? This sounds like the same tired argument crying for all businesses to pay an imaginary "living wage". So lets say we just double the Federal Minimum Wage. Then most companies would see their labor costs double. Where does this money come from? Well, it gets passed on the the consumer. So now everything costs 75% more. Plus, the supplier also has to increase his costs, so now everything costs 110% more. Guess what? The wage increase the minimum wage worker just received results in a loss in buying power and we have runaway inflation.
It isn't fair to you? I can't imagine how you arrived at this conclusion.
It isn't fair to business[es] that pay their workers enough to live. This argument assumes that some businesses pay their workers more than the local labor market dictates due to some altruistic reason, ignoring what the shareholders demand. With the exception of Gravity Payments, I don't know of many companies doing this but I still don't see how Amazon can be singled out of the thousands of other companies paying minimum wage.
In short, I don't see why people are mod'ing your post as "Insightful". I guess it means they want their salary augmented to a "living wage" too.
Agreed. Look how the media has popularized the term "Drone" to refer to anything that flies. Radio controlled multirotor-copters and fixed-wing planes are not drones. A drone requires autonomous flight capabilities that are usually associated with military use. The majority of what people refer to as drones should be called by a more generic name like quadcopter. Calling a quadcopter a "drone" because it flies is like calling a VW Beetle a racecar because it drives.
Wow. One of the first class action lawsuits that actually had a respectable payout to the plaintiffs. Normally everyone gets about $5 after the lawyers take their fees.
If you had to create a new name for an ancient group of people living near the Bering land bridge, what else would you name them? (Unless you were also attempting humor, in which case insert courtesy smile here.)
It still has a government. A government by the people. If you aren't communicating your displeasure to your congress person, you are not helping the situation.
This is one of the reasons patents should be peer reviewed before being granted. This was also discussed when it was revealed that Australia awarded a patent for a wheel in 2001. https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Slashdot Mirror
"We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
However, the spokesman never said they weren't going to implement this technology. They are trying to downplay the patent because of the sensitivity of people about their privacy. Classic misdirection. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".
Other statements of misdirection.
---
Calling smoking "freedom" is just bullshit. You are a smoker yourself, right? Then it is not logic that talks, but addiction. As long as you smoke in a public space where others may be, you risk exposing them to smoke. And it is by exposure to nicotine (in smoke or vape) that people get addicted to it. You don't have an inalienable right to create more addicts.
But if you want to inject yourself with nicotine, use a path, gum, tablet or inhaler. Then that's perfectly fine by me. That is your right.
So you are OK with banning cigarettes because that's what you see most often? It's OK to allow pat(c)h, gum, tablet, or inhaler (vape?) because that doesn't inconvenience YOU as much? A very little percentage of smoking is done in public but because THAT portion of a affects you the most, banning ALL smoking is your solution?
So, let me sum up your argument. Freedom is OK as long as YOU are not inconvenienced.
--
They should do the same with alcohol. Ban all flavors. The only legal alcohol would be grain alcohol. Studies show that virtually no teenage drinking starts with grain alcohol so it must have the benefit of stopping all teenage drinking. (/s)
Because 54% of teen smoking starts with menthol cigarettes banning menthol must lower teen smoking by more than half. If the only flavor of cigarettes are regular flavor, then 100% of teen smoking will start with regular flavor. There is no evidence that banning menthol will lower the number of teen smokers.
--
You read his post and know that isn't what he is arguing for. Why are you trying to twist his argument and confuse the issue?
Your solution makes about as much sense as using a shotgun to blow the tires off a car parked in a loading only zone. Or a bicyclist that rides down a pedestrian-only walkway so you demolish his bike with a baseball bat. Just because something is against the law doesn't give another person the right to turn vigilante.
---
So I like ... folders for prioritizing
Surprise! Gmail doesn't have folders. It has Labels. If you're using labels as simple replacements for folders, you are missing one of the benefits of Gmail.
For example, imagine you receive a new email that has to do with a proposed shipping contract of snowshoes to Alaska. If you have labels for Proposals, Contracts, Snowshoes, and Alaska you apply these labels to the email and remove the inbox label. Now it is easy to click on the Alaska label to see all correspondence that deals with Alaska. You can also click on Proposals and see all proposed contracts for multiple states and items. Clicking on Snowshoes would show you all orders for Alaska, Montana, Maine, etc.
You can color code labels so they stand out when viewing a list of emails. (I have a label named !Urgent that I color red to track urgent emails even after I have filed them.) You can also apply the labels to Sent messages to easily find them, even if you delete the original email.
With folders you would be limited to putting the email into a single folder and relying on the search feature to find all the emails that deal with snowshoes across a wide variety of folders.
Using multiple labels can combine the functions of folders, keywords, flags, and task lists into a single system.
---
Just like the recent bad decision to delete descriptions from bookmarks. It was a perfect place to put notes about the site, login information, date joined, interesting keywords on the site, membership numbers, etc.
I have turned off automatic updates and will stay with the previous version until they fix this or someone creates an add-on to restore this functionality.
---
In hindsight it would have been nice if the three solar panel sections could be lowered down to near vertical during dust storms. At least one of the panels would still be in sunlight after the storm and could recharge the batteries. Still, that would add one more item that could fail or jam. The fact that the 90-day rover survived for over 14 years is a testament to the engineering excellence of the design team at NASA.
---
Pure oxygen is NOT poisonous, unless you are underwater below 40 feet. Hospitals, ambulances, and EMTs all carry oxygen masks to provide 100% oxygen (unpressurized). Scuba divers will not dive deeper than 30 feet on pure O2. Deeper dives can be done on normal air mix, Nitrox, or Trimix.
---
Except you don't have to bomb the interior of the burned area. The purpose is to CONTAIN the file so the goal is to extinguish the fire at the periphery.
Dropping fuel-air explosive (FAE) bombs along the edge of a fire, assuming a radius of 100 meters and dropping outside the burning area so the flames are pushed inward toward the burned area, should give each bomb a 100 meter front. You would then need 16 bombs per mile to blow the flames inward. Since a typical bomb load can be 84 bombs, each bomber could blow out a five mile stretch of the fire.
These bombs would probably need to be made with fiberglass or other resin/fabric mix so the entire casing is burned during the explosion. Using an air inflated retarder and an altitude trigger would allow the bombs to detonate at about tree-top level to get the best blast effect.
---
I guess they didn't learn from their ill-received JPEG2000 format that not everyone appreciates messing with a near-universal standard. Maybe they will call the Blockchain version JPEG2020 so we can ignore it too.
---
"When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability.
So if the government mail service was used to send letters with fake news, the mail service would be accountable for any harm the misinformation caused? If you call someone on a cell and give them incorrect rumors that cause riots, the phone company is responsible for the content of the voice conversation? If you nail a flyer with misinformation to a power pole is the electric company accountable for "hosting" the message?
The communication method used by criminals can't be held responsible for the content of private and protected conversation if the service has no way to monitor every communication. If this was true, the cell phone providers would be just as culpable as WhatsApp for these false rumors.
--
I thought the days of delivering different content depending on the brand of browser was over. I guess some companies still think it is OK to provide different content to different platforms.
--
The White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency should swap his twitter phone during the night and reload all his previous tweets so he doesn't see anything different.
By design, security is ALWAYS inconvenient -- hopefully more inconvenient to the bad guys than to the users.
--
will save about 8 hours of forecaster time a day -- and about $1 million a year at NWS
Okay, I see that this is in Alaska. But a million dollars a year for one FTE? No wonder the union is squawking.
From the article:
Now, Buchanan says, NWS will need just one person [instead of three] at each remote site, to serve as a community liaison and to reload the autolauncher every 12 days. The other staff will relocate to bigger offices, like the ones in Anchorage or Fairbanks, where they can retrain for missions such as forecasting sea ice conditions and volcanic ash hazards, she says. The agency also plans to scale back office space and housing at the remote sites.
So the mistake is trying to connect the 8 hours of forecaster time and the $1M in savings. They are two different things. The savings from the 8 hours of forecaster time might not be monetized and could just free the forecasters to do more needed work. The $1M saving could be from reductions in leasing office space, leasing permanent housing in a remote area, travel costs, recruiting and hiring costs, background checks, etc.
---
What a weak argument. Ignoring the fact that the inventor of the file format declared he pronounced it "JIF" when he created it, there are plenty of acronyms where the sound of the word in the acronym and the way we pronounce it aren't the same.
AWOL = Absent Without Leave (long A/short A)
AIDS = Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (long A/short A)
UFO = Unidentified Flying Object (OOFO?)
CAP = Civil Air Patrol (SAP?)
GEOS = Graphical Environment Operating System (normally sounds like "JEOS)
GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program (NIMP?)
GPG = GNU Privacy Guard (NPG?)
Even the letter "G" is pronounced with a "J" sound. It is pronounced "Jee" not "Gee".
This is one of the oldest arguments on the internet (and Compuserve before that). We were pronouncing it "JIF" on Compuserve long before the internet WAS the internet.
---
Subsidizing Amazon because it refuses to pay its employees enough to live is not working "reasonably well."
How did you get the idea that Amazon is being subsidized because it refuses to pay its employees enough to live? That grammatical or logical error aside, this subsidy you are talking about is from the state or local municipality that is trying to encourage Amazon to build its warehouses in their area to attract new jobs. This subsidy is being paid to attract big businesses to a particular area to increase the number of jobs, not the high salaries of new jobs. Do you imagine the public would support construction subsidies for a research center that would hire only PhDs and pay 100K+ in salaries? These municipalities want more entry level jobs, not professional ones.
As for wages, the wage they pay their warehouse workers is the same as the typical person working across the street in a discount tire store. Both are being paid the Federal Minimum Wage because both businesses can find enough workers willing to work for those wages. If the labor market in those areas can find 10 people willing to work for every job posting, why would they pay higher wages? If you want to punish Amazon for paying their employees minimum wage in that area, you must be willing to punish ALL the businesses in that same area that are also paying minimum wage. Otherwise your argument becomes "punish Amazon because they are a big business and can afford it." That argument was silly in the 70s and it is still silly today.
It isn't fair to the workers, and it isn't fair to me, and it isn't fair to business that pay their workers enough to live.
It isn't fair to the workers? This sounds like the same tired argument crying for all businesses to pay an imaginary "living wage". So lets say we just double the Federal Minimum Wage. Then most companies would see their labor costs double. Where does this money come from? Well, it gets passed on the the consumer. So now everything costs 75% more. Plus, the supplier also has to increase his costs, so now everything costs 110% more. Guess what? The wage increase the minimum wage worker just received results in a loss in buying power and we have runaway inflation.
It isn't fair to you? I can't imagine how you arrived at this conclusion.
It isn't fair to business[es] that pay their workers enough to live. This argument assumes that some businesses pay their workers more than the local labor market dictates due to some altruistic reason, ignoring what the shareholders demand. With the exception of Gravity Payments, I don't know of many companies doing this but I still don't see how Amazon can be singled out of the thousands of other companies paying minimum wage.
In short, I don't see why people are mod'ing your post as "Insightful". I guess it means they want their salary augmented to a "living wage" too.
---
Wow, your post is hard to read. It's full of grammatical and spelling errors. Ever thought of hiring an editor? /s
--
Agreed. Look how the media has popularized the term "Drone" to refer to anything that flies. Radio controlled multirotor-copters and fixed-wing planes are not drones. A drone requires autonomous flight capabilities that are usually associated with military use. The majority of what people refer to as drones should be called by a more generic name like quadcopter. Calling a quadcopter a "drone" because it flies is like calling a VW Beetle a racecar because it drives.
--
Wow. One of the first class action lawsuits that actually had a respectable payout to the plaintiffs. Normally everyone gets about $5 after the lawyers take their fees.
---
If you had to create a new name for an ancient group of people living near the Bering land bridge, what else would you name them? (Unless you were also attempting humor, in which case insert courtesy smile here.)
--
It still has a government. A government by the people. If you aren't communicating your displeasure to your congress person, you are not helping the situation.
--
Agreed. And a second, hidden admin account. Mod parent +1
I agree. Mod +1
This is one of the reasons patents should be peer reviewed before being granted. This was also discussed when it was revealed that Australia awarded a patent for a wheel in 2001. https://yro.slashdot.org/story...