I conducted a survey a while back on said site and the average age of the visitor was between 18 and 27 years of age -- college students. I don't know any 13 year olds who are going for a BSC at Harvard. =)
Yeah, but I know a lot of 13-year olds who are prepared to lie in online surveys:)
If Microsoft vary or extend their implementation of the ECMA standard, which version do you think 99.999% of the market would follow?
Is there any reason why MS wouldn't do this, given their (lack of) respect for standards in the past?
At least Sun were honest about wanting to retain control -- seems like MS want it both ways. I'll be one of the people saying 'I told you so' when news of this comes out.
So much of their previous success has come through locking people in to proprietary data formats and networks; why would they change their methods now?
I thought that there was a bandwidth surplus? If that's true, then why is it so expensive?
There's a surplus because telcos built lots of infrastructure during the boomtime, and it's so expensive because they all borrowed money or issed mountains of stock to pay for that infrastructure. Now comes time to pay the bills or get that stock price back up, they're gouging left, right and centre.
I'd be interested to see the sums which drive their pricing models; I'm not sure that, e.g. $120/month is going to be all that appealing as the average cable or DSL bill.
just to add to my most excellent first post, in New Zealand I am signed up to a DSL plan. We get 10GB international traffic per month for $35, and then pay between 2c and 6c per MB after that. This is a 128kbps up/down service.
Compare Australian prices before crying hardship. I blame Telstra.
Tesla apparently figured out how to turn the entire planet into a giant battery so that, in order to get power, you'd simply stick a copper pole in the ground. He went to J.P. Morgan and asked for some cash to implement his idea. Morgan listened and then asked Tesla how exactly he was supposed to charge people for it.
Branding, of course!
Hell, if Coca-Cola can sell bottled tap water at obscene prices, Morgan would have had no trouble selling people free power:)
Yeah, but Microsoft owns so much, and is looking to get into the rest...
Any time someone says, e.g., "Microsoft doesn't do refrigerators" I could probably find a counter-example, or at least an early beta fridge that actually heats its contents:)
That's fine, except when the client wants gimmicky crap like this and specifically requests it -- even after a 10-15 minute lecture on the benefits of usability I could tell he wasn't going to bend...:(
Just playing devil's advocate here -- maybe because people can choose their profession but can't choose their skin colour? (Assuming, of course, that inflicting pain on others is a value-neutral activiity:)
(BTW, why is the 'Post anonymously' checkbox suddenly missing from this interface? Is AC suddenly persona non grata at/.?)
Talking about representing genes isn't really relevant.
Isn't that what these people are saying that they've patented? A representation of a gene that they have managed to produce? Or is the issue that they are trying to hide which gene that is and protect it with the DMCA? (I'm feeling extra-stupid now -- I don't think I realised the exact point of the original story:/)
It's a bit like saying that you could produce say, a phonograph that corresponded in every way to a patented phonograph, but avoid the patent by saying you used a different production process. It doesn't really work that way.
That may be because the patented phonograph could only be used in patented ways; this may also be the case with genes (when I resort to dodgy analogies, I'm way out of my depth, so I really don't know:)
I guess that could depend on whether your different process was sufficiently different... it just seems to me that protecting the result as well as the process is overly broad.
I guess the idea is to make the patent lawyers rich first and foremost.:)
The IP regime have to be tuned to ensure that progress in the fields they regulate occurs with the greatest rapidity possible; that's the principal benchmark of their effectiveness.
Too many businesses and governments are fixed on a short-term view of the future; governments because of the venality of the politicians (and by extension the voting public), and businesses because of the greediness of their boards & management (and by extension their shareholders).
Progress is a difficult thing to measure at the best of times, especially if you're too busy concentrating on the opinion polls or the quarterly results:/
The test for patentability under US law is, IIRC, "anything under the sun made by man".
Hmm, that's pretty broad. I can see patenting the processes used to isolate genes, that's definitely creative (even if it may be in the '1% inspiration, 99% perspiration' sense), but a description of something that already exists? Is that "made by man"? A lot closer to "made by evolution" (and/or God, depending on your perspective).
What if I wanted to represent the same gene using different notation, using a different investigative process to get that representation? What about the same notation and and a different process? In each case you can patent the process -- why can the gene also be patented by the first one to isolate it?
Again, I can understand being able to patent a process used to produce millions of instances of this gene for use in, e.g. cystic fibrosis sufferers. If the company gets a lot of good research done they should be able to sew up the market. But if other people can use a different method to produce a similar product, shouldn't they be allowed to compete?
Oh well, I guess the groundwork was laid with medicinal versions of otherwise common herbs and chemicals.
This does seem a lot like one of those newly exploitable frontiers that capitalism loves so much... I guess that's what it comes down to, and whether or not you agree on whether the patent system's protection for pharmaceutical companies encourages or discourages basic research.
I'm undecided on the topic, but my gut feeling is that it doesn't really help the public that much one way or the other, while it definitely helps the companies.
Compare Mozart's reputation today to that he had during his lifetime.
Now think of how people will consider the Disney characters in one or two hundred years time, given a constant marketing budget and various image changes.
After all, didn't Walt attend American Nazi Party meetings? Whether or not this particular slur was true, it definitely remains that his politics were... ummm... rather extremely right-wing.
As far as I'm aware patents should only be given to *processes*; a DNA sequence is just data, isn't it?
Money talks, and if one difference can be glossed over the other one can be too.
Besides, there's some pretty uncreative stuff out there that's still protected by copyright.... Windows, for example! (yes, it's the obligatory/. MS bashing:)
Speaking as a web-developer who has to design pages that are compatible with Netscape 4 as well as with browsers that actually make some attempt to support W3C specs,
Slashdot Mirror
It's the first time a non-japanese company is actually making a console
Atari?
I conducted a survey a while back on said site and the average age of the visitor was between 18 and 27 years of age -- college students. I don't know any 13 year olds who are going for a BSC at Harvard. =)
:)
Yeah, but I know a lot of 13-year olds who are prepared to lie in online surveys
If Microsoft vary or extend their implementation of the ECMA standard, which version do you think 99.999% of the market would follow?
Is there any reason why MS wouldn't do this, given their (lack of) respect for standards in the past?
At least Sun were honest about wanting to retain control -- seems like MS want it both ways. I'll be one of the people saying 'I told you so' when news of this comes out.
So much of their previous success has come through locking people in to proprietary data formats and networks; why would they change their methods now?
or at most he thinks he's buying it from sony, he doesn't know that he's really buying it from the evil-megacorporation-of-doom(tm)
and sony *isn't* an evil-megacorporation-of-doom(tm)? huh?
It really did remind me of Scientology.
:)
The other similarity -- really bad ghost-written books from the cult leaders.
Battlefield Earth vs. The Road Ahead -- which is worse?
I thought that there was a bandwidth surplus? If that's true, then why is it so expensive?
There's a surplus because telcos built lots of infrastructure during the boomtime, and it's so expensive because they all borrowed money or issed mountains of stock to pay for that infrastructure. Now comes time to pay the bills or get that stock price back up, they're gouging left, right and centre.
I'd be interested to see the sums which drive their pricing models; I'm not sure that, e.g. $120/month is going to be all that appealing as the average cable or DSL bill.
just to add to my most excellent first post, in New Zealand I am signed up to a DSL plan. We get 10GB international traffic per month for $35, and then pay between 2c and 6c per MB after that. This is a 128kbps up/down service.
Compare Australian prices before crying hardship. I blame Telstra.
Right, time to change the .sig -- you're the third person to ask :)
.com" advertising, but that's now long-gone.
:)
It was a pisstake of Sun's "dot in
BTW, I'm the first 4, the other position isn't yet taken
I'm waiting for the version for mathophobes, The Fear of All Sums :)
Tesla apparently figured out how to turn the entire planet into a giant battery so that, in order to get power, you'd simply stick a copper pole in the ground. He went to J.P. Morgan and asked for some cash to implement his idea. Morgan listened and then asked Tesla how exactly he was supposed to charge people for it.
:)
Branding, of course!
Hell, if Coca-Cola can sell bottled tap water at obscene prices, Morgan would have had no trouble selling people free power
Yeah, but Microsoft owns so much, and is looking to get into the rest...
:)
Any time someone says, e.g., "Microsoft doesn't do refrigerators" I could probably find a counter-example, or at least an early beta fridge that actually heats its contents
That's fine, except when the client wants gimmicky crap like this and specifically requests it -- even after a 10-15 minute lecture on the benefits of usability I could tell he wasn't going to bend... :(
Just playing devil's advocate here -- maybe because people can choose their profession but can't choose their skin colour? (Assuming, of course, that inflicting pain on others is a value-neutral activiity :)
/.?)
(BTW, why is the 'Post anonymously' checkbox suddenly missing from this interface? Is AC suddenly persona non grata at
Perfect Dark on the N64.
:) You just have to adapt to the loss of resolution...
(and Goldeneye's not bad either)
I originally felt like you did, but PD is just so well balanced
Rats with wings.
:/
Of course, some people consider rats an unappreciated species too.
Which is more expensive -- chickenfeed or pigeonfeed? As far as I can tell, they'll both eat almost anything, anyway :)
Maybe they could replace the current system with email over IP over pigeons -- that way the pigeons wouldn't be out of work and would remain well fed!
Sometimes I could swear Hotmail works that way anyway, of course...
Talking about representing genes isn't really relevant.
:/)
:)
:)
:/
Isn't that what these people are saying that they've patented? A representation of a gene that they have managed to produce? Or is the issue that they are trying to hide which gene that is and protect it with the DMCA? (I'm feeling extra-stupid now -- I don't think I realised the exact point of the original story
It's a bit like saying that you could produce say, a phonograph that corresponded in every way to a patented phonograph, but avoid the patent by saying you used a different production process. It doesn't really work that way.
That may be because the patented phonograph could only be used in patented ways; this may also be the case with genes (when I resort to dodgy analogies, I'm way out of my depth, so I really don't know
I guess that could depend on whether your different process was sufficiently different... it just seems to me that protecting the result as well as the process is overly broad.
I guess the idea is to make the patent lawyers rich first and foremost.
The IP regime have to be tuned to ensure that progress in the fields they regulate occurs with the greatest rapidity possible; that's the principal benchmark of their effectiveness.
Too many businesses and governments are fixed on a short-term view of the future; governments because of the venality of the politicians (and by extension the voting public), and businesses because of the greediness of their boards & management (and by extension their shareholders).
Progress is a difficult thing to measure at the best of times, especially if you're too busy concentrating on the opinion polls or the quarterly results
"At Microsoft, we put *everything* into our work."
has something to say on this matter:
bondage-and-discipline language n.
The test for patentability under US law is, IIRC, "anything under the sun made by man".
Hmm, that's pretty broad. I can see patenting the processes used to isolate genes, that's definitely creative (even if it may be in the '1% inspiration, 99% perspiration' sense), but a description of something that already exists? Is that "made by man"? A lot closer to "made by evolution" (and/or God, depending on your perspective).
What if I wanted to represent the same gene using different notation, using a different investigative process to get that representation?
What about the same notation and and a different process? In each case you can patent the process -- why can the gene also be patented by the first one to isolate it?
Again, I can understand being able to patent a process used to produce millions of instances of this gene for use in, e.g. cystic fibrosis sufferers. If the company gets a lot of good research done they should be able to sew up the market. But if other people can use a different method to produce a similar product, shouldn't they be allowed to compete?
Oh well, I guess the groundwork was laid with medicinal versions of otherwise common herbs and chemicals.
This does seem a lot like one of those newly exploitable frontiers that capitalism loves so much... I guess that's what it comes down to, and whether or not you agree on whether the patent system's protection for pharmaceutical companies encourages or discourages basic research.
I'm undecided on the topic, but my gut feeling is that it doesn't really help the public that much one way or the other, while it definitely helps the companies.
Compare Mozart's reputation today to that he had during his lifetime.
:/
Now think of how people will consider the Disney characters in one or two hundred years time, given a constant marketing budget and various image changes.
Scary, isn't it?
After all, didn't Walt attend American Nazi Party meetings? Whether or not this particular slur was true, it definitely remains that his politics were... ummm... rather extremely right-wing.
As far as I'm aware patents should only be given to *processes*; a DNA sequence is just data, isn't it?
/. MS bashing :)
Money talks, and if one difference can be glossed over the other one can be too.
Besides, there's some pretty uncreative stuff out there that's still protected by copyright.... Windows, for example! (yes, it's the obligatory
Speaking as a web-developer who has to design pages that are compatible with Netscape 4 as well as with browsers that actually make some attempt to support W3C specs,
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ON???