1. It's funny that the congresscritters' names are in normal text and the lawyers' names are in bold.
2. Yes they had 350 Ph.D's in the PTO. But they're Ph.D's who have chosen to work for gummint pay. When I was finishing up my MSEE I happened to become fairly well acquainted with the then-President of the US Patent Law Assn (he lectured at a biz class I took and then I discovered he lived right around the corner from me). I talked to him about the field, more from the technical than the legal side. The work looked kind of interesting ("poring over other people's never-before-seen stuff, day in, day out, in a dingy, humid office in a sub-basement in Crystal City? Cool!"), but the pay scales outright sucked, especially for new-hires. And I'd had enough of the insensate management style of institutions when I was in the Army, thank you. I took an easy job at HyperMegaSemiCorp and got rich, instead. I still wonder what the thought process was behind the career choice for every advanced-degreed individual working at the PTO.
Let's deal with the objections to my post en masse:
0. Minor changes to patented items can and do result in new patents. You may list the old patents yours relates to, and you may need to license those patents in order to use your patents, but you don't need to license them to be awarded your patents, and you don't need to license them in order to license your patents to others (it's the licensee's problem what patents he forgot to license).
1. If you publish patentable designs, and do not file within a year*, you lose your primacy. That makes it all the easier for people who make minor changes to receive patents, whether your publication is sufficient prior art to invalidate part of their invention or not.
2. Cup handles predate the patent system and are therefore moot as merely cup handles. New designs for cup handles are not patentable because they are designs, not new ways for people to do things. You can't patent a design, only a means. You can patent it if the new cup handle provides a new means to do something (like a pressure-operated digital alarm-timer insert so you know when your break is over, or a hook to hold your donut while you walk with a palm pilot in your other hand--I now have a year to patent those, modulo prior art...). Designs are copyrighted or trademarked, not patented. E.g., font-loading methods are patented; fonts are copyrighted (there's your "patenting the alphabet").
3. PTO employees are not perfect, hence the need to make it policy that the PTO will not ever patent any perpetual motion machine, because the ones who are clued just know that the ones who aren't will eventually fall for it. So "wrong" patents and "wrong" rejections of patents are no proof of what is and isn't right.
4. Non-filed prior art should only invalidate claims that are exact mimics of the methods described. AV's HTTP crawlers do not necessarily have anything in common with Archie, and should certainly have little in common on several claims. (IMO, their schtick infringes much more closely on The WebCrawler's schtick, but I don't recall who was there first; I know I was using webcrawler for a while before I first saw altavista; and for all I know they're two branches of the same rcs tree). It could not be invalidated on the basis that it's functionally the same as crawling around your house looking for your keys under every piece of furniture.
5. ComSat/IntelSat/etc. owe Arthur C. Clarke billions, morally if not legally. They sure did patent plenty of things about geosynchronous and geostationary satellites, and were in business only because he never whined until it was way, way too late. But you put a moral code in one hand and a legal decision in the other and see which one invalidates ComSat's patents. AltaVista might lose a few claims, if they were expansive in their filing. But I predict they will retain many, if not all. And maybe they should pay Arthur C. Clarke a few dubloons, just on principle.
If you guys were my IP-law department, I'd fire the lot of you.
--Blair
*-this may not be exact, but it's the stat I remember. YMMV. I can misread tribal knowledge and legal calves as well as anyone.
If AltaVista's crawler does things different, like using HTTP instead of FTP, or crawling without first knowing the fqdn of the well-known public servers, then they're not infringing (much).
Also, and this is a big also, if you make your work public, and don't file for a patent within a year, anyone can file based on their work without having to worry that you'll file on top of them. "Prior Art" depends not only on the existence of the "art", but on attempts to patent it.
And, of course, if you never make your process (i.e., the method, not just the shrouded executable) public, much less patent it, you have dick to say about it when PlutoPetaCorp beats you to the patent office.
Just ask Arthur C. Clarke if he's owed any money by ComSat.
The moving pictures, sound effects, and dialogue of It's a Wonderful Life are in the public domain (simple matter of lapsed copyright), but the music is not (it was licensed for the film rather than granted).
Someone figured that out 5-10 years ago, and started suing any television station that showed it with sound (istr one tried showing it without sound; ihniw they used subtitles). The number of instances of IAWL across the dial during the holiday season has dropped from several per day to a couple per year.
Of course, someone here could find a way to strip the music from the audio track and overlay some Phish and it'd be a wonderful capracorny phatty PD life again.
Here's a link to the GovExec.Com versions of the per diem tables. These define the max the IRS will let your company deduct for hotels and other expenses. It's a good indicator of the cost of living.
http://govexec.com/travel/
Our policy is to give normal pay plus some differential (10-20%) for out-of-town work, pay for the hotel and car as a direct expense, and then pay the full M&IE * n_days to cover food and incidentals. It's a matter of handling 2 receipts per month vs. 200. These expenses, plus transportation, are, of course, passed on to the client. If you try to set your base pay to match his local market, he'll just find someone who doesn't eat his lunch on expenses. You're competing in gross.
(True story: I drove from AZ to the East Bay once to take a job with a Brazilian company (it gets wierder). While I was on the road, their CEO added up the numbers. I woke up Monday morning and called to make sure we were still on. He was on a plane to Brazil to shanghai more $20/hr keyboard monkeys. I was back in Phoenix by dinnertime. If I'd known where Hayward was, I'd never have even considered him serious.)
If you're in total control of your own destiny, my advice is to try to get more money out of the next job than you got out of the last, and only backslide if the client proves to you that you're more desperate than he is.
There's no shame in turning down a deal if that makes you happier than taking it.
--Blair
"A penny earned is cooler than one you just made by smelting copper wire."
It's useless, except as an exercise. But that never stopped anyone.
Since it bastardizes ELF and therefore isn't portable to other OSes on the same CPU (well, maybe it is if their loaders treat the same fields in the same ways), it isn't ELF. It's an assembly program with comments that align with ELF fields that the Linux loader (well, his Linux loader) treats innocuously.
But, since deconstruction is as good for learning the ropes as construction is, it's 40367 bytes of useful education.
--Blair
"Tomorrow: The biggest ELF program you can't run!"
I've done very minimal fiddling with java so bear with me on this.
What is it about Java that makes it frequently go zombie? (The zombies are generally dead forks of Netscape, which seriously hamper the live ones. This is on Winboxen; I don't see it much on other platforms, and I shun IE unless a page won't display in NS.)
Is it a fundamental problem in the Win/Netscape plugin interpreter or is it bad design on the part of the app coder?
In order to connect this to the cockpit you'd have to have the cockpit software include a TCP/IP/802.11b network stack. That means that the stack would have to be certified to Level C at least, Level A if it interacted in any way with airframe control info. Certification involves inspection and test planning and test specification and test execution and test result analysis and problem reporting and independent reviews of the inspections and test plans and test specs and test code and test results and test result analyses and problem reports and documentation and audit of ever step and FAA DER signoff on all work products and development processes. I.e., hundreds of times more labor and paperwork and management than just "code it and ship it" (you know: Microsoft).
As a colleague of mine once put it, "There isn't enough money printed to certify a TCP/IP stack for flight."
Cabin software for systems that have no connection to the airframe systems at all (e.g. video games) can be "certified to level E", i.e., not inspected or tested or approved, basically just reported. The hardware needs some, to prevent spurious emission.
Since this new system radios outside the aircraft, the network layer (the 802.11b part) might have required certification. If so, I think I know what project it is. And I think I worked on it. Or a piece of it. That's how big that process gets. Half of my company wrote tests for maybe 20% of that layer for over a year, and had no need to know what the eventual application was.
Or maybe that was a competing system that just got thrown out the market window by this one...
Caveat clickor: www.junkscience.com (also.org) gets its funding primarily from the CATO institute, a "libertarian think-tank", if I may oxidize a moron.
I happen to be on the same side as they are, being against the notion of global warming being caused in gross by human activity, but that's a coincidental agreement. Most of the rest of their shit is designed to give mass--if not weight--to political and legal arguments that will be made by polluters and other chemical profiteers (e.g., the fuckers in the nicotine industry who killed my mother).
A few years ago I got in an email three-way with Steve Milloy of junkscience and the cats in Antarctica who are studying the "ozone hole". If you look closely at the famous false-color pictures, and if you understand the units (Dobsons, iirc) they made up to measure its depth, you realize that the "hole" is more of a "dent", and that the amount of ozone "missing" from the "hole" is roughly the same as the amount that can be seen in a big "pile" just to the side of the "hole". The scientist assured me that, integrated over the entire southern hemisphere, there was indeed a net depletion of ozone. But that's not what they were using the picture to claim, was it?
Given that gaia wobbles stochastically on her thermal axis, any attempt to attribute cause and effect to 100 years of data needs to be backed up by the reliable assertions that come only from hindsight. We won't know until it happens, and we'll drive ourselves into bankruptcy if we try to prevent something that isn't happening.
--Blair
"*snorrrrrk*...anyone want a hit of FR-12? I got it in Sonora. It's some goood sheet, mon..."
Face it, there are people who feel that if their insignificant problem doesn't get fixed this second the world will collapse and anarchy will reign.
The reason the world has collapsed and anarchy now reigns is that in 1988 the Boston U. helpdesk put me on hold for seven minutes while they checked if, indeed, there was extra whitespace at the end of a line in/.profile...
they could just invisibly add 25 or 50 cents to each bill & I don't think anyone would notice or mind too much.
If you're already thinking subjunctively about the nickels and dimes utilities have slipped-in on top of the value of the commodity, then you're already not noticing or minding too much. The extra 34c postage is just their way of pumping up their profit margins.
When you drill down into their organization, there's some middle manager in the billing department who realized he could save his ass and his budget by completely eliminating his own biggest cost.
Quick BOTE: Say PG&E---no...bad example... Say at SRP in Arizona it costs $.0615 to generate a KWh. Say they sell it to you for $.0844 and you use say 1200 KWh. Their gross profit for the month is $27.48 on gross expense of $101.28, or 27.13%. Adding 34c to that makes it 27.46%, a gain of 0.3% pure cash profit. But it's probably 70% of the billing department's old budget, and 300% of their new one. Tell your boss you'll cut your costs by 70% without cutting a single employee or customer, and see what you get for xmas.
--Blair
"A pound of flesh a week. That's all we ask."
Time was, people would take the blow-in cards from their magazines and avail themselves of the Business Reply Mail system by taping them to bricks, on the presumption that snail-mail charged by the pound for BRM. It was also popular to do this to the ubiquitous American Express applications.
Did it work? Maybe. The Annals of Improbable Research (www.improb.com), formerly the Journal of Irreproducible Results (URL to hijacked IP denigrated), published a study in which they had mailed odd and bulky items with correct postage and addresses. The USPS seems to have been imperfectly willing to maintain their unflappable image (what unflappable image!), so not everything got to where it was supposed to.
They've already begun. A cow orker came in today and said they'd taken down his neighborhood in Palo Alto two minutes before his coffee was ready.
D'oh!
They'll take down my office any minute.
So I type with haste.
The rolling blackouts last 60-90 minutes. Just long enough to deplete many large-scale UPS systems that are "protecting" many large-, medium-, and small-scale network service providers in the Silicon Valley.
Like the ones involved in bringing Slashdot to your face.
Notice higher latencies today? Stuck-at URLs? Think you're the only one in the world who visits your favorite gerbil-stuffing site? Yes, there are pervs in.za and.il and.tw who share your pain.
Next time someone asks you to sign a NIMBY petition on a generator for your grid, power them down.
--Blair
"The depression has begun. Oops. It's over. That's what the 1GHz economy will do for you."
1) A presidential pardon for Microsoft's "efforts to innovate" would trump any state cases that the scorned co-prosecutors might bring back home.
2) Bush is an idiot. It's right up his alley.
3) Orrin Hatch would turn to face the flag if His President asked him to join in forgiving Bill Gates.
(4)) The new Attorney General, from all indications, will be a card-carrying member of the Schutzstaffel who would take great glee from forcing Windoze 1.0 on the world for another fifteen years, as long as the DoJ had their backdoors installed in the Crypto.
No, I don't know which way the Bush administration will walk on Microsoft. The divestiture proposed is weak (I wanted them broken up into five companies: 3 OS companies with equal starting code bases, 1 MSN, and 1 apps company; then you'd see some competition). Could be this is what they want, forgoing real punishment.
There hasn't been a lot of fire and brimstone from Redmond since the ruling. I suspect we have Br'er Gates and Br'er Ballmer saying "oh lawdy puleeez don' trow us in dat Sherman patch" to Br'er Jackson and Br'er Boies.
As with Florida, this one isn't being decided where you and I can redact the sellout.
Ah, never mind. I just reread the topic header. I gotta stop yelling at the Vikings making excuses in the clubhouse while I'm trying to be editorial...
--Blair
"And Robert Smith thought they'd wasted '98..."
Time-shifting is recording broadcast for later replay.
But that's what these HDTV recorders will allow you to do.
What they may not all allow is more like archiving, and much more like piracy. SCMS was an attempt to allow archiving while preventing piracy. I haven't heard much about SCMS in the past few years. Gee. I guess it worked. It sure stopped itself from being copied more than once.
Unfortunately for all of us, Bill and Dave were neither of them named Agilent.
All of the new high-QA equipment will come from the father/daughter company, since the venerable Hewlett-Packard name has been deeded to the stepson Personal Computing/Printer division. Which makes decent enough products, I guess, but not of the quality of, say, the HP-51, which sat in your hand and glowed with the halo of future wonder.
HP calculators are half the reason I became an engineer in the first place. (The other half was Doc Edgerton and his hyperspeed photographs.)
The HP 15c and 16c regularly sell on eBay for double their original MSRP, and I suspect it's not for collectable value. I'd gladly pay $120 for a working 16c.
RPN is the right way to calculate. It's how all machines actually do the operations (marshal operands, apply operator, present result) and it's how you were taught in the 1st grade (draw numbers on board, compute answer). Infix is a notation, not a method. RPN and the lambda calculus is everything useful.
I think I'll visit The Garage next week and leave my old HP-28S as an offering.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things about your hundreds of PhDs link:
1. It's funny that the congresscritters' names are in normal text and the lawyers' names are in bold.
2. Yes they had 350 Ph.D's in the PTO. But they're Ph.D's who have chosen to work for gummint pay. When I was finishing up my MSEE I happened to become fairly well acquainted with the then-President of the US Patent Law Assn (he lectured at a biz class I took and then I discovered he lived right around the corner from me). I talked to him about the field, more from the technical than the legal side. The work looked kind of interesting ("poring over other people's never-before-seen stuff, day in, day out, in a dingy, humid office in a sub-basement in Crystal City? Cool!"), but the pay scales outright sucked, especially for new-hires. And I'd had enough of the insensate management style of institutions when I was in the Army, thank you. I took an easy job at HyperMegaSemiCorp and got rich, instead. I still wonder what the thought process was behind the career choice for every advanced-degreed individual working at the PTO.
--Blair
AltaVista started out as a service of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Maybe they were DEC patents, which means they could be Compaq's patents, now, though they should be AltaVista's.
Let's deal with the objections to my post en masse:
0. Minor changes to patented items can and do result in new patents. You may list the old patents yours relates to, and you may need to license those patents in order to use your patents, but you don't need to license them to be awarded your patents, and you don't need to license them in order to license your patents to others (it's the licensee's problem what patents he forgot to license).
1. If you publish patentable designs, and do not file within a year*, you lose your primacy. That makes it all the easier for people who make minor changes to receive patents, whether your publication is sufficient prior art to invalidate part of their invention or not.
2. Cup handles predate the patent system and are therefore moot as merely cup handles. New designs for cup handles are not patentable because they are designs, not new ways for people to do things. You can't patent a design, only a means. You can patent it if the new cup handle provides a new means to do something (like a pressure-operated digital alarm-timer insert so you know when your break is over, or a hook to hold your donut while you walk with a palm pilot in your other hand--I now have a year to patent those, modulo prior art...). Designs are copyrighted or trademarked, not patented. E.g., font-loading methods are patented; fonts are copyrighted (there's your "patenting the alphabet").
3. PTO employees are not perfect, hence the need to make it policy that the PTO will not ever patent any perpetual motion machine, because the ones who are clued just know that the ones who aren't will eventually fall for it. So "wrong" patents and "wrong" rejections of patents are no proof of what is and isn't right.
4. Non-filed prior art should only invalidate claims that are exact mimics of the methods described. AV's HTTP crawlers do not necessarily have anything in common with Archie, and should certainly have little in common on several claims. (IMO, their schtick infringes much more closely on The WebCrawler's schtick, but I don't recall who was there first; I know I was using webcrawler for a while before I first saw altavista; and for all I know they're two branches of the same rcs tree). It could not be invalidated on the basis that it's functionally the same as crawling around your house looking for your keys under every piece of furniture.
5. ComSat/IntelSat/etc. owe Arthur C. Clarke billions, morally if not legally. They sure did patent plenty of things about geosynchronous and geostationary satellites, and were in business only because he never whined until it was way, way too late. But you put a moral code in one hand and a legal decision in the other and see which one invalidates ComSat's patents. AltaVista might lose a few claims, if they were expansive in their filing. But I predict they will retain many, if not all. And maybe they should pay Arthur C. Clarke a few dubloons, just on principle.
If you guys were my IP-law department, I'd fire the lot of you.
--Blair
*-this may not be exact, but it's the stat I remember. YMMV. I can misread tribal knowledge and legal calves as well as anyone.
If AltaVista's crawler does things different, like using HTTP instead of FTP, or crawling without first knowing the fqdn of the well-known public servers, then they're not infringing (much).
Also, and this is a big also, if you make your work public, and don't file for a patent within a year, anyone can file based on their work without having to worry that you'll file on top of them. "Prior Art" depends not only on the existence of the "art", but on attempts to patent it.
And, of course, if you never make your process (i.e., the method, not just the shrouded executable) public, much less patent it, you have dick to say about it when PlutoPetaCorp beats you to the patent office.
Just ask Arthur C. Clarke if he's owed any money by ComSat.
--Blair
Over in the thread on mailing back blow-in cards with a brick attached? Or is this some sort of indefatigable synchronicity?
And can anyone clear up international patents? What stops a Japanese company from doing '1-click-shopping'?
Treaty. Berne Convention, etc.
No treaty? Fair game. It's a big problem in some countries. And a reason WIPO was created (www.wipo.org).
--Blair
The moving pictures, sound effects, and dialogue of It's a Wonderful Life are in the public domain (simple matter of lapsed copyright), but the music is not (it was licensed for the film rather than granted).
Someone figured that out 5-10 years ago, and started suing any television station that showed it with sound (istr one tried showing it without sound; ihniw they used subtitles). The number of instances of IAWL across the dial during the holiday season has dropped from several per day to a couple per year.
Of course, someone here could find a way to strip the music from the audio track and overlay some Phish and it'd be a wonderful capracorny phatty PD life again.
--Blair
Here's a link to the GovExec.Com versions of the per diem tables. These define the max the IRS will let your company deduct for hotels and other expenses. It's a good indicator of the cost of living.
http://govexec.com/travel/
Our policy is to give normal pay plus some differential (10-20%) for out-of-town work, pay for the hotel and car as a direct expense, and then pay the full M&IE * n_days to cover food and incidentals. It's a matter of handling 2 receipts per month vs. 200. These expenses, plus transportation, are, of course, passed on to the client. If you try to set your base pay to match his local market, he'll just find someone who doesn't eat his lunch on expenses. You're competing in gross.
(True story: I drove from AZ to the East Bay once to take a job with a Brazilian company (it gets wierder). While I was on the road, their CEO added up the numbers. I woke up Monday morning and called to make sure we were still on. He was on a plane to Brazil to shanghai more $20/hr keyboard monkeys. I was back in Phoenix by dinnertime. If I'd known where Hayward was, I'd never have even considered him serious.)
If you're in total control of your own destiny, my advice is to try to get more money out of the next job than you got out of the last, and only backslide if the client proves to you that you're more desperate than he is.
There's no shame in turning down a deal if that makes you happier than taking it.
--Blair
"A penny earned is cooler than one you just made by smelting copper wire."
It's useless, except as an exercise. But that never stopped anyone.
Since it bastardizes ELF and therefore isn't portable to other OSes on the same CPU (well, maybe it is if their loaders treat the same fields in the same ways), it isn't ELF. It's an assembly program with comments that align with ELF fields that the Linux loader (well, his Linux loader) treats innocuously.
But, since deconstruction is as good for learning the ropes as construction is, it's 40367 bytes of useful education.
--Blair
"Tomorrow: The biggest ELF program you can't run!"
I've done very minimal fiddling with java so bear with me on this.
What is it about Java that makes it frequently go zombie? (The zombies are generally dead forks of Netscape, which seriously hamper the live ones. This is on Winboxen; I don't see it much on other platforms, and I shun IE unless a page won't display in NS.)
Is it a fundamental problem in the Win/Netscape plugin interpreter or is it bad design on the part of the app coder?
--Blair
Seriously, they've seen that joke coming.
They being the FAA.
In order to connect this to the cockpit you'd have to have the cockpit software include a TCP/IP/802.11b network stack. That means that the stack would have to be certified to Level C at least, Level A if it interacted in any way with airframe control info. Certification involves inspection and test planning and test specification and test execution and test result analysis and problem reporting and independent reviews of the inspections and test plans and test specs and test code and test results and test result analyses and problem reports and documentation and audit of ever step and FAA DER signoff on all work products and development processes. I.e., hundreds of times more labor and paperwork and management than just "code it and ship it" (you know: Microsoft).
As a colleague of mine once put it, "There isn't enough money printed to certify a TCP/IP stack for flight."
Cabin software for systems that have no connection to the airframe systems at all (e.g. video games) can be "certified to level E", i.e., not inspected or tested or approved, basically just reported. The hardware needs some, to prevent spurious emission.
Since this new system radios outside the aircraft, the network layer (the 802.11b part) might have required certification. If so, I think I know what project it is. And I think I worked on it. Or a piece of it. That's how big that process gets. Half of my company wrote tests for maybe 20% of that layer for over a year, and had no need to know what the eventual application was.
Or maybe that was a competing system that just got thrown out the market window by this one...
--Blair
Caveat clickor: www.junkscience.com (also .org) gets its funding primarily from the CATO institute, a "libertarian think-tank", if I may oxidize a moron.
I happen to be on the same side as they are, being against the notion of global warming being caused in gross by human activity, but that's a coincidental agreement. Most of the rest of their shit is designed to give mass--if not weight--to political and legal arguments that will be made by polluters and other chemical profiteers (e.g., the fuckers in the nicotine industry who killed my mother).
A few years ago I got in an email three-way with Steve Milloy of junkscience and the cats in Antarctica who are studying the "ozone hole". If you look closely at the famous false-color pictures, and if you understand the units (Dobsons, iirc) they made up to measure its depth, you realize that the "hole" is more of a "dent", and that the amount of ozone "missing" from the "hole" is roughly the same as the amount that can be seen in a big "pile" just to the side of the "hole". The scientist assured me that, integrated over the entire southern hemisphere, there was indeed a net depletion of ozone. But that's not what they were using the picture to claim, was it?
Given that gaia wobbles stochastically on her thermal axis, any attempt to attribute cause and effect to 100 years of data needs to be backed up by the reliable assertions that come only from hindsight. We won't know until it happens, and we'll drive ourselves into bankruptcy if we try to prevent something that isn't happening.
--Blair
"*snorrrrrk*...anyone want a hit of FR-12? I got it in Sonora. It's some goood sheet, mon..."
Mabe Hemo sould hav red the artical abot Cruesoe as a servur chip.
--Blari
And this after he rejected my Playstation 3 article...
--Blair
"Yo quiero ESL."
Face it, there are people who feel that if their insignificant problem doesn't get fixed this second the world will collapse and anarchy will reign.
/.profile...
The reason the world has collapsed and anarchy now reigns is that in 1988 the Boston U. helpdesk put me on hold for seven minutes while they checked if, indeed, there was extra whitespace at the end of a line in
--Blair
"Sorry. My bad."
they could just invisibly add 25 or 50 cents to each bill & I don't think anyone would notice or mind too much.
If you're already thinking subjunctively about the nickels and dimes utilities have slipped-in on top of the value of the commodity, then you're already not noticing or minding too much. The extra 34c postage is just their way of pumping up their profit margins.
When you drill down into their organization, there's some middle manager in the billing department who realized he could save his ass and his budget by completely eliminating his own biggest cost.
Quick BOTE: Say PG&E---no...bad example... Say at SRP in Arizona it costs $.0615 to generate a KWh. Say they sell it to you for $.0844 and you use say 1200 KWh. Their gross profit for the month is $27.48 on gross expense of $101.28, or 27.13%. Adding 34c to that makes it 27.46%, a gain of 0.3% pure cash profit. But it's probably 70% of the billing department's old budget, and 300% of their new one. Tell your boss you'll cut your costs by 70% without cutting a single employee or customer, and see what you get for xmas.
--Blair
"A pound of flesh a week. That's all we ask."
Time was, people would take the blow-in cards from their magazines and avail themselves of the Business Reply Mail system by taping them to bricks, on the presumption that snail-mail charged by the pound for BRM. It was also popular to do this to the ubiquitous American Express applications.
Did it work? Maybe. The Annals of Improbable Research (www.improb.com), formerly the Journal of Irreproducible Results (URL to hijacked IP denigrated), published a study in which they had mailed odd and bulky items with correct postage and addresses. The USPS seems to have been imperfectly willing to maintain their unflappable image (what unflappable image!), so not everything got to where it was supposed to.
--Blair
"The bison's in the mail."
>> Has the hacker-friendly "appliance" finally arrived?
>
> If it's a robot girlfriend, then the answer is an unqualified "YES".
Robot girlfriend? Sure. Give us a minute to embed the mods.
But how about a web-enabled heavy petting waldo while you're waiting? You got it:
Cybersex Replaces Real Thing with Online Robots
--Blair
"Ohhh, Shania..."
They've already begun. A cow orker came in today and said they'd taken down his neighborhood in Palo Alto two minutes before his coffee was ready.
.za and .il and .tw who share your pain.
D'oh!
They'll take down my office any minute.
So I type with haste.
The rolling blackouts last 60-90 minutes. Just long enough to deplete many large-scale UPS systems that are "protecting" many large-, medium-, and small-scale network service providers in the Silicon Valley.
Like the ones involved in bringing Slashdot to your face.
Notice higher latencies today? Stuck-at URLs? Think you're the only one in the world who visits your favorite gerbil-stuffing site? Yes, there are pervs in
Next time someone asks you to sign a NIMBY petition on a generator for your grid, power them down.
--Blair
"The depression has begun. Oops. It's over. That's what the 1GHz economy will do for you."
In reply to blakestah's considerations:
1) A presidential pardon for Microsoft's "efforts to innovate" would trump any state cases that the scorned co-prosecutors might bring back home.
2) Bush is an idiot. It's right up his alley.
3) Orrin Hatch would turn to face the flag if His President asked him to join in forgiving Bill Gates.
(4)) The new Attorney General, from all indications, will be a card-carrying member of the Schutzstaffel who would take great glee from forcing Windoze 1.0 on the world for another fifteen years, as long as the DoJ had their backdoors installed in the Crypto.
No, I don't know which way the Bush administration will walk on Microsoft. The divestiture proposed is weak (I wanted them broken up into five companies: 3 OS companies with equal starting code bases, 1 MSN, and 1 apps company; then you'd see some competition). Could be this is what they want, forgoing real punishment.
There hasn't been a lot of fire and brimstone from Redmond since the ruling. I suspect we have Br'er Gates and Br'er Ballmer saying "oh lawdy puleeez don' trow us in dat Sherman patch" to Br'er Jackson and Br'er Boies.
As with Florida, this one isn't being decided where you and I can redact the sellout.
--Blair
Ah, never mind. I just reread the topic header. I gotta stop yelling at the Vikings making excuses in the clubhouse while I'm trying to be editorial...
--Blair
"And Robert Smith thought they'd wasted '98..."
Time-shifting is recording broadcast for later replay.
But that's what these HDTV recorders will allow you to do.
What they may not all allow is more like archiving, and much more like piracy. SCMS was an attempt to allow archiving while preventing piracy. I haven't heard much about SCMS in the past few years. Gee. I guess it worked. It sure stopped itself from being copied more than once.
--Blair
Unfortunately for all of us, Bill and Dave were neither of them named Agilent.
All of the new high-QA equipment will come from the father/daughter company, since the venerable Hewlett-Packard name has been deeded to the stepson Personal Computing/Printer division. Which makes decent enough products, I guess, but not of the quality of, say, the HP-51, which sat in your hand and glowed with the halo of future wonder.
--Blair
HP calculators are half the reason I became an engineer in the first place. (The other half was Doc Edgerton and his hyperspeed photographs.)
The HP 15c and 16c regularly sell on eBay for double their original MSRP, and I suspect it's not for collectable value. I'd gladly pay $120 for a working 16c.
RPN is the right way to calculate. It's how all machines actually do the operations (marshal operands, apply operator, present result) and it's how you were taught in the 1st grade (draw numbers on board, compute answer). Infix is a notation, not a method. RPN and the lambda calculus is everything useful.
I think I'll visit The Garage next week and leave my old HP-28S as an offering.
--Blair
"((R P) I) Bill Hewlett..."