You've long been able to patent processes and not just specific implementations of a process, at least in the US (and possibly other places, I haven't done the research to know). And by "long" I mean "more than a century" -- there was a USSC case involving a process for refining flour that addressed just this distinction (Cochane v. Deemer, 1877). The majority opinion there says "A process may be patentable, irrespective of the particular form of the instrumentality used.”
So what I want to know is why processes implemented in software are different than processes implement in other hardware, bearing in mind that the later have been eligible for patents for at least 132 years. Or if software and hardware implementations of processes aren't different, what in society has changed to that would make us want to overturn our traditional patent rules.
The proxy is often handy. For one thing, it lets you move from WiFi to cellular to alternate carrier cellular without changing your public-facing IP address -- you can keep TCP connections open as you move around. It's also handy if you have non-public resources and can put the proxy inside the firewall.
Plus it ensures that everything is encrypted between you and some host you control (or at least trust), which is useful if you're doing things like using free WiFi, or if you don't trust the local cellular network security.
And on recent BBs you can setup automatically activated/deactivated VoIP, so you can use the phone even when you're on WiFi-only coverage. That bit necessarily requires some remote proxy that can pickup your calls from the PSTN and route them to your handset.
It's nothing you *need*, but it can be handy. It would be about 14 times handier if you could run your own personal proxy without paying RIM thousands of dollars or being integrated into their network, but it's still not a bad plan even in the existing state.
What if I invented a new battery technology that was 50% cheaper but requires a minimum height of 1.25"? What if I invent a way to get 50% more life out of the battery, but that method requires addressing it as 6 cells instead of 3? Am I just not allowed to complete against the governement-regulated "standard" batteries?
The current system isn't great. But under the current system I have a choice of insurance companies and plans, the option to buy services outside of my coverage, the option to not have coverage and just pay for what I want, and even a choice among employers. If there's one insurance company for everyone in the nation I lose most of those choices. Even the availability of non-covered services is threatened -- if there are *no* insurers that cover the service (and since there's only one insurer it's an all-or-nothing game) you have to believe that service would be less available than when *some* insurers covered it.
How exactly do you propose that agricultural producers competing on a global commodities market raise the price of their goods without governmental intervention (or forming some sort of cartel/etc. to manipulate the market)?
Seriously, if you've got a solution for that you're on your way to a Nobel prize in economics. Until then you're just spewing rubbish.
Maybe farmers don't manipulate the price of their product because they sell their goods on global commodities market and aren't a cartel, and therefore have very limited control over the sale price of their goods? And maybe the government steps in as a middleman because the economic stability of the country depends on having a stable food supply?
There might be better ways to implement the system, but there is an obvious public interest in having cheap, widely-available, domestically-produced food supplies, even if that requires some form of subsidy.
Towers typically aren't omnidirectional though, they're typically 3 installations of a individually addressable antennas, so each antenna covers only about 120 degrees. It's still possible to have 2 such sections overlap in 2 points, but it's a lot less likely.
It isn't really that difficult unless you are actually using one of the millions of bits of really bad, Windows-only software that are the reason many businesses use Windows in the first place.
I've got a client that has one app the requires Administrator rights to even run, another than requires a logged-in session on the server (or whatever workstation is running as the server) 24/7 to allow access, and a third that will only save user data to Program Files folder. And these are considered to be some of the best apps available in this industry, at least for less than $250k.
What exactly would you do to secure those sort of apps into a "sensible implementation" that allows me to limit write access to the home folder?
Maybe you've got some sort magic, GPS-enabled muscle memory, but most of us can't reliably re-position our hands over a particular position without some sort of reference -- that's why your home row has those handy little bumps. Given the number of times a day an average person moves from keyboard to mouse and back the initial positioning of the mousing hand is a significant concern.
And muscle memory fails entirely if you need to make *any* little change, like sitting slightly to the side of the keyboard, or even adjusting the height of your chair; keys provide the ability to re-align your typing in-flight, without needing to look at the keyboard, or to do some sort of error analysis of the output to determine the modality of the current misalignment.
If a programmer wrote a pre-processing script that made it 50% easier to do their job -- at home, on their own time, but during the course of the employment -- you can be darn sure their employer would claim ownership of that script, and would not allow the programmer to take that script to a another company, or to sell copies.
And it's well established that university professor's lectures, notes, lesson plans, exams, etc. are all owned by their employer. While such institutions generally allow pretty liberal sharing/reuse, they most certainly would not allow a professor to re-sell their course materials or to offer the same courses outside of the regular university channels.
Why are you pretending that primary school teachers have another set of rules? It's maybe unfortunate that they aren't given enough prep time, and feel compelled to work outside of their regular schedule, but that doesn't affect the ownership of their work output.
First, we *have* automated bricklaying. We call it concrete pumping. Bricks are now used purely for aesthetic reasons, and even then is sometimes replaced with brick shapes and colors pressed into concrete. We've almost completely replaced the traditional work done by bricklayers with more efficient technologies.
Second, the fact that someone does a job well, or more cheaply than a robot, does not mean that it could not be done by a robot. For example, if you're a chef that cooks exactly the same food every day from exactly the same ingredients, you *could* be a replaced by a robot, and we've done just that in many parts of high-volume food preparation. If you do design work to make new dishes, or to adapt to new ingredients, etc., then a robot is not sufficient, but neither is the work repetitive or trivial.
Or how about they just look for things that pose an immediate risk persons or property likely to be encountered while flying, and ignore everything else? Even if you buy that their safety-related searches increase safety (which is not at all clear to me), what reason do they have for reporting anything else they find?
While it might be nice to catch more criminals there's just too much room for abuse; are you 100% sure that everything you've ever carried is 100% legal in both your original and destination locales? Plus you'd only catch people committing property crimes; it's very unlikely that any reasonable search for dangerous materials would uncover evidence of violent crimes. So even the "catch criminals" argument is pretty lame in terms of additional public safety or eminent threat to others.
If the old testament has been superseded, why is it still published? I mean, sure, keep a copy around for reference, but it seems like you could print a lot more bibles for distribution to the heathen masses if you cut out all the old, worthless stuff from the front end.
But of course then you'd lose the creation myth and other traditional stories that people want to have in their religion. There aren't a lot of successful religions without a creation myth.
Because old case law no longer applies? Because it takes 4 or more ruling before a precedent is set? Because you have more recent citations that contradict his?
As the legal expert you're making yourself out to be, you should know better than to ask for an answer you don't already know or don't want to hear.
Which is great for you -- you know what Windows 7 needs, what your computer has, and how to change it. Even for relatively savvy users it's likely that one or more of those is not true, making such upgrades implausible at best.
No, the law says that if you were using a phone you've met the legal requirements to be fined. It does not actual prove that you were in fact distracted or dangerous. You might well have been. It's possible that everyone hold a phone is (though that seems unlikely).
Frankly, it's an absurd argument anyway. For one thing, it's a decision that could be set via precedent rather than legislation. Rather than legislating against specific activities that may or may not have any impact on others, and that may or may not continue to be relevant as technology changes, we can let the judicial system make sticky but not irreversible rulings on what constitutes a distraction. It's like someone thought of this 500 years ago and already solved the problem without more stupid driving laws.
And that's not to mention that ridiculous treatment of dash-mounted/hands-free vs. hand-held equipment. Somehow the same device with a piece of tape on the back is less distracting. Either that or the law isn't really intended to trade the conveniences of such devices for safety -- because that would annoy people who like their GPS -- but rather to grab some political capital by creating a law that increases both perceived safety AND revenue. It might possibly increase actual safety, but it's difficult to see how that could be the intent, or what particular safety benefits it provides over existing laws against distracted driving.
I'd rather not surrender my liquids at all, even if there had already been a bombing using liquid explosives on a plane. It seems absurd to surrender anything until and unless there's decent evidence that some device/material/etc. poses a practical, likely threat.
The fact that someone planned a liquid-based plane bombing does not make it plausible, and even if it is plausible it does not mean that it poses a statistically significant risk (i.e. that it will happen often enough to be important) or an economically relevant threat (that it's among the cheaper ways to blow up a plane).
Terrorists are, by definition, irrational from a societal viewpoint, so maybe we shouldn't rely on them to determine what constitutes a valid security policy. I'll take that one step further and suggest letting terrorists define our security policy so directly is a bad plan -- we're giving the terrorist the ability to get anything they want banned from flights just by drawing up a crude plan and getting some patsy caught with it.
Because there's never any long-running process that I might want to monitor remotely -- it's obvious that anyone who cooks has nothing better to do than stand in the kitchen and watch their thermometers and timers until the food is ready; there's absolutely no use for a popup on your DVR that tells you when your roast hits the desired temperature, or when your 40 minute timer has expired.
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You've long been able to patent processes and not just specific implementations of a process, at least in the US (and possibly other places, I haven't done the research to know). And by "long" I mean "more than a century" -- there was a USSC case involving a process for refining flour that addressed just this distinction (Cochane v. Deemer, 1877). The majority opinion there says "A process may be patentable, irrespective of the particular form of the instrumentality used.”
So what I want to know is why processes implemented in software are different than processes implement in other hardware, bearing in mind that the later have been eligible for patents for at least 132 years. Or if software and hardware implementations of processes aren't different, what in society has changed to that would make us want to overturn our traditional patent rules.
The proxy is often handy. For one thing, it lets you move from WiFi to cellular to alternate carrier cellular without changing your public-facing IP address -- you can keep TCP connections open as you move around. It's also handy if you have non-public resources and can put the proxy inside the firewall.
Plus it ensures that everything is encrypted between you and some host you control (or at least trust), which is useful if you're doing things like using free WiFi, or if you don't trust the local cellular network security.
And on recent BBs you can setup automatically activated/deactivated VoIP, so you can use the phone even when you're on WiFi-only coverage. That bit necessarily requires some remote proxy that can pickup your calls from the PSTN and route them to your handset.
It's nothing you *need*, but it can be handy. It would be about 14 times handier if you could run your own personal proxy without paying RIM thousands of dollars or being integrated into their network, but it's still not a bad plan even in the existing state.
What if I invented a new battery technology that was 50% cheaper but requires a minimum height of 1.25"? What if I invent a way to get 50% more life out of the battery, but that method requires addressing it as 6 cells instead of 3? Am I just not allowed to complete against the governement-regulated "standard" batteries?
Maybe I'll just take the whores now and die when I get old. That doesn't seem like a terrible trade.
The current system isn't great. But under the current system I have a choice of insurance companies and plans, the option to buy services outside of my coverage, the option to not have coverage and just pay for what I want, and even a choice among employers. If there's one insurance company for everyone in the nation I lose most of those choices. Even the availability of non-covered services is threatened -- if there are *no* insurers that cover the service (and since there's only one insurer it's an all-or-nothing game) you have to believe that service would be less available than when *some* insurers covered it.
How exactly do you propose that agricultural producers competing on a global commodities market raise the price of their goods without governmental intervention (or forming some sort of cartel/etc. to manipulate the market)?
Seriously, if you've got a solution for that you're on your way to a Nobel prize in economics. Until then you're just spewing rubbish.
Maybe farmers don't manipulate the price of their product because they sell their goods on global commodities market and aren't a cartel, and therefore have very limited control over the sale price of their goods? And maybe the government steps in as a middleman because the economic stability of the country depends on having a stable food supply?
There might be better ways to implement the system, but there is an obvious public interest in having cheap, widely-available, domestically-produced food supplies, even if that requires some form of subsidy.
Dell 2007FP. Decent (not great, but decent) monitor. 4x3 -- 1600x1200. Pivots to 1200x1600. Nice stand. Refurbished for $200 on Amazon.
/ Pivoted to portrait mode they also fit nicely at the of a 2560x1600 display
Towers typically aren't omnidirectional though, they're typically 3 installations of a individually addressable antennas, so each antenna covers only about 120 degrees. It's still possible to have 2 such sections overlap in 2 points, but it's a lot less likely.
It isn't really that difficult unless you are actually using one of the millions of bits of really bad, Windows-only software that are the reason many businesses use Windows in the first place.
I've got a client that has one app the requires Administrator rights to even run, another than requires a logged-in session on the server (or whatever workstation is running as the server) 24/7 to allow access, and a third that will only save user data to Program Files folder. And these are considered to be some of the best apps available in this industry, at least for less than $250k.
What exactly would you do to secure those sort of apps into a "sensible implementation" that allows me to limit write access to the home folder?
Mr. Lawyer probably isn't expected to respond immediately to calls that come in between 11 PM and 5 AM though.
I love how Iraq and Afghanistan are the same place whenever talk about not having EU support comes up.
Maybe you've got some sort magic, GPS-enabled muscle memory, but most of us can't reliably re-position our hands over a particular position without some sort of reference -- that's why your home row has those handy little bumps. Given the number of times a day an average person moves from keyboard to mouse and back the initial positioning of the mousing hand is a significant concern.
And muscle memory fails entirely if you need to make *any* little change, like sitting slightly to the side of the keyboard, or even adjusting the height of your chair; keys provide the ability to re-align your typing in-flight, without needing to look at the keyboard, or to do some sort of error analysis of the output to determine the modality of the current misalignment.
If a programmer wrote a pre-processing script that made it 50% easier to do their job -- at home, on their own time, but during the course of the employment -- you can be darn sure their employer would claim ownership of that script, and would not allow the programmer to take that script to a another company, or to sell copies.
And it's well established that university professor's lectures, notes, lesson plans, exams, etc. are all owned by their employer. While such institutions generally allow pretty liberal sharing/reuse, they most certainly would not allow a professor to re-sell their course materials or to offer the same courses outside of the regular university channels.
Why are you pretending that primary school teachers have another set of rules? It's maybe unfortunate that they aren't given enough prep time, and feel compelled to work outside of their regular schedule, but that doesn't affect the ownership of their work output.
First, we *have* automated bricklaying. We call it concrete pumping. Bricks are now used purely for aesthetic reasons, and even then is sometimes replaced with brick shapes and colors pressed into concrete. We've almost completely replaced the traditional work done by bricklayers with more efficient technologies.
Second, the fact that someone does a job well, or more cheaply than a robot, does not mean that it could not be done by a robot. For example, if you're a chef that cooks exactly the same food every day from exactly the same ingredients, you *could* be a replaced by a robot, and we've done just that in many parts of high-volume food preparation. If you do design work to make new dishes, or to adapt to new ingredients, etc., then a robot is not sufficient, but neither is the work repetitive or trivial.
Or how about they just look for things that pose an immediate risk persons or property likely to be encountered while flying, and ignore everything else? Even if you buy that their safety-related searches increase safety (which is not at all clear to me), what reason do they have for reporting anything else they find?
While it might be nice to catch more criminals there's just too much room for abuse; are you 100% sure that everything you've ever carried is 100% legal in both your original and destination locales? Plus you'd only catch people committing property crimes; it's very unlikely that any reasonable search for dangerous materials would uncover evidence of violent crimes. So even the "catch criminals" argument is pretty lame in terms of additional public safety or eminent threat to others.
unless the person you're installing it for only wants email and to occasionally surf some websites.
So the proposed solution would only work for 80% of clueless home users. You're right, that's totally impractical.
I know Apple's laptops don't currently send audio over Mini-DP, but I thought the protocol/cable supported audio, even if Apple isn't using it.
Am I just wrong?
If the old testament has been superseded, why is it still published? I mean, sure, keep a copy around for reference, but it seems like you could print a lot more bibles for distribution to the heathen masses if you cut out all the old, worthless stuff from the front end.
But of course then you'd lose the creation myth and other traditional stories that people want to have in their religion. There aren't a lot of successful religions without a creation myth.
Because old case law no longer applies? Because it takes 4 or more ruling before a precedent is set? Because you have more recent citations that contradict his?
As the legal expert you're making yourself out to be, you should know better than to ask for an answer you don't already know or don't want to hear.
Which is great for you -- you know what Windows 7 needs, what your computer has, and how to change it. Even for relatively savvy users it's likely that one or more of those is not true, making such upgrades implausible at best.
No, the law says that if you were using a phone you've met the legal requirements to be fined. It does not actual prove that you were in fact distracted or dangerous. You might well have been. It's possible that everyone hold a phone is (though that seems unlikely).
Frankly, it's an absurd argument anyway. For one thing, it's a decision that could be set via precedent rather than legislation. Rather than legislating against specific activities that may or may not have any impact on others, and that may or may not continue to be relevant as technology changes, we can let the judicial system make sticky but not irreversible rulings on what constitutes a distraction. It's like someone thought of this 500 years ago and already solved the problem without more stupid driving laws.
And that's not to mention that ridiculous treatment of dash-mounted/hands-free vs. hand-held equipment. Somehow the same device with a piece of tape on the back is less distracting. Either that or the law isn't really intended to trade the conveniences of such devices for safety -- because that would annoy people who like their GPS -- but rather to grab some political capital by creating a law that increases both perceived safety AND revenue. It might possibly increase actual safety, but it's difficult to see how that could be the intent, or what particular safety benefits it provides over existing laws against distracted driving.
Discrimination is only generally illegal against specific protected classes. Race, gender, etc. "Purple hair" is not one of those.
I'd rather not surrender my liquids at all, even if there had already been a bombing using liquid explosives on a plane. It seems absurd to surrender anything until and unless there's decent evidence that some device/material/etc. poses a practical, likely threat.
The fact that someone planned a liquid-based plane bombing does not make it plausible, and even if it is plausible it does not mean that it poses a statistically significant risk (i.e. that it will happen often enough to be important) or an economically relevant threat (that it's among the cheaper ways to blow up a plane).
Terrorists are, by definition, irrational from a societal viewpoint, so maybe we shouldn't rely on them to determine what constitutes a valid security policy. I'll take that one step further and suggest letting terrorists define our security policy so directly is a bad plan -- we're giving the terrorist the ability to get anything they want banned from flights just by drawing up a crude plan and getting some patsy caught with it.
Because there's never any long-running process that I might want to monitor remotely -- it's obvious that anyone who cooks has nothing better to do than stand in the kitchen and watch their thermometers and timers until the food is ready; there's absolutely no use for a popup on your DVR that tells you when your roast hits the desired temperature, or when your 40 minute timer has expired.