But GMO crops didn't just "grow alone" by themselves. The infringing farmers took concerted action, over several years, to isolate and propagate the seeds, and then benefited from the patented gene by spraying their fields with glyphosate.
Sorry, but bullshit.
There have been numerous instances of naturalpollination contaminating other people's crops and Monstanto suing them.
This isn't a case of someone ripping off their seed and using their chemicals -- this is a case of farmers who aren't using their seeds or chemicals (in some case organic farmers who have never used it).
Because the problem becomes that wind, bees, and every other natural way plants get pollinated can cross pollinate into other fields, and Monstanto ends up suing.
Monsanto are greedy asshats, and their product is contaminating other people's farms, and then they sue because your crop has their gene in it when you did nothing at all.
So unless Monsanto can find a way to keep their stuff from contaminating other stuff (which they won't because it's a cash cow), this will continue to end up where it isn't supposed to be through no fault of the people who own the crops.
Monsanto owns the patent on a gene, and genes can spread through natural methods quite readily.
Someone can plant Monsanto seed miles away and have it pollinate your crops, and then you get sued. This is not a case of someone actively using Monsanto's crap, it's people who in many cases are avoiding it.
So the ultimate killer feature would be the ability to use any app from any source, without restriction.
I think we all know the iWatch, if it ever exists, won't do that.
Of course, no other device does this now, so you're kind putting a high bar for Apple.
Would a Microsoft phone/watch/OS run stuff from Android, Apple, mainframes and the old Amiga? All without restriction? Would an Android watch let you run Windows and iOS apps? You could wait for the Linux watch, but it would be hard to find drivers for it and the only place to get help would be an IRC chatroom where everybody says "RTFM n00b".
What you're asking for doesn't exist now, so why should it exist as a watch?
But, fear not -- everybody else will wait and see if Apple succeeds with this, then come out with the inevitable "me too" products, each with their own warts and features. They'll all specifically exclude each other's software, and only work with their own phones.
The Microsoft watch will need to be rebooted weekly, the Linux watch will run forever but with ugly fonts, and the Android watch will be smug in the fact that it's neither Microsoft nor Apple, but the carriers will customize it and refuse to release updates for it.;-)
Software freedom philosophies notwithstanding, entities like Microsoft and Apple are never going to play nicely by design. They're competing, and that doesn't make for a situation where the consumer gets to choose "all of the above".
All I know is that the reported iPhone time is generally anywhere from a couple of seconds to over a minute off the time reported from an NTP-synced computer.
I can't speak to an iPhone, but I know my cell phone takes its time from the actual carrier.
So it's well within the bounds of reason that yours is doing the same -- and if your carrier is using a clock which is slightly different from your NTP-synced computer, that could account for the drift.
One of the things that's really nice about that, is when I travel it picks up local time and I don't need to set it.
And, slightly more on topic... I'm clearly not the target market for this product. I can't figure out why I'd want a voice activated watch, or biometrics, or mobile payments on my watch. Then again, I wouldn't want those features on my cell phone either. This just feels like one of those technology for the sake of it products.
I'm sure there's features a lot of people will say are the coolest ever and be willing to plunk down money for it. Me, I prefer a device meant to do one thing well instead of 10 things half-assed -- which is why I own actual cameras, music players, and GPS nav units instead of something which kinda does most of those things.
It's cool in a Dick Tracy kind of way, but I prefer my watches to just be watches.
Of course, I'm sure "hey baby, want to see my iWatch" would be an awesome pickup line. So there is that.;-)
But, as much as I absolutely hate the term, the iWatch and iPhone combo seems like it would be a flashing sign that says "hipster douchebag".
Fortunately, case law has established the criteria for what can't qualify:
The Miller case established what came to be known as the Miller Standard, which clearly articulated that three criteria must be met for a work to be legitimately subject to state regulations. The Court recognized the inherent risk in legislating what constitutes obscenity, and necessarily limited the scope of the criteria. The criteria were: 1) The average person, applying local community standards, looking at the work in its entirety, appeals to the prurient interest. 2) The work must describe or depict, in an obviously offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions. 3) The work as a whole must lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values".
So you'd need to prove that those two people doing it in front of a camera is all of the above, and some of those are very subjective.
The problem with deciding one kind of 'speech' is free and one isn't is sooner or later someone comes to arrest you for suggesting that Geroge Bush resembled a monkey.
You can't be for free speech but then decide there's parts of it you wish would go away -- I defend the right of someone to take a shit on a sheet and call it art. I don't get it, and I'm not interested in it, but I'm not going to appoint myself or anybody else to be the arbiter of what we should and shouldn't say. And you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad, or you're setting yourself up for a situation in which one group or another gets to define 'art', 'obscene', and things you're allowed to say.
Which is why the loons from Westboro Church are still around.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell 'ya. You've ruined my faith in mankind. OK, not really.
And, yeah, I see people offering $100 to migrate a web site from Flash to HTML including animations, and someone else who looks like they want their homework done.
People seem to expect miracles and professional software for pennies... like the guy offering $50 to write the credit card processing for an allegedly complete MMO.
It seems like it would be prone to shady players and clueless clients who don't know anything about software and how much it actually costs.
So, any word on how we managed to get from 'researchers identify class of conditions for which mice are an unexpectedly lousy model' to 'drug testing in mice may be a waste of time'?
Well, one of the linked articles says:
The study's findings do not mean that mice are useless models for all human diseases. But, its authors said, they do raise troubling questions about diseases like the ones in the study that involve the immune system, including cancer and heart disease.
It may well be a case of either the submitter or an intermediate press agency adding the words "waste of time". The author didn't reach such a bold conclusion.
Windows Phones don't need access to a bazillion apps, usually, because the phones do so much more out of the box than the other two big competitors.
What "so much more out of the box" does a Windows Phone do that the others don't?
You're making a bold claim with nothing to support it, and I'm genuinely curious to know if that's true. I've certainly never heard of anything those phones do that Android and Apple can't do.
My guess is it does the exact same thing as other phones for the most part.
Oh? So you come up with a subscriber based on questionable data, that subscriber is a little old lady and unlikely to have downloaded porn, so you select the nearest candidate and assume they did it.
Sorry, but from TFA it's pretty clear that this guy is filing suits with zero evidence other than some vague stuff which can't identify anybody, and making assumptions about who it likely is.
If your methodology is crap, your lawsuits are crap... and if you're just suing random people, who you sue is really relevant.
Hopefully we get to the point where some more burden of proof is required. Because the "who" in this case is people you can't really show any proof ever did anything.
If this is what they say this is... this is far enough beyond an 'ethical' breach as to be obscene.
This guy really needs to be jailed, fined, flogged, disbarred, and everything else available to the courts. TFA seems pretty clear this is wide-scale fraud on the courts. And judges don't like it when lawyers lie to them.
In addition to the Alan Cooper issue, Judge Wright is concerned about the slipshod way Prenda identifies defendants. When a household has multiple members, Prenda evidently decides who to sue based on statistical guesswork. "For example," Prenda wrote in one court filing, "if the subscriber is 75 years old, or the subscriber is female, it is statistically quite unlikely that the subscriber was the infringer."
These shotgun approach lawsuits are just attempts at extortion when they have no real evidence.
I really hope this guy gets some pretty serious sanctions -- making some poor schmuck the CEO of an offshore company is some pretty serious stuff, the kind that should get you into jail and disbarred.
And if I read this right, he doesn't even have legal standing to be suing, and might stand to make money from this.
Oh dear god. My alma mater had an absolute dinosaur chairing the CS dept. In 2001 he still taught machine organization using 8086 assembly language on MS-DOS
And I learned that on a VAX/11, which was the same instruction set as a PDP-11, which was 25-30 years old by the time I ever saw it.
In terms of a nice starting point, and an environment you can actually get into the fiddly bits -- why not? The equivalent to a "BNZ" in one assembly is the same concept everywhere, which is enough to show you how an if statement really works.
Once you understand how one works, the other ones are structured more or less the same way.
Not broken. Prevented. Thank god. Web pages what play background audio are the spawn of satan.
Indeed... every few months I hit some god-awful web site which believes it should immediately start blaring theme music at me.
I'm not interested in your audio track of shitty MIDI sounds, and I wasn't interested in it in 1997 when this was more common.
Other than someone being an idiot who missed the mid-late 90's and doesn't know how much people hate this, I have no idea of why people think having audio blaring on a web page is a good idea.
Disabling it in the browser is good, as was removing support for the evil blink tag.
At my university, the CS department are, counter-intuitively, some of the most reluctant to use our online capabilities and classroom presentation tech.
I don't find that counter-intuitive -- the longer you work with technology the less you want to use it for the sake of using it. And there's lots of students who would simply read the syllabus and then show up for the exam thinking they've got it covered without knowing what the professor actually taught in class.
I'd say about half of the CS profs still want everything handed in hard-copy and don't even post their syllabi online
Supposedly, Donald Knuth had his secretary print out his emails.
You would think programmers would be more comfortable with computers.
If it helps the problem sure, if it's just busy work, not so much. Sometimes, technology doesn't really add anything but extra steps of little value.
I find at work someone always is pushing us to do all of our work in some form of social media like Sharepoint. And it's not something that helps me get my work done (in fact it usually makes it harder), it's something that the people in charge of these can point to and bray about the adoption of it. A discussion thread is more trouble than it's worth for most things I find.
It may be that I can't differentiate fiction from non-fiction, but doesn't the US military have satellites with the capabilities of infrared viewing and detection that would perform the same task but with much greater efficiency
If that worked, they wouldn't have taken so long to find Bin Laden.
We're talking about LA, an absolutely huge area... spotting an infrared signature isn't exactly a small task if you're looking for something specific.
It's not like they can just click in the "find me this guy" command (yet) -- you have to know where to look.
Besides, all of the satellites you mention spend most of their time looking down at nude beaches anyway.;-)
Countless superb programmers come from another engineering discipline such as Electrical Engineering, Mechanical, Aerospace, etc
As do countless shitty ones, because they don't teach programming much or at all.
We once hired an electrical engineer, and it didn't take very long to discover it was a really bad choice. He'd never written any code, and knew nothing about it -- he kind of expected we were going to teach him to write code. I've also known loads of engineers who are self taught coders, and who absolutely rocked.
But a good deal of engineering schools don't produce people who are also good programmers unless it was incidental. (Sadly, I've known people with Master's degrees in CS who couldn't either because what they essentially learned was theoretical mathematics and enough code to write the stuff they needed but not much else -- so I'm not singling out engineers.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but bullshit.
There have been numerous instances of natural pollination contaminating other people's crops and Monstanto suing them.
This isn't a case of someone ripping off their seed and using their chemicals -- this is a case of farmers who aren't using their seeds or chemicals (in some case organic farmers who have never used it).
Because the problem becomes that wind, bees, and every other natural way plants get pollinated can cross pollinate into other fields, and Monstanto ends up suing.
Monsanto are greedy asshats, and their product is contaminating other people's farms, and then they sue because your crop has their gene in it when you did nothing at all.
So unless Monsanto can find a way to keep their stuff from contaminating other stuff (which they won't because it's a cash cow), this will continue to end up where it isn't supposed to be through no fault of the people who own the crops.
Monsanto owns the patent on a gene, and genes can spread through natural methods quite readily.
Someone can plant Monsanto seed miles away and have it pollinate your crops, and then you get sued. This is not a case of someone actively using Monsanto's crap, it's people who in many cases are avoiding it.
Monsanto sucks balls.
Of course, no other device does this now, so you're kind putting a high bar for Apple.
Would a Microsoft phone/watch/OS run stuff from Android, Apple, mainframes and the old Amiga? All without restriction? Would an Android watch let you run Windows and iOS apps? You could wait for the Linux watch, but it would be hard to find drivers for it and the only place to get help would be an IRC chatroom where everybody says "RTFM n00b".
What you're asking for doesn't exist now, so why should it exist as a watch?
But, fear not -- everybody else will wait and see if Apple succeeds with this, then come out with the inevitable "me too" products, each with their own warts and features. They'll all specifically exclude each other's software, and only work with their own phones.
The Microsoft watch will need to be rebooted weekly, the Linux watch will run forever but with ugly fonts, and the Android watch will be smug in the fact that it's neither Microsoft nor Apple, but the carriers will customize it and refuse to release updates for it. ;-)
Software freedom philosophies notwithstanding, entities like Microsoft and Apple are never going to play nicely by design. They're competing, and that doesn't make for a situation where the consumer gets to choose "all of the above".
You just need to keep practicing, or stop partying with frat boys.
I can't speak to an iPhone, but I know my cell phone takes its time from the actual carrier.
So it's well within the bounds of reason that yours is doing the same -- and if your carrier is using a clock which is slightly different from your NTP-synced computer, that could account for the drift.
One of the things that's really nice about that, is when I travel it picks up local time and I don't need to set it.
And, slightly more on topic ... I'm clearly not the target market for this product. I can't figure out why I'd want a voice activated watch, or biometrics, or mobile payments on my watch. Then again, I wouldn't want those features on my cell phone either. This just feels like one of those technology for the sake of it products.
I'm sure there's features a lot of people will say are the coolest ever and be willing to plunk down money for it. Me, I prefer a device meant to do one thing well instead of 10 things half-assed -- which is why I own actual cameras, music players, and GPS nav units instead of something which kinda does most of those things.
It's cool in a Dick Tracy kind of way, but I prefer my watches to just be watches.
Of course, I'm sure "hey baby, want to see my iWatch" would be an awesome pickup line. So there is that. ;-)
But, as much as I absolutely hate the term, the iWatch and iPhone combo seems like it would be a flashing sign that says "hipster douchebag".
I'm assuming they'd put them into something like an Otter Box -- which should pretty much make them ruggedized enough.
Ahhh .... I'll know it when I see it.
Fortunately, case law has established the criteria for what can't qualify:
So you'd need to prove that those two people doing it in front of a camera is all of the above, and some of those are very subjective.
The problem with deciding one kind of 'speech' is free and one isn't is sooner or later someone comes to arrest you for suggesting that Geroge Bush resembled a monkey.
You can't be for free speech but then decide there's parts of it you wish would go away -- I defend the right of someone to take a shit on a sheet and call it art. I don't get it, and I'm not interested in it, but I'm not going to appoint myself or anybody else to be the arbiter of what we should and shouldn't say. And you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad, or you're setting yourself up for a situation in which one group or another gets to define 'art', 'obscene', and things you're allowed to say.
Which is why the loons from Westboro Church are still around.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell 'ya. You've ruined my faith in mankind. OK, not really.
And, yeah, I see people offering $100 to migrate a web site from Flash to HTML including animations, and someone else who looks like they want their homework done.
People seem to expect miracles and professional software for pennies ... like the guy offering $50 to write the credit card processing for an allegedly complete MMO.
It seems like it would be prone to shady players and clueless clients who don't know anything about software and how much it actually costs.
Well, one of the linked articles says:
It may well be a case of either the submitter or an intermediate press agency adding the words "waste of time". The author didn't reach such a bold conclusion.
Only to those people who find objective reality gets in the way of the reality they prefer.
If you can convince the rubes that objective reality is just an opinion, you can say anything.
Doh, "But I'm sure someone" ... I have no experience with them.
What about Rent-A-Coder?
This seems to be the kind of thing they do -- no idea of it pays well or anything about it, but I'm someone around her has experience with them.
Process of elimination says Windows Fanboi, or bitter Amiga fan. There's not really many other platforms left. :-P
What "so much more out of the box" does a Windows Phone do that the others don't?
You're making a bold claim with nothing to support it, and I'm genuinely curious to know if that's true. I've certainly never heard of anything those phones do that Android and Apple can't do.
My guess is it does the exact same thing as other phones for the most part.
Oh? So you come up with a subscriber based on questionable data, that subscriber is a little old lady and unlikely to have downloaded porn, so you select the nearest candidate and assume they did it.
Sorry, but from TFA it's pretty clear that this guy is filing suits with zero evidence other than some vague stuff which can't identify anybody, and making assumptions about who it likely is.
If your methodology is crap, your lawsuits are crap ... and if you're just suing random people, who you sue is really relevant.
Hopefully we get to the point where some more burden of proof is required. Because the "who" in this case is people you can't really show any proof ever did anything.
If this is what they say this is ... this is far enough beyond an 'ethical' breach as to be obscene.
This guy really needs to be jailed, fined, flogged, disbarred, and everything else available to the courts. TFA seems pretty clear this is wide-scale fraud on the courts. And judges don't like it when lawyers lie to them.
There is no patent trolling here since these are Copyright suits.
They're not the same thing, and there's no mention of patents anywhere.
These shotgun approach lawsuits are just attempts at extortion when they have no real evidence.
I really hope this guy gets some pretty serious sanctions -- making some poor schmuck the CEO of an offshore company is some pretty serious stuff, the kind that should get you into jail and disbarred.
And if I read this right, he doesn't even have legal standing to be suing, and might stand to make money from this.
And I learned that on a VAX/11, which was the same instruction set as a PDP-11, which was 25-30 years old by the time I ever saw it.
In terms of a nice starting point, and an environment you can actually get into the fiddly bits -- why not? The equivalent to a "BNZ" in one assembly is the same concept everywhere, which is enough to show you how an if statement really works.
Once you understand how one works, the other ones are structured more or less the same way.
Gee ... you mean they're soft copies?
Indeed ... every few months I hit some god-awful web site which believes it should immediately start blaring theme music at me.
I'm not interested in your audio track of shitty MIDI sounds, and I wasn't interested in it in 1997 when this was more common.
Other than someone being an idiot who missed the mid-late 90's and doesn't know how much people hate this, I have no idea of why people think having audio blaring on a web page is a good idea.
Disabling it in the browser is good, as was removing support for the evil blink tag.
I don't find that counter-intuitive -- the longer you work with technology the less you want to use it for the sake of using it. And there's lots of students who would simply read the syllabus and then show up for the exam thinking they've got it covered without knowing what the professor actually taught in class.
Supposedly, Donald Knuth had his secretary print out his emails.
If it helps the problem sure, if it's just busy work, not so much. Sometimes, technology doesn't really add anything but extra steps of little value.
I find at work someone always is pushing us to do all of our work in some form of social media like Sharepoint. And it's not something that helps me get my work done (in fact it usually makes it harder), it's something that the people in charge of these can point to and bray about the adoption of it. A discussion thread is more trouble than it's worth for most things I find.
Bah, if they were tough they wouldn't need air conditioning. ;-)
Have you ever been to an astronomy department? ;-)
If that worked, they wouldn't have taken so long to find Bin Laden.
We're talking about LA, an absolutely huge area ... spotting an infrared signature isn't exactly a small task if you're looking for something specific.
It's not like they can just click in the "find me this guy" command (yet) -- you have to know where to look.
Besides, all of the satellites you mention spend most of their time looking down at nude beaches anyway. ;-)
As do countless shitty ones, because they don't teach programming much or at all.
We once hired an electrical engineer, and it didn't take very long to discover it was a really bad choice. He'd never written any code, and knew nothing about it -- he kind of expected we were going to teach him to write code. I've also known loads of engineers who are self taught coders, and who absolutely rocked.
But a good deal of engineering schools don't produce people who are also good programmers unless it was incidental. (Sadly, I've known people with Master's degrees in CS who couldn't either because what they essentially learned was theoretical mathematics and enough code to write the stuff they needed but not much else -- so I'm not singling out engineers.)