If the person who wrote your patent application was any good, you wouldn't have claimed just a 41:01 meeting. You would have claimed all durations other than an hour. And you could sue all the copycats using 40:00 and 41:00 meetings.
What IBM's application actually claims is the use of different meeting lengths at different times of the day and year. So it's not simply "40-minute meetings" but "40-minute meetings in the morning and 20-minute meetings near lunchtime and 90-minute meetings late in the afternoon". Or "120-minute meetings during the design stage of a project and 30-minute meetings near launch". And it doesn't cover manually scheduled meetings, just a computer system for automating the prescribed variations in scheduling.
Scheduling a meeting for 40 minutes is useless, because the meeting will just end up going overtime by 20 minutes most of the time.
I can have a meeting that runs 20 minutes, and another that runs 90 minutes, and the 20 minute one will be more productive [...].
If you can do it, why can't anybody else? Maybe the shorter schedule will help the meeting leader keep the other members on track. It's one thing to have the leader want to be productive and brief; it's another thing to have everybody else aware of the time constraint and putting pressure on any rambling talkers.
The link gets you the claims if you want them. But claims are hard to grok. I'm writing up my own patent application right now, I have a good book to guide me, and I still can't quite make sense of how claims work. They can be confusing because they look like a list of dozens of things being claimed as inventions, when in fact some of the list items are combined with Boolean AND's. Plus, they're written so broadly that it takes a lot of imagination to realize what specific embodiments they have in mind.
The abstract and background are much better ways to get the gist of the patent across. Complaining that a patent should be described by claims alone is like complaining that software should be explained by source code alone and screenshots or descriptions are bad summaries.
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
I believe the above passage is a prediction of this epidemic by the nascent brain of Skynet.
1 is much less than 20,000, yes. But that's 1 in 141 cases. If the entire population of the U.S. were infected and died at that rate, that'd be 2,000,000 deaths.
Some people might avoid infection, making that number lower. And many cases might be unreported, also making that number lower. But some of the current cases might yet become fatalities, making that number higher. There's a lot of uncertainty in those rates right now.
Until the disease is better understood, attempts to study and contain it are warranted. Even if it's just like an extra seasonal flu, trying to save another 20,000 lives is the humane thing to do.
1) "Pandemic" is defined as a new, infectious disease spreading in at least two countries in one region and at least one country in another region. We already have the two, and the other one is likely to be confirmed next week.
2) Computer projections by two independent teams both put the number of cases in the U.S. at around 1,700 by late May.
3) The spread is exponential, so the number at four months is far higher than quadruple the number at one month, and so on.
4) A vaccine like the ones used for seasonal flu can be made, but it will take a few months to get to market. Likewise, with a known demand more drugs like Tamiflu can be made but it will take time.
So by detecting the flu while it's in just a few hundred people, we can take measures to slow its exponential growth. That buys time for countermeasures and stops the epidemic from becoming "serious". If we didn't detect the disease until it was already in 20,000 people, there would be far less time to react and a greater chance of "serious" consequences.
Wow, seriously? The entire operating system stops while it plays the shutdown sound? I would have thought the sound data could be spit out to the sound card to play autonomously while the operating system cleaned up. But maybe that's just a fantasy from an old Amiga user. Or at least the sound could be given its own thread for the CPU to run while it's waiting for disk IO.
Are you sure you're talking about Netflix? Search for "adult" on their site and you'll get the message "We do not carry X-rated or mature titles."
Are you sure you read an article about Netflix employees pilfering the incoming mail? The summary itself notes an arrest of Post Office employees, but I've never heard of a problem with Netflix employees.
You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
I live in one of those big coastal cities - Washington, D.C. The reason that people look at each other as objects is that they see each other once and never again. If I walk up to the store I'll pass a hundred people I've never seen before and only a handful I have: the homeless guy, the restaurant owner, the cashier, and maybe one of the six people I recognize from my apartment building.
Many people are visiting for just a few days or living here for only a year or two. It would be exhausting for an introvert to invest in meeting those hundred new people every day. There probably are some people who have lived near me for years but I don't recognize. Maybe they're below the threshold of perception since there are so many other distractions around.
The explanation that I've heard for this phenomenon goes like this:
For all the years that you're in school, you're always waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the next exam, waiting to finish the school year, waiting to get a driver's license, waiting to graduate. In that situation it makes sense to have an activity to consume time and get to the next goal sooner.
Once you're out in the real world, time gets much more valuable. You're not waiting for the clock to turn, you're fighting against the clock to get things done as quickly as possible. The main limit to what you can accomplish is how efficiently you spend your time. So you'd probably rather relax and recharge during your free time rather than engage in an activity to make the next work day come as soon as possible.
I would happily pay for music from the early 20th century. It's hard to find, especially in high quality restoration. So if somebody goes to the trouble of collecting it, restoring it, digitizing it, and making it convenient to find and download then they deserve to make a profit.
I agree that century-long copyright is immoral, but not because it makes old music commercially valuable. It's immoral because it denies the value of old music to society. I have some old 78 RPM Victrola records that I digitized and restored. I wanted to host them on an ad-supported site for others to download and thought I was in the clear since they have no copyright notice and seemed to predate the oldest active copyrights. But then I learned that their legal status is unclear and the still-existing record companies might have grounds enough to come after me. So now they're just gathering dust on my hard drive.
My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more. And people consume more as technology progresses.
I am already consuming media just as fast as I can. During most of my waking hours I am doing at least two of three things: reading, listening to music, or watching video. No matter how cheap storage gets, I can't absorb more songs, movies, or books per month.
But what I can do is absorb those things at higher quality. So instead of each one getting cheaper, I expect to pay the same price but get higher definition or greater utility and convenience.
Yep, all that CO2 was in the atmosphere and there was plenty of life on Earth. If we put it all back then the Earth as a biosphere will be just fine. But we humans will have a little adjusting to do while the ocean currents stop, the jet streams shift a thousand miles, and most plant and animal life dies because the climate at home is no longer the climate it adapted to.
We might also have to rebuild our coastal cities (and there are a few) since shorelines can vary by hundreds of miles with varying sea levels. And farming will be fun when centuries of climatic experience are no good and a little place like Kansas stops growing wheat but you have no way to predict where else wheat will grow year-to-year.
So in short, "Is alcohol killing our planet?" - no. "Is burning fossil fuel killing our planet?" - no, not literally. At worst it will kill a large percentage of the individuals living at the time of rapid climatic change and it might kill a few of the less adaptable species. But there will still be lots of biomass on Earth.
The scary thing is that I do reread my messages before sending/posting them and 80% of the time I catch an error. Then if I go to lunch and come back I catch another error. And if I leave it overnight and come back I catch yet another error. The good news is I am asymptotically approaching perfection.
Is "because it's a clever, nerdy hack" a good enough answer? I'm not sure about the business case for developing this format, but wouldn't it tickle your nerd bone to be the one assigned to make it work?
I don't know about Firefox in particular, but many browsers slow or stop Flash in hidden tabs. So you'd have to split those tabs into windows and tile them across the screen to get your CPU working harder.
Amen. I love good music. It's harder to find without a good social network or decent radio station but it's still being made. Lately my best avenues to discover new artists have been movie soundtracks, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, and online "you might also like" recommendations.
I heard about a couple albums recently that I wanted in their entirety: Sea Sew by Lisa Hannigan and The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists. I found them both as legal, DRM-free downloads for $9 or as CD's for $14 with shipping. Then I had to ask myself: Are a plastic disc and paper liner notes worth $5 and five days of waiting?
My reluctant conclusion was no. The last CD I bought was ripped and then left to collect dust for the past six months. These albums might have nice notes and artwork, but I can't justify paying 56% more for that. Instead I'll download an extra album and contribute to the trend.
So what you're saying is that the regular Joe Gamer does in fact need more processing power to make his games more interesting and fun? I am astonished.
[Sarcasm directed at those who cry "The average person doesn't need more GHz or cores!", not you parent.]
My first rule of game AI is that the computer should have access to the same information and controls as a human player. I hate games where the computer knows about your units and buildings that it hasn't scouted.
The big advantage that computers have is that they can micromanage every unit with 100% efficiency. One way to reduce skill could be to limit the amount of attention the computer can spend, maybe in the form of "actions per minute". For a game like poker that could be a limit on how precisely the computer player calculates odds. A more experienced human player has a better feel for the game, so a more skillful computer player could dig deeper into the nooks and crannies of probability.
A way that computers often act too stupid is not accounting for how their interactions with one player will influence other players who aren't directly involved. For example, in a three-way game the computer player might throw everything against the strongest player, weakening them both and letting the third player win. Humans have millions of years of instincts for dealing with such situations. So the game AI might need to precompute some game theory and adapt to opponent reactions over a series of many games. Then it could be dumbed down by reducing its use of that experience and acting more like a newbie human player.
What's the point of going to college at 40? Does it actually increase your employability?
Sure, why not? If you worked as an auto mechanic for twenty years and decide that you want to switch to engineering or law, graduating from college would be a useful and necessary thing.
My mother graduated from medical school when I, her fourth child, was an infant. She was 35 years old. Going a step or two higher in education can be a smart move when your family is growing and your spouse is underemployed.
Also, college is not trade school. I gained many things from my education that don't show up on my resume but make me a more fulfilled human being.
If a company wants to make an MP3 player with buttons on the headphone cable, instead of on the device, why is that evil?
Because the reactionaries haven't realized that these headphones are the device. The stick part of the shuffle is only there because the engineers haven't yet shrunk it out of existence. If you buy the new Shuffle you're buying earbuds that play music with controls on the cable.
Since these fancy earbuds are also cheap, complaining that you can't replace them with other headphones is like complaining that a transistor radio won't interface with your $2,000 stereo components.
Slashdot Mirror
If the person who wrote your patent application was any good, you wouldn't have claimed just a 41:01 meeting. You would have claimed all durations other than an hour. And you could sue all the copycats using 40:00 and 41:00 meetings.
What IBM's application actually claims is the use of different meeting lengths at different times of the day and year. So it's not simply "40-minute meetings" but "40-minute meetings in the morning and 20-minute meetings near lunchtime and 90-minute meetings late in the afternoon". Or "120-minute meetings during the design stage of a project and 30-minute meetings near launch". And it doesn't cover manually scheduled meetings, just a computer system for automating the prescribed variations in scheduling.
If you can do it, why can't anybody else? Maybe the shorter schedule will help the meeting leader keep the other members on track. It's one thing to have the leader want to be productive and brief; it's another thing to have everybody else aware of the time constraint and putting pressure on any rambling talkers.
The link gets you the claims if you want them. But claims are hard to grok. I'm writing up my own patent application right now, I have a good book to guide me, and I still can't quite make sense of how claims work. They can be confusing because they look like a list of dozens of things being claimed as inventions, when in fact some of the list items are combined with Boolean AND's. Plus, they're written so broadly that it takes a lot of imagination to realize what specific embodiments they have in mind.
The abstract and background are much better ways to get the gist of the patent across. Complaining that a patent should be described by claims alone is like complaining that software should be explained by source code alone and screenshots or descriptions are bad summaries.
Taxpayers: "This is not a mundane detail, pHus10n!"
No, the pig go. The dove fly:
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
I believe the above passage is a prediction of this epidemic by the nascent brain of Skynet.
1 is much less than 20,000, yes. But that's 1 in 141 cases. If the entire population of the U.S. were infected and died at that rate, that'd be 2,000,000 deaths.
Some people might avoid infection, making that number lower. And many cases might be unreported, also making that number lower. But some of the current cases might yet become fatalities, making that number higher. There's a lot of uncertainty in those rates right now.
Until the disease is better understood, attempts to study and contain it are warranted. Even if it's just like an extra seasonal flu, trying to save another 20,000 lives is the humane thing to do.
Not at all, unless you're prepared to launch 210,000 people into space every day. That's the growth rate of the world population.
According to an NPR story I heard yesterday:
1) "Pandemic" is defined as a new, infectious disease spreading in at least two countries in one region and at least one country in another region. We already have the two, and the other one is likely to be confirmed next week.
2) Computer projections by two independent teams both put the number of cases in the U.S. at around 1,700 by late May.
3) The spread is exponential, so the number at four months is far higher than quadruple the number at one month, and so on.
4) A vaccine like the ones used for seasonal flu can be made, but it will take a few months to get to market. Likewise, with a known demand more drugs like Tamiflu can be made but it will take time.
So by detecting the flu while it's in just a few hundred people, we can take measures to slow its exponential growth. That buys time for countermeasures and stops the epidemic from becoming "serious". If we didn't detect the disease until it was already in 20,000 people, there would be far less time to react and a greater chance of "serious" consequences.
Wow, seriously? The entire operating system stops while it plays the shutdown sound? I would have thought the sound data could be spit out to the sound card to play autonomously while the operating system cleaned up. But maybe that's just a fantasy from an old Amiga user. Or at least the sound could be given its own thread for the CPU to run while it's waiting for disk IO.
Are you sure you're talking about Netflix? Search for "adult" on their site and you'll get the message "We do not carry X-rated or mature titles."
Are you sure you read an article about Netflix employees pilfering the incoming mail? The summary itself notes an arrest of Post Office employees, but I've never heard of a problem with Netflix employees.
I live in one of those big coastal cities - Washington, D.C. The reason that people look at each other as objects is that they see each other once and never again. If I walk up to the store I'll pass a hundred people I've never seen before and only a handful I have: the homeless guy, the restaurant owner, the cashier, and maybe one of the six people I recognize from my apartment building.
Many people are visiting for just a few days or living here for only a year or two. It would be exhausting for an introvert to invest in meeting those hundred new people every day. There probably are some people who have lived near me for years but I don't recognize. Maybe they're below the threshold of perception since there are so many other distractions around.
The explanation that I've heard for this phenomenon goes like this:
For all the years that you're in school, you're always waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the next exam, waiting to finish the school year, waiting to get a driver's license, waiting to graduate. In that situation it makes sense to have an activity to consume time and get to the next goal sooner.
Once you're out in the real world, time gets much more valuable. You're not waiting for the clock to turn, you're fighting against the clock to get things done as quickly as possible. The main limit to what you can accomplish is how efficiently you spend your time. So you'd probably rather relax and recharge during your free time rather than engage in an activity to make the next work day come as soon as possible.
I would happily pay for music from the early 20th century. It's hard to find, especially in high quality restoration. So if somebody goes to the trouble of collecting it, restoring it, digitizing it, and making it convenient to find and download then they deserve to make a profit.
I agree that century-long copyright is immoral, but not because it makes old music commercially valuable. It's immoral because it denies the value of old music to society. I have some old 78 RPM Victrola records that I digitized and restored. I wanted to host them on an ad-supported site for others to download and thought I was in the clear since they have no copyright notice and seemed to predate the oldest active copyrights. But then I learned that their legal status is unclear and the still-existing record companies might have grounds enough to come after me. So now they're just gathering dust on my hard drive.
I am already consuming media just as fast as I can. During most of my waking hours I am doing at least two of three things: reading, listening to music, or watching video. No matter how cheap storage gets, I can't absorb more songs, movies, or books per month.
But what I can do is absorb those things at higher quality. So instead of each one getting cheaper, I expect to pay the same price but get higher definition or greater utility and convenience.
Yep, all that CO2 was in the atmosphere and there was plenty of life on Earth. If we put it all back then the Earth as a biosphere will be just fine. But we humans will have a little adjusting to do while the ocean currents stop, the jet streams shift a thousand miles, and most plant and animal life dies because the climate at home is no longer the climate it adapted to.
We might also have to rebuild our coastal cities (and there are a few) since shorelines can vary by hundreds of miles with varying sea levels. And farming will be fun when centuries of climatic experience are no good and a little place like Kansas stops growing wheat but you have no way to predict where else wheat will grow year-to-year.
So in short, "Is alcohol killing our planet?" - no. "Is burning fossil fuel killing our planet?" - no, not literally. At worst it will kill a large percentage of the individuals living at the time of rapid climatic change and it might kill a few of the less adaptable species. But there will still be lots of biomass on Earth.
You're also getting absent-minded. You just posted this three minutes ago and worded it better that time. Your writing skills are declining with age!
The scary thing is that I do reread my messages before sending/posting them and 80% of the time I catch an error. Then if I go to lunch and come back I catch another error. And if I leave it overnight and come back I catch yet another error. The good news is I am asymptotically approaching perfection.
Is "because it's a clever, nerdy hack" a good enough answer? I'm not sure about the business case for developing this format, but wouldn't it tickle your nerd bone to be the one assigned to make it work?
I don't know about Firefox in particular, but many browsers slow or stop Flash in hidden tabs. So you'd have to split those tabs into windows and tile them across the screen to get your CPU working harder.
Amen. I love good music. It's harder to find without a good social network or decent radio station but it's still being made. Lately my best avenues to discover new artists have been movie soundtracks, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, and online "you might also like" recommendations.
I heard about a couple albums recently that I wanted in their entirety: Sea Sew by Lisa Hannigan and The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists. I found them both as legal, DRM-free downloads for $9 or as CD's for $14 with shipping. Then I had to ask myself: Are a plastic disc and paper liner notes worth $5 and five days of waiting?
My reluctant conclusion was no. The last CD I bought was ripped and then left to collect dust for the past six months. These albums might have nice notes and artwork, but I can't justify paying 56% more for that. Instead I'll download an extra album and contribute to the trend.
So what you're saying is that the regular Joe Gamer does in fact need more processing power to make his games more interesting and fun? I am astonished.
[Sarcasm directed at those who cry "The average person doesn't need more GHz or cores!", not you parent.]
My first rule of game AI is that the computer should have access to the same information and controls as a human player. I hate games where the computer knows about your units and buildings that it hasn't scouted.
The big advantage that computers have is that they can micromanage every unit with 100% efficiency. One way to reduce skill could be to limit the amount of attention the computer can spend, maybe in the form of "actions per minute". For a game like poker that could be a limit on how precisely the computer player calculates odds. A more experienced human player has a better feel for the game, so a more skillful computer player could dig deeper into the nooks and crannies of probability.
A way that computers often act too stupid is not accounting for how their interactions with one player will influence other players who aren't directly involved. For example, in a three-way game the computer player might throw everything against the strongest player, weakening them both and letting the third player win. Humans have millions of years of instincts for dealing with such situations. So the game AI might need to precompute some game theory and adapt to opponent reactions over a series of many games. Then it could be dumbed down by reducing its use of that experience and acting more like a newbie human player.
Sure, why not? If you worked as an auto mechanic for twenty years and decide that you want to switch to engineering or law, graduating from college would be a useful and necessary thing.
My mother graduated from medical school when I, her fourth child, was an infant. She was 35 years old. Going a step or two higher in education can be a smart move when your family is growing and your spouse is underemployed.
Also, college is not trade school. I gained many things from my education that don't show up on my resume but make me a more fulfilled human being.
Because the reactionaries haven't realized that these headphones are the device. The stick part of the shuffle is only there because the engineers haven't yet shrunk it out of existence. If you buy the new Shuffle you're buying earbuds that play music with controls on the cable.
Since these fancy earbuds are also cheap, complaining that you can't replace them with other headphones is like complaining that a transistor radio won't interface with your $2,000 stereo components.