Given the unreliability and outrageous costs of shuttle launches, it would probably be quicker and cheaper to take the backup mirror out of the Smithsonian Institution, build a new copy of the Hubble with it, and launch it on an expendable rocket. Unfortunately, in the mind of budget directors, that would be a "new project", and it would be harder to fund than just shoveling yet more money into the shuttle black hole.
My only question to SGI is why didn't you start defending the patent earlier?
Most likely because they used to actually make stuff. Since most of the companies that they could sue probably have plenty of patents of their own that SGI was infringing on, such an action would have risked shutting down SGI's production lines.
Now that they've gone bankrupt, they probably figure that they don't stand to gain much by trying to produce things, so they can go forward as a pure patent troll. This won't infringe on others' patents, so there's no longer any deterrent to SGI filing patent lawsuits as they please.
Claim 8 is an independent claim. It isn't constrained by claims 9 through 14.
B2C style e-commerce as typically implemented today is not claimed by this patent, having been already cited as background art using Prodigy as an example.
The claims define the scope of the patent. Even if you subtract out the prior art, this claim incredibly broad. It essentially covers any use of a client-server online ordering where the order request happens to be passed through another computer that doesn't host the database.
Ok then, here's claim 8 from the 5,319,542 patent:
8. In an electronic catalog requisition system in which catalogs of items offered by suppliers are stored on a central catalog database system, a method for retrieving information elating to said items and electronically ordering items from suppliers comprising the following steps:
searching the catalog database for information on a customer-selected item, said catalog database residing on a public computer system;
downloading said information on said customer-selected item to a Customer/Requestor computer system;
creating an electronic requisition using the Customer/Requestor computer system; and
transmitting the electronic requisition to a supplier computer system.
Its scope is not all that much narrower than the title.
I find it mind-boggling that the USPTO routinely rubberstamps claims like this.
If that's true, unless someone is an audiologist, it's probably because they saw or heard about a news item pointing out the dangers. Just like this one.
Since the population is not static, you can't just stop publishing info like this and expect the next generation of people to somehow magically know it.
Scissors don't need a study because it's intuitively obvious to adults that you could get stabbed by them. It's not so obvious to children, that's why mothers are always nagging their kids about "don't run with scissors!".
It's not obvious that tiny earphones driven by a AAA battery could damage your hearing, so somebody studies the issue to find out. They find evidence that the earphones can indeed damage your hearing, so they tell people about it. Now many people who would otherwise not know about the risks can take steps to avoid problems.
Are you arguing that mothers should stop nagging their children about scissors and that researchers should keep findings like these under wraps just because you already happen to know about them?
BTW, plenty of people warn about PA speakers and the sound levels they often produce at concerts and clubs.
It's it widely understood that the actual flames captured on the footage was in fact from the covering and paint of the Hindenburg,
That's partly true. The burning covering provided the soot that was able to glow and make the flames visible. Hydrogen flames are almost invisible.
However, urban legends about the extreme flammability of the doping notwithstanding, there is NO WAY a vessel the size of the Titanic could be vaporized in 30 seconds, throwing a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the air, unless the reaction was driven mainly by the burning hydrogen gas. The gas did dissipate quickly; it just happened to be burning as it did.
Of course they do. I've used the GIMP off and on over the years, and I wasted quite a bit of time searching for circle/rectangle/etc. tools before I came to terms with the idea that someone would bother to write such an elaborate program and leave those simple features out.
So what it's a photo manipulation program: people need to stick circles and rectangle into photos sometimes. The menus are already cluttered with dozens if not hundreds of obscure tools and scripts. Surely adding a set of shortcut commands to do a very common basic task in a non-ass-backwards fashion wouldn't make the clutter significantly worse.
Can you name another power source that we have right now that can meet our needs, even in principle?
As I originally said, it sure ain't nuclear. By the numbers you gave, without breeder reactors, we'd run out of fuel in just a couple of decades if we tried to use it to replace all fossil fuel. Breeder reactors are not a current production-ready technology.
Not to mention the actual number one reason why it's not going to happen: WMD fears. Can you imagine a scenario where every country on this planet is running breeder reactors and involved in reprocessing plutonium on a massive scale? At the end of the day, policymakers just are not going to go that route.
Solar power may take a lot of room, but not nearly as much as we already use for current agriculture. Luckily, the best places for solar collectors are not the best for growing food. What's wrong with filling deserts with mirrors? I know there's a bunch of tree-huggers who would be against it, but why should deserts get any more special treatment than all the other types of landscape we've already heavily modified?
Yep - and the so-called 'Clean Coal' approach concentrates naturally occurring radioactivity to the extent that the waste produced by even the most modern coal fired power plants has comparable amounts of radioactivity to nuclear plants.
That's just plain wrong. You're confusing the oft-quoted factoid that a coal plant *releases* more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant along with its long-term storage facilities. (As long as Murphy's law is held at bay for 10,000 years or so.) That does not mean that the coal plant *produces* anywhere near as much radioactivity as a nuclear plant. If you want a demonstration, I'll go stand in a room full of unshielded barrels of coal ash and CO2 for 12 hours, and you go stand in a room full of unshielded spent fuel rods for 12 hours. We'll see which of us is able to walk back out.
Nuclear power has problems - but they are all solvable within our technological reach.
With current technology, nuclear power will not put a serious dent in world energy use before we run out of fissionable uranium. If nuclear power is to be the answer to the world's energy needs, we will have to switch over to using breeder reactors almost exclusively. This technology hasn't exactly had a great track record in the real world; it would need a huge amount of work get safe breeder reactors producing power in quantities an order of magnitude greater than current simpler nuclear technologies. In fact, I assert that such a feat is no more feasible than the other technologies you brush off as being too hard or immature.
In my experience, fats and oils absorb microwave energy more effectively than water, so if an item has both kinds of ingredients, the oil heats up much faster.
IIRC, microwave popcorn bags go one step farther by adding a sheet a special microwave absorber substance inside the bottom side of the bag. This quickly heats the oil and kernels by conduction to a higher temperature than they would naturally attain. That way they can pop before the shells start to get a scorched taste. It basically emulates a traditionally heated oil popper.
The key in popping any corn is to quickly get the steam pressure up to where the kernel explodes, then get the popped kernel away from the highest heat so they don't burn.
That's like saying "The Titanic really was an unsinkable ship - the only problem was the poor quality steel and rivets that made it vulnerable to opening huge gashes in the hull during collisions".
The problem is that their "final releases", which you certainly have to pay for, are usually at a level that everyone else defines as betas. Microsoft's term for an actual final release is "Service Pack". To support this scheme of early revenue generation, they arbitrarily redefine all those other software development terms.
You dont have the same guarantee with a Beta.... there could be drastic changes to the underlying mechanisms and APIs.
It doesn't matter how Microsoft defines "beta". The real definition of beta is that the software is feature complete and is in the final stages of testing (but not yet a possible RTM like RC really means). If drastic changes to the underlying mechanism and APIs are still possible, the software is still alpha, or more likely, it's not even out of the design phase yet.
By buying into these bogus definitions, you've been hoodwinked by Microsoft's marketing department into paying good money for unfinished goods.
No, RC is supposed to mean "We expect that this exact disk image will be the RTM unless the next round of testing finds a showstopper bug". Otherwise it wouldn't be a "candidate for release".
There isn't a single person on this planet, either inside or outside of Microsoft, who expected that Vista "RC1" had even an inkling of a chance of being the actual RTM image. That makes it just another beta release, nothing more, nothing less.
I guess there is not a lot of Cobol source available on the Internet, even although there is supposed to be more Cobol source in existence than any other language
Well, once the search database factored out all of the boilerplate declarations, there was pretty much nothing left to store.
I am dumbfounded that out of 300 MILLION PEOPLE we can ever only find TWO SLEAZY, SCUMBAG BOZOS to prop up to vote for.
IMO, the reason for that is the same reason that pop music sucks so much these days: focus groups and computer models are used to select the choices offered to the public. This essentially guarantees mediocrity.
You do realize, terrorists who live within this country have the same rights as you.
For every terrorist who lives in this country, there are probably thousands living here who would have no problem with a totalitarian government. For every person killed by terrorists in the past century, hundreds more have been killed by their own totalitarian governments. Now what's the bigger danger you should be worrying about?
Flying up to 60,000 ft then riding a rocket spewing nitrogen oxides and carbon/sulfur soot-laced exhaust is not going to pollute more than a ride in a Gulfstream IV?
Spreading particulates in the stratosphere is one way to fight global warming. Given that human nature is to ignore problems as long as possible, I expect that within 50 years we'll be intentionally injecting megatons of soot or some similar substance into the stratosphere in a heroic effort to keep Florida above water.
Last time I checked, the Government made more on Oil Taxes than the Oil Companies made in profits.
And those oil taxes come nowhere near military expenditures that the government pays to ensure worldwide security for the oil market. So the government takes additional money by "force" from the rest of us to subsidize the oil industry by providing them with free security services.
Taking some tax money and allocating it towards finding energy sources that don't require major projection of military force to secure could very likely end up reducing the overall amount of money that's "forcefully" collected from you in the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a clue for you: the Iraqi insurgency doesn't use weapons that are legal for you to own. So much for the 2nd amendment.
Given the unreliability and outrageous costs of shuttle launches, it would probably be quicker and cheaper to take the backup mirror out of the Smithsonian Institution, build a new copy of the Hubble with it, and launch it on an expendable rocket. Unfortunately, in the mind of budget directors, that would be a "new project", and it would be harder to fund than just shoveling yet more money into the shuttle black hole.
Most likely because they used to actually make stuff. Since most of the companies that they could sue probably have plenty of patents of their own that SGI was infringing on, such an action would have risked shutting down SGI's production lines.
Now that they've gone bankrupt, they probably figure that they don't stand to gain much by trying to produce things, so they can go forward as a pure patent troll. This won't infringe on others' patents, so there's no longer any deterrent to SGI filing patent lawsuits as they please.
1. Do something with a computer.
Its scope is not all that much narrower than the title.
I find it mind-boggling that the USPTO routinely rubberstamps claims like this.
Since the population is not static, you can't just stop publishing info like this and expect the next generation of people to somehow magically know it.
It's not obvious that tiny earphones driven by a AAA battery could damage your hearing, so somebody studies the issue to find out. They find evidence that the earphones can indeed damage your hearing, so they tell people about it. Now many people who would otherwise not know about the risks can take steps to avoid problems.
Are you arguing that mothers should stop nagging their children about scissors and that researchers should keep findings like these under wraps just because you already happen to know about them?
BTW, plenty of people warn about PA speakers and the sound levels they often produce at concerts and clubs.
That's partly true. The burning covering provided the soot that was able to glow and make the flames visible. Hydrogen flames are almost invisible.
However, urban legends about the extreme flammability of the doping notwithstanding, there is NO WAY a vessel the size of the Titanic could be vaporized in 30 seconds, throwing a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the air, unless the reaction was driven mainly by the burning hydrogen gas. The gas did dissipate quickly; it just happened to be burning as it did.
Of course they do. I've used the GIMP off and on over the years, and I wasted quite a bit of time searching for circle/rectangle/etc. tools before I came to terms with the idea that someone would bother to write such an elaborate program and leave those simple features out.
So what it's a photo manipulation program: people need to stick circles and rectangle into photos sometimes. The menus are already cluttered with dozens if not hundreds of obscure tools and scripts. Surely adding a set of shortcut commands to do a very common basic task in a non-ass-backwards fashion wouldn't make the clutter significantly worse.
May I suggest you look into a reading comprehension course?
As I originally said, it sure ain't nuclear. By the numbers you gave, without breeder reactors, we'd run out of fuel in just a couple of decades if we tried to use it to replace all fossil fuel. Breeder reactors are not a current production-ready technology.
Not to mention the actual number one reason why it's not going to happen: WMD fears. Can you imagine a scenario where every country on this planet is running breeder reactors and involved in reprocessing plutonium on a massive scale? At the end of the day, policymakers just are not going to go that route.
Solar power may take a lot of room, but not nearly as much as we already use for current agriculture. Luckily, the best places for solar collectors are not the best for growing food. What's wrong with filling deserts with mirrors? I know there's a bunch of tree-huggers who would be against it, but why should deserts get any more special treatment than all the other types of landscape we've already heavily modified?
Ok, I'll fix the ambiguous syntax: "barrels of (coal ash and CO2)". We'll assume for the sake of this exercise that the barrels aren't leaking.
Right. The only two sources of energy in this universe are coal or nuclear fission.
That's just plain wrong. You're confusing the oft-quoted factoid that a coal plant *releases* more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant along with its long-term storage facilities. (As long as Murphy's law is held at bay for 10,000 years or so.) That does not mean that the coal plant *produces* anywhere near as much radioactivity as a nuclear plant. If you want a demonstration, I'll go stand in a room full of unshielded barrels of coal ash and CO2 for 12 hours, and you go stand in a room full of unshielded spent fuel rods for 12 hours. We'll see which of us is able to walk back out.
With current technology, nuclear power will not put a serious dent in world energy use before we run out of fissionable uranium. If nuclear power is to be the answer to the world's energy needs, we will have to switch over to using breeder reactors almost exclusively. This technology hasn't exactly had a great track record in the real world; it would need a huge amount of work get safe breeder reactors producing power in quantities an order of magnitude greater than current simpler nuclear technologies. In fact, I assert that such a feat is no more feasible than the other technologies you brush off as being too hard or immature.
IIRC, microwave popcorn bags go one step farther by adding a sheet a special microwave absorber substance inside the bottom side of the bag. This quickly heats the oil and kernels by conduction to a higher temperature than they would naturally attain. That way they can pop before the shells start to get a scorched taste. It basically emulates a traditionally heated oil popper.
The key in popping any corn is to quickly get the steam pressure up to where the kernel explodes, then get the popped kernel away from the highest heat so they don't burn.
That's like saying "The Titanic really was an unsinkable ship - the only problem was the poor quality steel and rivets that made it vulnerable to opening huge gashes in the hull during collisions".
The problem is that their "final releases", which you certainly have to pay for, are usually at a level that everyone else defines as betas. Microsoft's term for an actual final release is "Service Pack". To support this scheme of early revenue generation, they arbitrarily redefine all those other software development terms.
It doesn't matter how Microsoft defines "beta". The real definition of beta is that the software is feature complete and is in the final stages of testing (but not yet a possible RTM like RC really means). If drastic changes to the underlying mechanism and APIs are still possible, the software is still alpha, or more likely, it's not even out of the design phase yet.
By buying into these bogus definitions, you've been hoodwinked by Microsoft's marketing department into paying good money for unfinished goods.
There isn't a single person on this planet, either inside or outside of Microsoft, who expected that Vista "RC1" had even an inkling of a chance of being the actual RTM image. That makes it just another beta release, nothing more, nothing less.
Well, once the search database factored out all of the boilerplate declarations, there was pretty much nothing left to store.
IMO, the reason for that is the same reason that pop music sucks so much these days: focus groups and computer models are used to select the choices offered to the public. This essentially guarantees mediocrity.
For every terrorist who lives in this country, there are probably thousands living here who would have no problem with a totalitarian government. For every person killed by terrorists in the past century, hundreds more have been killed by their own totalitarian governments. Now what's the bigger danger you should be worrying about?
And those oil taxes come nowhere near military expenditures that the government pays to ensure worldwide security for the oil market. So the government takes additional money by "force" from the rest of us to subsidize the oil industry by providing them with free security services.
Taking some tax money and allocating it towards finding energy sources that don't require major projection of military force to secure could very likely end up reducing the overall amount of money that's "forcefully" collected from you in the long term.