And there isn't a shred of science behind such a proclamation.
And you don't have any facts to back up your sense of overconfidence. No more pandemics ever? That statement is simply absurd.
The world of medicine is vastly different, and vastly more effective, than at any other time in human history
The "world of medicine" currently has only enough drugs and hospital beds to treat a couple of million people, and the excess hospital capacity not already in use is much lower than that. Once an epidemic surpasses that capacity, we're back to same level of care that they had in 1918.
Oh, and addressing this specifically: if this stands, and other countries follow, no more advances may be made in bird flu research since all private-sector motivation is removed.
There already is almost no motivation for private sector research into dealing with epidemics. The market for vaccines just isn't very lucrative compared to things like allergy treatments or impotency cures, and the market size is spotty and unpredictable. Without big profits to chase, major funding for significant advances in these areas will have to be driven by government funding anyway, so dropping the patent incentive would be no big loss.
Yeah, with those burdens, the drug companies sure have been having a hard time making ends meet lately. Maybe we need to set up a relief fund for them.
Since there's already a market value for the drug,
It's not the same market, so the value is meaningless. The current market is a boutique drug for a couple million people in rich countries who want to cut a couple of days off their sick leave if they pick up a normal case of the flu. The new market is mass distribution of the drug to much of the general population as part of a public health policy.
The price points should have no relation to each other since the purchasers and their motives are completely different. In particular, the mass distribution by governments basically makes the drug a commodity, which should have a price much closer to production costs than a boutique drug.
The core API is definately C, but most of the ancillary libraries are C++. Pretty much anything COM based is C++ (DirectX, OLE, GDI+, etc...).
Any COM interface can be called directly from C code. It's just a matter of typing an even more redundant and finicky syntax than the C++ version. In theory, COM was supposed to be a language-independent standard.
A DOS.INI file holds a description of how it's structured. It's made of keyword:value pairs, and the keywords define the structure (along with the [section] headers which are also contained in the file). All of this is in a "neutral" format, whatever that means. If I transmit an.INI file from my computer (like say distributing it with an app), it's covered by this claim.
I can't believe some of the claims in these patents. The patent examiners must have been smoking crack. Here's claim 11 of the first patent:
11. A method of transferring data in electronic form from a computer comprising the steps of:
a) organizing and storing the data in neutral form that is to be transferred;
b) organizing and storing the names, definitions and properties of the structural tags used to express the data in neutral form; and
c) transferring the data expressed in neutral form along with the names, definitions and properties of the structural tags that make up that neutral form data.
WTF does that mean? It says everything and nothing at all. This is the kind of language sales guys use when they want to bamboozle a PHB with a liberal arts degree. A DOS.INI file "infringes" on that claim just as much as an XML file does, not to mention every LISP program ever written.
And the patent examiner agreed that nobody in history has probably ever implemented something that's described by this statement. Simply unbelievable.
I would bet a large sum of money that security holes do in fact exist that would let you do all of those things. In many cases, those systems are just too obscure for the usual hacker types to have poked into them very much, but that doesn't mean that they're free of bugs.
During the cold war, we actually *did* almost start a nuclear war when somebody accidentally played a nuclear attack training tape without first disconnecting the test system from the live radar tracking systems.
The idea of us ringing up the Australians and saying "What ho! We're going to build a rocket base in your outback. Look, I know you chaps think you're independent now, but Queen Liz says to tell you to bally well stuff off" is just not going to fly, I'm afraid.
It seems that the Australians wouldn't have too much problem with letting Britain launch some rockets from their country, considering that they've previously agreed to let them nuke it.
I read over the first patent. The description section compares it with prior art landline prepaid plans and then points out that the key improvement here is that the user doesn't have to type in the calling card number. They make the vast intellectual leap of realizing that a cellphone has a UID that can be used instead of a calling card number.
The most general and interesting claim, #10, states:
10. A method for pre-paid cellular telephone service, said method comprising the steps of:
forwarding to a pre-paid switching system a dialed number identification system code (DNIS) and an automated number identification code (ANI) representing a call from a cellular telephone;
at the pre-paid switching system, verifying a positive balance in an account identified by the ANI;
forwarding the call to an LEC; and
decrementing the balance in the account at regular intervals during the call until the call is terminated or until the balance is no longer positive, whichever occurs first.
This claim describes the exact sequence of events of a landline calling card, except that the old "user types in calling card number" is replaced by " and an automated number identification code (ANI) representing a call from a cellular telephone". Now, if asked to design a prepaid wireless phone service, would it be obvious to even a less-than-average person that it would be better use the ID number already in the phone rather than an arbitrary one on a separate card? Yes, of course it is. However, the cabal of judges, lawyers and bureaucrats that make up the IP establishment have their own version of English, where the word "obvious" has no real meaning.
In the mean time, for the next 15 years, people are probably going to have to come up with stupid work-arounds that evade other parts of that claim. The first one that comes to my mind is zero out the account when the call starts, set a timer to end the call, and refund money into the account if the timer hasn't expired when the call hangs up.
That may not fly because it's too "functionally equivalent" to the claim, but with software programmable phones and cryptographic protocols it's probably possible to avoid sending a fixed phone ID number or keeping a centralized account balance altogether. At the end of the day, it's doubtful people will be paying royalties on this patent for very long, but there will just be a bunch of pointless make-work kludging people will have to do to sidestep this patent. So much for advancements to useful arts and sciences.
I just compared the new layout with an old version of the Onion on the Wayback Machine. IMO, the worst thing about the new layout is that the Onion is supposed to be a collection of jokes. For some reason, looking at a two-dimensional grid of jokes just doesn't work very well.
The old layout basically had a single column of story headers, so you saw the jokes in a linear fashion. You read one, chuckle, maybe open the story in a background tab, and move on to the next one. In the new layout, I find my eyes darting all over the page as I try to skim all the headings. It's too distracting. They also only allocate a fraction of the old space for a text summary, so it's harder to get a good idea of whether the story is any good. When in doubt, I usually don't bother clicking.
As I understand it, passenger rail service in the US has almost never been profitable since day one. The only reason the railroads offered passenger service at all was because they were required to do so as a condition of their original free government handouts of right-of-way. When the government offered to take up responsibility passenger rail service with Amtrack, the railroads were more than happy to unload it and focus on their profitable freight business.
My guess is that passenger rail is no more profitable in most other countries, but government subsidies make up the difference. Here in the US, the people don't seem to like the idea of government subsidies for passenger rail for some reason; they only want subsidies for roads and airports. Thus, those modes of transport can make a profit with relatively cheap fares. In the mean time, the rail service languishes with such low volume due to stingy government subsidies (relative to other transportation modes) that it lacks economies of scale, and the ticket price stays high.
hey moron, the reason you get charged for a static ip is not because of the lack of ip's, but because of the extra labor required to manage your static ip
No it's not. The reason they charge more is because they're charging what the market will bear. They figure if you want a static IP, you're trying to run some kind of server, and you're probably willing to pay more for it.
If IP6 effectively gives every device in the world a static IP, then the upsell oportunities associated with the witholding of static IPs by the ISPs go away. That's why I don't see many ISPs supporting IP6 any time soon.
If you are running vim on X11, then just select File->Exit, just like any other editor. *Any* editor not running under a GUI will have some kind of obscure key sequence to exit; you shouldn't be surprised about that. Some, like nano, will dedicate a couple of screen lines to remind you full-time what those keystrokes are. That's great, but a professional developer probably won't want to reserve valuable screen real-estate for that purpose unless they suffer from severe amnesia.
The yellow marker highlights whatever you've last searched for. It's an incredibly useful feature. If you can't remember the official command to turn it off (:nohighlight, or:noh for short), just search for something nonexistent like/jfjf.
Re:hats off to Bram, Bill Joy, and ATT
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 1
The second one might be simpler to do visually. Put the cursor at column 20 of the first line, then:
Thankfully, my house is in the low-res area of Google's satellite coverage. It's too fuzzy to recognize at all. I'm well-hidden, and I sleep more soundly at night for it. The Terrorists are certain to pick another target that they can get a better fix on.
However, I don't think it's wise to be complacent. Just to be sure, I still might paint my roof lime green just to blend into the image a little better.
Retail sales are meaningless without integrating direct sales (Dell, etc).
Who's to say what's meaningful? For example, auto manufacturers have often met production milestones by stuffing huge numbers of a particular model into their captive auto rental subsidiaries. Are the market share numbers that include those artificially created purchases more meaningful than the sales numbers for dealer sales to individuals? It depends on what aspect picture you're interested in.
Scientific Purpose?
on
Space Tourism?
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· Score: 3, Funny
yet are these activities simply carried out so as to 'entertain' or is there real scientific purpose behind them?
Given that the space station itself doesn't have a real scientific purpose, using it to host tourists is perfectly appropriate.
And there's precious little science worse than economics, which has an utterly abysmal record at predicting future conditions. That's my point. Basing any decision on the long-term prediction of an economist is silly.
Trillions of dollars and Millions of lives will be lost if the "we should take action just in case" crowd wins. Some of the best estimates say that cutting CO2 by 50% will cost 1.5 BILLION LIVES by 2100.
Climatology may have some certainty, but the "science" of economics is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Taking or not taking any actions based on fuzzy multi-decade economic forecasts is complete folly.
Human civilization has already weathered many transitions more profound than changing our current source of energy. At no point has anywhere near 25% of the world's population been killed off by economic distress.
Massachusetts will likely learn that even the most open format is considerably more proprietary if your customers don't use it.
They're not customers. Most everyone the state deals with wants something for free or wants to sell them something. They can use the format the state specifies or take a hike.
When the project required changes to our customers' standards, by State Decree, the costs ballooned.
It's a one-time cost. After the conversion is complete, everyone will save money because they can buy tools to work on documents on the free market, not from a single-source vendor.
what you in fact have is in the array 4 additional additions (between registers),
Actually, most x86s have a dedicated address generation units which handle those index additions in parallel on separate logic from the main ALU. So both cases would actually run at the same speed on a modern x86.
Well, I don't know why you're proposing anything then. People are already entering into "mutually consensual arrangements" by agreeing that the software vendor has no liability. Who is going to force a change where vendors have to buy insurance? After such forcing, are any agreements still consensual?
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And you don't have any facts to back up your sense of overconfidence. No more pandemics ever? That statement is simply absurd.
The world of medicine is vastly different, and vastly more effective, than at any other time in human history
The "world of medicine" currently has only enough drugs and hospital beds to treat a couple of million people, and the excess hospital capacity not already in use is much lower than that. Once an epidemic surpasses that capacity, we're back to same level of care that they had in 1918.
There already is almost no motivation for private sector research into dealing with epidemics. The market for vaccines just isn't very lucrative compared to things like allergy treatments or impotency cures, and the market size is spotty and unpredictable. Without big profits to chase, major funding for significant advances in these areas will have to be driven by government funding anyway, so dropping the patent incentive would be no big loss.
Yeah, with those burdens, the drug companies sure have been having a hard time making ends meet lately. Maybe we need to set up a relief fund for them.
It's not the same market, so the value is meaningless. The current market is a boutique drug for a couple million people in rich countries who want to cut a couple of days off their sick leave if they pick up a normal case of the flu. The new market is mass distribution of the drug to much of the general population as part of a public health policy.
The price points should have no relation to each other since the purchasers and their motives are completely different. In particular, the mass distribution by governments basically makes the drug a commodity, which should have a price much closer to production costs than a boutique drug.
Any COM interface can be called directly from C code. It's just a matter of typing an even more redundant and finicky syntax than the C++ version. In theory, COM was supposed to be a language-independent standard.
A DOS .INI file holds a description of how it's structured. It's made of keyword:value pairs, and the keywords define the structure (along with the [section] headers which are also contained in the file). All of this is in a "neutral" format, whatever that means. If I transmit an .INI file from my computer (like say distributing it with an app), it's covered by this claim.
And the patent examiner agreed that nobody in history has probably ever implemented something that's described by this statement. Simply unbelievable.
During the cold war, we actually *did* almost start a nuclear war when somebody accidentally played a nuclear attack training tape without first disconnecting the test system from the live radar tracking systems.
It seems that the Australians wouldn't have too much problem with letting Britain launch some rockets from their country, considering that they've previously agreed to let them nuke it.
The most general and interesting claim, #10, states:
This claim describes the exact sequence of events of a landline calling card, except that the old "user types in calling card number" is replaced by " and an automated number identification code (ANI) representing a call from a cellular telephone". Now, if asked to design a prepaid wireless phone service, would it be obvious to even a less-than-average person that it would be better use the ID number already in the phone rather than an arbitrary one on a separate card? Yes, of course it is. However, the cabal of judges, lawyers and bureaucrats that make up the IP establishment have their own version of English, where the word "obvious" has no real meaning.
In the mean time, for the next 15 years, people are probably going to have to come up with stupid work-arounds that evade other parts of that claim. The first one that comes to my mind is zero out the account when the call starts, set a timer to end the call, and refund money into the account if the timer hasn't expired when the call hangs up.
That may not fly because it's too "functionally equivalent" to the claim, but with software programmable phones and cryptographic protocols it's probably possible to avoid sending a fixed phone ID number or keeping a centralized account balance altogether. At the end of the day, it's doubtful people will be paying royalties on this patent for very long, but there will just be a bunch of pointless make-work kludging people will have to do to sidestep this patent. So much for advancements to useful arts and sciences.
The old layout basically had a single column of story headers, so you saw the jokes in a linear fashion. You read one, chuckle, maybe open the story in a background tab, and move on to the next one. In the new layout, I find my eyes darting all over the page as I try to skim all the headings. It's too distracting. They also only allocate a fraction of the old space for a text summary, so it's harder to get a good idea of whether the story is any good. When in doubt, I usually don't bother clicking.
My guess is that passenger rail is no more profitable in most other countries, but government subsidies make up the difference. Here in the US, the people don't seem to like the idea of government subsidies for passenger rail for some reason; they only want subsidies for roads and airports. Thus, those modes of transport can make a profit with relatively cheap fares. In the mean time, the rail service languishes with such low volume due to stingy government subsidies (relative to other transportation modes) that it lacks economies of scale, and the ticket price stays high.
No it's not. The reason they charge more is because they're charging what the market will bear. They figure if you want a static IP, you're trying to run some kind of server, and you're probably willing to pay more for it.
If IP6 effectively gives every device in the world a static IP, then the upsell oportunities associated with the witholding of static IPs by the ISPs go away. That's why I don't see many ISPs supporting IP6 any time soon.
The yellow marker highlights whatever you've last searched for. It's an incredibly useful feature. If you can't remember the official command to turn it off (:nohighlight, or :noh for short), just search for something nonexistent like /jfjf.
However, I don't think it's wise to be complacent. Just to be sure, I still might paint my roof lime green just to blend into the image a little better.
Really? How do you think that so many of the ancient ruins got ruined?
Who's to say what's meaningful? For example, auto manufacturers have often met production milestones by stuffing huge numbers of a particular model into their captive auto rental subsidiaries. Are the market share numbers that include those artificially created purchases more meaningful than the sales numbers for dealer sales to individuals? It depends on what aspect picture you're interested in.
Given that the space station itself doesn't have a real scientific purpose, using it to host tourists is perfectly appropriate.
And there's precious little science worse than economics, which has an utterly abysmal record at predicting future conditions. That's my point. Basing any decision on the long-term prediction of an economist is silly.
Climatology may have some certainty, but the "science" of economics is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Taking or not taking any actions based on fuzzy multi-decade economic forecasts is complete folly.
Human civilization has already weathered many transitions more profound than changing our current source of energy. At no point has anywhere near 25% of the world's population been killed off by economic distress.
They're not customers. Most everyone the state deals with wants something for free or wants to sell them something. They can use the format the state specifies or take a hike.
When the project required changes to our customers' standards, by State Decree, the costs ballooned.
It's a one-time cost. After the conversion is complete, everyone will save money because they can buy tools to work on documents on the free market, not from a single-source vendor.
Actually, most x86s have a dedicated address generation units which handle those index additions in parallel on separate logic from the main ALU. So both cases would actually run at the same speed on a modern x86.
Well, I don't know why you're proposing anything then. People are already entering into "mutually consensual arrangements" by agreeing that the software vendor has no liability. Who is going to force a change where vendors have to buy insurance? After such forcing, are any agreements still consensual?