Maybe I've seen a few too many bad sci-fi movies, but robots with shotguns scare me.
The robots with shotguns aren't really a big deal. There may be a lot of them, but they're stupid, slow to fire, and they move sluggishly. Once you've built up some skills, you don't even think abou them.
The ones to watch out for are the mutants with the plasma canons, the giants with the chain guns, and especially the three-headed boss with the rocket launcher and electromagnetic disruption field. That one is a real bitch.
Then go back and read your posts, see what you have argued, compare that to the requirments and let me know what you come up with.
Are you dense?
Everybody on this thread have been telling you that The requirements are wrong.
Obviously your precious regulations as interpreted by the current courts allowed this silly patent. That doesn't make it reasonable or right. Pull your head out of your ass and look at the big picture.
Why is it so nonobvious that they deserve a 20-year monopoly on it? There are basically 3 ways that websites have made user choices since the WWW was invented: links, buttons or menus. I assert that picking one of three standard ways is not nonobvious. At any rate, they would probably argue in court that a selection of country-specific links constitutes a "menu".
The "separate sites in each country" idea is just stupid. That's not how the WWW works, and is not the first thing that would come to anybody's mind.
It's not just obvious in hindsight. It's the only way to do it (or at least one out of a couple of possible ways). What's not so obvious is how you would accept orders from international customers without infringing on this patent.
You're so hung up on the details of the patent process that you can't see how the abuse of it is currently paralyzing this industry.
Try again, this time provide dated proof that these concepts were obvious before December 30, 1996.
They are objectively obvious. They would have been obvious in 1492 if you had simply verbally described a computer and a network to a merchant.
I know the system is broken and that a bunch of bureaucrats have attempted to redefine the word "obvious" to mean something that it doesn't.
Nevertheless, it doesn't change the fact that the claims are obvious. Anybody capable of coding up such an online sales system who was told to support international orders would have come up with the exact same list. It doesn't matter that this company may have been the first to implement it. It's still obvious, and they don't deserve a monopoly on it.
The patent is supposedly #6,460,020. The problem with it is that it is totally obvious even to a high school dropout. Here is the first claim:
1. A computer implemented process for carrying out an international commercial transaction comprising:
running a transaction program on a computer system so as to integrate processes including:
(a) selecting a language from a menu in which to view cataloge information on products;
(b) selecting a currency from amenu in which to obtain price information;
(c) selecting a product to be purchased and a destination for shipping such product to be purchased;
(d) accessing at least one local or remote database for obtaining
(i) price information for the product to be purchased; and
(ii) a product code for an international goods clasification system pertinent to such product; and
(iii) international shipping information related to an origination point of such product and said destination;
(e) calculating costs involved in moving such product to said destination based upon said destination and such product;
(f) determining a total cost of the transaction that includes a price of the product;
(g) receiving an order for such product thereby triggering an electronic process for confirming existence of available funds; and
(h) upon confirmation of availability of said funds, accepting said order, generating an electronic record, such record including the content of a commercial invoice, to facilitate passage of such product to said destination.
The rest of the claims are further minor tweaks on this same theme.
Here is my assessment of these steps in their transaction process: (a) duh (b) duh (c) duh duh (d) duh duh duh duh (e) duh (f) duh (g) duh (h) duh.
Is there any possible way to implement an "international" purchase that doesn't require all those steps? Is there anything innovative at all in those claims? No, because everything there is totally OBVIOUS.
The idea of the government granting a 20-year monopoly on this set of steps is utterly absurd.
It's not necessarily "stirring up". If the coolant is disabled and the spent fuel ignites under it's own heat, it would be distributed as fine soot particles.
That sort of accident would probably cover a few square miles of land with moderate contamination which wouldn't do anyone much harm in the short term and could be cleaned up.
Oh, that explains why the area around the Chernobyl plant is bustling with activity.
Planes of a certain size aren't allowed to fly within a certain radius of nuclear power plants. That radius is determined by how long it would take to scramble an Air Force jet to shoot the offender down.
A plane flies at almost 10 miles per minute. Do you seriously think that they can scramble a fighter jet in time to intercept it, especially if it drops below radar coverage? Even if they banned all flights within a 50 mile radius of the site, that only gives them 5 minutes response time. They would need to have an air force pilot sitting ready on the runway near every single nuclear plant.
the sites are already built to withstand everything the size of a 737 or smaller.
Spent fuel storage is often not shielded like the reactor, and it often holds more total radioactivity.
Planes aren't the only issue. They are also vulnerable to commando-style attacks.
If Bin Laden were to disrupt the flow of gas from Siberia to Europe and plunge the continent into chaos, cold, darkness, sickness and death, maybe the politicians will do something about it.
How about if Bin Laden were to fly an airplane into a spent fuel storage pool and plunge an entire state into chaos, radiation, sickness and death?
Unlike the gas pipeline, which could be fixed in a few days, the nuclear contamination would linger for decades.
Thousands of cosmic rays do not pass through our bodies every day... They are stopped by the atmosphere.
IIRC, when an energetic cosmic ray collides with the atmosphere, it creates a cascade of thousands of other high-energy particles that can reach us.
When I was a kid, I saw a large gizmo on exhibit (maybe a spark chamber?) that showed each cosmic ray-generated particle going through it as a neon flash. It was getting hit every couple of seconds.
If you don't want to pay money for a book whose full contents I say you can't read, then fine - don't buy it.
You can certainly restrict your customers such terms -- as long as you convince the buyer to read and sign a legally binding contract prior to the sale.
If you don't get a signature, you can't expect any restrictions.
There is no indication that will prevent Moore's Law from continuing
I'm not so sure about that. They've had to crank back on the speed partly because of their outrageous power consumption. One of the causes of the power problem is the high leakage current they're getting from the latest geometry shrink. Since Moore's law is about transistor counts, and end to shrinking feature sizes would put a big dent in Moore's law.
If you notice, most of the CPU vendors are going with multiple cores for their next trick. I'm figuring that it's because the CPU core doesn't actually consume that much real estate compared to caches, so it's a way to eke out some more performance even though they're going to ease back on the feature shrinks and total transistor counts.
If they don't solve the gate leakage problems soon, I think that the density increases are really going to taper off.
There's a good reason that the X-15 cost more: The X-15 was more capable than SS1. Not only could it reach 100km altitude, it could also fly like an airplane at hypersonic speeds within the atmosphere. SS1 just pops up and then floats back down like a leaf. Getting up to Mach 6 in the atmosphere and controlling the flight without melting is probably by itself much harder than reaching the X-prize altitude.
Has anybody signed such a treaty? There are still a couple of dozen fission reactors (not RTGs) from Soviet military radar satellites mothballed in parking orbits that will decay in a few hundred years.
Caddies are "protective" disk holders that come in two flavors: User insertable or permanent.
User insertable == Major Pain in the Ass, because you never have as many caddies as disks. Therefore, you actually stand to scratch your disks more by constantly juggling them in and out of caddies than by just putting it gently on the drive tray. My first CD-ROM drive used caddies and I soon developed an intense hatred for it.
Permanent == Each disk comes from the manufacturer with its own caddy. Therefore, the price of the disk media is never going to drop below $5/ea. Some other format without caddies will eventually win in the marketplace, and you'll be left with an orphan storage system.
Lowering taxes without cutting spending accomplishes exactly jack shit.
Increased spending under his watch is inevitably going to be paid for with *more taxes*. It's unbelievable how so many people don't seem to be able to comprehend this simple fact.
Unless a politician does the hard work of making spending cuts to accompany lower taxes, it's nothing more than bald-faced pandering to people with bad math skills.
I believe a better question is does collective consciousness somehow affect the outcome of certain events, and could some events be tied together?
The events are tied together only by people looking for pattern matches. This "Redskins last home game" has matched the outcome 17 times (1936 - 2000). With a 50/50 probability assigned, that's 131072:1 odds.
That sounds pretty creepy until you analyze the math behind it. There are hundreds of big professional and university sports teams in the US; there are probably hundreds of permutations to qualify the outcome similar to "last home game before $EVENT", (last away game, last game, first game in october, etc.). There are hundreds of major $EVENTS to match with, like the presidential election, natural disasters, wars, oscar winners, etc.
When looking for unlikely coincidences, you increase the odds by the product of each of the "hundreds" given above when you compare all of the different combinations together looking for some kind of match. Given that 100*100*100 = 1 million, it's not hard to find coincidences. Any given coincidence may have long odds, but there are so many possible coincidences, you're guaranteed to find them if you look.
Radiators were made to have a flow of air over them, so putting a fan blowing over that thing would greatly increase its cooling abilities.
That probably won't be necessary. Assuming that the original car had a 130hp engine with 30% thermal efficiency, and making a wild-ass-guess that 10% of the waste heat of the car actually goes through the radiator (rather than exhaust or other means), my calculations indicate that in the car the radiator would have a peak thermal throughput of over 22 kilowatts. A 100W CPU doesn't need to get rid of even 0.5% of that amount of heat. A fan would just seem to supply even more pointless overkill.
All it would take is just *one* of those massive events and nature will have accelerated past us in greenhouse (and other noxious) gas production.
Sure. And those types of huge natural events have been among the prime suspects to explain some of the mass extinctions that have occurred over the eons. Maybe that should tell us something.
That's also the logic they used to get congressional funding for the STS. They said at the time that this particular system would have reliability and costs more akin to aircraft operations than existing rockets. If they knew those promises were false and they were just getting bucks to play around with technology, then it was fraud.
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The robots with shotguns aren't really a big deal. There may be a lot of them, but they're stupid, slow to fire, and they move sluggishly. Once you've built up some skills, you don't even think abou them.
The ones to watch out for are the mutants with the plasma canons, the giants with the chain guns, and especially the three-headed boss with the rocket launcher and electromagnetic disruption field. That one is a real bitch.
Are you dense?
Everybody on this thread have been telling you that The requirements are wrong.
Obviously your precious regulations as interpreted by the current courts allowed this silly patent. That doesn't make it reasonable or right. Pull your head out of your ass and look at the big picture.
The "separate sites in each country" idea is just stupid. That's not how the WWW works, and is not the first thing that would come to anybody's mind.
It's not just obvious in hindsight. It's the only way to do it (or at least one out of a couple of possible ways). What's not so obvious is how you would accept orders from international customers without infringing on this patent.
You're so hung up on the details of the patent process that you can't see how the abuse of it is currently paralyzing this industry.
They are objectively obvious. They would have been obvious in 1492 if you had simply verbally described a computer and a network to a merchant.
I know the system is broken and that a bunch of bureaucrats have attempted to redefine the word "obvious" to mean something that it doesn't.
Nevertheless, it doesn't change the fact that the claims are obvious. Anybody capable of coding up such an online sales system who was told to support international orders would have come up with the exact same list. It doesn't matter that this company may have been the first to implement it. It's still obvious, and they don't deserve a monopoly on it.
The patent is supposedly #6,460,020. The problem with it is that it is totally obvious even to a high school dropout. Here is the first claim:
The rest of the claims are further minor tweaks on this same theme.
Here is my assessment of these steps in their transaction process: (a) duh (b) duh (c) duh duh (d) duh duh duh duh (e) duh (f) duh (g) duh (h) duh.
Is there any possible way to implement an "international" purchase that doesn't require all those steps? Is there anything innovative at all in those claims? No, because everything there is totally OBVIOUS.
The idea of the government granting a 20-year monopoly on this set of steps is utterly absurd.
It's not necessarily "stirring up". If the coolant is disabled and the spent fuel ignites under it's own heat, it would be distributed as fine soot particles.
Oh, that explains why the area around the Chernobyl plant is bustling with activity.
A plane flies at almost 10 miles per minute. Do you seriously think that they can scramble a fighter jet in time to intercept it, especially if it drops below radar coverage? Even if they banned all flights within a 50 mile radius of the site, that only gives them 5 minutes response time. They would need to have an air force pilot sitting ready on the runway near every single nuclear plant.
the sites are already built to withstand everything the size of a 737 or smaller.
Spent fuel storage is often not shielded like the reactor, and it often holds more total radioactivity.
Planes aren't the only issue. They are also vulnerable to commando-style attacks.
How about if Bin Laden were to fly an airplane into a spent fuel storage pool and plunge an entire state into chaos, radiation, sickness and death?
Unlike the gas pipeline, which could be fixed in a few days, the nuclear contamination would linger for decades.
IIRC, when an energetic cosmic ray collides with the atmosphere, it creates a cascade of thousands of other high-energy particles that can reach us.
When I was a kid, I saw a large gizmo on exhibit (maybe a spark chamber?) that showed each cosmic ray-generated particle going through it as a neon flash. It was getting hit every couple of seconds.
You can certainly restrict your customers such terms -- as long as you convince the buyer to read and sign a legally binding contract prior to the sale.
If you don't get a signature, you can't expect any restrictions.
Thanks for your truly riveting analysis.
You're the one playing silly word games to sidestep the argument, and you think I'm being an ass. Whatever.
Looks like you're the one who can't comprehend that a word can mean more than just the most narrow possible definition.
Only if you've somehow confused about the distinction between square miles of dirt and citizens.
I'm not so sure about that. They've had to crank back on the speed partly because of their outrageous power consumption. One of the causes of the power problem is the high leakage current they're getting from the latest geometry shrink. Since Moore's law is about transistor counts, and end to shrinking feature sizes would put a big dent in Moore's law.
If you notice, most of the CPU vendors are going with multiple cores for their next trick. I'm figuring that it's because the CPU core doesn't actually consume that much real estate compared to caches, so it's a way to eke out some more performance even though they're going to ease back on the feature shrinks and total transistor counts.
If they don't solve the gate leakage problems soon, I think that the density increases are really going to taper off.
There's a good reason that the X-15 cost more: The X-15 was more capable than SS1. Not only could it reach 100km altitude, it could also fly like an airplane at hypersonic speeds within the atmosphere. SS1 just pops up and then floats back down like a leaf. Getting up to Mach 6 in the atmosphere and controlling the flight without melting is probably by itself much harder than reaching the X-prize altitude.
Has anybody signed such a treaty? There are still a couple of dozen fission reactors (not RTGs) from Soviet military radar satellites mothballed in parking orbits that will decay in a few hundred years.
Actually, far less power than a 486. It was a 15-bit CPU (8K RAM, 64K ROM) with a memory cycle frequency of only 83 kHz.
User insertable == Major Pain in the Ass, because you never have as many caddies as disks. Therefore, you actually stand to scratch your disks more by constantly juggling them in and out of caddies than by just putting it gently on the drive tray. My first CD-ROM drive used caddies and I soon developed an intense hatred for it.
Permanent == Each disk comes from the manufacturer with its own caddy. Therefore, the price of the disk media is never going to drop below $5/ea. Some other format without caddies will eventually win in the marketplace, and you'll be left with an orphan storage system.
Bottom line: caddies suck bigtime.
Lowering taxes without cutting spending accomplishes exactly jack shit.
Increased spending under his watch is inevitably going to be paid for with *more taxes*. It's unbelievable how so many people don't seem to be able to comprehend this simple fact.
Unless a politician does the hard work of making spending cuts to accompany lower taxes, it's nothing more than bald-faced pandering to people with bad math skills.
The events are tied together only by people looking for pattern matches. This "Redskins last home game" has matched the outcome 17 times (1936 - 2000). With a 50/50 probability assigned, that's 131072:1 odds.
That sounds pretty creepy until you analyze the math behind it. There are hundreds of big professional and university sports teams in the US; there are probably hundreds of permutations to qualify the outcome similar to "last home game before $EVENT", (last away game, last game, first game in october, etc.). There are hundreds of major $EVENTS to match with, like the presidential election, natural disasters, wars, oscar winners, etc.
When looking for unlikely coincidences, you increase the odds by the product of each of the "hundreds" given above when you compare all of the different combinations together looking for some kind of match. Given that 100*100*100 = 1 million, it's not hard to find coincidences. Any given coincidence may have long odds, but there are so many possible coincidences, you're guaranteed to find them if you look.
That probably won't be necessary. Assuming that the original car had a 130hp engine with 30% thermal efficiency, and making a wild-ass-guess that 10% of the waste heat of the car actually goes through the radiator (rather than exhaust or other means), my calculations indicate that in the car the radiator would have a peak thermal throughput of over 22 kilowatts. A 100W CPU doesn't need to get rid of even 0.5% of that amount of heat. A fan would just seem to supply even more pointless overkill.
Sure. And those types of huge natural events have been among the prime suspects to explain some of the mass extinctions that have occurred over the eons. Maybe that should tell us something.
That's also the logic they used to get congressional funding for the STS. They said at the time that this particular system would have reliability and costs more akin to aircraft operations than existing rockets. If they knew those promises were false and they were just getting bucks to play around with technology, then it was fraud.