Can someone please justify why we should consider the CSIRO to be a patent troll? They are an actual research organisation (a taxpayer-funded one at that); they don't exist just to file patents and make claims on them. Why are people dismissing them as trolls?
Because in this case they went after independent invention, a standard late in the process, put good vendors out of the market in certain jurisdictions (e.g. Buffalo in the US) and generally dragged down 802.11n for years.
This wasn't for the public good, which is what government organizations are supposed to do. Heck, I'd wager Australian businesses alone lost more than $200M over the course of several years due to their lawsuits. So, add 'self-defeating' to the list.
NH gives you the option to have your picture removed from their database after they print your license.
Note that they've recently switched to issuing temporaries on the spot and mailing the real one, so it persists for some period of time. I've had it on my to-do list for a while to check on how their backups are managed to comply with the law.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Mr. Stross is the one who seems to be missing the point.
If I want education, I'll watch Science/Discovery/History . . . better yet, I'll read a book. When I want entertainment, I want entertainment. Obviously, I'm not alone in feeling that Star Trek/Babylon 5/Firefly et. al. provide that.
And the point of all three was to examine modern society, through the lens of fantasy. Agreed, technology wasn't the point.
So by making 'space mining' feasible it makes itself obsolete, you say that like its a bad thing..
Really, if the typical critics had that kind of imagination they wouldn't be critics, so it's probably a non-issue with them. Fighting that lack of imagination would certainly be much harder.
The troubling middle will be researchers competing for funds for their special lift ideas who can see the potential but would rather not see it funded.
Considering we just hit the Moon to try to figure out how much water ice is there, it seems unlikely that we have any good ideas on which asteroids have water ice in them
much less the ability to bring them to where we need them (yet)
Yeah, I think smart folks feel it's a pretty straight-forward, if slow, proposition, but we'd have to still design and build the actual devices. Heck, convincing the populace that the rocket scientists wouldn't crash the asteroid into Earth is probably the hardest part.
That's more the type of project I'd expect a few decades _after_ we do what this project is talking about. All in good time, my friend...
Agreed.:) This kind of air gun could be a good way to bridge the gap.
Just keep sending up loads of water and compressed air, etc., for however long you can afford to do so
I've heard it argued by folks who sounded like they knew their stuff that it's much cheaper to do it by dragging in asteroids (maybe one with a cubic mile of ice in it) than to shoot it up from earth. I admit, I haven't seen the numbers.
And, yes, it seems unlikely that governments will get this done.
Send up consumables, for sure. Fuel, water, compressed air, freeze-dried food, etc. Even if just used for that, this is not a bad plan. There's no rule that says you have to use only ONE method to get stuff off-planet.
One good criticism would be that this is a short-term project. You'll need conventional lift to get the tools up into space to build an orbital mining facility. This air-gun can be used to lift all the materials that those tools will use to build the mining facility and fuel for the crafts that will go get the asteroids and coax them back. But once that's done, we ought not need the air gun nearly as much or at all.
Still, compared to the costs of things like shuttles or ISS, this is pocket change.
A solution that I've heard of is storing a backup in a safe deposit box in a bank.
Yes, this is how I set up my clients. Nightly rsnapshots locally, a weekly break of a RAID mirror goes to the bank.
If your data is stolen from a bank safe deposit box, you've got more problems than the missing data.
You're out $238. LUKS-encrypt the backup mirror. My biggest risk at the moment is that my new office is pretty close to the bank and a massive bomb could take out both buildings. If my city is bombed, though, screw the IT business, I'm selling ammo.
Suppose that you could only really store weekly backups there unless you want to go to the bank every day. Put two hard drives in the box. When you put one in with your weekly backup, take out the one for the previous week.
Actually, take out the one from two weeks ago. You need 4 copies - one in your server, one in your server's mirror, and two previous weeks' at the bank. Then, you break your server mirror, cart that one to the bank, take out the oldest one at the bank, take that back to the office, and add it back into the array. If something happens in transit, you always have two off-site, in case one of the offsite drives fails to spin up (always a possibility). Increase the number of off-site rotations for your level of paranoia of that. Get two bank accounts ($60/yr here) if you're totally nutters about it.
I mean, the guy was a dictator, but he liked money; having a facility to hire out would have given him the cash to build even more palaces for himself.
Yes, that's within the realm of possibilities, but he had already attacked Israel before (poorly), so it seems far more likely that's what he was up to.
The filing date is May 8, 2006. Really? This technology wasn't around before then?
Oh, who cares. I hope they get the injunction. Then a million Prius owners will tell everybody who will listen (or may be confused for listening) just how awful the patent system has become.
http://i.ehow.com/images/GlobalPhoto/Articles/5065096/2379282369908fb9e03em_Full.jpg [ehow.com] (Anyone know how I can make these banners on modern printers? I don't think it can even be done today.)
haha, I wrote a C=64 BASIC program to make those when I was about 12. Those were the days.
I have some panoramic paper roll for my Epson inkjet that can handle very long pages. I'm not sure the total length limit though, I think it's only 4-feet or so.
Not that I read TFA, but having a set of guidelines for implementers to have handy is a good idea. Not every engineer is a good gamer and everybody misses something.
I attended a symposium on Ethics for AI's a couple year ago. It's a 10-year-plus off problem, but the idea is to have through through the implications before building the things. You want things like ethics build into the design.
Other options like bonds or CDs are paying such lousy interest rates, that it's not even worth looking at them.
There are non-dollar holding options that are stable and going up, relative to the dollar. I'm not sure where you're located - my C=64 keyboard came with a pound key.
Yes, Microsoft is a big, litigious, evil monopoly, but they actually have made a pretty watertight commitment to keeping those portions of.NET that Mono relies on open and free.
That's true, but from that perspective mono isn't compatible with Windows.NET, which greatly diminishes its value. Setting all legal pitfalls aside, it's still a non-open software stack that is inspired by and reliant on Microsoft creativity. JVM and parrot are two open alternatives.
It really pisses me off that a computer that's otherwise fine is doomed to obsolescence years before it either became too slow to use or physically broke.
Fedora 11 or Ubuntu 8 LTS should both work fine. Your hardware is fine, Apple just abandoned it.
No, they are the bad guy. The laws suck, and the guys using the laws to hold the software world hostage to moronic demands are bad guys.
Well, here I go defending a patent troll: no.
The only reason anybody pays attention to patent laws is that the government will send men with guns to take your property and your liberty if you don't obey them. That's where the buck stops - the government enables and enforces the desires of the patent trolls. If they're to take credit for any positive implications of patents they take the blame for the offences.
Now then, the issue is one of fairness. If this work was done in 1993, 2009 is too late to begin talking to implementers. Anybody with a pulse in the field would have noticed this before 2001. There has to be a mechanism for fairness in declaring such patents abandoned without active work on licensing.
At this point, it has been said so many times that you pretty much have to be a complete idiot not to have grasped that GOOGLE VOICE IS NOT VOIP. It's more like a switchboard, routing calls.
One must qualify that with 'on the iPhone' to be so declarative, and that's probably where the confusion lies. You can use Google Voice as a SIP trunk from other applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Because in this case they went after independent invention, a standard late in the process, put good vendors out of the market in certain jurisdictions (e.g. Buffalo in the US) and generally dragged down 802.11n for years.
This wasn't for the public good, which is what government organizations are supposed to do. Heck, I'd wager Australian businesses alone lost more than $200M over the course of several years due to their lawsuits. So, add 'self-defeating' to the list.
Note that they've recently switched to issuing temporaries on the spot and mailing the real one, so it persists for some period of time. I've had it on my to-do list for a while to check on how their backups are managed to comply with the law.
Your life would be richer if the majority of humans (who aren't rich and in a metro area) mattered to you.
And the point of all three was to examine modern society, through the lens of fantasy. Agreed, technology wasn't the point.
no, you just need to know what protocols you can handle, and if the first part doesn't match one of those, assume 'http'.
So by making 'space mining' feasible it makes itself obsolete, you say that like its a bad thing..
Really, if the typical critics had that kind of imagination they wouldn't be critics, so it's probably a non-issue with them. Fighting that lack of imagination would certainly be much harder.
The troubling middle will be researchers competing for funds for their special lift ideas who can see the potential but would rather not see it funded.
Considering we just hit the Moon to try to figure out how much water ice is there, it seems unlikely that we have any good ideas on which asteroids have water ice in them
Some progress on that front:
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2009/10/08/ice-confirmed-on-an-asteroid.html
much less the ability to bring them to where we need them (yet)
Yeah, I think smart folks feel it's a pretty straight-forward, if slow, proposition, but we'd have to still design and build the actual devices. Heck, convincing the populace that the rocket scientists wouldn't crash the asteroid into Earth is probably the hardest part.
That's more the type of project I'd expect a few decades _after_ we do what this project is talking about. All in good time, my friend...
Agreed. :) This kind of air gun could be a good way to bridge the gap.
Just keep sending up loads of water and compressed air, etc., for however long you can afford to do so
I've heard it argued by folks who sounded like they knew their stuff that it's much cheaper to do it by dragging in asteroids (maybe one with a cubic mile of ice in it) than to shoot it up from earth. I admit, I haven't seen the numbers.
And, yes, it seems unlikely that governments will get this done.
Send up consumables, for sure. Fuel, water, compressed air, freeze-dried food, etc. Even if just used for that, this is not a bad plan. There's no rule that says you have to use only ONE method to get stuff off-planet.
One good criticism would be that this is a short-term project. You'll need conventional lift to get the tools up into space to build an orbital mining facility. This air-gun can be used to lift all the materials that those tools will use to build the mining facility and fuel for the crafts that will go get the asteroids and coax them back. But once that's done, we ought not need the air gun nearly as much or at all.
Still, compared to the costs of things like shuttles or ISS, this is pocket change.
Or Dell or Apple. But speaking of Sony, I wonder if you can put a trojan rootkit in a battery?
I noticed in Leopard the system info app reveals the Apple batteries to be of Sony manufacture.
A solution that I've heard of is storing a backup in a safe deposit box in a bank.
Yes, this is how I set up my clients. Nightly rsnapshots locally, a weekly break of a RAID mirror goes to the bank.
If your data is stolen from a bank safe deposit box, you've got more problems than the missing data.
You're out $238. LUKS-encrypt the backup mirror. My biggest risk at the moment is that my new office is pretty close to the bank and a massive bomb could take out both buildings. If my city is bombed, though, screw the IT business, I'm selling ammo.
Suppose that you could only really store weekly backups there unless you want to go to the bank every day. Put two hard drives in the box. When you put one in with your weekly backup, take out the one for the previous week.
Actually, take out the one from two weeks ago. You need 4 copies - one in your server, one in your server's mirror, and two previous weeks' at the bank. Then, you break your server mirror, cart that one to the bank, take out the oldest one at the bank, take that back to the office, and add it back into the array. If something happens in transit, you always have two off-site, in case one of the offsite drives fails to spin up (always a possibility). Increase the number of off-site rotations for your level of paranoia of that. Get two bank accounts ($60/yr here) if you're totally nutters about it.
I mean, the guy was a dictator, but he liked money; having a facility to hire out would have given him the cash to build even more palaces for himself.
Yes, that's within the realm of possibilities, but he had already attacked Israel before (poorly), so it seems far more likely that's what he was up to.
Moderating. Just 'cause you're trolling somebody who deserves it doesn't mean it's not trolling.
Why have the karma if not for the occasional cathartic burn?
Oh, who cares. I hope they get the injunction. Then a million Prius owners will tell everybody who will listen (or may be confused for listening) just how awful the patent system has become.
Isn't that why our government just auctioned off billions of dollars of our publicly-owned spectrum?
The department that manages that spectrum is apparently run by somebody who has yet to discover the term "gigabytes". What could possibly go wrong?
haha, I wrote a C=64 BASIC program to make those when I was about 12. Those were the days.
I have some panoramic paper roll for my Epson inkjet that can handle very long pages. I'm not sure the total length limit though, I think it's only 4-feet or so.
Not that I read TFA, but having a set of guidelines for implementers to have handy is a good idea. Not every engineer is a good gamer and everybody misses something.
I attended a symposium on Ethics for AI's a couple year ago. It's a 10-year-plus off problem, but the idea is to have through through the implications before building the things. You want things like ethics build into the design.
There are non-dollar holding options that are stable and going up, relative to the dollar. I'm not sure where you're located - my C=64 keyboard came with a pound key.
A cookie for somebody who develops a method to convert a .swf to javascript+html5. A really big cookie.
That's true, but from that perspective mono isn't compatible with Windows .NET, which greatly diminishes its value. Setting all legal pitfalls aside, it's still a non-open software stack that is inspired by and reliant on Microsoft creativity. JVM and parrot are two open alternatives.
Fedora 11 or Ubuntu 8 LTS should both work fine. Your hardware is fine, Apple just abandoned it.
Anybody know of a linux kernel module that will fake ECC on a regular system? Yeah, I know, it'll be slower.
Well, here I go defending a patent troll: no.
The only reason anybody pays attention to patent laws is that the government will send men with guns to take your property and your liberty if you don't obey them. That's where the buck stops - the government enables and enforces the desires of the patent trolls. If they're to take credit for any positive implications of patents they take the blame for the offences.
Now then, the issue is one of fairness. If this work was done in 1993, 2009 is too late to begin talking to implementers. Anybody with a pulse in the field would have noticed this before 2001. There has to be a mechanism for fairness in declaring such patents abandoned without active work on licensing.
post your 3-line script. People here are calling BS.
One must qualify that with 'on the iPhone' to be so declarative, and that's probably where the confusion lies. You can use Google Voice as a SIP trunk from other applications.