While I agree wholeheartedly with your argument, the courts do not. Another example from the same paper is even scarier. In a similar case (Register.com vs. Verio), the court said the use of search robots to gather information may be illegal regardless of whether it broke the site's terms of service:
"Instead, the Court concluded that the mere fact that Register.com had decided to sue Verio meant that Verio's use of the search robot was without authorization: 'because Register.com objects to Verio's use of search robots,' the Court held, 'they represent an unauthorized access to the [Register.com] WHOIS database.'"
[Ironically, the pdf for the paper apparently uses some feature of Acrobat which disallows copying text from it. I guess they don't want robots scraping text out of it or something. First time in quite a while I've had to type a quote from the net by hand!]
I think prior art is the human brain. In particular, the human brains of store clerks. A mom goes to the toy store and asks, "My kid wants some crazy new toy, called Po-something. Do you know what I mean?" The mom is "a wireless device without a full keyboard", as the patent claims. The database is the store clerk's head, which knows what items are popular. Voila, the database suggests "Pokemon", or "Mister Potato Head". Patent dismissed.
...injecting test errors to better evaluate systems and train operators
So this should help reduce the number of railroad accidents in the future, right?
In C++, when using STL, the preferred way to increment iterators is ++x. This is because it is more efficient than x++. Why? Postincrement must evaluate to the state of x before the incement, which requires additional effort ove preincrement, which evaluates to the state of x after the increment.
While x++ has historically been the preferred apporach, ++x is becoming the preferred approach, largely because of STL. I work at a large game developer, and I'm seeing this more and more, including some people who want to make it part of our coding standard.
Hardware-rendereed curved surfaces, and/or fully raytraced scenes. At some point, once the 3D models reach significantly high detail, polygon-to-pixel ratios will become so low as to make them useless. I wouldn't be suprised in a few years to see PC game engines start doing rendering completely in software again because raytracing will become cheaper and more realistic than all the computation necessary to make polygons look reflective/refractive/curved/etc.
> Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't > sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them.
By the same argument, a movie that starts out as as 300-page script shouldn't be entertaining. The thing is, this tome is not truly where a game or movie "starts". The 15-page comic book is really the starting point, but a team needs more than that to understand what they are trying to make. So they write out their ideas, inspired by the comic book (or whatever). As long as the document is considered flexible, I don't feel it reduces creativity. It's up to project leaders to encourage their developers to create organic design documents. For example, if a team uses MS Word to make it, it seems set in stone as soon as it's typed. But if they set up, say, a wiki web thing or something for the team to use, it encourages a sort of "controlled creativity".
I've worked on games with either no design document or the 300-page brick, and the lack of focus caused by the "no design doc" approach makes the latter much more preferable. In any event, the 300-pager projects usually complete within an order of magnitude of their planned schedule, which is something I've never seen on a project with no design doc.
> If congress passed a law that says we all must > do our shopping for entertainment products at > Wal-Mart, I'd agree with you.
Actually, a "you must buy everything at Wal*Mart" addendum was quietly slipped into the homeland security bill at the last moment before it was passed. -_-_-
"The FTC also has limited authority to police certain industries -- such as telephone companies -- that fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission."
> serving someone twenty consecutive beers, you > are truly being negligent
I once worked as a bartender at a bar which had upwards of 500 people on a busy weekend night. How on earth do I keep track of how many beers each drunken idiot in the bar has had?!? We would shut people off when they were really drunk, but usually that would be "too late" by your standards. Really, not many bars actually fit the stereotypical image of the bartender standing around wiping the bar and waiting all night on a lone customer crying in his beer. -_-_-
Bars have been successfully sued for negligence when serving people "too much alcohol" where it has led to death or injury. Why is this different from gun manufacturers? Well, how much money does the "bartender lobby" spend compared with the "gun lobby"? -_-_-
But how much are they paying Grace Jones!?
on
New Mad Max Film
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· Score: 1
I sure hope she's in the new one. It's time for the Grace Jones '02 comeback special! -_-_-
Who cares if Mel Gibson is in it?
on
New Mad Max Film
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it was professionally written, except for the use of phrases and words like "pain in the ass", "jackass", and "asshole".
Last time I voted, I got some sort of receipt to take with me.
> Why is it any harder to write an email worm for a Mac?
> Send an executable attachment to the average mac user.
Uhh, that's not a worm.
-_-_-
"Instead, the Court concluded that the mere fact that Register.com had decided to sue Verio meant that Verio's use of the search robot was without authorization: 'because Register.com objects to Verio's use of search robots,' the Court held, 'they represent an unauthorized access to the [Register.com] WHOIS database.'"
[Ironically, the pdf for the paper apparently uses some feature of Acrobat which disallows copying text from it. I guess they don't want robots scraping text out of it or something. First time in quite a while I've had to type a quote from the net by hand!]
I think prior art is the human brain. In particular, the human brains of store clerks. A mom goes to the toy store and asks, "My kid wants some crazy new toy, called Po-something. Do you know what I mean?" The mom is "a wireless device without a full keyboard", as the patent claims. The database is the store clerk's head, which knows what items are popular. Voila, the database suggests "Pokemon", or "Mister Potato Head". Patent dismissed.
So this should help reduce the number of railroad accidents in the future, right?
In C++, when using STL, the preferred way to increment iterators is ++x. This is because it is more efficient than x++. Why? Postincrement must evaluate to the state of x before the incement, which requires additional effort ove preincrement, which evaluates to the state of x after the increment.
While x++ has historically been the preferred apporach, ++x is becoming the preferred approach, largely because of STL. I work at a large game developer, and I'm seeing this more and more, including some people who want to make it part of our coding standard.
Hardware-rendereed curved surfaces, and/or fully raytraced scenes. At some point, once the 3D models reach significantly high detail, polygon-to-pixel ratios will become so low as to make them useless. I wouldn't be suprised in a few years to see PC game engines start doing rendering completely in software again because raytracing will become cheaper and more realistic than all the computation necessary to make polygons look reflective/refractive/curved/etc.
... Hoofah Kingcares
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So can I play Zork on this thing or what?
-_-_-
Are you talking about SETI or Slashdot?
-_-_-
> Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't
> sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them.
By the same argument, a movie that starts out as as 300-page script shouldn't be entertaining. The thing is, this tome is not truly where a game or movie "starts". The 15-page comic book is really the starting point, but a team needs more than that to understand what they are trying to make. So they write out their ideas, inspired by the comic book (or whatever). As long as the document is considered flexible, I don't feel it reduces creativity. It's up to project leaders to encourage their developers to create organic design documents. For example, if a team uses MS Word to make it, it seems set in stone as soon as it's typed. But if they set up, say, a wiki web thing or something for the team to use, it encourages a sort of "controlled creativity".
I've worked on games with either no design document or the 300-page brick, and the lack of focus caused by the "no design doc" approach makes the latter much more preferable. In any event, the 300-pager projects usually complete within an order of magnitude of their planned schedule, which is something I've never seen on a project with no design doc.
-_-_-
... how sheep's bladders may be used to prevent earthquakes.
-_-_-
Both forms are acceptable actually.
Wait, you worked at Radio Shack and are calling RCA "shoddy"? Like "Realistic", "Tandy", and "Optimus" are somehow synonymous with quality.
-_-_-
> If congress passed a law that says we all must
> do our shopping for entertainment products at
> Wal-Mart, I'd agree with you.
Actually, a "you must buy everything at Wal*Mart" addendum was quietly slipped into the homeland security bill at the last moment before it was passed.
-_-_-
Right here
-_-_-
AT&T will still be calling you.
"The FTC also has limited authority to police certain industries -- such as telephone companies -- that fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission."
-_-_-
Maybe it has to do with their decision to choose Microsoft for POS instead of Linux?
_-_-_
> serving someone twenty consecutive beers, you
> are truly being negligent
I once worked as a bartender at a bar which had upwards of 500 people on a busy weekend night. How on earth do I keep track of how many beers each drunken idiot in the bar has had?!? We would shut people off when they were really drunk, but usually that would be "too late" by your standards. Really, not many bars actually fit the stereotypical image of the bartender standing around wiping the bar and waiting all night on a lone customer crying in his beer.
-_-_-
Bars have been successfully sued for negligence when serving people "too much alcohol" where it has led to death or injury. Why is this different from gun manufacturers? Well, how much money does the "bartender lobby" spend compared with the "gun lobby"?
-_-_-
I sure hope she's in the new one. It's time for the Grace Jones '02 comeback special!
-_-_-
I just want to see Grace Jones!
-_-_-
Guess how much they charge for web hosting...
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