I'm not going to dispute your numbers. If you say you got that, then good for you.
That being said, you'd never get so low as 32 mpg on the highway in a Golf TDI. I have seen a lot of dismay over the CR numbers by VW owners you need to take those numbers with a big grain of salt. However, I think those numbers look just about right for the gasoline Golf... as long as you're not driving like a jackass.
Oh please. Impersonate you to do what? Identity theft is basically credit card or credit rating.
Don't foist your paranoia on everyone just because you want to enjoy the supposed convenience of electronic fund transfers and pre-approved credit. Instead try the following:
1) Demand better from your financial institutions -- not your government. 2) Don't use your SSN/SIN, raise hell when someone claims that it is necessary 3) Use cash (don't have a CC/debt) (its also) 4) Put a hold on your credit rating
Myth. Prius fuel consumption in the real world is better than any diesel car currently available new. Check Consumer Reports' tests.
Bullshit! Prius is a great city car, but is just as bad as any other gas car on the highway. The mileage of a prius is 35-48 MPG. I get 60 MPG on the highway in my Golf TDI. A Prius can't compare. In the city I probably drop down to around 45-50.
Also keep in mind that a lot of drivers who drive more than 20 minutes at a time are probably driving at least part that time on a highway.
in most cases it must be easier for the inventor to learn the language than for the lawyer to understand the science and technology behind the invention.
If you survey the top IP firms you'll find that their attorneys typically have, at minimum, a BSc in the field that they practice in. More often they have an MSc or a Phd. Moreover in such firms it is usual that the work of all attorneys be reviewed by partners and senior attorneys who have practiced much longer than their three year JD/LLB would indicate. Be careful with how far you take your analogies... unless you expect that you can so easily master the language and knowledge that comes with such experience.
Both you and your GP poster are wrong. The attorney you hire to write your patent does not provide a layer of abstraction that makes it likely that your attorney is going to go searching for prior art. You are right about triple damages, if the inventor knew about infringing prior art. However, the penalties for the attorney if they file a patent that infringes on known prior art are even more severe. A patent attorney is obligated by law to disclose any prior art. If they do not, they can be disbarred (the patent bar)!
Knowing about all prior art is the patent office's job! This is why you have to pay such high fees to the patent office. If you are an inventor it is assumed that you will be familiar with the state of the art and thus you can make a judgment about the likelihood of its novelty. But nothing more is necessary. The patent office is the ultimate authority on whether your patent is truly novel. If your patent is invalidated by an obscure reference in BYTE, it probably wasn't very interesting to begin with.
The only way you can have your cake and eat it too is to hire two separate attorneys: one to do the search and one to do the patent.
BTW, doing a patent search will often cost as much as writing the patent in the first place.
In general patent attorneys do not search for prior art. That's not their job. It's the patent office's job to know what's prior art. After all, they have years worth of patent applications sitting right in front of them -- many of them covering inventions that are still in the lab and aren't public knowledge.
A patent attorney writes a patent that covers your invention and potentially foreseeable implementations of your invention. A good patent attorney produces a document that is defensible in court. In otherwords, a document that threatens your competition's implementation of your idea and incites them to license your patent.
Government waste is one reason why many Asian countries, even without the benefit of low-cost workers (i.e., Taiwan) can eat the lunch of any European nation when it comes to competitive production. Government waste is one reason why American's are finding less in their lunch boxes too.
Just because someone is worse doesn't mean we have to be satisfied with the status quo.
You might enjoy your military superiority, but try having the misfortune of being poor (or even middle-class) and sick. You might wish that the government would trade in a few tanks for a few doctors. American's spend 430 billion each year -- not including research, maintenance, production, or active 'wars'.
One only needs to look at the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) to find almost universal distaste for the quality of their decision making.
Off topic I know, but if more Canadians looked south of the border they'd see that despite the supposed incompetence of the CRTC, Canadian telecoms provide much better value than their american counterparts. I pay $52 USD for equivalent broadband service that I had in Canada for a mere $34 CAN. Now who's to thank for this? The profit maximizing telecoms or the committee that is tasked with striking a balance (as you put it)?
Yes you are missing something. Namely that NTP doesn't have patents, they have patent applications. Applications that were found to be undeserving of issuance by the PTO; but only for the time being, ultimately anything is patentable if you're determined and willing to pay enough continuance/appeal fees to the PTO.
Unfortunately for RIM, fortunately for NTP, patent owners can litigate and license their patents before issuance. This little loophole was introduced because applications take so long to be examined by the PTO.
The outcry is because Bethesda long-ago announced that mount armour would be forthcoming in a mod. Naturally, they forgot to mention that this extra bit of content would cost an extra $2.50.
It just send the wrong message to gamers, namely: we're going to be as deceptive as possible in order to maximize our revenue. That includes charging you for content that might be in the box, and then charging you again if you really want the content that actually wasn't in the box in the firstplace.
It sets a terrible precedent for gamers who have to wonder what content is going to be provided, and what content is going to come later and how much that content is going to cost.
Pretty soon the game companies will just charge us $60 for a pile of content parts that the gamer has to put together themselves, or alternatively pay someone else $40 to put it together. Its all just a backhanded way of jacking up prices.
Why buy a UMD Movie, that is the same price as the DVD
If only it things were that good!! Almost always you can by the DVD equivalent for less. More quality, more versetile, less money. No brainer. UMD was doomed to fail from the get-go.
Compare two samples, a new release and an old release:
At the risk of sounding like a luddite, although we may be able to affect change through violence the people's ability to do so is stunted considerably by improvements in technology. Technology that is increasingly only in the hands of the state. At least now, and in the past, the machine by which a state oppresses it's people largely consists of other [common] people. For example, soldiers, police, etc. Therefore you can reasonably expect that at some point those people will disagree with the oppression that they're being asked to impose and turn their tools against their masters.
In the future though, as automation and robotics become more prevalent and advanced you'll see the tools of oppression concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer. These are the people who hold the strings. These are the people controlling the automated aircraft carriers, UAVs, spy satellites, crowd control devices and armed robotic vehicles (all current or near-future technology). None of these things are in the hands of the people who can affect violent change.
For would-be aggressors against the oppressive state, the cost of revolt is considerably higher than it would otherwise be. To keep the state in check we have enshrined the right to bear arms. Tomorrow we will need something considerably more potent than [fire]arms to threaten the state.
Correction, in most states its illegal to do so without notifying a party. Exceptions are California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.
In other words, if you are a party to the conversation, feel free to record. You can't record your two neighbors having a private conversation but you can record the conversation you have with your neighbor(s).
Dvorak writes: Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers.
His article would have made much more sense if he posited that apple do away, not only with expensive OS development, but expensive computer development altogether. After all, why bother building high-margin computers (windows or otherwise) when you can build ultra-high-margin media players instead?
Not only that, but in the process you can now leverage your products to get into really lucrative markets: content delivery and content production!
If you check out the financials of the Gates Foundation you can see that they pay out three times less in contributions than what they earn from investments, nevermind the principle!
This is all just a form of tax evasion, with benefits. Not only do you get the tax advantages of being able to write off a portion of the charity, but if you happen to be so rich to afford your own "charitable foundation", there are other benefits as well!
For example, you can afford to pay your friends and family handsomely for their management of the foundation. In Bill's case, his Dad and a former Microsoft executive. Although I'm sure they just happen to be exactly the right kind of people to lead such an esteemed organization.
Also, you get the glamour and praise of fellow socialites and the plebs at large. This is especially helpful if you are battling an unfortunate image as a cold-hearted corporate capitalist. Now, people like the parent will kindly note your philanthropy at every turn. This is true even if your foundation does very little charitable work.
Not only do you get the tax advantages of being able to write off a portion of the charity, but if you happen to be so rich to afford your own "charitable foundation", there are other benefits as well!
For example, you can afford to pay your friends and family handsomely for their management of the foundation. (In politics this would be called a patronage appointment) In Bill's case, his Dad and a former Microsoft executive. Although I'm sure they just happen to be exactly the right kind of people to lead such an esteemed organization.
Also, you get the glamour and praise of fellow socialites and the plebs at large. This is especially helpful if you are battling an unfortunate image as a cold-hearted corporate capitalist. Now, folks like the grand-parent poster will kindly note your philanthropy at every turn. This is true even if your foundation does very little charitable work.
For example, if you check out the financials of the foundation you can see that they pay out three times less in contributions than what they make from investments!
The problem with your 'logic' (in all your responses in this thread) is that you are answering the wrong question. Of course we know who the president is! Its the guy who is currently president, that's an undisputable fact.
The question is which candidate received more votes! Without a paper trail there's no way to know for sure. (Refer to responses in this thread)
As far as the courts are concerned, all that proves is that the courts/judges did not believe there was reasonable ground to investigate/contend the vote. And even that is only true if you assume that the court had complete, correct information and that judgement was completely impartial and unbiased.
A simple vote tally should not require so many assumptions!
Okay, so its open source. Now how do you verify that the machine in the voting booth is running the software that you just finished inspecting for errors?... That is why you still need the paper ballot/receipt!
In either case, are you going to test the machine to make sure it works in certain scenarios? So, maybe you'd catch the grandparent's simplistic code manipulations, but what about more sophisticated corruptions? Does that mean everyone is going to have to be an expert in voting machine testing? Or are you going to _trust_ someone to do your testing? Maybe you'll trust the incumbent, but voting isn't supposed to require trust.
Complexity may be inevitable, but for a moment lets put on our economist hat and look at what motivates companies to tolerate complexity. While some complexity in inherent, I believe that a lot of this complexity is often accidental, sometimes born out of naivete and occasionally deliberate. However, at the end of the day companies are not in a big hurry because the added cost of complexity often doesn't cost them anything, it is merely added to the cost of doing business and paid for by the consumer.
Furthermore, in some cases complexity can be quite convenient. For example, in my city the gas company outsources its billing so that one company provides gas and the other bills for it. Sounds great, but when ever there is a discrepancy between the bill and the amount of gas you've used, good luck trying to get something resolved. In my case the gas had long been cut off but the billing continued. After fighting through automated telephone systems to speak to real live people they quite happily point the finger at the other guy and leave it at that. In effect the complexity that they have engineered into their business model provides them with a very handy excuse for inaction.
Perhaps you expect capitalism and free markets to address this problem? I think that the much of our technical infrastructure is so monstrous and well entrenched that, just like your local utilities, there no room for upstart firms to enter the market. For the consumer (end consumer or other business entities) there are very few legitimate choices. More often than not I think that complexity is often just another excuse to maintain the status quo and an excuse that is held up to 'educate' consumers not to expect any better.
These kinds of scary FUD stories come up again and again, but the problem is not world production, it is a distribution problem. So while US farmers are payed to produce too much food and while thousands of tonnes of food go to rot in Canada, African's are left to starve.
The real obstacle to the world's food issues have far more to do with economics, politics and popular will rather than the production capacity of the planet. Perhaps this won't be a big deal anyway, the UN forcasts that the earth's population will begin to decline in our lifetimes
Wrong again. The issue here is not piracy and its not the evil RIAA. The issue here is plain as day: the inaccessible backwater that is our justice system.
Democracy and Justice walk hand and hand, if you don't equip citizens with the tools for them to resolve disputes in a fair, organized, open and systematic way then things start to go awry. Its no wonder we're suffering from this kind of corporate tyranny. I doubt many of these people really believe they deserve to pay 3,000-11,000 for downloading a song. Instead I suspect, they are really terrified at the thought of paying tens of thousands of dollars for lawyers to engage in a legal game of chance.
This begs the question why our legal system has (d)evolved to require such massive amounts of money and why even seasoned lawyers are loath to litigate because of its inherent unpredictability. But those are old questions. Perhaps, in this case we should ask why a private entity is allowed to pursue thousands en mass in what amounts to public policy without some form of legal aid to protect people or at least to resolve the legitimacy of this tactic.
There are a few guides out there explaining what to do. Most of them involve shutting off windows services (such as file sharing and the windows network client) and using the firewall included with Windows XP before connecting to the internet.
Alternatively you could use mouse gesturing that Opera supports. Right click on the link, pull straight down on the mouse, unclick and voila!
It might take a few tries but it becomes very intuitive. Even though I can go back and forward at with one mouse click I still occasionally find myself using the gestures instead. I think it may have something to do with the physical affordance that the gesture implies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to dispute your numbers. If you say you got that, then good for you.
That being said, you'd never get so low as 32 mpg on the highway in a Golf TDI. I have seen a lot of dismay over the CR numbers by VW owners you need to take those numbers with a big grain of salt. However, I think those numbers look just about right for the gasoline Golf... as long as you're not driving like a jackass.
Oh please. Impersonate you to do what? Identity theft is basically credit card or credit rating.
Don't foist your paranoia on everyone just because you want to enjoy the supposed convenience of electronic fund transfers and pre-approved credit. Instead try the following:
1) Demand better from your financial institutions -- not your government.
2) Don't use your SSN/SIN, raise hell when someone claims that it is necessary
3) Use cash (don't have a CC/debt) (its also)
4) Put a hold on your credit rating
Myth. Prius fuel consumption in the real world is better than any diesel car currently available new. Check Consumer Reports' tests.
Bullshit! Prius is a great city car, but is just as bad as any other gas car on the highway. The mileage of a prius is 35-48 MPG. I get 60 MPG on the highway in my Golf TDI. A Prius can't compare. In the city I probably drop down to around 45-50.
Also keep in mind that a lot of drivers who drive more than 20 minutes at a time are probably driving at least part that time on a highway.
in most cases it must be easier for the inventor to learn the language than for the lawyer to understand the science and technology behind the invention.
If you survey the top IP firms you'll find that their attorneys typically have, at minimum, a BSc in the field that they practice in. More often they have an MSc or a Phd. Moreover in such firms it is usual that the work of all attorneys be reviewed by partners and senior attorneys who have practiced much longer than their three year JD/LLB would indicate. Be careful with how far you take your analogies... unless you expect that you can so easily master the language and knowledge that comes with such experience.
Both you and your GP poster are wrong. The attorney you hire to write your patent does not provide a layer of abstraction that makes it likely that your attorney is going to go searching for prior art. You are right about triple damages, if the inventor knew about infringing prior art. However, the penalties for the attorney if they file a patent that infringes on known prior art are even more severe. A patent attorney is obligated by law to disclose any prior art. If they do not, they can be disbarred (the patent bar)!
Knowing about all prior art is the patent office's job! This is why you have to pay such high fees to the patent office. If you are an inventor it is assumed that you will be familiar with the state of the art and thus you can make a judgment about the likelihood of its novelty. But nothing more is necessary. The patent office is the ultimate authority on whether your patent is truly novel. If your patent is invalidated by an obscure reference in BYTE, it probably wasn't very interesting to begin with.
The only way you can have your cake and eat it too is to hire two separate attorneys: one to do the search and one to do the patent.
BTW, doing a patent search will often cost as much as writing the patent in the first place.
In general patent attorneys do not search for prior art. That's not their job. It's the patent office's job to know what's prior art. After all, they have years worth of patent applications sitting right in front of them -- many of them covering inventions that are still in the lab and aren't public knowledge.
A patent attorney writes a patent that covers your invention and potentially foreseeable implementations of your invention. A good patent attorney produces a document that is defensible in court. In otherwords, a document that threatens your competition's implementation of your idea and incites them to license your patent.
Government waste is one reason why many Asian countries, even without the benefit of low-cost workers (i.e., Taiwan) can eat the lunch of any European nation when it comes to competitive production. Government waste is one reason why American's are finding less in their lunch boxes too.
Just because someone is worse doesn't mean we have to be satisfied with the status quo.
You might enjoy your military superiority, but try having the misfortune of being poor (or even middle-class) and sick. You might wish that the government would trade in a few tanks for a few doctors. American's spend 430 billion each year -- not including research, maintenance, production, or active 'wars'.
One only needs to look at the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) to find almost universal distaste for the quality of their decision making.
Off topic I know, but if more Canadians looked south of the border they'd see that despite the supposed incompetence of the CRTC, Canadian telecoms provide much better value than their american counterparts. I pay $52 USD for equivalent broadband service that I had in Canada for a mere $34 CAN. Now who's to thank for this? The profit maximizing telecoms or the committee that is tasked with striking a balance (as you put it)?
Yes you are missing something. Namely that NTP doesn't have patents, they have patent applications. Applications that were found to be undeserving of issuance by the PTO; but only for the time being, ultimately anything is patentable if you're determined and willing to pay enough continuance/appeal fees to the PTO.
Unfortunately for RIM, fortunately for NTP, patent owners can litigate and license their patents before issuance. This little loophole was introduced because applications take so long to be examined by the PTO.
The outcry is because Bethesda long-ago announced that mount armour would be forthcoming in a mod. Naturally, they forgot to mention that this extra bit of content would cost an extra $2.50.
It just send the wrong message to gamers, namely: we're going to be as deceptive as possible in order to maximize our revenue. That includes charging you for content that might be in the box, and then charging you again if you really want the content that actually wasn't in the box in the firstplace.
It sets a terrible precedent for gamers who have to wonder what content is going to be provided, and what content is going to come later and how much that content is going to cost.
Pretty soon the game companies will just charge us $60 for a pile of content parts that the gamer has to put together themselves, or alternatively pay someone else $40 to put it together. Its all just a backhanded way of jacking up prices.
Why buy a UMD Movie, that is the same price as the DVD
If only it things were that good!! Almost always you can by the DVD equivalent for less. More quality, more versetile, less money. No brainer. UMD was doomed to fail from the get-go.
Compare two samples, a new release and an old release:
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: $15.76 vs $21.99
The Matrix: $9.76 vs. 17.99
You mean like x.com
At the risk of sounding like a luddite, although we may be able to affect change through violence the people's ability to do so is stunted considerably by improvements in technology. Technology that is increasingly only in the hands of the state. At least now, and in the past, the machine by which a state oppresses it's people largely consists of other [common] people. For example, soldiers, police, etc. Therefore you can reasonably expect that at some point those people will disagree with the oppression that they're being asked to impose and turn their tools against their masters.
In the future though, as automation and robotics become more prevalent and advanced you'll see the tools of oppression concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer. These are the people who hold the strings. These are the people controlling the automated aircraft carriers, UAVs, spy satellites, crowd control devices and armed robotic vehicles (all current or near-future technology). None of these things are in the hands of the people who can affect violent change.
For would-be aggressors against the oppressive state, the cost of revolt is considerably higher than it would otherwise be. To keep the state in check we have enshrined the right to bear arms. Tomorrow we will need something considerably more potent than [fire]arms to threaten the state.
In other words, if you are a party to the conversation, feel free to record. You can't record your two neighbors having a private conversation but you can record the conversation you have with your neighbor(s).
His article would have made much more sense if he posited that apple do away, not only with expensive OS development, but expensive computer development altogether. After all, why bother building high-margin computers (windows or otherwise) when you can build ultra-high-margin media players instead?
Not only that, but in the process you can now leverage your products to get into really lucrative markets: content delivery and content production!
If you check out the financials of the Gates Foundation you can see that they pay out three times less in contributions than what they earn from investments, nevermind the principle!
This is all just a form of tax evasion, with benefits. Not only do you get the tax advantages of being able to write off a portion of the charity, but if you happen to be so rich to afford your own "charitable foundation", there are other benefits as well!
For example, you can afford to pay your friends and family handsomely for their management of the foundation. In Bill's case, his Dad and a former Microsoft executive. Although I'm sure they just happen to be exactly the right kind of people to lead such an esteemed organization.
Also, you get the glamour and praise of fellow socialites and the plebs at large. This is especially helpful if you are battling an unfortunate image as a cold-hearted corporate capitalist. Now, people like the parent will kindly note your philanthropy at every turn. This is true even if your foundation does very little charitable work.
... where its a-okay to outsource to China and India, but to a low-tax state? Hell no.
Not only do you get the tax advantages of being able to write off a portion of the charity, but if you happen to be so rich to afford your own "charitable foundation", there are other benefits as well!
For example, you can afford to pay your friends and family handsomely for their management of the foundation. (In politics this would be called a patronage appointment) In Bill's case, his Dad and a former Microsoft executive. Although I'm sure they just happen to be exactly the right kind of people to lead such an esteemed organization.
Also, you get the glamour and praise of fellow socialites and the plebs at large. This is especially helpful if you are battling an unfortunate image as a cold-hearted corporate capitalist. Now, folks like the grand-parent poster will kindly note your philanthropy at every turn. This is true even if your foundation does very little charitable work.
For example, if you check out the financials of the foundation you can see that they pay out three times less in contributions than what they make from investments!
The question is which candidate received more votes! Without a paper trail there's no way to know for sure. (Refer to responses in this thread)
As far as the courts are concerned, all that proves is that the courts/judges did not believe there was reasonable ground to investigate/contend the vote. And even that is only true if you assume that the court had complete, correct information and that judgement was completely impartial and unbiased.
A simple vote tally should not require so many assumptions!
In either case, are you going to test the machine to make sure it works in certain scenarios? So, maybe you'd catch the grandparent's simplistic code manipulations, but what about more sophisticated corruptions? Does that mean everyone is going to have to be an expert in voting machine testing? Or are you going to _trust_ someone to do your testing? Maybe you'll trust the incumbent, but voting isn't supposed to require trust.
Complexity may be inevitable, but for a moment lets put on our economist hat and look at what motivates companies to tolerate complexity. While some complexity in inherent, I believe that a lot of this complexity is often accidental, sometimes born out of naivete and occasionally deliberate. However, at the end of the day companies are not in a big hurry because the added cost of complexity often doesn't cost them anything, it is merely added to the cost of doing business and paid for by the consumer.
Furthermore, in some cases complexity can be quite convenient. For example, in my city the gas company outsources its billing so that one company provides gas and the other bills for it. Sounds great, but when ever there is a discrepancy between the bill and the amount of gas you've used, good luck trying to get something resolved. In my case the gas had long been cut off but the billing continued. After fighting through automated telephone systems to speak to real live people they quite happily point the finger at the other guy and leave it at that. In effect the complexity that they have engineered into their business model provides them with a very handy excuse for inaction.
Perhaps you expect capitalism and free markets to address this problem? I think that the much of our technical infrastructure is so monstrous and well entrenched that, just like your local utilities, there no room for upstart firms to enter the market. For the consumer (end consumer or other business entities) there are very few legitimate choices. More often than not I think that complexity is often just another excuse to maintain the status quo and an excuse that is held up to 'educate' consumers not to expect any better.
These kinds of scary FUD stories come up again and again, but the problem is not world production, it is a distribution problem. So while US farmers are payed to produce too much food and while thousands of tonnes of food go to rot in Canada, African's are left to starve.
The real obstacle to the world's food issues have far more to do with economics, politics and popular will rather than the production capacity of the planet. Perhaps this won't be a big deal anyway, the UN forcasts that the earth's population will begin to decline in our lifetimes
Democracy and Justice walk hand and hand, if you don't equip citizens with the tools for them to resolve disputes in a fair, organized, open and systematic way then things start to go awry. Its no wonder we're suffering from this kind of corporate tyranny. I doubt many of these people really believe they deserve to pay 3,000-11,000 for downloading a song. Instead I suspect, they are really terrified at the thought of paying tens of thousands of dollars for lawyers to engage in a legal game of chance.
This begs the question why our legal system has (d)evolved to require such massive amounts of money and why even seasoned lawyers are loath to litigate because of its inherent unpredictability. But those are old questions. Perhaps, in this case we should ask why a private entity is allowed to pursue thousands en mass in what amounts to public policy without some form of legal aid to protect people or at least to resolve the legitimacy of this tactic.
Here is a fairly comprehensive guide, aptly named: Windows XP: Surviving the First Day
Alternatively you could use mouse gesturing that Opera supports. Right click on the link, pull straight down on the mouse, unclick and voila!
It might take a few tries but it becomes very intuitive. Even though I can go back and forward at with one mouse click I still occasionally find myself using the gestures instead. I think it may have something to do with the physical affordance that the gesture implies.