The incident you refer to is from 1998 (a year before Armstrong returned), which was a horrible year and was the incident that sparked the crackdown on doping in cycling. The fact of the matter is, Armstrong is the most tested athlete in the history of sports and unlike baseball players, he gets NO advanced warning that there's going to be a test. If Lance were doping, he'd have been caught by now.
While I know enough about Lance (or any pro athlete) to know if he's doping, I do know cycling is known for getting the fancy drugs first, before they can develop tests. If the dope can't be detected it doesn't matter how many tests you take, you're going to come back clean.
As to your previous comment,
You do understand that chemo is effective and has all the nasty side-effects, because it's POISONOUS, right? I'm sorry but chemo/recovery drugs are not going to do anything helpful for the biochemistry of a bike racer.
Although that is true, ironically if Lance didn't get cancer he wouldn't be nearly as successful a rider (he was good but not of the level to compete for a tour win if I recall). Before he got cancer he had a fairly well built upper body (probably not anything exceptional but more than is common for a pro rider), upper body mass is not much of a benefit in cycling, especially on the hills. When he got cancer he lost a ton of body mass, both upper and lower, when he recovered he was able to rebuild the lower body but leave the upper body thin, this gave him the edge he needed to start dominating the tour (which is heavily biased to hill climbers) that and the immense amount of work to build the leg muscles back again of course.
It is always embarrassing when you have to compete against your own products.
Microsoft are sort-of obliged to keep rolling out security fixes for 2K, but is a popup blocker a fix or a feature? They surely would love to have a lever to get us all moved onto XP.
Here we see one of the major disadvantages of monopolies, when your biggest competition is from your previous released it becomes very tempting to hold back on things like popup blocking and all these fixes for IE from current releases to save them for a future release. If it wasn't for mozilla suddenly becoming a threat I'm sure we wouldn't of seen these fixes to IE until Longhorn, no matter how bad it got, in fact the worse it got the better because that's simply a motivation to buy the new product. Now they have to try it earlier than they want and put it in XP because of competition from Mozilla but I'm sure we're not going to see these fixes backported to previous versions of windows, it would take away to incentive to upgrade.
Right now one of the major faults with internet searching is that search engines must make their decisions on what pages to show up based soley on what we type at that moment, completely ignoring the results we've previously chosen. Of course we don't want them to change this behavior since that would have the potential for a major privacy invasion. The solution, have the browser (ie firefox) keep this info locally, then, in a way to make sure the person does not confuse these with the original search engine results, have the browser resort the results based on your past actions. For example if I'm searching for internet browsers that IE link would drop right off the front page along with that iCab link that is in a different language since I don't use either IE nor another language. When I search for midi examples it will promote pages with source code showing me how to write various midi related code over pages with midi tunes. Just think of all the useless results you have to parse through every time you make a certain type of search that aren't always easy to get rid of using '-'.
Many times when I formerly may of picked up a book I will find myself reading through the comments on/.. Other times I'll look for something of interest on Wikipedia, and once there I may read up on half a dozen associated articles. I still do read physical books of course and wish more people would, I can't think of any medium other than a book that has the same stimulating effect. Music, while relaxing, doesn't really contain a real story, nor does it lend itself especially well to being the center of attention. Television while very enjoyable and relaxing often lacks the same depth that is inherent in books. Moreso it's far too dictorial in pace and mood, the active participation of books (you visualize the characters and setting, you decide the pace) leads to a far stronger effect.
A nice idea, but not without flaws. For example, what if you make a really great new type of microchip which allows for ten times the current density of circuits. Are you going to have to purchase every electronic product and put it under a microscope to determine whether or not it's infringing so that you don't lose your rights?
I don't think that's how trademarks work, if you invent some superduper comic book character do you now have to read every single comic, every single magazine, and every single webcomic to be sure they aren't infringing so you don't lose your rights? Not in my understanding, you only lose it if you know someone is blatantly infringing but you say, "meh, they're not my competitor so I don't really mind them" and you start selectively enforcing your trademark, than you lose it. If we modify patent law to incorporate this idea than it doesn't hurt your microchip since you didn't know about those infringers so you can't be expected to sure someone you didn't know was infringing on you. The effect it would have is all these submarine patents, along with all these defensive patents that corporations are now forced to get, are suddenly obselete and our industry can sleep a whole lot better at night.
Well I'm sure Mr L. Prosser will be very pleased to hear this, fortunatly his inhertiance of a stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats should mean he'll fit right in.
I strongly believe that both Mac and Linux systems are far more secure by a variety of metrics but the writers of that quote have no idea what they are talking about. Local access doesn't just mean someone walking up to your computer and fiddling around, indeed if you log out or lock the desktop when you leave the computer you should be safe from local exploits. Local exploits are someone having access to a local account. It doesn't matter it ther're sitting looking at the computer or logged in from Mars (well they might time out in that case) getting their access through a remote exploit, if they have access to a local account a local exploit which allows "escalation of privileges" can give them root. Remote access exploit + Local privilage escalation exploit = Remote privilage escalation explot
That's why you rewire the "SLEEP" button to turn on the power (I mean who uses sleep anyways) and rewire the "POWER" button to a small explosive. Unlikely to help with your data recovery but at least you won't be the only person concerned with recovery:)
p.s. You might want to inform your friends that they should never turn your computer on or off... well your good friends at least.
..that the hackers will start targetting Mozilla/FireFox now as it might become the dominant browser out there.
They will always target the browser having the most user base as the probablity of exploit becoming successfull increases.
Except in this case Mozilla/FireFox is inarguably more secure with the default install, key quotes from the article (from a mozilla guy I believe but they're still accurate).
Mozilla's Hofmann agreed that ActiveX is only part of the story, pointing also to IE's tight integration into the Window's operating system, and differences in IE and Mozilla's default security settings and architecture as other reasons why Mozilla browsers are more secure.
"Tight integration of the browser with the operating system provides some convenience and power for Windows developers and users, but has also been a continuing source that allows malicious hackers to leverage that same convenience and power for their exploits," said Hofmann.
If 90% of people used moz instead of IE a heck of a lot less people would be getting hacked.
The EU agreed and told Microsoft in March that it had 120 days to reveal details of its Windows software codes so rivals could design compatible products more easily.
It appears they havent seen this[msdn]
As for unbundling windows media player, how do ppl without internet get a media player? Aside from media player classic, windows media player is the best one out there
As to msdn it's the secret API calls and propietary formats that aren't listed on MSDN that rivals need to make compatible formats. And as to the getting a media player you seem to have misunderstood the intent of the ruling, first you don't need to buy the unbundled version, it's called choice, and secondly I've always understood a big target of this would be the OEMs who could now install their own players.
Robyn Eckard, a spokeswoman for the Irvine, Calif.-based Kelley Blue Book, said the company learned about the problem late Wednesday after Web site visitors said their antivirus software tipped them off to the code. Eckard said Kelly Blue Book removed the malicious code from its site by late Thursday afternoon.
There wasn't any mention of their site being down so that means a period of what could be almost a full day where they knew their website was infecting customers with this virus but continued to let it run. Are they really allowed to do that? Perhaps they figgured the bad PR or loss of buisness from their site being down would be greater than the bad PR and loss of buisness by their customers being infected by this thing then possibly robbed when their bank info was lifted. Perhaps the article was just mistaken, google returns multiple sites and at netcraft I can't make heads or tails of the first one but the second site appears to have remained up could they be charged for this it seems kinda like one of those people with AIDS who doesn't tell partners thier infected and goes around having unprotected sex.
You probably already realize this but make sure this guy understands computers. Ask him general questions to make sure he understands the general technology behind the projects (make sure he has a little geek in him). But most importantly make sure to ask him questions that you claim are easy and he should know but are anything but, see how he handles these situations. If he's starts trying to BS that's definate bad news, you want a boss who will admit when he's outside of his experience and is willing to listen to the advice of his subordinates.
If you don't let people vent their anger on websites that no one will read, then they might go out and use violence to vent that anger.
Very insightful,
also dead wrong. They don't just go, vent their anger on these websites throw a hissy fit and become happy smiling people. They go vent their anger and meet lots of other angry people who tell them they're right but most people don't realize and they become even angrier!!
Should we stop this?
Of course not, aside from the fact that they should be allowed to say what they think there's always the possibility that some angry people just might be right. Looking at the posts so far there's a lot of angry people here right now...
The only time that software can be a natural monopoly is when closed standards are used preventing interoperability (ie Microsoft). When open standards are used (as among *nix) it is anything but a natural monopoly (observe multiple flavours of unix, linux, BSD)
As another reader pointed out, the odds of it being hit by a second meteorite, is exactly the same is it being hit by the first... which is slim, but another meteor isn't going to avoid the house next time because a meteor crashed there beforehand.
As another reader pointed out, the odds of you getting the first joke, is exactly the same as you being hit by a meteor... which is slim, but this joke isn't going to avoid you next time because you ruined the first joke before hand.
(seriously I would hope that the/. crowd doesn't need the Gambler's fallacy explained to it:)
Well the long drawn out thing was to cover a lot of issues, as I mentioned some could probably be taken out or you could only mention part (the two paragraphs could probably be used completely seperatly with a touch of editing which would cut it down considerably). The reason for using a simply analogy is that it really is a simple problem at the root with a simple solution, however people are used to people trying to decieve them with technobable and often disregard it as a result. As well people are smart enough to realize there are factors in technology they don't know about and don't trust their judgement, these factors aren't present in my analogy so they'll trust their instincts.
This just seems to be part of a larger problem of people unfamiliar with computers just not getting the issue so I've constructed what I think is a pretty good metaphor of the problem.
There's this company, called Diebold, and their employees are fast counters, really fast, so fast they can count all the votes in an election almost instantaneously. The problem is they need a warehouse to do the counting in.
So at all the voting stations they build themselves a warehouse. An election official come in a few months before the election and look around, lots of boxes are around, a whole bunch of different gadgets, the officials can't look over everything but it seems alright. The official remindes Diebold it's against the law to touch anything or let anyone inside before election time for security reasons. A couple days later the Diebold employee in charge goes back inside, he moves some things around and is seen driving up in moving trucks and taking boxes in and out but the election official doesn't see. One day when the Diebold employee isn't at the warehouse a guy is walking down the street and notices a door wide open, he wanders in and finds himself in the warehouse. He decides to take some pictures, windows are left open, most of the doors are unlocked or just have a piece of rope to tie them shut and their security alarm is a mute poodle. This guy shows the pictures around, security companies everywhere are just appaled, they can't believe how bad security is and are screaming it's way too unsecure to hold votes in but the government and Diebold ignore them.
So election time comes around and you have to vote. You go to the lobby at the front of the warehouse and go into your booth. There you mark your ballot as usual (except they have really nice ballots and pencils). Then instead of putting it in a box you go and give it to a person standing behnid the counter, it's supposed to be an elections official but it could also be a guy who snuck in off the street. Your ballot is out of sight for a minute as he carries it over and hands it to the Diebold employee, the Diebold employee then tells you he'll put the ballot in a box and he'll count it at the end with the others. He then goes into the warehouse and that's the last you, or anybody else but the Diebold employee, see of your ballot. After the election the Diebold employee comes out and tells everyone what he counted and who won the election, it not who most people expected and a couple people ask for a recount but the Diebold employee says that he threw out the ballots as he counted them so you just have to take his word for it. A couple of people ask why they didn't just put a photocopier and a traditional ballot box in the lobby where everyone could see it and no one could tamper with it. After marking your first ballot you would be be able to make exactly one copy of it, you could then put the second ballot in that ballot box and at the end if they wanted a recount they could just count the ballots in the traditional box. The Diebold employee (who lost a bunch of the ballots before counting them) says that his counting is good enough and that the old ballot box couldn't be trusted. Oh yeah, that Diebold employee was also campaigning for the guy who won.
Please feel free to redistribute this or give me any suggestions you might have on how to make it better. I've tried to be as factual as possible (not sure about leaving the upset in there).
The problem is that people don't realize it's an ad. They hear the song on the radio and assume it's being played because it's popular/a good song, not because the label just paid them a bunch of money. If they wanted a real ad they should just make it 15 or 30 seconds long and play clips to give a feel or reminder of the song as another poster suggested instead of decieving you into thinking that it's being played because the dj likes it.
Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list, let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you tried to sell it.
You know what, that is obvious. If there isn't something that constitutes prior art already out there it's simply because the number of approaches a finite number of programs can implement is well finite, obvious things are going to be left unimplemented!
As to patents, vacuum cleaners as far as I know were a legitimate invention and deserved patents. You know what, if back at the very dawn of the computer industry someone had patented the idea of a compiler translating a high level language to machine code or making an OS to simplify the computing environment I may not object, as far as I know those were fundamental advances at the time. The best fundamental advancements I can think of recently are compile once/run anywhere languages (eg java) and tabbed browsing. But compile once languages are simlpy a natural extension of portable code and documents that can be opened by systems on different platforms, tabbed browsing is just moving tabs into a different part of userspace. Both were innovative but moreso made practical by the maturation of technology and their respective projects, heck I'm sure both ideas had been "invented" thousands of times before by a bunch of CS students blabbing to eachother after a few beers. Neither in my opinion are worthy of patents as it was just a race to implementation and this MS patent which is far more obvious, just more specific, is certainly not deserving of a patent.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like somebody was jelous of a certain other browsers bug now weren't they?
The incident you refer to is from 1998 (a year before Armstrong returned), which was a horrible year and was the incident that sparked the crackdown on doping in cycling. The fact of the matter is, Armstrong is the most tested athlete in the history of sports and unlike baseball players, he gets NO advanced warning that there's going to be a test. If Lance were doping, he'd have been caught by now.
While I know enough about Lance (or any pro athlete) to know if he's doping, I do know cycling is known for getting the fancy drugs first, before they can develop tests. If the dope can't be detected it doesn't matter how many tests you take, you're going to come back clean.
As to your previous comment,
You do understand that chemo is effective and has all the nasty side-effects, because it's POISONOUS, right? I'm sorry but chemo/recovery drugs are not going to do anything helpful for the biochemistry of a bike racer.
Although that is true, ironically if Lance didn't get cancer he wouldn't be nearly as successful a rider (he was good but not of the level to compete for a tour win if I recall). Before he got cancer he had a fairly well built upper body (probably not anything exceptional but more than is common for a pro rider), upper body mass is not much of a benefit in cycling, especially on the hills. When he got cancer he lost a ton of body mass, both upper and lower, when he recovered he was able to rebuild the lower body but leave the upper body thin, this gave him the edge he needed to start dominating the tour (which is heavily biased to hill climbers) that and the immense amount of work to build the leg muscles back again of course.
It is always embarrassing when you have to compete against your own products.
Microsoft are sort-of obliged to keep rolling out security fixes for 2K, but is a popup blocker a fix or a feature? They surely would love to have a lever to get us all moved onto XP.
Here we see one of the major disadvantages of monopolies, when your biggest competition is from your previous released it becomes very tempting to hold back on things like popup blocking and all these fixes for IE from current releases to save them for a future release. If it wasn't for mozilla suddenly becoming a threat I'm sure we wouldn't of seen these fixes to IE until Longhorn, no matter how bad it got, in fact the worse it got the better because that's simply a motivation to buy the new product. Now they have to try it earlier than they want and put it in XP because of competition from Mozilla but I'm sure we're not going to see these fixes backported to previous versions of windows, it would take away to incentive to upgrade.
Right now one of the major faults with internet searching is that search engines must make their decisions on what pages to show up based soley on what we type at that moment, completely ignoring the results we've previously chosen. Of course we don't want them to change this behavior since that would have the potential for a major privacy invasion. The solution, have the browser (ie firefox) keep this info locally, then, in a way to make sure the person does not confuse these with the original search engine results, have the browser resort the results based on your past actions. For example if I'm searching for internet browsers that IE link would drop right off the front page along with that iCab link that is in a different language since I don't use either IE nor another language. When I search for midi examples it will promote pages with source code showing me how to write various midi related code over pages with midi tunes. Just think of all the useless results you have to parse through every time you make a certain type of search that aren't always easy to get rid of using '-'.
Many times when I formerly may of picked up a book I will find myself reading through the comments on /.. Other times I'll look for something of interest on Wikipedia, and once there I may read up on half a dozen associated articles. I still do read physical books of course and wish more people would, I can't think of any medium other than a book that has the same stimulating effect. Music, while relaxing, doesn't really contain a real story, nor does it lend itself especially well to being the center of attention. Television while very enjoyable and relaxing often lacks the same depth that is inherent in books. Moreso it's far too dictorial in pace and mood, the active participation of books (you visualize the characters and setting, you decide the pace) leads to a far stronger effect.
Yipee
...
8. Linux 704692 (0%)
12. Win ME 44323 (0%)
(we'll just ignore that 0% thing)
A nice idea, but not without flaws. For example, what if you make a really great new type of microchip which allows for ten times the current density of circuits. Are you going to have to purchase every electronic product and put it under a microscope to determine whether or not it's infringing so that you don't lose your rights?
I don't think that's how trademarks work, if you invent some superduper comic book character do you now have to read every single comic, every single magazine, and every single webcomic to be sure they aren't infringing so you don't lose your rights?
Not in my understanding, you only lose it if you know someone is blatantly infringing but you say, "meh, they're not my competitor so I don't really mind them" and you start selectively enforcing your trademark, than you lose it. If we modify patent law to incorporate this idea than it doesn't hurt your microchip since you didn't know about those infringers so you can't be expected to sure someone you didn't know was infringing on you. The effect it would have is all these submarine patents, along with all these defensive patents that corporations are now forced to get, are suddenly obselete and our industry can sleep a whole lot better at night.
Well I'm sure Mr L. Prosser will be very pleased to hear this, fortunatly his inhertiance of a stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats should mean he'll fit right in.
I strongly believe that both Mac and Linux systems are far more secure by a variety of metrics but the writers of that quote have no idea what they are talking about. Local access doesn't just mean someone walking up to your computer and fiddling around, indeed if you log out or lock the desktop when you leave the computer you should be safe from local exploits. Local exploits are someone having access to a local account. It doesn't matter it ther're sitting looking at the computer or logged in from Mars (well they might time out in that case) getting their access through a remote exploit, if they have access to a local account a local exploit which allows "escalation of privileges" can give them root. Remote access exploit + Local privilage escalation exploit = Remote privilage escalation explot
That's why you rewire the "SLEEP" button to turn on the power (I mean who uses sleep anyways) and rewire the "POWER" button to a small explosive. Unlikely to help with your data recovery but at least you won't be the only person concerned with recovery :)
p.s. You might want to inform your friends that they should never turn your computer on or off... well your good friends at least.
They will always target the browser having the most user base as the probablity of exploit becoming successfull increases.
Except in this case Mozilla/FireFox is inarguably more secure with the default install, key quotes from the article (from a mozilla guy I believe but they're still accurate).
Mozilla's Hofmann agreed that ActiveX is only part of the story, pointing also to IE's tight integration into the Window's operating system, and differences in IE and Mozilla's default security settings and architecture as other reasons why Mozilla browsers are more secure.
"Tight integration of the browser with the operating system provides some convenience and power for Windows developers and users, but has also been a continuing source that allows malicious hackers to leverage that same convenience and power for their exploits," said Hofmann.
If 90% of people used moz instead of IE a heck of a lot less people would be getting hacked.
Search ErrorMSN Search is temporarily unable to process your request.
/.ed Microsoft!
Please try again in a few minutes.
EID: f:651496928 - 1041:1041:10004:1059
HC: 71d61b15
We've
YIPEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
emphasis mine
Cons:
1) Cold
2) Curling
3) French-speaking People
4) French-speaking People
Curling a con!?!?
Okay buddy, now it's personal, you've just earned yourself a meeting with a 20 kg hunk of granite!!
I mean co'mon, it used to be you took at least ten seconds to figgure out exactly how the government was BS'ing you, they're not even trying anymore!!
The EU agreed and told Microsoft in March that it had 120 days to reveal details of its Windows software codes so rivals could design compatible products more easily.
It appears they havent seen this[msdn]
As for unbundling windows media player, how do ppl without internet get a media player? Aside from media player classic, windows media player is the best one out there
As to msdn it's the secret API calls and propietary formats that aren't listed on MSDN that rivals need to make compatible formats.
And as to the getting a media player you seem to have misunderstood the intent of the ruling, first you don't need to buy the unbundled version, it's called choice, and secondly I've always understood a big target of this would be the OEMs who could now install their own players.
Robyn Eckard, a spokeswoman for the Irvine, Calif.-based Kelley Blue Book, said the company learned about the problem late Wednesday after Web site visitors said their antivirus software tipped them off to the code. Eckard said Kelly Blue Book removed the malicious code from its site by late Thursday afternoon.
There wasn't any mention of their site being down so that means a period of what could be almost a full day where they knew their website was infecting customers with this virus but continued to let it run. Are they really allowed to do that? Perhaps they figgured the bad PR or loss of buisness from their site being down would be greater than the bad PR and loss of buisness by their customers being infected by this thing then possibly robbed when their bank info was lifted. Perhaps the article was just mistaken, google returns multiple sites and at netcraft I can't make heads or tails of the first one but the second site appears to have remained up could they be charged for this it seems kinda like one of those people with AIDS who doesn't tell partners thier infected and goes around having unprotected sex.
LICENSE
-------
We are releasing the source code for the j3d-core-utils and
j3d-examples projects under a BSD license.
Sun... "Open Source" Code... Non tainting license...
Someone find me the strings, I must be dreaming!
You probably already realize this but make sure this guy understands computers. Ask him general questions to make sure he understands the general technology behind the projects (make sure he has a little geek in him). But most importantly make sure to ask him questions that you claim are easy and he should know but are anything but, see how he handles these situations. If he's starts trying to BS that's definate bad news, you want a boss who will admit when he's outside of his experience and is willing to listen to the advice of his subordinates.
If you don't let people vent their anger on websites that no one will read, then they might go out and use violence to vent that anger.
Very insightful,
also dead wrong. They don't just go, vent their anger on these websites throw a hissy fit and become happy smiling people. They go vent their anger and meet lots of other angry people who tell them they're right but most people don't realize and they become even angrier!!
Should we stop this?
Of course not, aside from the fact that they should be allowed to say what they think there's always the possibility that some angry people just might be right. Looking at the posts so far there's a lot of angry people here right now...
The only time that software can be a natural monopoly is when closed standards are used preventing interoperability (ie Microsoft). When open standards are used (as among *nix) it is anything but a natural monopoly (observe multiple flavours of unix, linux, BSD)
As another reader pointed out, the odds of it being hit by a second meteorite, is exactly the same is it being hit by the first... which is slim, but another meteor isn't going to avoid the house next time because a meteor crashed there beforehand.
/. crowd doesn't need the Gambler's fallacy explained to it :)
As another reader pointed out, the odds of you getting the first joke, is exactly the same as you being hit by a meteor... which is slim, but this joke isn't going to avoid you next time because you ruined the first joke before hand.
(seriously I would hope that the
Well the long drawn out thing was to cover a lot of issues, as I mentioned some could probably be taken out or you could only mention part (the two paragraphs could probably be used completely seperatly with a touch of editing which would cut it down considerably). The reason for using a simply analogy is that it really is a simple problem at the root with a simple solution, however people are used to people trying to decieve them with technobable and often disregard it as a result. As well people are smart enough to realize there are factors in technology they don't know about and don't trust their judgement, these factors aren't present in my analogy so they'll trust their instincts.
Either way thanks for the input!
This just seems to be part of a larger problem of people unfamiliar with computers just not getting the issue so I've constructed what I think is a pretty good metaphor of the problem.
There's this company, called Diebold, and their employees are fast counters, really fast, so fast they can count all the votes in an election almost instantaneously. The problem is they need a warehouse to do the counting in.
So at all the voting stations they build themselves a warehouse. An election official come in a few months before the election and look around, lots of boxes are around, a whole bunch of different gadgets, the officials can't look over everything but it seems alright. The official remindes Diebold it's against the law to touch anything or let anyone inside before election time for security reasons. A couple days later the Diebold employee in charge goes back inside, he moves some things around and is seen driving up in moving trucks and taking boxes in and out but the election official doesn't see. One day when the Diebold employee isn't at the warehouse a guy is walking down the street and notices a door wide open, he wanders in and finds himself in the warehouse. He decides to take some pictures, windows are left open, most of the doors are unlocked or just have a piece of rope to tie them shut and their security alarm is a mute poodle. This guy shows the pictures around, security companies everywhere are just appaled, they can't believe how bad security is and are screaming it's way too unsecure to hold votes in but the government and Diebold ignore them.
So election time comes around and you have to vote. You go to the lobby at the front of the warehouse and go into your booth. There you mark your ballot as usual (except they have really nice ballots and pencils). Then instead of putting it in a box you go and give it to a person standing behnid the counter, it's supposed to be an elections official but it could also be a guy who snuck in off the street. Your ballot is out of sight for a minute as he carries it over and hands it to the Diebold employee, the Diebold employee then tells you he'll put the ballot in a box and he'll count it at the end with the others. He then goes into the warehouse and that's the last you, or anybody else but the Diebold employee, see of your ballot. After the election the Diebold employee comes out and tells everyone what he counted and who won the election, it not who most people expected and a couple people ask for a recount but the Diebold employee says that he threw out the ballots as he counted them so you just have to take his word for it. A couple of people ask why they didn't just put a photocopier and a traditional ballot box in the lobby where everyone could see it and no one could tamper with it. After marking your first ballot you would be be able to make exactly one copy of it, you could then put the second ballot in that ballot box and at the end if they wanted a recount they could just count the ballots in the traditional box. The Diebold employee (who lost a bunch of the ballots before counting them) says that his counting is good enough and that the old ballot box couldn't be trusted. Oh yeah, that Diebold employee was also campaigning for the guy who won.
Please feel free to redistribute this or give me any suggestions you might have on how to make it better. I've tried to be as factual as possible (not sure about leaving the upset in there).
The problem is that people don't realize it's an ad. They hear the song on the radio and assume it's being played because it's popular/a good song, not because the label just paid them a bunch of money. If they wanted a real ad they should just make it 15 or 30 seconds long and play clips to give a feel or reminder of the song as another poster suggested instead of decieving you into thinking that it's being played because the dj likes it.
Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically
detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list,
let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you
tried to sell it.
You know what, that is obvious. If there isn't something that constitutes prior art already out there it's simply because the number of approaches a finite number of programs can implement is well finite, obvious things are going to be left unimplemented!
As to patents, vacuum cleaners as far as I know were a legitimate invention and deserved patents. You know what, if back at the very dawn of the computer industry someone had patented the idea of a compiler translating a high level language to machine code or making an OS to simplify the computing environment I may not object, as far as I know those were fundamental advances at the time. The best fundamental advancements I can think of recently are compile once/run anywhere languages (eg java) and tabbed browsing. But compile once languages are simlpy a natural extension of portable code and documents that can be opened by systems on different platforms, tabbed browsing is just moving tabs into a different part of userspace. Both were innovative but moreso made practical by the maturation of technology and their respective projects, heck I'm sure both ideas had been "invented" thousands of times before by a bunch of CS students blabbing to eachother after a few beers. Neither in my opinion are worthy of patents as it was just a race to implementation and this MS patent which is far more obvious, just more specific, is certainly not deserving of a patent.