I thought the same thing about Hypercard from Apple. If they had just added the ability to link using URL's they would have had a real competitor to HTML.
Re:Political commentary at the Key Bridge in DC
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And that differs from what the Fundamentalist Christian fanatics want, how exactly?
1) : forced conversion of all non-(christians).
Christian Fundamentalists believe in salvation by personal faith that cannot be coerced.
2) Death to all who resist.
Christian Fundamentalists not believing in the efficacy of forced conversion also don't believe in killing those who resist the gospel. Serious Fundamentalists (Double seperatist baptists and the like) tend to be formally pacifists, though less so these days than in past decades.
3) total destruction of the U.S.
Christian fundamentalists tend to be in the US and tend to be quite patriotic - *some* tend to have mixed in to their theology an American Execptionalism that sees the USA as having been founded on Biblical principles and thus uniquely blessed by God. Most fundamentalists though are uncomfortable with such an idea and see it as borderline heresy - the real concern is not the kingdom of man but the kingdom of God.
4)...and Israel.
Christian Fundamentalists are "dispensationists" that believe that Israel is blessed by God and that the current state of Israel is the nascent Israel of of Revalation blessed by God. That it's friends will enjoy God's blessings and it's enemies God's curse. Those that also hold to American exceptionalism believe that the main reason America is blessed by God is because America has always been good to the Jews and supportive of Israel.
5) Slavery for the wives and children of those who resist.
I'm unaware of any Fundamentalist christians who favor of slavery for unbelievers. Since fundamentalism was strong in the south many fundamentalists had racist attitudes... however that isn't essential or central to fundamentalist belief and as southern attitudes have changed there has been quite a lot of focus on racial reconciliation using the language of sin and repentance one would expect.
There are very real differences between Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam. Both religions believe that God has an absolute moral law and that failure to obey that law is to be damned to hell. Fundamentalist Christians believe that man is fallen and cannot obey Gods law and needs to be forgiven for his failure to obey. A fundamentalist christian believes that those that put their trust in God's forgiveness shall receive it and that this faith is personal and cannot be coerced. Fundamentalist Christians believe that this world has been given to Satan, a temporary trial of faith, earthly utopia is utterly impossible our hope is in heaven - politics is ultimately unimportant.
Islam believes that man is not fallen but he is weak that he can in fact succeed in obeying Gods law but that he needs the help of society and government to compel him to do so. There is not and cannot be separation of church and state since the power of the state is an essential component in Islamic belief. Unbelievers can be tolerated BUT they too must submit to islamic law (which is quite precise in it's strictures) so as not to disrupt the true believers. Islam literally means "submission" and Muslim means "submitted one". Earthly utopia in which all submit IS possible and it is the muslims duty to see it come to pass through war, and enforcing the submission of those who will not submit of their own will.
I'm a spammer, I don't _care_ that your machine's only a zombie for a few hours...
Sure you do, there are only so many zombies out there, and you want to send millions of emails to profit off the tiny percentage of responses.
So now, instead of sending 40 messages to each address I know about, I only have the computational horsepower to send 4.
You are describing a 10-fold decrease in the volume of spam. That seems worthwhile. Also, it might be low. It might be much more than simply 10X more difficult to generate a stamp than to simply send an email.
Indeed, since my viruses didn't tell me how many people they sent spam to, I'm obviously not billing by the message, anyhow, so my profits don't change.
But you will also be getting fewer paying responses since responses are a percentage of spams sent.
If this scheme was widely adopted there would be fewer zombies because zombie machines would go from being a bit flaky to being downright unusable causing at least/some/ people to fix them. And each zombie would send dramatically fewer spams.
FRO or no, I stand by my original message: The spammers don't care, because it's _your_ machine.
But in a sense it *is*. Zombies are a finite resource. They are bought and sold by spammers on a black market. Reducing supply will increase the price even as the need to generate stamps makes them less valuable. If the supply shrinks enough while the value plummets enough the economics utterly collapse making spam a losing proposition. Even if that doesn't happen there would be a sharp reduction in the volume of spam.
I mean no disrespect but I think you are missing the point of the parent, and I suspect the point of the article.
The parent wasn't saying that they should strive for some impossible level of perfection only that they (we) shouldn't use Orwellian language that makes it SOUND like they have achieved something when they haven't. Zero Defects should mean zero defects. Saying what you really mean is important. Zero Known Defects or perhaps Acceptable Defects would be accurate - "Zero Defects" is newspeak.
As for missing the articles point I think what he DOES mean by Zero Defects is that a known issue like freezing when you click foo, bar, baz etc. WOULD in fact be fixed - or at least it would be if the foo, bar, baz functions are supposed to be completely done at the "zero defect" milestone in question. From the article I think it's pretty clear that he is looking to avoid unaccountable slippage - saying "even though this is supposed to be complete now and it's still got known issues we'll move on anyway and fix it before the next milestone" which of course means you didn't REALLY hit your milestone you are just pretending that you did and hoping to make up for it later, which you won't because you aren't going to have the time and more bugs you'll "fix later" are going to slip past other milestones until at the end you'll have "hit" all your deadlines except the last one.
I didn't say it's good, I said the threat is usually overstated in the/. story. Traditionally on slashdot they take the abstract which talks about the patent claims *generally* and complain about how general the patent is.
It *is* true that many patents make claims that are overly broad. This is not good - but as a practical matter it is often not something to get your panties in a bunch about prematurely. As the article pointed out if Acacia tries for too broad an interpretation on a patent they are more likely to run into prior art which could invalidate the patent - even narrower bits they maybe COULD have successfully defended. If they avoid prior art by interpreting the patent very narrowly they end up with a patent that is easy to bypass. The patent holder is not only limited by the text of the patent but also by the practical consideration that if they get too greedy they run the risk of losing it all. For practical reasons the USPTO can only put applications through a cursory vetting process. The real vetting happens in the courts during disputes - this is bad (for everyone but lawyers) but there are still limits to how far a patent holder can abuse his overly broad patent.
I never saw Wall Street as particularly insightful. In fact it's a bit shallow, a bit propagandistic with the big-time trader nothing but a parasite, a stock villain with no function in society but to drink it's blood. Gordon Gecko is a straw man, and a particularly unappealing one at that.
A MUCH more insightful (and much funnier) movie that covers the exact same ground is Other People's Money. First off "Larry the Liquidator" is not a mere stock villain from central casting. He makes the same "Greed... for lack of a better word... Is Good" arguments but since he isn't "evil" it's not a straw man but a serious argument that needs to be seriously considered.
At the end of the movie if you reflect on what happens economically you see what role Larry the Liquidator and Gordon Gecko in fact play in the economy. The factory Larry want's to liquidate *IS* a losing proposition that *really is* worth more if liquidated. Of course if it's closed all the workers will be out of work and it will devastate the small new england mill town. But to keep it going on that basis alone is not business but charity and sadly it is doomed to failure over the long haul. Their mill jobs are really "busy-work" and the whole enterprise is a fantasy. Larry's takeover bid forces them to deal with the changed, and harsh reality, cable is being replaced by fiber optic and there is no longer enough demand for their product. In the end they fend off Larry by developing a new and viable business plan with new products (The metal mesh cabling in automobile air-bags). The pressure of financiers that don't just "want" but in fact "need" a return on their investment is an important reality check in the real world of business. The harsh reality is not created by "Larry" which is the point of his speech at the shareholder meeting - the company is *ALREADY* dead they just haven't faced up to it yet. Facing that harsh reality is painful but it does allow everyone involved to move on, to find opportunity and it frees up resources that are being wasted to maintain a fantasy. Once free they WILL flow over the medium to long term to fund *real* opportunities. Then again Larry isn't himself doing this for the long-term good it may bring about - he's a greedy bastard.
The dialogue about economics in "OPM" is really quite sophisticated. I've seen as many liberals who see it as a movie about compassion for "stakeholders" against the greed of "trickle-down" economics as there are conservative/libertarians who see it as a movie vindicating those same ideas. To me that suggests that both arguments are fairly, and compellingly, presented.
"Lawyers are like nuclear warheads. I have them because the other guy has them, but the first time you use them it fucks everything up" - Larry the Liquidator
Probably not. Some/. articles like to take the vague summary "a method to do X" and ignore the fact that this is just that... a vague summary, it is one PARTICULAR method of doing X and not X itself. Also patent claims tend to be written in a general, broad way and then get narrower and narrower.
A method for making marks on paper.
1) I invented a writing implement
2) It uses ink
3) It's the ball-point pen
4) A ball-point pen that can write upside down
5) A ball-point pen that accomplishes this in a particular way.
6) Here is *exactly* how it works.
The broadest claims aren't really expected to be upheld and aren't pursued - pretty much they just put the later claims into context. The next couple of claims are your wet dream "I hope there's no prior art... I'll be a gazillionare". The next few claims are what you are realistically hoping to profit from. The narrowest claim is your disappointing fall-back - there are lots of other ways to do it, it's easy to avoid infringing your patent with only minor changes BUT maybe someone will find it worth something to do it your way without having to make those changes.
Another thing that happens is that we all look back with 20/20 vision. "it's obvious"... Well it's obvious NOW but was it then. Perhaps in this case, especially for the broadest claims. In the case of small companies that may have truly invented something they don't have the ability to enforce them - which why they sell them to Acacia - but several years may go by during which subsequent people come up with similar or identical ideas. After it becomes commonplace it seems obvious but it wasn't back when the patent was granted. IBM has the clout to make sure it's patents are respected and that people coming up with the idea independently (but later) don't infringe. Imagine the response by "Big Corp Inc." when IBM calls to say that Big Corp is infringing on a patent as opposed to Joe Inventor calling from his basement office. IBM pretty quickly gets some kind of licensing deal while Joe Inventor gets put off until when he finally gets onto/. everybody says "but that is so obvious, everyone's been doing that for years". True but perhaps Joe Inventor has been getting put off for those years and finally gave up on seeing all the profits himself so he sold the patent at a discount to Acacia.
No public healthcare yet defense contracts like this aren't a big deal?
Yes, because government is about coercion - just think about what the word "government" means. Even in the case of "public" healthcare what makes it "public" is that if you as an individual don't want to pay into the system men with weapons will make you. If you refuse to pay in they will imprison you, if you resist them they will shoot you. All government action flows from the barrel of a gun.
There are some who think that the only justification for violence is self-defense and that the violence implicit in all government action is only legitimate as an expression of our collective right of self-defense. Anything beyond that is immoral, it is using violence to impose our collective will on others who pose no threat to us. In this view paying for a military is legitimate (as long as that military is used for self-defense) while public healthcare is always immoral - the use of violence to compel others to do what we think they should rather than what they choose themselves to do.
To a degree you are confusing cause and effect. WHY is your money safe in Switzerland? Because it's one big mountain fortress where every male over 18 is trained to use an assault rifle in defense of their home (and incidentally, your money)
Problem with that is much of the cool sci-fi concepts have been explored by its progenitors.
No. Part of the whole appeal of sci-fi is that there are no "outer limits". In no way have all the cool sci-fi concepts been explored because there there are always more concepts to explore... what is required is imagination, which is what recent series have lacked.
In many ways the original trek was like "The outer limits" or "the twilight zone" the main difference being that there were recurring characters and that there was a bare outline of a larger story (spaceship on exploration mission) but that larger story was just a vehicle, an excuse, to justify the different self-contained stories each week. Each week a new planet, a new story noodling around with some "sci-fi/speculative fiction" concept and it's implications. But with the old familiar characters wrestling through it - each with their own take on the problem (logic, emotion, leadership etc.)
I have to say though that your idea would be really cool to see done in the trek (or any other fictional) universe.
Or they could go the other direction in the grand tradition of the original series. The "journey of exploration" was just a devise to set up totally unrelated episodes. It was a series of short stories featuring recurring characters rather than chapters in a novel that told a larger story. It worked. Each episode worked on it's own, a little exploration of a "sci-fi" idea.
Recent Star Trek series seem to fall between the chairs. They aren't quite telling a larger epic story but they limit themselves as though they are. They are too concerned with consistency, dealing with the same basic conflicts and alien species from episode to episode but not feeling like you are getting anywhere. You could go with the epic "story arc" but I think keeping with the spirit of TOS would be the better choice. Every week a new planet, new aliens, a new funky "sci-fi" concept. Of course this actually requires MORE imaginative storytelling than an epic story-arc. Perhaps they could just grab a bunch of old science fiction short story anthologies off the shelf and start re-writing them into star trek episodes.
I never thought that my generation would see commerical space flight in our life time. I thought that the world was too caught up in... greed for the next great step to the star
Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good.
To be fair this wasn't really a commercial space flight - on the other hand there are governments that do truly commercial space flights. In the long run though self-interest will always be a greater motivation than philanthropy. How much time have you spent on such a project yourself as an unpaid volunteer? How does it stack up against the amount of time you spend at your paying job? See, even your own "greed" is a more powerful motivation than either charity or intellectual curiosity. When space travel has tangible benefits that those with the means (either of money, but also of knowledge) can profit from THEN we will see even greater strides.
More like it is the only browser that webdesigners work their butts off tying to design webpages that render properly on it.
Amen!! Preach it brother!
All my sites work with I.E. but only because they have to. It is a piece of crap and I have to put in a lot of extra work to get something to display properly in I.E. that was trivial to get working with MOZ or Safari/KHTML.
If you are not writing for IE it is MUCH quicker and cleaner to do pure, simple CSS. Learning CSS using Safari as my browser and checking it against MOZ from time to time I was amazed at how easy and straightforward it was - just like the standards said it should be. Then I fired up the PC and looked at it in I.E. - What a mess! back to the drawing board, don't do things the easy way according to the standards documents, do it the difficult way that will work in I.E. - POS!
You've caught me at a bad moment when I'm trying to redesign a site using pure css without dumbing down my design or using any bastard HTML table positioning, spacer gifs or the rest of the bag of layout tricks from 1997. But I am continually being thwarted by I.E.'s crappy support for the standard while every other browser renders it beautifully.
First off (though this isn't a CSS issue per se) I.E. supports PNG but not with alpha transparency.
Second, no support for position: fixed.
Third, no ability declare both top and bottom or both left and right positions (or all four) to get a div to fill the available space. To be fair I'm not sure if the standard is supposed to work this way but it *would be* really useful and it works with the other browsers.
Fourth, no support for "min-height/min-width"
There are plenty of others, these are just the ones that I'm irritated about right at this moment.
Instead I have to hack around these limitations, change what should be an easy and straightforward design, or fall back on the bad-old table layout, using twice as much code that is ten times more complex.
As for it being the "better" browser in that the user doesn't have to deal with sites that "don't work" that may be true. You are of course stuck with pop-ups and in some cases the site you are looking at MIGHT "not work" but you don't notice it. In some (too rare) instances web designers DO use these unsupported by I.E. elements but in such a way that they degrade gracefully so you won't notice what you are missing. For instance a site might have a floating menu (position: fixed;) in Netscape (Safari, KHTML etc.) that is always at the top (left, right or bottom) of the browser window where it is always available even when you scroll down - but with I.E. it is at the top of the *page* where you have to scroll back up to it.
There are *no* shipping costs, yet i-tunes US won't sell music to a UK customer, presumably because they figured out they can extract more money from them...
Or presumably because it would get them sued by copyright holders because the deal under which they sell songs in the USA only covers the USA or indicted for tax evasion because each nation has it's own laws & taxes.
I'm sure that if Apple is making a profit at.99 per song they would be happy to just sell through one world-wide store and not have to come up with hundreds of different ones in each different country. Sure, maybe they could gouge a little extra profit out of the U.K. but then again they are losing sales from all the countries they will *never* set up a store for as well as a year or more worth of sales while they were setting up the Euro-iTunes.
OK, still, read the rest of my post. Look at how much trash goes out to the the curb EVERY WEEK. Adding an OLED screen (or two or three) once a year (or even once a quarter) is statistically insignificant. Now imagine using OLED for store signage instead of dead trees - Now what is the environmental impact. How about hi-res/flexible longer-lasting monochrome OLED reader for a book/magazine/newspaper replacement that you can read on the john - NOW what is the environmental impact.
Great, now we're churning out even more consumer waste to put in landfills.
How can this make you happy?
Because I think about things rather than have violent knee-jerk reactions to words like "disposable"
What does the "O" stand for? (A: "Organic") WHY does it lose quality over time? (A: It's decomposing) - I'm sure there remain plenty of environmental problems but even if they are insurmountable and the trash is persistent replacing a few or even very many paper thin sheets of OLED once every year or so isn't going to add much to any landfills - especially if this once a year replacement does a lot to cut down on the use of much more frequently disposed of paper signage. This stuff will be MUCH cheaper, MUCH brighter (bright enough for outdoor use), thinner, potentially higher resolution that uses far less power. It's not only a replacement for infrequently disposed of TV's and Monitors but also for very frequently disposed of paper (store signage, newspapers, magazines)
Sterling is saying that nuclear power is bad because it can be used by "a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, a secret police, and a large army" to develop nuclear weapons.
I'm looking forward to Stirlings assault on solar, and wind power. After all the electricity itself can (and is) used by "dictatorial megalomaniacs in command of national economies, secret police and large armies" for a lot of nefarious purposes. I'm sure it will be followed by his condemnation of pharmecuticals, chemistry, machines of all types and eventually all technologies using either sharp or heavy blunt objects... won't anybody think of the children? By this basis any technology starting with picking up a rock to hit something is barred from consideration.
It seems particularly stupid in this case to say that we shouldn't use nuclear power because it might allow our government to attain the nuclear weapons. A valid argument against exporting nuclear technology perhaps, but not very convincing in denying it to ourselves.
It's a belief the audience already shares
In other words he is an idiot preaching to a choir of imbeciles.
I apologize for misrepresenting your view, I arguing as much against a particular faction on/. as against you and that is unfair to you.
That being said the difficulty is that there ARE those that will "share" with their 10,000 closest friends for $$ or simply because the technology makes it easy. Any attempt to use technology to make such "sharing" inconvenient is decried as a limitation of fair use even when fair use is allowed for (as in this case). Every attempt to prosecute de-facto publishers distributing artists work without compensation is portrayed as harassing helpless victims. That 12 year-old that is "publishing" a CD collection via P2P networks is just as much an (unfair) competitor as a rival publisher lifting the work and selling it as their own.
This antipathy is sometimes fair, the music industry has been ham-handed and unwilling to look at alternatives. Their common mistreatment of the actual artists makes them rather unsympathetic characters. But it remains that their grievances as copyright holders (who could just as well be the actual artists) are legitimate - their product *IS* being "published" on a massive scale by others without them and by extension the artists being compensated at all. Sure they get what they deserve considering their victimization of the artists but it's hard to see how the artists benefit from the devaluation of what they produce. Nor how the new legal-theories justifying it will help creators who live off of copy-rights in other less rapacious industries.
Yes - and since you are posting on/. I'm assuming you do to. There is really little stopping you from wandering off into a national park somewhere out west to live off the land right this second. Get yourself some sharp sticks and rocks and you too can enjoy the purported bliss of stone-age living. You wouldn't even have much to fear from the occasional vengeful
Even if it were the blissful existence portrayed in "Dances with Wolves" am I to assume that you would be the first in line to be part of the population reduction necessary to bring back a hunter-gatherer/subsistence farming society?
You claimed you need to be paid for EVERY COPY taking place, unless the meaning of "every" has been changed lately, that includes the one for your own use.
Oh, dear, you caught me exaggerating. Mea culpa.
There's also a third case where you make, say 1-5 copies and give them not to everyone that asks but your closest friends or family members
Then you approve of this DRM scheme? (allows up to 5 copies) Or am I missing something?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the same thing about Hypercard from Apple. If they had just added the ability to link using URL's they would have had a real competitor to HTML.
And that differs from what the Fundamentalist Christian fanatics want, how exactly?
1) : forced conversion of all non-(christians).
Christian Fundamentalists believe in salvation by personal faith that cannot be coerced.
2) Death to all who resist.
Christian Fundamentalists not believing in the efficacy of forced conversion also don't believe in killing those who resist the gospel. Serious Fundamentalists (Double seperatist baptists and the like) tend to be formally pacifists, though less so these days than in past decades.
3) total destruction of the U.S.
Christian fundamentalists tend to be in the US and tend to be quite patriotic - *some* tend to have mixed in to their theology an American Execptionalism that sees the USA as having been founded on Biblical principles and thus uniquely blessed by God. Most fundamentalists though are uncomfortable with such an idea and see it as borderline heresy - the real concern is not the kingdom of man but the kingdom of God.
4)...and Israel.
Christian Fundamentalists are "dispensationists" that believe that Israel is blessed by God and that the current state of Israel is the nascent Israel of of Revalation blessed by God. That it's friends will enjoy God's blessings and it's enemies God's curse. Those that also hold to American exceptionalism believe that the main reason America is blessed by God is because America has always been good to the Jews and supportive of Israel.
5) Slavery for the wives and children of those who resist.
I'm unaware of any Fundamentalist christians who favor of slavery for unbelievers. Since fundamentalism was strong in the south many fundamentalists had racist attitudes... however that isn't essential or central to fundamentalist belief and as southern attitudes have changed there has been quite a lot of focus on racial reconciliation using the language of sin and repentance one would expect.
There are very real differences between Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam. Both religions believe that God has an absolute moral law and that failure to obey that law is to be damned to hell. Fundamentalist Christians believe that man is fallen and cannot obey Gods law and needs to be forgiven for his failure to obey. A fundamentalist christian believes that those that put their trust in God's forgiveness shall receive it and that this faith is personal and cannot be coerced. Fundamentalist Christians believe that this world has been given to Satan, a temporary trial of faith, earthly utopia is utterly impossible our hope is in heaven - politics is ultimately unimportant.
Islam believes that man is not fallen but he is weak that he can in fact succeed in obeying Gods law but that he needs the help of society and government to compel him to do so. There is not and cannot be separation of church and state since the power of the state is an essential component in Islamic belief. Unbelievers can be tolerated BUT they too must submit to islamic law (which is quite precise in it's strictures) so as not to disrupt the true believers. Islam literally means "submission" and Muslim means "submitted one". Earthly utopia in which all submit IS possible and it is the muslims duty to see it come to pass through war, and enforcing the submission of those who will not submit of their own will.
I'm a spammer, I don't _care_ that your machine's only a zombie for a few hours...
/some/ people to fix them. And each zombie would send dramatically fewer spams.
Sure you do, there are only so many zombies out there, and you want to send millions of emails to profit off the tiny percentage of responses.
So now, instead of sending 40 messages to each address I know about, I only have the computational horsepower to send 4.
You are describing a 10-fold decrease in the volume of spam. That seems worthwhile. Also, it might be low. It might be much more than simply 10X more difficult to generate a stamp than to simply send an email.
Indeed, since my viruses didn't tell me how many people they sent spam to, I'm obviously not billing by the message, anyhow, so my profits don't change.
But you will also be getting fewer paying responses since responses are a percentage of spams sent.
If this scheme was widely adopted there would be fewer zombies because zombie machines would go from being a bit flaky to being downright unusable causing at least
FRO or no, I stand by my original message: The spammers don't care, because it's _your_ machine.
But in a sense it *is*. Zombies are a finite resource. They are bought and sold by spammers on a black market. Reducing supply will increase the price even as the need to generate stamps makes them less valuable. If the supply shrinks enough while the value plummets enough the economics utterly collapse making spam a losing proposition. Even if that doesn't happen there would be a sharp reduction in the volume of spam.
I mean no disrespect but I think you are missing the point of the parent, and I suspect the point of the article.
The parent wasn't saying that they should strive for some impossible level of perfection only that they (we) shouldn't use Orwellian language that makes it SOUND like they have achieved something when they haven't. Zero Defects should mean zero defects. Saying what you really mean is important. Zero Known Defects or perhaps Acceptable Defects would be accurate - "Zero Defects" is newspeak.
As for missing the articles point I think what he DOES mean by Zero Defects is that a known issue like freezing when you click foo, bar, baz etc. WOULD in fact be fixed - or at least it would be if the foo, bar, baz functions are supposed to be completely done at the "zero defect" milestone in question. From the article I think it's pretty clear that he is looking to avoid unaccountable slippage - saying "even though this is supposed to be complete now and it's still got known issues we'll move on anyway and fix it before the next milestone" which of course means you didn't REALLY hit your milestone you are just pretending that you did and hoping to make up for it later, which you won't because you aren't going to have the time and more bugs you'll "fix later" are going to slip past other milestones until at the end you'll have "hit" all your deadlines except the last one.
So how is this good?
/. story. Traditionally on slashdot they take the abstract which talks about the patent claims *generally* and complain about how general the patent is.
I didn't say it's good, I said the threat is usually overstated in the
It *is* true that many patents make claims that are overly broad. This is not good - but as a practical matter it is often not something to get your panties in a bunch about prematurely. As the article pointed out if Acacia tries for too broad an interpretation on a patent they are more likely to run into prior art which could invalidate the patent - even narrower bits they maybe COULD have successfully defended. If they avoid prior art by interpreting the patent very narrowly they end up with a patent that is easy to bypass. The patent holder is not only limited by the text of the patent but also by the practical consideration that if they get too greedy they run the risk of losing it all. For practical reasons the USPTO can only put applications through a cursory vetting process. The real vetting happens in the courts during disputes - this is bad (for everyone but lawyers) but there are still limits to how far a patent holder can abuse his overly broad patent.
I never saw Wall Street as particularly insightful. In fact it's a bit shallow, a bit propagandistic with the big-time trader nothing but a parasite, a stock villain with no function in society but to drink it's blood. Gordon Gecko is a straw man, and a particularly unappealing one at that.
A MUCH more insightful (and much funnier) movie that covers the exact same ground is Other People's Money. First off "Larry the Liquidator" is not a mere stock villain from central casting. He makes the same "Greed... for lack of a better word... Is Good" arguments but since he isn't "evil" it's not a straw man but a serious argument that needs to be seriously considered.
At the end of the movie if you reflect on what happens economically you see what role Larry the Liquidator and Gordon Gecko in fact play in the economy. The factory Larry want's to liquidate *IS* a losing proposition that *really is* worth more if liquidated. Of course if it's closed all the workers will be out of work and it will devastate the small new england mill town. But to keep it going on that basis alone is not business but charity and sadly it is doomed to failure over the long haul. Their mill jobs are really "busy-work" and the whole enterprise is a fantasy. Larry's takeover bid forces them to deal with the changed, and harsh reality, cable is being replaced by fiber optic and there is no longer enough demand for their product. In the end they fend off Larry by developing a new and viable business plan with new products (The metal mesh cabling in automobile air-bags). The pressure of financiers that don't just "want" but in fact "need" a return on their investment is an important reality check in the real world of business. The harsh reality is not created by "Larry" which is the point of his speech at the shareholder meeting - the company is *ALREADY* dead they just haven't faced up to it yet. Facing that harsh reality is painful but it does allow everyone involved to move on, to find opportunity and it frees up resources that are being wasted to maintain a fantasy. Once free they WILL flow over the medium to long term to fund *real* opportunities. Then again Larry isn't himself doing this for the long-term good it may bring about - he's a greedy bastard.
The dialogue about economics in "OPM" is really quite sophisticated. I've seen as many liberals who see it as a movie about compassion for "stakeholders" against the greed of "trickle-down" economics as there are conservative/libertarians who see it as a movie vindicating those same ideas. To me that suggests that both arguments are fairly, and compellingly, presented.
"Lawyers are like nuclear warheads. I have them because the other guy has them, but the first time you use them it fucks everything up" - Larry the Liquidator
I doubt it's as bad as it sounds...
/. articles like to take the vague summary "a method to do X" and ignore the fact that this is just that... a vague summary, it is one PARTICULAR method of doing X and not X itself. Also patent claims tend to be written in a general, broad way and then get narrower and narrower.
/. everybody says "but that is so obvious, everyone's been doing that for years". True but perhaps Joe Inventor has been getting put off for those years and finally gave up on seeing all the profits himself so he sold the patent at a discount to Acacia.
Probably not. Some
A method for making marks on paper.
1) I invented a writing implement
2) It uses ink
3) It's the ball-point pen
4) A ball-point pen that can write upside down
5) A ball-point pen that accomplishes this in a particular way.
6) Here is *exactly* how it works.
The broadest claims aren't really expected to be upheld and aren't pursued - pretty much they just put the later claims into context. The next couple of claims are your wet dream "I hope there's no prior art... I'll be a gazillionare". The next few claims are what you are realistically hoping to profit from. The narrowest claim is your disappointing fall-back - there are lots of other ways to do it, it's easy to avoid infringing your patent with only minor changes BUT maybe someone will find it worth something to do it your way without having to make those changes.
Another thing that happens is that we all look back with 20/20 vision. "it's obvious"... Well it's obvious NOW but was it then. Perhaps in this case, especially for the broadest claims. In the case of small companies that may have truly invented something they don't have the ability to enforce them - which why they sell them to Acacia - but several years may go by during which subsequent people come up with similar or identical ideas. After it becomes commonplace it seems obvious but it wasn't back when the patent was granted. IBM has the clout to make sure it's patents are respected and that people coming up with the idea independently (but later) don't infringe. Imagine the response by "Big Corp Inc." when IBM calls to say that Big Corp is infringing on a patent as opposed to Joe Inventor calling from his basement office. IBM pretty quickly gets some kind of licensing deal while Joe Inventor gets put off until when he finally gets onto
No public healthcare yet defense contracts like this aren't a big deal?
Yes, because government is about coercion - just think about what the word "government" means. Even in the case of "public" healthcare what makes it "public" is that if you as an individual don't want to pay into the system men with weapons will make you. If you refuse to pay in they will imprison you, if you resist them they will shoot you. All government action flows from the barrel of a gun.
There are some who think that the only justification for violence is self-defense and that the violence implicit in all government action is only legitimate as an expression of our collective right of self-defense. Anything beyond that is immoral, it is using violence to impose our collective will on others who pose no threat to us. In this view paying for a military is legitimate (as long as that military is used for self-defense) while public healthcare is always immoral - the use of violence to compel others to do what we think they should rather than what they choose themselves to do.
Responding to a lame post shouldn't instantly make you insightful or interesting. It makes you a drone.
Out of curiosity... what does responding to the response to a lame post make you?
To a degree you are confusing cause and effect. WHY is your money safe in Switzerland? Because it's one big mountain fortress where every male over 18 is trained to use an assault rifle in defense of their home (and incidentally, your money)
Problem with that is much of the cool sci-fi concepts have been explored by its progenitors.
No. Part of the whole appeal of sci-fi is that there are no "outer limits". In no way have all the cool sci-fi concepts been explored because there there are always more concepts to explore... what is required is imagination, which is what recent series have lacked.
In many ways the original trek was like "The outer limits" or "the twilight zone" the main difference being that there were recurring characters and that there was a bare outline of a larger story (spaceship on exploration mission) but that larger story was just a vehicle, an excuse, to justify the different self-contained stories each week. Each week a new planet, a new story noodling around with some "sci-fi/speculative fiction" concept and it's implications. But with the old familiar characters wrestling through it - each with their own take on the problem (logic, emotion, leadership etc.)
I have to say though that your idea would be really cool to see done in the trek (or any other fictional) universe.
Or they could go the other direction in the grand tradition of the original series. The "journey of exploration" was just a devise to set up totally unrelated episodes. It was a series of short stories featuring recurring characters rather than chapters in a novel that told a larger story. It worked. Each episode worked on it's own, a little exploration of a "sci-fi" idea.
Recent Star Trek series seem to fall between the chairs. They aren't quite telling a larger epic story but they limit themselves as though they are. They are too concerned with consistency, dealing with the same basic conflicts and alien species from episode to episode but not feeling like you are getting anywhere. You could go with the epic "story arc" but I think keeping with the spirit of TOS would be the better choice. Every week a new planet, new aliens, a new funky "sci-fi" concept. Of course this actually requires MORE imaginative storytelling than an epic story-arc. Perhaps they could just grab a bunch of old science fiction short story anthologies off the shelf and start re-writing them into star trek episodes.
I never thought that my generation would see commerical space flight in our life time. I thought that the world was too caught up in... greed for the next great step to the star
Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good.
To be fair this wasn't really a commercial space flight - on the other hand there are governments that do truly commercial space flights. In the long run though self-interest will always be a greater motivation than philanthropy. How much time have you spent on such a project yourself as an unpaid volunteer? How does it stack up against the amount of time you spend at your paying job? See, even your own "greed" is a more powerful motivation than either charity or intellectual curiosity. When space travel has tangible benefits that those with the means (either of money, but also of knowledge) can profit from THEN we will see even greater strides.
That sound like the BEST TREK EVER!!! I need the DVD!
More like it is the only browser that webdesigners work their butts off tying to design webpages that render properly on it.
Amen!! Preach it brother!
All my sites work with I.E. but only because they have to. It is a piece of crap and I have to put in a lot of extra work to get something to display properly in I.E. that was trivial to get working with MOZ or Safari/KHTML.
If you are not writing for IE it is MUCH quicker and cleaner to do pure, simple CSS. Learning CSS using Safari as my browser and checking it against MOZ from time to time I was amazed at how easy and straightforward it was - just like the standards said it should be. Then I fired up the PC and looked at it in I.E. - What a mess! back to the drawing board, don't do things the easy way according to the standards documents, do it the difficult way that will work in I.E. - POS!
You've caught me at a bad moment when I'm trying to redesign a site using pure css without dumbing down my design or using any bastard HTML table positioning, spacer gifs or the rest of the bag of layout tricks from 1997. But I am continually being thwarted by I.E.'s crappy support for the standard while every other browser renders it beautifully.
First off (though this isn't a CSS issue per se) I.E. supports PNG but not with alpha transparency.
Second, no support for position: fixed.
Third, no ability declare both top and bottom or both left and right positions (or all four) to get a div to fill the available space. To be fair I'm not sure if the standard is supposed to work this way but it *would be* really useful and it works with the other browsers.
Fourth, no support for "min-height/min-width"
There are plenty of others, these are just the ones that I'm irritated about right at this moment.
Instead I have to hack around these limitations, change what should be an easy and straightforward design, or fall back on the bad-old table layout, using twice as much code that is ten times more complex.
As for it being the "better" browser in that the user doesn't have to deal with sites that "don't work" that may be true. You are of course stuck with pop-ups and in some cases the site you are looking at MIGHT "not work" but you don't notice it. In some (too rare) instances web designers DO use these unsupported by I.E. elements but in such a way that they degrade gracefully so you won't notice what you are missing. For instance a site might have a floating menu (position: fixed;) in Netscape (Safari, KHTML etc.) that is always at the top (left, right or bottom) of the browser window where it is always available even when you scroll down - but with I.E. it is at the top of the *page* where you have to scroll back up to it.
There is almost never a need to use the term America when speaking of North and South America.
And when there is the term "western hemisphere" works just as well.
There are *no* shipping costs, yet i-tunes US won't sell music to a UK customer, presumably because they figured out they can extract more money from them...
.99 per song they would be happy to just sell through one world-wide store and not have to come up with hundreds of different ones in each different country. Sure, maybe they could gouge a little extra profit out of the U.K. but then again they are losing sales from all the countries they will *never* set up a store for as well as a year or more worth of sales while they were setting up the Euro-iTunes.
Or presumably because it would get them sued by copyright holders because the deal under which they sell songs in the USA only covers the USA or indicted for tax evasion because each nation has it's own laws & taxes.
I'm sure that if Apple is making a profit at
I think the parent was saying that IE is apparently required by law to have a security issue every day.
The de jure IE security issue de jour.
OK, still, read the rest of my post. Look at how much trash goes out to the the curb EVERY WEEK. Adding an OLED screen (or two or three) once a year (or even once a quarter) is statistically insignificant. Now imagine using OLED for store signage instead of dead trees - Now what is the environmental impact. How about hi-res/flexible longer-lasting monochrome OLED reader for a book/magazine/newspaper replacement that you can read on the john - NOW what is the environmental impact.
Great, now we're churning out even more consumer waste to put in landfills.
How can this make you happy?
Because I think about things rather than have violent knee-jerk reactions to words like "disposable"
What does the "O" stand for? (A: "Organic") WHY does it lose quality over time? (A: It's decomposing) - I'm sure there remain plenty of environmental problems but even if they are insurmountable and the trash is persistent replacing a few or even very many paper thin sheets of OLED once every year or so isn't going to add much to any landfills - especially if this once a year replacement does a lot to cut down on the use of much more frequently disposed of paper signage. This stuff will be MUCH cheaper, MUCH brighter (bright enough for outdoor use), thinner, potentially higher resolution that uses far less power. It's not only a replacement for infrequently disposed of TV's and Monitors but also for very frequently disposed of paper (store signage, newspapers, magazines)
Sterling is saying that nuclear power is bad because it can be used by "a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, a secret police, and a large army" to develop nuclear weapons.
I'm looking forward to Stirlings assault on solar, and wind power. After all the electricity itself can (and is) used by "dictatorial megalomaniacs in command of national economies, secret police and large armies" for a lot of nefarious purposes. I'm sure it will be followed by his condemnation of pharmecuticals, chemistry, machines of all types and eventually all technologies using either sharp or heavy blunt objects... won't anybody think of the children? By this basis any technology starting with picking up a rock to hit something is barred from consideration.
It seems particularly stupid in this case to say that we shouldn't use nuclear power because it might allow our government to attain the nuclear weapons. A valid argument against exporting nuclear technology perhaps, but not very convincing in denying it to ourselves.
It's a belief the audience already shares
In other words he is an idiot preaching to a choir of imbeciles.
I apologize for misrepresenting your view, I arguing as much against a particular faction on /. as against you and that is unfair to you.
That being said the difficulty is that there ARE those that will "share" with their 10,000 closest friends for $$ or simply because the technology makes it easy. Any attempt to use technology to make such "sharing" inconvenient is decried as a limitation of fair use even when fair use is allowed for (as in this case). Every attempt to prosecute de-facto publishers distributing artists work without compensation is portrayed as harassing helpless victims. That 12 year-old that is "publishing" a CD collection via P2P networks is just as much an (unfair) competitor as a rival publisher lifting the work and selling it as their own.
This antipathy is sometimes fair, the music industry has been ham-handed and unwilling to look at alternatives. Their common mistreatment of the actual artists makes them rather unsympathetic characters. But it remains that their grievances as copyright holders (who could just as well be the actual artists) are legitimate - their product *IS* being "published" on a massive scale by others without them and by extension the artists being compensated at all. Sure they get what they deserve considering their victimization of the artists but it's hard to see how the artists benefit from the devaluation of what they produce. Nor how the new legal-theories justifying it will help creators who live off of copy-rights in other less rapacious industries.
Are you sure it was all that bad?
/. I'm assuming you do to. There is really little stopping you from wandering off into a national park somewhere out west to live off the land right this second. Get yourself some sharp sticks and rocks and you too can enjoy the purported bliss of stone-age living. You wouldn't even have much to fear from the occasional vengeful
Yes - and since you are posting on
Even if it were the blissful existence portrayed in "Dances with Wolves" am I to assume that you would be the first in line to be part of the population reduction necessary to bring back a hunter-gatherer/subsistence farming society?
You claimed you need to be paid for EVERY COPY taking place, unless the meaning of "every" has been changed lately, that includes the one for your own use.
Oh, dear, you caught me exaggerating. Mea culpa.
There's also a third case where you make, say 1-5 copies and give them not to everyone that asks but your closest friends or family members
Then you approve of this DRM scheme? (allows up to 5 copies) Or am I missing something?