It doesn't. It's to prevent John Q. Public from doing anything - they couldn't care less about the random EE inclined hacker who would could patch something together.
They are our representatives, yet they don't represent us.
It doesn't matter - I haven't watched Hollywood movies or TV in the last 6 months - and you know what? I found out I don't have a need for it either. Hollywood isn't going to get another dollar of my cash nor a minute of my attention anymore (TV). That's how I'm voting from now on.
I'd rather have a good book or website or/and do something productive with my time than be a slave to the media industry anymore.
The Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 (PDF) is sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) (PDF) and would close that pesky analog hole that poses such a dire threat to the survival of the music and movie industries. The bill was originally planned for introduction in early November, but was tabled after hearings held by the House Subcomittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.
Remember, Wisconsin and Michigan residents, these are your representatives. Unless you support the massive "content creation" in your area, you might want to drop these assholes a note:
According to Reps. Sensenbrenner and Conyers, the legislation is absolutely necessary because of the dire threat PCs and the Internet pose to the content-creation industry's very livelihood. Apparently, it's not nimble enough to keep up with advances in technology.
Is it because you have no sellable ideas of your own?
And when did you stop hitting your wife?
No, it's sad that someone can come up with a relatively generic idea (not implementation) and sit on it, wait for someone to make it reality, and then claim ownership of it.
Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
Mankind has imagined fantastic things for at least thousands of years, thinking about it (and printing it in a book) is different from an actual implementation.
But perhaps Gene Roddenberry's estate will collect money from space travel for 'patents' or 'ideas' hundreds of years from now. (Congress will pass an "Human Progress Act" extending patents for 500 years in 2008).
Also, is Asimov really the originator of many of those ideas? Much as Orsen Welles was being original with 1984, see Zamyatin.
I find this comment (on the cluelessness of consumers) somewhat hilarious if it's supposed to support Blu-ray/HD-DVD. Most owners that have HD TVs, at least the early adopters, probably have a clue. The other (majority) of consumers with lesser TVs won't have a reason to really give a rat's ass about anything but DVD and thus don't have a reason to buy in the first place.
I still think it's too early in the DVD cycle for DVDs to lose a significant amount of customers. HD is still a niche market.
By the time HVD comes out with it's significantly higher GB count, the market will have expanded while Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be playing the Laserdisc role.
BTW, the GB count on HVD will play in it's uptake on the computer side just for sheer storage, regardless whether the studio output movies on it or not - so that's millions of players shipped off every year for that format.
Only the most open solution can win. Consumers will realize if they can't copy (to some other medium) or if either one angles them in DRM, that it just isn't worth it.
AFAIK, both of them drown in DRM features and there's no real buzz for them outside some in the video-phile community, DVDs will prevail - they are good enough and neither new offering offer killer must-have features for the majority of people.
Since either medium doesn't give me a significantly big boost in GBs that I was expecting, it will probably flop on the computer side as a gotta have (as a burner) because Holographic storage will blow it away by the time burners come out.
I suppose what these type of algorithms really say is how close a song (or movie) followed a successful formula - but it cannot predict a new genre of music (or movie) and will give you a false negative on it's success.
In any given genre - there was one or a generation of breakthrough artists and then the imitators get quickly spawned off to leech off that success. These algorithms try to predict the success of the leeches.
Just watch TV for confirmation - CSI becomes successful - there are X,000 CSI like shows on TV now. Medium becomes successful, how many medium-type show are on TV now? (I'm not saying these are the original trendsetters, but the original ones for this TV cycle).
But if the creative arts are tested against these algorithms, diversity will die and so will the audience as everything will become the SOS (Same Old Shit, more than it is now).
Let's start with 3 - raising the price. The price should only reflect what the average actual cost is to research, review and approve or reject the patent. For a small operation that thinks they have a good product, a patent can be a life saver. $1000 is no problem, but $50K is a gamble most can't afford to take.
Shouldn't the "price" reflect the burden put on society to a)protect said patent when it's out (mostly the courts, police sting operations on operations selling fake goods, etcetera)?
I don't see what idea that would be a lifesaver couldn't be implemented without a patent (if others take it, you are not in trouble if you document your prior art use of it). You could always trademark and copyright such a product for brand recognition and if it is so important - why not 10-50K? Shouldn't the patent bring it in?
Also, I was under the impression, many patent are applied for for protection, not for the patent's sake itself - because small companies don't have the funds for long drawn-out lawsuits anyway. It would eliminate that.
That takes us to 4 - a bounty system. That's just plain dumb.
Why? Adversarial systems are the best, self-interest and all. It would draw in knowledgeable people in the field who have a motive to disprove a patent (but they wouldn't be the judges). It wouldn't be a stressed out patent clerk dealing with X amount of patents.
I hear all the time the need for more patent clerks and I cringe. Would they even know what to look for in the advance fields? And the taxpayer expense at what has become a corporate feeding frenzy.
I would envision that of the people/companies that run lawsuit mills (patent everything, including the ridiculous, sit on it until someone implements it, then sue them for big cash settlement, move on to next sucker) would set up a lot of schill/front corporations to apply for patents, if they get accepted the schill corporation passes it to the parent or another company for a small transferal fee. If it gets rejected, they declare bankruptcy and the people behind it are free to apply for another patent.
A non-upfront fee like that wouldn't reduce the amount of frivolous patents applied for and isn't a visible or fair barrier - it would just shock the honest person applying for a patent but didn't do his homework (a upfront fee would make the person do his homework) on prior art, etcetera, and they really expected it to pass.
The aim of patents is to encourage the creation of new inventions by rewarding someone who comes up with something new. However, it's notoriously bad at determining whether someone who created that "something-new" has created something that would have been come up with anyway.
This is wrong, the aim of patents is to offer inventors an incentive to open up their knowledge (a patent application is just that - describing how it works) to society in exchange for a protection of that knowledge (that only they can use it or license it out).
This might not be so important on products you can immediately examine and deduce the workings of, but is very important for manufacturing techniques, etcetera, where you can't reverse engineer based on the resulting product alone.
We had such a system where no patents existed in the dark/medieval ages - it lead to having various guilds (carpenter's guild, stone-mason's guild) or families (say who cast cannons or bells) that kept their manufacturing techniques to themselves and were very secretive.
There was a reason it was the dark ages.
But now we are in the other extreme.
BTW, I agree with you on software patents, etcetera. Only implementations should be patented if a working model can be presented.
The Patent Office, not the courts, would be the judges to see if something is actually disproven. Actually, I would replace the deciding clerks (who have no clue in many areas) with committees of several experts in fields......
I would expect relative expediency, especially as the # of patents applied for would be driven down. There would also be less need of appeals, as it's only a patent, not a death sentence on someone's life.
You just doubled or tripled the cost of applying for a patent.
Even these days, I heard that unless a product is expected to bring in at least $1 million, it's not worth patenting for the little guy/small business.
The fee would prevent businesses to patent everything under the sun because the cost would be prohibitive, but if something is really worthwhile, I would expect that the upfront fee could be overcome with loans/VCs - such is the cost of business.
And besides, it would also be refunded if the patents are granted. Consider it a tax: applying for a patent is asking for society's protection for X years in return that the information in the patent is open pushing forward progress once the patent is expired. If someone is abusing society by applying for a frivolous (or obvious) patent, that 50K down the drain would be the punishment for draining government (taxpayer) resources.
I have my own problems with copyrights or actually perpetual copyrights ala Disney (who happened to take most of their ideas from the public domain - Grimm Brothers) but they can't nor shouldn't be dealt with the same way.
BTW, even if you don't register your copyright, it's still copyrighted to you by the Berne convention (?) - registering it is for extra safety.
I said it yesterday, and I'll repeat it - the patent system (bureacracy) needs to be, not fixed, but neutered.
Bureacracies always reach out and try to take more power - once patents simply protected implementations - now the patent office is reaching out to get a stranglehold on stuff like "business methods" and algorithms (math) and essentially ideas - many of them common sense to the problem being solved.
Patents are for society, not the individual. It's supposed to push progress forward by opening non-obvious ideas for everyone for a limited time. Not MONOPOLIZE obvious ideas for the benefit of one person against the rest of society.
To fix patents, we don't need more patent clerks (federal employees), we need to:
1. Go back to old way patents were done - which includes working implementation upon application. Thus ideas become unpatentable. Same with business methods. It will also render 90% all the unreadable legalese to obscure what you are patenting obsolete.
2. Punish non-English application. No, I don't mean application in a foreign language, just the ones that read like they are. Plain english is a must. Jail time in Gitmo otherwise.
3. Raise price to apply for patent to $10,000-50,000 (refundable only on recieving a patent) - while it may seem to screw the "little guy" it actually will kill corporations trying to patent every little thing. Even a little operation will be able to afford to patent 1 WORTHWHILE application, but will corporate America still be able to afford to apply for 10's of thousands of trivial patents?
THE KEY 4. Part of application fee (say 1/2) will go as a bounty to anybody who can disprove it - in other words show prior art, etcetera. This could be anybody - college students, professors, employees of another company.
Why hire clueless clerks when you could flocks of knowleable people examining patents because of a profit motive to turn them down? They won't have the power to deny a patent, they bring the case against it.
5. No renewable patents. Lower patent length from 17 years to 9 years or so. Back in the 1700's, business and the pace of life overall was slower, let's reflect that.
The only workable solution I can think of is imposing liability on the inventor to find prior art and prove novelty: if your patent gets invalidated, you are held liable for restraint of trade. I think a lot of folks -- particularly "IP speculators" -- would walk away from their patents in that environment.
Then raise the price, $10,000 is figure thrown out there.
I think the key is the bounty system. It's would be a good adversarial system (most good systems in nature are, capitalism is supposed to be good for consumers because of competition) - your proposed system depends on the slow legal system and has several pitfalls:
Company declares bankruptcy and owner moves on to next schill company - no one gets justice. Slow, over-booked legal system to implement this, subject to appeals ad infinity. Depends on the foxes to monitor the henhouse.
The bounty system: Would apply swift punishment for applying frivolous patents because profit-minded people would be involved who are interested in disproving patents, not just patent clerks who have a quota and are motivated to grant patents (so I heard). Appliers automatically start checking more carefully, or their patent fee will have $0 ROI.
Yeah, it seems like an utterly frivolous and unimaginative use for the product.
OTOH, I would pay decent money to have an e-Paper library, one sheet, multiple books. Sort of like the literary version of i-Tunes. I wonder when e-book downloads for this thing will become the norm?
1. Go back to old way patents were done - which includes working implementation upon application. Thus ideas become unpatentable. Same with business methods. It will also render 90% all the unreadable legalese to obscure what you are patenting obsolete.
2. Punish non-English application. No, I don't mean application in a foreign language, just the ones that read like they are. Plain english is a must. Jail time in Gitmo otherwise.
2. Raise price to apply for patent to $10,000 - while it may seem to screw the "little guy" it actually will kill corporations trying to patent every little thing. Even a little operation will be able to afford to patent 1 worthwhile application, but will corporate America still be able to afford to apply for 10's of thousands of trivial patents?
3. Part of application fee (say 1/2) will go as a bounty to anybody who can disprove it - in other words show prior art, etcetera. This could be anybody - college students, professors, employees of another company.
I am skeptical, especially as it doesn't have a harddrive and the screen is small (9.5 inches).....
But I read up on it and the idea as a whole isn't bad - no need to keep 100 different versions of everything running for some poor admin at an elementary school.
Plus it always be cool to have on for myself as an el-cheapo version to keep in the car:)
You still have the right of free speech you can still say whatever you want and just as long as it doesn't cause direct harm, (Like yelling Fire in a crowded room)
Could saying "Weapons of Mass Destruction!" land the sayer in prison?
Emmm, have you been paying ANY attention? 9-11 claimed the life of 3,000 innocent souls. The civilian death tool in Iraq is 30,000.
The "War on Terror" is already in negative equity. Giving cigarettes out to school children would probably have less negative impact.
You math is assuming that no further civilian casualities would have resulted regardless of the response to Sept 11th. I'd like to think some further terrorist attacks were prevented by waging war on terrorism - but mainly the actions in Afghanistan and the direct military actions on Al-Quada cells and similiar terrorist groups.
BTW, it's not that I disagree with your logic per se, but there is a hole in it and isn't as absolute as is implied.
Perhaps you missed the point, my project is for my own amusement, an experiment if you will - it has no commercial value whatsoever and if, in the remotest possibility a market became commercially viable for it - I'd hire an actual experienced DB programmer who'll have a say in the next redesign.
The thing is: I DO BELIEVE YOU. PostGreSQL is probably much better.
Going "lalalala I can't hear anything you all are just Postgres/DB2/whatever zealots" won't change anything at all.
But talking about Castles crumbling down is the wrong tactic when all I want to do is build a shed or perhaps a doghouse (pun intended);)
No one called you a zealot either, but selling the positives over something might be a better start into a conversation like this rather than negative campaigning.
It actually informed what the movie was about for about a sentence or two - that it was 400 years in the future and 5 million people were left after some disease wiped the rest out.
So there's the set-up, but anything about the plot/storyline?
Not anything coherent (a hint of romance between two unnamed characters), but mostly just fanboyish drooling over Charlize Theron.
It seems to have an out of proportion effect on our lives for the damage it currently causes. This is not to belittle the victims, but we are letting something that has miniscule effect on the populace as a whole CONTROL US.
Or at least let the politicians control us through FUD. Any politician that utters the word "terrorism" along with a bill that they think "needs" to get passed to "protect" us should be voted out ASAP anyway.
But imagine if nations like the US spent their kind of anti-terrorism money on, something basic, like national healthcare. Would that have saved or benefited more lives than "fighting the war on terrorism?"
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It doesn't. It's to prevent John Q. Public from doing anything - they couldn't care less about the random EE inclined hacker who would could patch something together.
They are our representatives, yet they don't represent us.
It doesn't matter - I haven't watched Hollywood movies or TV in the last 6 months - and you know what? I found out I don't have a need for it either. Hollywood isn't going to get another dollar of my cash nor a minute of my attention anymore (TV). That's how I'm voting from now on.
I'd rather have a good book or website or/and do something productive with my time than be a slave to the media industry anymore.
Remember, Wisconsin and Michigan residents, these are your representatives. Unless you support the massive "content creation" in your area, you might want to drop these assholes a note:
http://www.house.gov/sensenbrenner/
http://www.house.gov/conyers/
Oh, and this is how they think on the subject:
Tell them why they are wrong.
That (your) post had no question(s).
And when did you stop hitting your wife?
No, it's sad that someone can come up with a relatively generic idea (not implementation) and sit on it, wait for someone to make it reality, and then claim ownership of it.
Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
Mankind has imagined fantastic things for at least thousands of years, thinking about it (and printing it in a book) is different from an actual implementation.
But perhaps Gene Roddenberry's estate will collect money from space travel for 'patents' or 'ideas' hundreds of years from now. (Congress will pass an "Human Progress Act" extending patents for 500 years in 2008).
Also, is Asimov really the originator of many of those ideas? Much as Orsen Welles was being original with 1984, see Zamyatin.
The guy had patents?
I think anybody who reads his books and has what it takes to implement said ideas from there shouldn't have to license a patent for anything.....
Do we also go back and pay Italy (or whoever holds the DaVinci estate) for his futuristic musings (such as helocopters, etcetera).
It's a sad world when a sentiment like this is norm.
I find this comment (on the cluelessness of consumers) somewhat hilarious if it's supposed to support Blu-ray/HD-DVD. Most owners that have HD TVs, at least the early adopters, probably have a clue. The other (majority) of consumers with lesser TVs won't have a reason to really give a rat's ass about anything but DVD and thus don't have a reason to buy in the first place.
I still think it's too early in the DVD cycle for DVDs to lose a significant amount of customers. HD is still a niche market.
By the time HVD comes out with it's significantly higher GB count, the market will have expanded while Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be playing the Laserdisc role.
BTW, the GB count on HVD will play in it's uptake on the computer side just for sheer storage, regardless whether the studio output movies on it or not - so that's millions of players shipped off every year for that format.
Thanks for the belly-laugh^_^
0 259.html
o -adopt-same-drm-as-rival-hddvd.html
Blu-ray:
http://www.exisle.net/mb/lofiversion/index.php/t3
Blu-ray and HD-DVD:
http://www.techspot.com/news/18300-bluray-discs-t
Only the most open solution can win. Consumers will realize if they can't copy (to some other medium) or if either one angles them in DRM, that it just isn't worth it.
AFAIK, both of them drown in DRM features and there's no real buzz for them outside some in the video-phile community, DVDs will prevail - they are good enough and neither new offering offer killer must-have features for the majority of people.
Since either medium doesn't give me a significantly big boost in GBs that I was expecting, it will probably flop on the computer side as a gotta have (as a burner) because Holographic storage will blow it away by the time burners come out.
Reinvent unix, you mean like Linux?
i /
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/plan_9_wik
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
(Sorry, I'm not attacking Linux, I just find your post ironic....)
I suppose what these type of algorithms really say is how close a song (or movie) followed a successful formula - but it cannot predict a new genre of music (or movie) and will give you a false negative on it's success.
In any given genre - there was one or a generation of breakthrough artists and then the imitators get quickly spawned off to leech off that success. These algorithms try to predict the success of the leeches.
Just watch TV for confirmation - CSI becomes successful - there are X,000 CSI like shows on TV now. Medium becomes successful, how many medium-type show are on TV now? (I'm not saying these are the original trendsetters, but the original ones for this TV cycle).
But if the creative arts are tested against these algorithms, diversity will die and so will the audience as everything will become the SOS (Same Old Shit, more than it is now).
Shouldn't the "price" reflect the burden put on society to a)protect said patent when it's out (mostly the courts, police sting operations on operations selling fake goods, etcetera)?
I don't see what idea that would be a lifesaver couldn't be implemented without a patent (if others take it, you are not in trouble if you document your prior art use of it). You could always trademark and copyright such a product for brand recognition and if it is so important - why not 10-50K? Shouldn't the patent bring it in?
Also, I was under the impression, many patent are applied for for protection, not for the patent's sake itself - because small companies don't have the funds for long drawn-out lawsuits anyway. It would eliminate that.
Why? Adversarial systems are the best, self-interest and all. It would draw in knowledgeable people in the field who have a motive to disprove a patent (but they wouldn't be the judges). It wouldn't be a stressed out patent clerk dealing with X amount of patents.
I hear all the time the need for more patent clerks and I cringe. Would they even know what to look for in the advance fields? And the taxpayer expense at what has become a corporate feeding frenzy.
I would envision that of the people/companies that run lawsuit mills (patent everything, including the ridiculous, sit on it until someone implements it, then sue them for big cash settlement, move on to next sucker) would set up a lot of schill/front corporations to apply for patents, if they get accepted the schill corporation passes it to the parent or another company for a small transferal fee. If it gets rejected, they declare bankruptcy and the people behind it are free to apply for another patent.
A non-upfront fee like that wouldn't reduce the amount of frivolous patents applied for and isn't a visible or fair barrier - it would just shock the honest person applying for a patent but didn't do his homework (a upfront fee would make the person do his homework) on prior art, etcetera, and they really expected it to pass.
This is wrong, the aim of patents is to offer inventors an incentive to open up their knowledge (a patent application is just that - describing how it works) to society in exchange for a protection of that knowledge (that only they can use it or license it out).
This might not be so important on products you can immediately examine and deduce the workings of, but is very important for manufacturing techniques, etcetera, where you can't reverse engineer based on the resulting product alone.
We had such a system where no patents existed in the dark/medieval ages - it lead to having various guilds (carpenter's guild, stone-mason's guild) or families (say who cast cannons or bells) that kept their manufacturing techniques to themselves and were very secretive.
There was a reason it was the dark ages.
But now we are in the other extreme.
BTW, I agree with you on software patents, etcetera. Only implementations should be patented if a working model can be presented.
I would expect relative expediency, especially as the # of patents applied for would be driven down. There would also be less need of appeals, as it's only a patent, not a death sentence on someone's life.
Even these days, I heard that unless a product is expected to bring in at least $1 million, it's not worth patenting for the little guy/small business.
The fee would prevent businesses to patent everything under the sun because the cost would be prohibitive, but if something is really worthwhile, I would expect that the upfront fee could be overcome with loans/VCs - such is the cost of business.
And besides, it would also be refunded if the patents are granted. Consider it a tax: applying for a patent is asking for society's protection for X years in return that the information in the patent is open pushing forward progress once the patent is expired. If someone is abusing society by applying for a frivolous (or obvious) patent, that 50K down the drain would be the punishment for draining government (taxpayer) resources.
Copyrights are not patents and patents are not copyrights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
I have my own problems with copyrights or actually perpetual copyrights ala Disney (who happened to take most of their ideas from the public domain - Grimm Brothers) but they can't nor shouldn't be dealt with the same way.
BTW, even if you don't register your copyright, it's still copyrighted to you by the Berne convention (?) - registering it is for extra safety.
I said it yesterday, and I'll repeat it - the patent system (bureacracy) needs to be, not fixed, but neutered.
Bureacracies always reach out and try to take more power - once patents simply protected implementations - now the patent office is reaching out to get a stranglehold on stuff like "business methods" and algorithms (math) and essentially ideas - many of them common sense to the problem being solved.
Patents are for society, not the individual. It's supposed to push progress forward by opening non-obvious ideas for everyone for a limited time. Not MONOPOLIZE obvious ideas for the benefit of one person against the rest of society.
To fix patents, we don't need more patent clerks (federal employees), we need to:
1. Go back to old way patents were done - which includes working implementation upon application. Thus ideas become unpatentable. Same with business methods. It will also render 90% all the unreadable legalese to obscure what you are patenting obsolete.
2. Punish non-English application. No, I don't mean application in a foreign language, just the ones that read like they are. Plain english is a must. Jail time in Gitmo otherwise.
3. Raise price to apply for patent to $10,000-50,000 (refundable only on recieving a patent) - while it may seem to screw the "little guy" it actually will kill corporations trying to patent every little thing. Even a little operation will be able to afford to patent 1 WORTHWHILE application, but will corporate America still be able to afford to apply for 10's of thousands of trivial patents?
THE KEY
4. Part of application fee (say 1/2) will go as a bounty to anybody who can disprove it - in other words show prior art, etcetera. This could be anybody - college students, professors, employees of another company.
Why hire clueless clerks when you could flocks of knowleable people examining patents because of a profit motive to turn them down? They won't have the power to deny a patent, they bring the case against it.
5. No renewable patents. Lower patent length from 17 years to 9 years or so. Back in the 1700's, business and the pace of life overall was slower, let's reflect that.
Would it help that it be refundable on the event the patent passes? This way the frivolous/crappily_researched patents wouldn't be mostly punished.
Then raise the price, $10,000 is figure thrown out there.
I think the key is the bounty system. It's would be a good adversarial system (most good systems in nature are, capitalism is supposed to be good for consumers because of competition) - your proposed system depends on the slow legal system and has several pitfalls:
Company declares bankruptcy and owner moves on to next schill company - no one gets justice.
Slow, over-booked legal system to implement this, subject to appeals ad infinity.
Depends on the foxes to monitor the henhouse.
The bounty system:
Would apply swift punishment for applying frivolous patents because profit-minded people would be involved who are interested in disproving patents, not just patent clerks who have a quota and are motivated to grant patents (so I heard).
Appliers automatically start checking more carefully, or their patent fee will have $0 ROI.
Yeah, it seems like an utterly frivolous and unimaginative use for the product.
OTOH, I would pay decent money to have an e-Paper library, one sheet, multiple books. Sort of like the literary version of i-Tunes. I wonder when e-book downloads for this thing will become the norm?
1. Go back to old way patents were done - which includes working implementation upon application. Thus ideas become unpatentable. Same with business methods. It will also render 90% all the unreadable legalese to obscure what you are patenting obsolete.
2. Punish non-English application. No, I don't mean application in a foreign language, just the ones that read like they are. Plain english is a must. Jail time in Gitmo otherwise.
2. Raise price to apply for patent to $10,000 - while it may seem to screw the "little guy" it actually will kill corporations trying to patent every little thing. Even a little operation will be able to afford to patent 1 worthwhile application, but will corporate America still be able to afford to apply for 10's of thousands of trivial patents?
3. Part of application fee (say 1/2) will go as a bounty to anybody who can disprove it - in other words show prior art, etcetera. This could be anybody - college students, professors, employees of another company.
That's it:)
I am skeptical, especially as it doesn't have a harddrive and the screen is small (9.5 inches).....
But I read up on it and the idea as a whole isn't bad - no need to keep 100 different versions of everything running for some poor admin at an elementary school.
Plus it always be cool to have on for myself as an el-cheapo version to keep in the car:)
Could saying "Weapons of Mass Destruction!" land the sayer in prison?
You math is assuming that no further civilian casualities would have resulted regardless of the response to Sept 11th. I'd like to think some further terrorist attacks were prevented by waging war on terrorism - but mainly the actions in Afghanistan and the direct military actions on Al-Quada cells and similiar terrorist groups.
BTW, it's not that I disagree with your logic per se, but there is a hole in it and isn't as absolute as is implied.
The thing is: I DO BELIEVE YOU. PostGreSQL is probably much better.
But talking about Castles crumbling down is the wrong tactic when all I want to do is build a shed or perhaps a doghouse (pun intended);)
No one called you a zealot either, but selling the positives over something might be a better start into a conversation like this rather than negative campaigning.
It actually informed what the movie was about for about a sentence or two - that it was 400 years in the future and 5 million people were left after some disease wiped the rest out.
So there's the set-up, but anything about the plot/storyline?
Not anything coherent (a hint of romance between two unnamed characters), but mostly just fanboyish drooling over Charlize Theron.
This "review" was just pathetic.
It seems to have an out of proportion effect on our lives for the damage it currently causes. This is not to belittle the victims, but we are letting something that has miniscule effect on the populace as a whole CONTROL US.
Or at least let the politicians control us through FUD. Any politician that utters the word "terrorism" along with a bill that they think "needs" to get passed to "protect" us should be voted out ASAP anyway.
But imagine if nations like the US spent their kind of anti-terrorism money on, something basic, like national healthcare. Would that have saved or benefited more lives than "fighting the war on terrorism?"