Good point. Makes me think that it might be a possible way for start-up companies to avoid being destroyed by patent litigation. Say for example, some relatively small startup company (this could apply to both software and hardware) is manufacturing a product that has a component that could maybe-kinda-sorta infringe on another company's patent. Said startup could spin off a (very) small company with very few assets, and contract with it to produce said component - if the patent holder sues and the component is found to be infringing - the spin-off company can be liquidated to settle the legal debts, with only minor losses sustained by the startup. Employees of the spin-off return to the mothership and a new, non-infringing method is developed. Repeat as necessary.
Sure, there's ample room for abuse, but it would prevent small startups from being obliterated before they get on their feet (or into the black) and ultimately allow for more innovation in the market. The lawyers would still get rich, but the patent trolls would not.
I downloaded (from Amazon Unbox) the pilot for "Chuck" - while the technical aspects require quite the suspension of disbelief (transferring what must have been petabytes of data over wireless in seconds) the show is pretty entertaining, and pretty unpredictable (which automatically makes it better than 99% of other network programs). That said, I'm sure all the *other* shows will be crap.:P
Oh, and for the love of all that is holy *do not* watch a program called "Big Bang Theory" - thirty seconds of that and I wanted to take a drill to my temple.
An *incident* maybe, but a massive anti-terror/bomb-squad response? I don't think that's what they intended at all. I think far more likely they wanted to draw the ire (and thereby some free publicity on say, Fox News) of people who found the middle finger offensive.
A fair point, but as the GP pointed out, minimum wage sets an effective price floor for unskilled labor. While someone working as a custodian may be making *more* than minimum wage, often it's not much more, and still insufficient to support a family with. Unfortunately not all unskilled jobs can be filled by part-time high school and college students.
Were the minimum wage to be abolished, you could judge how much people like this would be paid by what less than scrupulous employers pay illegal immigrants to do such jobs: significantly less than the current minimum wage. In other words, who minimum wage should be for, and how the market ultimately determines who gets minimum wage are by no means linked. Until all unskilled labor in the world can be done by robots, career laborers will most certainly exist. We, as a society, need to respect the fact that we *need* unskilled labor, and those people who fulfill that role need food, healthcare and a roof over their head as much as anybody.
As it stands now, people earning minimum wage largely do not have healthcare, and do not make enough money to support their families, or even themselves. Now, if you're actually proposing to abolish the minimum wage, you'd better come up with a proposal about how we're going to house the *millions* of people who would no longer be able to afford housing, or the incidence of homelessness (and with it, crime) will surge to crisis levels. Of course, in time, the market will correct this, because many of these people will die.
The invisible hand of the free market cannot solve the world's problems without an abject disregard for human life.
In order for a stabbing motion to be truly effective in a combat situation, it has to be either very fast and unexpected, or easily redirected to slip by an opponents parry. The heavier the blade, the more difficult it is to change the direction of the point, and the easier it is to defend against a thrust. You can stab with almost any sword, but the heavier the sword is, the less useful the thrust becomes as a primary attack - with a rapier, the thrust can be very difficult to avoid (because in the process of the thrust, one can do devious feints and changes in direction), whereas with weapons with heavy, broad blades, slashing is far more effective as a means to put one's opponent in a position where they won't be able to avoid the slower, more direct thrust that the heavier blade makes.
The problem is that you really can't strike a balance (even the sword you describe, and assuming we're talking about period materials) because any blade that can withstand repeated lateral blows will be too heavy to achieve the speed necessary for an effective thrusting attack.
Unlock != Jailbreak. TFA focuses specifically on the applications being developed that *unlock* the phone - i.e. allow SIMs from other telephone service providers to work in the iPhone - the process to do this exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability in the software, which, IIRC is not required to install custom software on the phone. I don't think Jobs has any problem with developers creating their own third party applications for the phone, but he (quite reasonably) doesn't want to a) advertise that particular feature and b) deal with the inevitable support headaches that would arise as a result of broken third party apps.
Replacing it with one of these certainly would. No disk - but also no sacrifice of functionality. Also, no need to worry about the inevitable failure of the HDD.
Repeating the same thing over and over... I once heard somewhere that the definition of insanity is performing the same action over and over, each time expecting a different result.
I'm curious about one thing here: In many large chain stores in NYC (Best Buy, Home Depot, etc.) - there is a little sign posted at the entrance that says "We reserve the right to search your bags," or something to that effect. Now - by reading that sign, and subsequently entering the store, am I therefore consenting to any subsequent search of my bags while in the store? Can a private institution actually reserve a right that violates my own constitutional right to privacy (without my explicit consent)? I think it's also relevant to note that the signs do not say "By entering this store you are consenting to arbitrary bag searches" but even if it did - can this sort of thing be considered a binding contract? I'd be very interested in hearing the answer to these questions.
Can you provide some non-anecdotal evidence to back this up? I can boot any number of machines off an OS installed on my iPod (handy to have one for diagnostic purposes), and it runs just as reliably as it does off an internal drive. With a 1 in 100 miss rate, that sure as hell would not be the case.
The reason (as I see it) that Apple has the grounds to get a chunk of the contract fees for the iPhone is that without such a cut, Apple would have been far better off (in terms of hardware sales) selling iPhones as unlocked devices. By granting exclusivity to AT&T, Apple probably knew that a number of potential customers would not buy an iPhone, simply because AT&T has crappy coverage in their area or they had a bad experience with AT&T, etc. On the flip side of that, an exclusive contract added to the "iPhone Experience" in the form of Visual Voicemail, which undoubtedly required upgrades to infrastructure that not every carrier would be willing to make.
My question, though, is given the number of handsets produced by the likes of Nokia, Motorola, HTC, etc., that are licensed exclusively to certain service providers - do those manufacturers also have contracts in place that give them a cut of contract fees when, say, a new customer signs a contract and buys one of their phones?
By that standard, phishers are not "stealing" credit card numbers or bank account information. They are merely copying some information. A poor analogy. Phishers facilitate separating you from your money. If I "steal" an mp3, I can't use that mp3 to then drain a band's bank account. Identity theft in general is in fact theft. Once their identity has been stolen, an identity theft victim loses their identity, i.e. they are no longer able to get mortgages, credit cards, even cell phone contracts (that without the theft they would be able to get), because their credit score has been destroyed.
Did Universal have an *exclusive* digital distribution contract with iTunes? I don't think so - I seem to recall seeing music from Universal being available on Yahoo!. I think it's really more of an issue of these companies' hubris thinking they can out-market Apple - I don't see that happening anytime soon.
And/or watching it for free on nbc.com. If I recall correctly, new episodes were aired on their site the day after being aired on television.
I don't really understand what NBC would stand to gain from differential pricing schemes anyway; did they want to in fact charge more than $2 a show? I recall someone doing the calculation that showed they were making approx. $0.64 per viewer in advertising revenue (on average) from standard OTA broadcasts, and I don't think apple's cut could be more than half - so where did the dispute lie?
Actually, I believe Apple bought the company that designed the touch-screen (and thus the patents for said technology). But touch-screen's aren't new. One detail I did not see in the video was multi-touch - I think Nokia will have a hard time getting around the patents for that (for now).
While we're at it, let's teach ebonics in the classroom and encourage the phonetic spelling of everything....oh wait, what!? I don't think there's any delusion in at least attempting to keep the English language a *single* language - if we don't attempt to at least try to agree on the spelling of things, a few decades down the line, half the population won't be able to read the street signs.
And frankly, if you pronounce the phrase "should of", you're not making a grammatical error - "should of" is simply a misspelling of the contraction "should've". Oh, and encouraging people to denote their socio-economic class through the use of malapropisms is idiocy, particularly with the written word - unless you think that "not a native english speaker" is a definitive economic indicator.
Well - Sam Brownback is a presidential candidate (brownback.com). Fortunately, he doesn't stand an ice cube's chance in hell of actually getting elected.
Indeed - as oft as we slashdot folk tend to berate the USPTO's idiocy, you've got to remember the most famous employee of the USPTO - Albert Einstein. Admittedly, he didn't achieve worldwide renown until well after he'd left, but nevertheless even Einstein, as brilliant as he was, had no traceable impact on the way the USPTO functioned.
As I see it, a large part of the problem with the USPTO is the perception that "I can patent anything - even a perpetual motion machine!" - which in turn yields an enormous number of garbage patent applications. If we were (somehow) able to change that perception, the number of bogus patent applications would most certainly go down, and thereby decrease the number of bogus patents that are actually awarded. Essentially, there are two ways to proceed - reduce the number of patent applications, or increase the number of reviewers. Since almost everyone on the planet who is confronted with an absurdly large workload and an unreasonable quota will take whatever shortcut is necessary to guarantee that they get their paycheck, at the very least, we must reduce the load of applications that is layed on the examiners.
Admittedly, there's a bit of a chicken and the egg issue, but nevertheless - I think the solution to our horrible patent problem is to give the USPTO a better image. If we can create the perception that a patent is hard to get, and that one must create something that is truly unique in order to get a patent, the number of patent applications will undoubtedly decline, and with it, the number of stupid, trivial patents.
A cursory examination of the site (peertopatent.org) gives me the impression that in order to give objections to a given patent any credence, one must in fact provide proof (i.e. a link to a previous patent, or to a peer-reviewed article). Admittedly, this has its own limitations, but nevertheless, my (admittedly brief) examination of the site gave me the impression that even in the free-for-all discussion section, the contributions are well thought out and well supported.
This can certainly be explained by the (very) small population of contributors, but at the same time I think trolls would be easily identifiable and just as easily disregarded. Since the prior art that is actually evaluated by the USPTO is determined by the community (I believe they submit the top 10 highest rated prior art examples to the patent office), I believe that there is a sufficient corrective force in the community based system to prevent people with profit-driven agendas from significantly changing the judgement of a patent.
In truth, the best course is to have nothing to do with Microsoft or its products and get on with life. I think this is the best example of "Easier said than done" I've seen on slashdot in years. I think I'd equate it to: "Don't like nitrogen? Well - just don't breathe it in.":P
If the Chinese will unashamedly disregard other software and hardware licenses, why on earth would you expect them to respect the GPL? After all - the creators of the GPL, and those who enforce it, don't have nearly the clout that, for example, Microsoft has with the federal government in terms of international IP enforcement. You can demand all you want, but I doubt the manufacturers would even humor you by answering the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. Makes me think that it might be a possible way for start-up companies to avoid being destroyed by patent litigation. Say for example, some relatively small startup company (this could apply to both software and hardware) is manufacturing a product that has a component that could maybe-kinda-sorta infringe on another company's patent. Said startup could spin off a (very) small company with very few assets, and contract with it to produce said component - if the patent holder sues and the component is found to be infringing - the spin-off company can be liquidated to settle the legal debts, with only minor losses sustained by the startup. Employees of the spin-off return to the mothership and a new, non-infringing method is developed. Repeat as necessary.
Sure, there's ample room for abuse, but it would prevent small startups from being obliterated before they get on their feet (or into the black) and ultimately allow for more innovation in the market. The lawyers would still get rich, but the patent trolls would not.
I downloaded (from Amazon Unbox) the pilot for "Chuck" - while the technical aspects require quite the suspension of disbelief (transferring what must have been petabytes of data over wireless in seconds) the show is pretty entertaining, and pretty unpredictable (which automatically makes it better than 99% of other network programs). That said, I'm sure all the *other* shows will be crap. :P
Oh, and for the love of all that is holy *do not* watch a program called "Big Bang Theory" - thirty seconds of that and I wanted to take a drill to my temple.
You can't crash an airport into a skyscraper, either.
(She made no attempt to board a plane wearing the device)
An *incident* maybe, but a massive anti-terror/bomb-squad response? I don't think that's what they intended at all. I think far more likely they wanted to draw the ire (and thereby some free publicity on say, Fox News) of people who found the middle finger offensive.
A fair point, but as the GP pointed out, minimum wage sets an effective price floor for unskilled labor. While someone working as a custodian may be making *more* than minimum wage, often it's not much more, and still insufficient to support a family with. Unfortunately not all unskilled jobs can be filled by part-time high school and college students.
Were the minimum wage to be abolished, you could judge how much people like this would be paid by what less than scrupulous employers pay illegal immigrants to do such jobs: significantly less than the current minimum wage. In other words, who minimum wage should be for, and how the market ultimately determines who gets minimum wage are by no means linked. Until all unskilled labor in the world can be done by robots, career laborers will most certainly exist. We, as a society, need to respect the fact that we *need* unskilled labor, and those people who fulfill that role need food, healthcare and a roof over their head as much as anybody.
As it stands now, people earning minimum wage largely do not have healthcare, and do not make enough money to support their families, or even themselves. Now, if you're actually proposing to abolish the minimum wage, you'd better come up with a proposal about how we're going to house the *millions* of people who would no longer be able to afford housing, or the incidence of homelessness (and with it, crime) will surge to crisis levels. Of course, in time, the market will correct this, because many of these people will die.
The invisible hand of the free market cannot solve the world's problems without an abject disregard for human life.
In order for a stabbing motion to be truly effective in a combat situation, it has to be either very fast and unexpected, or easily redirected to slip by an opponents parry. The heavier the blade, the more difficult it is to change the direction of the point, and the easier it is to defend against a thrust. You can stab with almost any sword, but the heavier the sword is, the less useful the thrust becomes as a primary attack - with a rapier, the thrust can be very difficult to avoid (because in the process of the thrust, one can do devious feints and changes in direction), whereas with weapons with heavy, broad blades, slashing is far more effective as a means to put one's opponent in a position where they won't be able to avoid the slower, more direct thrust that the heavier blade makes.
The problem is that you really can't strike a balance (even the sword you describe, and assuming we're talking about period materials) because any blade that can withstand repeated lateral blows will be too heavy to achieve the speed necessary for an effective thrusting attack.
Unlock != Jailbreak. TFA focuses specifically on the applications being developed that *unlock* the phone - i.e. allow SIMs from other telephone service providers to work in the iPhone - the process to do this exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability in the software, which, IIRC is not required to install custom software on the phone. I don't think Jobs has any problem with developers creating their own third party applications for the phone, but he (quite reasonably) doesn't want to a) advertise that particular feature and b) deal with the inevitable support headaches that would arise as a result of broken third party apps.
Replacing it with one of these certainly would. No disk - but also no sacrifice of functionality. Also, no need to worry about the inevitable failure of the HDD.
I'm curious about one thing here: In many large chain stores in NYC (Best Buy, Home Depot, etc.) - there is a little sign posted at the entrance that says "We reserve the right to search your bags," or something to that effect. Now - by reading that sign, and subsequently entering the store, am I therefore consenting to any subsequent search of my bags while in the store? Can a private institution actually reserve a right that violates my own constitutional right to privacy (without my explicit consent)? I think it's also relevant to note that the signs do not say "By entering this store you are consenting to arbitrary bag searches" but even if it did - can this sort of thing be considered a binding contract? I'd be very interested in hearing the answer to these questions.
Can you provide some non-anecdotal evidence to back this up? I can boot any number of machines off an OS installed on my iPod (handy to have one for diagnostic purposes), and it runs just as reliably as it does off an internal drive. With a 1 in 100 miss rate, that sure as hell would not be the case.
The reason (as I see it) that Apple has the grounds to get a chunk of the contract fees for the iPhone is that without such a cut, Apple would have been far better off (in terms of hardware sales) selling iPhones as unlocked devices. By granting exclusivity to AT&T, Apple probably knew that a number of potential customers would not buy an iPhone, simply because AT&T has crappy coverage in their area or they had a bad experience with AT&T, etc. On the flip side of that, an exclusive contract added to the "iPhone Experience" in the form of Visual Voicemail, which undoubtedly required upgrades to infrastructure that not every carrier would be willing to make.
My question, though, is given the number of handsets produced by the likes of Nokia, Motorola, HTC, etc., that are licensed exclusively to certain service providers - do those manufacturers also have contracts in place that give them a cut of contract fees when, say, a new customer signs a contract and buys one of their phones?
Did Universal have an *exclusive* digital distribution contract with iTunes? I don't think so - I seem to recall seeing music from Universal being available on Yahoo!. I think it's really more of an issue of these companies' hubris thinking they can out-market Apple - I don't see that happening anytime soon.
And/or watching it for free on nbc.com. If I recall correctly, new episodes were aired on their site the day after being aired on television.
I don't really understand what NBC would stand to gain from differential pricing schemes anyway; did they want to in fact charge more than $2 a show? I recall someone doing the calculation that showed they were making approx. $0.64 per viewer in advertising revenue (on average) from standard OTA broadcasts, and I don't think apple's cut could be more than half - so where did the dispute lie?
...says the AC reading (and commenting on) Slashdot.
Actually, I believe Apple bought the company that designed the touch-screen (and thus the patents for said technology). But touch-screen's aren't new. One detail I did not see in the video was multi-touch - I think Nokia will have a hard time getting around the patents for that (for now).
Hahaha, well forgive me for failing to appreciate the sarcasm of your post.
Well done, sir!
While we're at it, let's teach ebonics in the classroom and encourage the phonetic spelling of everything....oh wait, what!? I don't think there's any delusion in at least attempting to keep the English language a *single* language - if we don't attempt to at least try to agree on the spelling of things, a few decades down the line, half the population won't be able to read the street signs.
And frankly, if you pronounce the phrase "should of", you're not making a grammatical error - "should of" is simply a misspelling of the contraction "should've". Oh, and encouraging people to denote their socio-economic class through the use of malapropisms is idiocy, particularly with the written word - unless you think that "not a native english speaker" is a definitive economic indicator.
Well - Sam Brownback is a presidential candidate (brownback.com). Fortunately, he doesn't stand an ice cube's chance in hell of actually getting elected.
Indeed - as oft as we slashdot folk tend to berate the USPTO's idiocy, you've got to remember the most famous employee of the USPTO - Albert Einstein. Admittedly, he didn't achieve worldwide renown until well after he'd left, but nevertheless even Einstein, as brilliant as he was, had no traceable impact on the way the USPTO functioned.
As I see it, a large part of the problem with the USPTO is the perception that "I can patent anything - even a perpetual motion machine!" - which in turn yields an enormous number of garbage patent applications. If we were (somehow) able to change that perception, the number of bogus patent applications would most certainly go down, and thereby decrease the number of bogus patents that are actually awarded. Essentially, there are two ways to proceed - reduce the number of patent applications, or increase the number of reviewers. Since almost everyone on the planet who is confronted with an absurdly large workload and an unreasonable quota will take whatever shortcut is necessary to guarantee that they get their paycheck, at the very least, we must reduce the load of applications that is layed on the examiners.
Admittedly, there's a bit of a chicken and the egg issue, but nevertheless - I think the solution to our horrible patent problem is to give the USPTO a better image. If we can create the perception that a patent is hard to get, and that one must create something that is truly unique in order to get a patent, the number of patent applications will undoubtedly decline, and with it, the number of stupid, trivial patents.
A cursory examination of the site (peertopatent.org) gives me the impression that in order to give objections to a given patent any credence, one must in fact provide proof (i.e. a link to a previous patent, or to a peer-reviewed article). Admittedly, this has its own limitations, but nevertheless, my (admittedly brief) examination of the site gave me the impression that even in the free-for-all discussion section, the contributions are well thought out and well supported.
This can certainly be explained by the (very) small population of contributors, but at the same time I think trolls would be easily identifiable and just as easily disregarded. Since the prior art that is actually evaluated by the USPTO is determined by the community (I believe they submit the top 10 highest rated prior art examples to the patent office), I believe that there is a sufficient corrective force in the community based system to prevent people with profit-driven agendas from significantly changing the judgement of a patent.
If the Chinese will unashamedly disregard other software and hardware licenses, why on earth would you expect them to respect the GPL? After all - the creators of the GPL, and those who enforce it, don't have nearly the clout that, for example, Microsoft has with the federal government in terms of international IP enforcement. You can demand all you want, but I doubt the manufacturers would even humor you by answering the phone.