Planes dropping out of the sky might of been an exaggeration by rumour mongers, (I'm not sure, anyone care to correct me?), but serious global problems aren't such a dumb idea as a result of a few major systems crashing.
No planes would have literally dropped out of the sky; the actual aircraft control electronics weren't (hopefully still aren't) date dependent. However I'm not sure if any navigation or ATC systems would have failed had no one addressed the Y2K issue, and that could have been messy. Certainly Y2K issues in air traffic control systems _were_ corrected.
We understand Nintendo's right to protect its characters and trademarks and understand how in order to keep their property unspoiled by fan's interpretation of the franchise, Nintendo needs to protect itself -- even from fan-works with good intentions.
It's bad enough Nintendo shut them down. Forcing them to put out a "mea culpa" statement like this (no doubt with hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of lawsuits promised if they did not) is absolutely disgusting. Even if they did manage to put a little edge in it.
Right now, any ebook that is pretty popular can be found on various sharing web sites.
Right now any BOOK that is pretty popular, even those never published electronically, can be found on various sharing web sites. So tell me again what DRM is going to do for authors?
Now there is no reason a copy-limited work cannot be resold. There are ways to manage this that do not prevent resale or other transfers.
They all involve going back to the original "seller", though. Which is not the same thing as a resale. If I buy a book, I don't need Barnes&Noble or Simon&Schuster to do anything for me to resell it; I just do so.
You conveniently forget that without these necessary DRM restrictions, nobody will be bothered to actually write articles and books in the first place.
Thus, the only way to break the DRM is to simultaneously read every signal line going out to the display panel.
Which is doable. And it's not even analog; it's digital. So all I need to do is simulate a display panel, encode to MPEG and I can get an almost-as-good 2nd generation copy, despite all the effort you went through to prevent me from getting a first generation copy.
If you're going through all that effort you may as well go to a chip-in-glass decoder.
Do you know how rare it is for an author to make any profits off of royalties? Do you know why that is? Publishers subtract books "returned" from books sold, and frankly, an amazing number of people return books that they have read.
"Returns" in the publishing world are books returned from bookstores unsold, not books returned by retail customers; there may be some small percentage of the latter but mostly it is books which were never sold in the first place (in many cases because the bookstore made no attempt to sell them, e.g. by putting them on the shelves, but that's another story).
This is my biggest problem. Being forced to buy into a device. Right now, there are so many different version of readers and the DRM protected content only works of a select few. This is my problem. Look the way that the floppy drive has gone. What will happen in 5 or 10 years? Is you reader still going to exist, let alone be in serviceable (usable) condition? Will Amazon/B&N/Sony/etc. continue to support all those "old" devices? Will you be able to take your content from old device and put it into a new differing device? READ: I like Sony's digital reader better than my Kindle, can I put my Kindle content on my Sony reader? Or am I at the mercy of what Amazon/Sony/other choose to support?
Which is why I won't deal with anything not in an open format, or that I can't convert to an open format. ASCII or HTML? Great; we won't forget how to handle either in my lifetime or the forseeable future. Open Ebook? Basically a packaging of XHTML, so fine. PDF? Grudgingly accepted; it's widespread enough that it's not going away soon, and the format is openly documented. Cracked DRM protected formats? Well, I consider any book I can crack to be mine by right of conquest:-), but I won't "purchase" DRM protected books because I don't want to support the business model. Uncracked DRM protected formats? Fuhgeddaboutit.
Look how difficult now it is to find a computer with a 3.5" floppy drive?
I think there's two in my basement:-)
I can pretty much promise you that your electronic reader is going to go the same way.
Sure, but I'm not worried about that as long as I can keep the files around. All the books I have for my REB-1100 are in HTML-based formats which can be read on a computer or readily converted to Sony, Kindle, or Nook-compatible formats. The problem of long-term archiving of electronic files is a separate one not specific to eBooks, and one I figure will eventually be solved; until then I can keep rolling the files forward as I upgrade machines.
I hate to break it to all of you engineers, but Liberal Arts majors are the ones getting laid and getting paid.
In college they're getting laid. Out in the Real World they've been saying "Would you like fries with that" for decades, and only recently have they been welcoming engineers to the paper-hat brigade.
It's business and finance majors who have been getting paid.
Looking at the light in the article, changing the shape of the hood or similar passive solutions probably won't work; the vertical metal sign is snow-covered despite no snow-trapping surfaces. So it's going to need to be an active solution. Heat and vibration are two choices. Vibration might work, but vibration + electronics is often a bad idea; you might vibrate your LEDs loose as well as the snow. Plus a heater is likely going to be more reliable. So the next idea is how to turn it on. Manual solutions are possible but an automatic one is desirable. Easy enough not to turn it on when the lens is above 32F, but you also want it off when the lens is unobscured but cold.
Seems to me one way to do this is to measure the reflected light. Include two photosensors. Both should be on the inside of the lens but shielded from the LCDs themselves. One should have a filter which blocks light except in the LCDs color. The filtered sensor measures reflected light. If the lens is obscured by snow, the filtered sensor signal should be high in absolute terms and similar to the unfiltered sensor signal. If the lens is clear of snow, the filtered sensor signal should be much lower than the unfiltered sensor signal during the day, and low in absolute terms at night.
In different parts of the country, like Florida, they have traffic lights in a horizontal orientation.
It's Florida. The ambiguity of the lights to red/green colorblind people is of no importance compared to the ambiguity of the whole idea of lights in general to the average Florida driver.
* No. 5, 634, 074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer
Sneer. Point. Laugh.
I know, I know. I should look at the claims before I sneer, point, and laugh. But really, for that title I'll make an exception. I mean, that one's right up there with the one about two disk shaped devices connected in their center by a rod.
Copyright would apply to a diagram or schematic of your mouse trap. A copyright on your schematic would not prevent me from building the trap described by the schematic. It just keeps me from copying the schematic itself. But a patent on your design does keep me from making your mouse trap, regardless of whether or not I actually copy the schematic. Extrapolating out to software is not difficult and is left as an exercise for the reader.
Actually it IS difficult. Because in the case of software, the schematic IS the device.
Why is it ok to patent the implementation of an algorithm in hardware but not ok to patent the implementation of the same algorithm in software?
It shouldn't be. "Algorithm X, implemented in pre-existing hardware" should be unpatentable.
Do we say that all software patents should be invalid simply because of obvious patents like amazon's one click? Isn't that a problem with the obviousness criteria and not the underlying makeup (be it software or hardware) of the patent?
Yes, that one is. But there are multiple problems with the patent system. The novelty and non-obviousness criteria are broken (to be non-novel pretty much means the prior art must describe exactly what the patent describes), and their implementations are even more broken (as the same thing as been patented multiple times on many occasions). But just because that's true doesn't mean software patents should be valid if it were false.
Whether Nokia follow their agreement with GSMA or not is a matter between Nokia and GSMA. Apple have no grounds to complain, because they aren't a party to that agreement.
That's not necessarily true. If the GSMA promotes (with the consent of the member manufacturers) the availability of this licensing to all potential licensees, then Apple might be able to claim to be an intended third-party beneficiary which would give them grounds to complain.
I can tell you one patent Apple uses without even turning on iPhone. iPhone has no visible antenna right? Guess who shipped such device first and spent some years to convince people that the external antenna isn't really better than the internal one?
You're seriously claiming that an internal antenna is a patentable item? You may have a career as a patent examiner.
Nope, sorry. Coffee trees enjoy a very *specific* type of climate, which is why the growing regions are restricted to specific altitudes, latitudes, rainfall rates, and so forth. Change that environment significantly and the result would be very destructive.
Coffee grows in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Mexico, Indonesia, Jamaica, Ghana, Ethiopia, and numerous other places around the world. It has its limitations; it's not going to grow in North Dakota. But it's not quite the hothouse flower you make it out to be.
This patent used the common tricks of "An ordinary computer implementing 'insert unpatentable material here'" and "A computer-readable medium containing code implementing 'insert unpatentable material here'", and while the board rejected both, it did so with very nitpicky analysis (particularly in the second case).
What the board should have done is categorically rejected them, particularly the second one. A claim like "A computer-readable medium containing X" should be no more valid than a claim of "A human-readable medium containing X". And the latter case would make the patent applications themselves patentable, which is obviously absurd.
Of course you can. You're forgetting why it's called trademark. Your trademark rights apply only within your specific trade. Then again, I'm sure some creative lawyer could find away to connect GM to donkey erotica.
There's a part of trademark law called "anti-dilution", which says that if your mark is "famous", it can be enforced against anyone, not just anyone in the fields you use the mark in. It's a really stupid and evil provision, but it exists. So no Kodak bicycles, and no General Motors Donkey Erotica.
I've looked through RFC822, and the inclusion of "+" in an email is not excluded, so it's perfectly legal. GMail's functional use of it, however (account+foo@gmail.com and account+bar@gmail.com both go to account@gmail.com, for easy tagging/filing) is just an implementation that takes advantage of the fact that most people do not have + signs in their email addresses.
It's a common convention that has been around at least since the '90s and probably earlier; I don't know where it started. I use underscores for unique accounts in my own domain, because almost every mail system accepts underscore and I'm concerned that if I use a plus sign, anyone wanting to use it nefariously will strip it off.
Venting on Facebook is more like going to Times Square and shouting out loud that you want to kill somebody. Don't be surprised when someone calls the police.
Yeah, one guy calls the police. But fifteen other guys are sympathetic and say "Yeah, you and me both buddy". And two offer you a price list.
How could a/. member be ignorant of a committing a fallacy esp. when they use its name in the commission?
After a careful study, the American Rhetoric Institute has concluded that the Slippery Slope argument is not a fallacy after all, but generally valid. Spokesman Res Ipsal says "We're not sure how this one been misclassified for all these years. But we've reached the bottom of so many of those slippery slopes that it's pretty clear that there's something to the argument".
Slashdot Mirror
No planes would have literally dropped out of the sky; the actual aircraft control electronics weren't (hopefully still aren't) date dependent. However I'm not sure if any navigation or ATC systems would have failed had no one addressed the Y2K issue, and that could have been messy. Certainly Y2K issues in air traffic control systems _were_ corrected.
It's bad enough Nintendo shut them down. Forcing them to put out a "mea culpa" statement like this (no doubt with hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of lawsuits promised if they did not) is absolutely disgusting. Even if they did manage to put a little edge in it.
Right now any BOOK that is pretty popular, even those never published electronically, can be found on various sharing web sites. So tell me again what DRM is going to do for authors?
They all involve going back to the original "seller", though. Which is not the same thing as a resale. If I buy a book, I don't need Barnes&Noble or Simon&Schuster to do anything for me to resell it; I just do so.
Here you go: Necessity of DRM
Which is doable. And it's not even analog; it's digital. So all I need to do is simulate a display panel, encode to MPEG and I can get an almost-as-good 2nd generation copy, despite all the effort you went through to prevent me from getting a first generation copy.
If you're going through all that effort you may as well go to a chip-in-glass decoder.
"Returns" in the publishing world are books returned from bookstores unsold, not books returned by retail customers; there may be some small percentage of the latter but mostly it is books which were never sold in the first place (in many cases because the bookstore made no attempt to sell them, e.g. by putting them on the shelves, but that's another story).
Which is why I won't deal with anything not in an open format, or that I can't convert to an open format. ASCII or HTML? Great; we won't forget how to handle either in my lifetime or the forseeable future. Open Ebook? Basically a packaging of XHTML, so fine. PDF? Grudgingly accepted; it's widespread enough that it's not going away soon, and the format is openly documented. Cracked DRM protected formats? Well, I consider any book I can crack to be mine by right of conquest :-), but I won't "purchase" DRM protected books because I don't want to support the business model. Uncracked DRM protected formats? Fuhgeddaboutit.
I think there's two in my basement :-)
Sure, but I'm not worried about that as long as I can keep the files around. All the books I have for my REB-1100 are in HTML-based formats which can be read on a computer or readily converted to Sony, Kindle, or Nook-compatible formats. The problem of long-term archiving of electronic files is a separate one not specific to eBooks, and one I figure will eventually be solved; until then I can keep rolling the files forward as I upgrade machines.
In college they're getting laid. Out in the Real World they've been saying "Would you like fries with that" for decades, and only recently have they been welcoming engineers to the paper-hat brigade.
It's business and finance majors who have been getting paid.
...which calls for a technological solution.
Looking at the light in the article, changing the shape of the hood or similar passive solutions probably won't work; the vertical metal sign is snow-covered despite no snow-trapping surfaces. So it's going to need to be an active solution. Heat and vibration are two choices. Vibration might work, but vibration + electronics is often a bad idea; you might vibrate your LEDs loose as well as the snow. Plus a heater is likely going to be more reliable. So the next idea is how to turn it on. Manual solutions are possible but an automatic one is desirable. Easy enough not to turn it on when the lens is above 32F, but you also want it off when the lens is unobscured but cold.
Seems to me one way to do this is to measure the reflected light. Include two photosensors. Both should be on the inside of the lens but shielded from the LCDs themselves. One should have a filter which blocks light except in the LCDs color. The filtered sensor measures reflected light. If the lens is obscured by snow, the filtered sensor signal should be high in absolute terms and similar to the unfiltered sensor signal. If the lens is clear of snow, the filtered sensor signal should be much lower than the unfiltered sensor signal during the day, and low in absolute terms at night.
It's Florida. The ambiguity of the lights to red/green colorblind people is of no importance compared to the ambiguity of the whole idea of lights in general to the average Florida driver.
Sneer. Point. Laugh.
I know, I know. I should look at the claims before I sneer, point, and laugh. But really, for that title I'll make an exception. I mean, that one's right up there with the one about two disk shaped devices connected in their center by a rod.
Actually it IS difficult. Because in the case of software, the schematic IS the device.
It shouldn't be. "Algorithm X, implemented in pre-existing hardware" should be unpatentable.
Yes, that one is. But there are multiple problems with the patent system. The novelty and non-obviousness criteria are broken (to be non-novel pretty much means the prior art must describe exactly what the patent describes), and their implementations are even more broken (as the same thing as been patented multiple times on many occasions). But just because that's true doesn't mean software patents should be valid if it were false.
That's not necessarily true. If the GSMA promotes (with the consent of the member manufacturers) the availability of this licensing to all potential licensees, then Apple might be able to claim to be an intended third-party beneficiary which would give them grounds to complain.
You're seriously claiming that an internal antenna is a patentable item? You may have a career as a patent examiner.
That's "GATTACA". If you have a "G" instead of a "C" in that next to last position, you're subnormal and no reproduction for you.
Coffee grows in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Mexico, Indonesia, Jamaica, Ghana, Ethiopia, and numerous other places around the world. It has its limitations; it's not going to grow in North Dakota. But it's not quite the hothouse flower you make it out to be.
Yeah, well, if Dick Cheney was still in charge, things would be different.
This patent used the common tricks of "An ordinary computer implementing 'insert unpatentable material here'" and "A computer-readable medium containing code implementing 'insert unpatentable material here'", and while the board rejected both, it did so with very nitpicky analysis (particularly in the second case).
What the board should have done is categorically rejected them, particularly the second one. A claim like "A computer-readable medium containing X" should be no more valid than a claim of "A human-readable medium containing X". And the latter case would make the patent applications themselves patentable, which is obviously absurd.
...but Verizon's decision to make Bing the only allowable search provider on Blackberrys on its network would have made 88 easy.
You mean the real stuff the AGW crowd is hiding, or the stuff they're making up?
Oh, much more than that once you consider the reduction to the GDP.
Yeah, by creating a water monopoly empire, only with power (in the form of CO2 credits) instead of water.
There's a part of trademark law called "anti-dilution", which says that if your mark is "famous", it can be enforced against anyone, not just anyone in the fields you use the mark in. It's a really stupid and evil provision, but it exists. So no Kodak bicycles, and no General Motors Donkey Erotica.
It's a common convention that has been around at least since the '90s and probably earlier; I don't know where it started. I use underscores for unique accounts in my own domain, because almost every mail system accepts underscore and I'm concerned that if I use a plus sign, anyone wanting to use it nefariously will strip it off.
Yeah, one guy calls the police. But fifteen other guys are sympathetic and say "Yeah, you and me both buddy". And two offer you a price list.
After a careful study, the American Rhetoric Institute has concluded that the Slippery Slope argument is not a fallacy after all, but generally valid. Spokesman Res Ipsal says "We're not sure how this one been misclassified for all these years. But we've reached the bottom of so many of those slippery slopes that it's pretty clear that there's something to the argument".