You mean like the requirement that an invention be non-obvious in 35 U.S.C. 103? Or the 9 factor test the Supreme Court outlined in KSR v. Teleflex? I think you've got an incredibly new idea here - maybe you should patent it.
Despite those things, there's still a valid patent on a general purpose computer installed in a car. I think something's still broken.
IMO, that goes too far. If the defendant has (allegedly) infringed in plaintiff's home state, plaintiff should be free to sue there. And if the defendant has infringed somewhere other than either party's home state, and only there, the plaintiff should be free to sue there. (e.g. defendant based in New York sells something only in Florida which allegedly violates patents of Arizona company could be sued in Florida, even if defendant does not have a location in Florida)
Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, was born on August 17, 1944
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was born on August 21, 1973
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, was born on March 26, 1973
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple was born August 11, 1950
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, born November 6, 1968
Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp, born November 1, 1950
You were saying, Mr. Gladwell? I didn't even have to reach for those.
I often see people from the United States complaining about their "crumbling infrastructure". I travel to the US quite often on business and I don't quite understand where this perception comes from. I have yet to see one example of actual crumbling infrastructure. The roads for the most part are smooth and well maintained. When you plug something into a socket, you can depend on it having power. So, I just don't understand how you can come to the conclusion that your infrastructure is crumbling.
Yeah, mostly the "crumbling infrastructure" thing is propaganda, used by people who want to get money to theoretically spend on fixing "crumbling infrastructure". But there are real examples of literally crumbling infrastructure in the road system, such as that bridge in Missouri which collapsed. Some of this is to be expected; infrastructure has to be maintained, and there will always be some parts of it nearing the end of its current maintenance cycle. And some is because the last place politicians like to spend money is on boring, useful stuff like road maintenance.
I find it bizarre that the US and Canada don't have something similar to the Schengen agreement in Europe (in Europe you have the right to work in any country that's an EU member if you are a citizen of an EU member country).
There is a NAFTA visa for professionals, but it's more limited than the European agreement.
The very idea that any law firm or financial institution that's been around since the seventies would find any of our generation's "excesses" shocking is, frankly, laughable. Get a few martinis in any old secretary and you will hear stories you will not fucking believe. We are amateurs
Well, yes and no. It's certain most of the people in charge at those firms have enjoyed a lot more excess than most slashdotters. And it's certain they wouldn't be actually shocked by anything most of us have done. But there's two problems still
1) They're total hypocrites. Just because they used to (and perhaps still do) engage in various sorts of merriment does not mean they will won't reject a potential employee for the same or milder behavior.
2) The person doing the weeding out may actually be that boring.
We're in a society where a guy wins 14 Olympic gold medals and still gets fired for smoking a little weed. Tolerance is not the watchword of the day.
You can't do memory mapped I/O in standard C. You can't even do threads in standard C (well you can, but only if you don't try to share state between the threads, and then what is the point...)
You are confusing C with...well, I'm not sure what...Haskell, maybe? In many cases with C, the sequence of events is as important as the end result. C code can have side-effects.
The optimizer wouldn't do it unless there were no side effects to the right hand side of the short circuit operator. So if (foo && (*foo == CONSTANT)) and if (!foo || (*foo == CONSTANT))
would be optimized in this way but if (foo && baz(*foo))
would not (since function baz could have side effects).
It doesn't matter what was at location 0; the test for null was still evaluated, but condition code arithmetic rather than branches were used to handle it.
Version 2.0 won't just steal data. It'll make trades. Aside from the obvious theft possibilities, the controller would have the ability to create his very own economic meltdown, in any companies he wished, limited only by the size of his botnet...
With a zero null value, you can easily arrange for this to happen by protecting the bottom page of memory from reads and writes. That way, even an assembly language program can't dereference a null pointer.
Until the perennial enemy of safety, performance, rears its head. For a long time (and perhaps still), the IBM POWER XLC compiler would optimize code like
if (foo && *foo == CONSTANT)...
by ignoring the short-circuit and dereferencing the pointer even when it was null. This saves a branch and is apparently a significant time-saver in real-world code, but it does require the zero page be readable.
The second article looks more like it was sponsored by GE Medical or some other maker of MRI scanners rather than by health insurance companies. Health insurance companies _don't_ want new MRI machines purchased, whereas this article is claiming that 10-year-old machines are useless.
If some of the examples given in the article are representative, I have to side with the doctors on this one.
The glaring one to me: "A 2006 study of schizophrenia drugs found that old-line antipsychotics were as effective as pricey new ones." Uh, yeah. Perhaps even more effective. The main problem with those old-line antipsychotics isn't their effectiveness, it's their side effects.
Others have pointed out that testing for cervical cancer is still useful after total hysterectomy (especially if the hysterectomy was for cervical cancer), despite what the author thinks.
What angers people though is the routine denials of claims. I don't think its right to reject ambulance fees when you're injured with a compound fracture (this happened to my little brother); did they expect him to walk to the emergency room?
The problem there is that there's no cost to the insurance company for denying a claim. And little market pressure on the insurance companies who have a policy of initially denying every claim, because the people getting denied aren't the people choosing the insurance.
The current evil incarnation of HMOs et al were the result of a misguided and illiberal government policy: let's insure people through their employers.
IIRC, in the United States the practice of insuring people through their employers became standard during WWII, when companies could not raise wages (because of wage controls) in a tight labor market. They could, however, provide health insurance.
The current incarnation of HMOs came later, when the government required employers who offered health insurance to offer an HMO option.
The result, as you point out, was the extreme decoupling of the service provider and the service receiver, and the problems we have today.
Is it a truth universally acknowledged that any group will always consider itself comprised of people relatively intelligent compared to some "average"?
No. For example, groups of athletes almost certainly consider themselves faster or stronger than average, but they're unlikely to define their group in terms of intelligence.
Do any of you guys reading or posting on Slashdot ever think to yourselves that you might be, in broad intellectual terms, at or below average?
Occasionally. Then I look around at a lot of those other people out there, and I reject the hypothesis.
I judge myself as fairly stupid, and, frankly, I judge much of the output of Slashdot posters as hot air.
Well, you have a problem there. If you're not stupid, you refute your own hypothesis. If you are stupid, your judgement of others is likely faulty.
No, failure. You're going to die in 100 years like the rest of us. Think less of yourself. Hate yourself more for your failures, and show some humility. Realise that what you have to say is probably obvious or bullshit - either way, it's already been thought about by a million people before you, who didn't think themselves so important to speak it out loud. Love yourself and you will become lazy and derive a sense of entitlement based on your abilities and chance; loathe more your very existence and you will strive to be more productive and useful.
Well, maybe you are fairly stupid. Either that or you're trying to play the rest of us for suckers. The self-loathing and productive person is useful to someone, but he derives no gain from his productivity.
This debate is not about the pluses and minuses of gasoline. The time for that discussion would have been decades ago. The debate is about what comes next.
On the contrary; that reasoning makes the assumption that gasoline must be replaced, regardless of the inferiority of the replacement.
Rather, I can disprove your implication by simply pointing out that gasoline has always shared the market with that other petroleum fuel. Diesel wouldn't exist if gasoline filled all transportation niches.
You claimed that we treat gasoline as a single solution to all transportation needs; we don't, so I generously assumed that you intended to include all the liquid petroleum fuels, which do make up an overwhelming share of current transportation energy needs. If it's only gasoline you meant, you're beating on a strawman.
Recent efforts, as anemic as they have been, to promote alternative fuels have been fairly successful. Cities wouldn't have fleets of CNG powered buses, etc., if it didn't make some sort of economic sense.
Right, like obtaining grants and subsidies.
Heck - I was talking about "all transportation needs" - the Apollo CM was powered by hydrogen fuel cells 40 years ago.
Electricity was generated from hydrogen fuel cells, but the actual motive power was provided by hydrazine and nitrogen peroxide.
The downside is that your job's temporary and you have fewer rights, as this article shows. That's the risk they choose to take.
Contractors may have fewer rights (or may not, in an at-will employment state). But this article doesn't show it. Any company can tell its employees to take a 10% pay cut or hit the road.
So in this day and age when it takes less than 15 minutes to establish a LLC and set yourself up as a private contractor, why would anyone work for one of these employment agencies?
These debates about looking for a single replacement for gasoline are puerile. The real point is that gasoline has never been a single solution to all transportation needs. That we continue to treat it this way is just a testament to the effectiveness of the oil industries PR flacks (starting back with Standard Oil).
It's actually a testament to just how good petroleum-derived liquid fuels are. They're lighter and burn cleaner and hotter than coal. They're easy to transport, being liquid. They're easy to store, again, liquid. They're plentiful compared to vegetable-derived fuels (and not by a little bit; by orders of magnitude). They have high energy density both by weight and by volume.
Hydrogen has basically one advantage, and that's a dubious one -- it has no carbon. It's a stone cold bitch to store and transport, since it leaks out of very small pores and embrittles metals. It has very low energy density by volume at practical pressures, and any advantage of its high energy density by weight is negated by the weight of its handling system. Most ways of producing it take more energy than can possibly be released by burning it; the other ways (producing it from coal or natural gas) produce CO2, which wrecks the advantage it has.
IMO, using corn was all a scam by the Bush/Cheney/Oil industry to delay even longer any meaningful reduction in oil usage.
Wrong players. Using corn is all a scam by the Archer Daniels Midland company. They were around before Bush/Cheney and they'll be around after Obama/Biden is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite those things, there's still a valid patent on a general purpose computer installed in a car. I think something's still broken.
IMO, that goes too far. If the defendant has (allegedly) infringed in plaintiff's home state, plaintiff should be free to sue there. And if the defendant has infringed somewhere other than either party's home state, and only there, the plaintiff should be free to sue there. (e.g. defendant based in New York sells something only in Florida which allegedly violates patents of Arizona company could be sued in Florida, even if defendant does not have a location in Florida)
I hear it'll be based on Bruce Schneier's Yarrow system.
Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, was born on August 17, 1944 Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was born on August 21, 1973 Larry Page, co-founder of Google, was born on March 26, 1973 Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple was born August 11, 1950 Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, born November 6, 1968 Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp, born November 1, 1950 You were saying, Mr. Gladwell? I didn't even have to reach for those.
For the same reason the US switched to first to invent. (The US used first to file in the past)
How much would, say, Vladimir Putin, pay to cause economic disruption in the United States?
That's the international sign for "I'm not an American, really I'm not, eh?"
Yeah, mostly the "crumbling infrastructure" thing is propaganda, used by people who want to get money to theoretically spend on fixing "crumbling infrastructure". But there are real examples of literally crumbling infrastructure in the road system, such as that bridge in Missouri which collapsed. Some of this is to be expected; infrastructure has to be maintained, and there will always be some parts of it nearing the end of its current maintenance cycle. And some is because the last place politicians like to spend money is on boring, useful stuff like road maintenance.
There is a NAFTA visa for professionals, but it's more limited than the European agreement.
Well, yes and no. It's certain most of the people in charge at those firms have enjoyed a lot more excess than most slashdotters. And it's certain they wouldn't be actually shocked by anything most of us have done. But there's two problems still
1) They're total hypocrites. Just because they used to (and perhaps still do) engage in various sorts of merriment does not mean they will won't reject a potential employee for the same or milder behavior.
2) The person doing the weeding out may actually be that boring.
We're in a society where a guy wins 14 Olympic gold medals and still gets fired for smoking a little weed. Tolerance is not the watchword of the day.
Um, "volatile" keyword?
The optimizer wouldn't do it unless there were no side effects to the right hand side of the short circuit operator.
So
if (foo && (*foo == CONSTANT))
and
if (!foo || (*foo == CONSTANT))
would be optimized in this way
but
if (foo && baz(*foo))
would not (since function baz could have side effects).
It doesn't matter what was at location 0; the test for null was still evaluated, but condition code arithmetic rather than branches were used to handle it.
Version 2.0 won't just steal data. It'll make trades. Aside from the obvious theft possibilities, the controller would have the ability to create his very own economic meltdown, in any companies he wished, limited only by the size of his botnet...
Until the perennial enemy of safety, performance, rears its head. For a long time (and perhaps still), the IBM POWER XLC compiler would optimize code like
if (foo && *foo == CONSTANT)
by ignoring the short-circuit and dereferencing the pointer even when it was null. This saves a branch and is apparently a significant time-saver in real-world code, but it does require the zero page be readable.
The second article looks more like it was sponsored by GE Medical or some other maker of MRI scanners rather than by health insurance companies. Health insurance companies _don't_ want new MRI machines purchased, whereas this article is claiming that 10-year-old machines are useless.
If some of the examples given in the article are representative, I have to side with the doctors on this one.
The glaring one to me: "A 2006 study of schizophrenia drugs found that old-line antipsychotics were as effective as pricey new ones."
Uh, yeah. Perhaps even more effective. The main problem with those old-line antipsychotics isn't their effectiveness, it's their side effects.
Others have pointed out that testing for cervical cancer is still useful after total hysterectomy (especially if the hysterectomy was for cervical cancer), despite what the author thinks.
Then radiologist or pathologist is the career for you!
The problem there is that there's no cost to the insurance company for denying a claim. And little market pressure on the insurance companies who have a policy of initially denying every claim, because the people getting denied aren't the people choosing the insurance.
IIRC, in the United States the practice of insuring people through their employers became standard during WWII, when companies could not raise wages (because of wage controls) in a tight labor market. They could, however, provide health insurance.
The current incarnation of HMOs came later, when the government required employers who offered health insurance to offer an HMO option.
The result, as you point out, was the extreme decoupling of the service provider and the service receiver, and the problems we have today.
No. For example, groups of athletes almost certainly consider themselves faster or stronger than average, but they're unlikely to define their group in terms of intelligence.
Occasionally. Then I look around at a lot of those other people out there, and I reject the hypothesis.
Well, you have a problem there. If you're not stupid, you refute your own hypothesis. If you are stupid, your judgement of others is likely faulty.
Well, maybe you are fairly stupid. Either that or you're trying to play the rest of us for suckers. The self-loathing and productive person is useful to someone, but he derives no gain from his productivity.
On the contrary; that reasoning makes the assumption that gasoline must be replaced, regardless of the inferiority of the replacement.
You claimed that we treat gasoline as a single solution to all transportation needs; we don't, so I generously assumed that you intended to include all the liquid petroleum fuels, which do make up an overwhelming share of current transportation energy needs. If it's only gasoline you meant, you're beating on a strawman.
Right, like obtaining grants and subsidies.
Electricity was generated from hydrogen fuel cells, but the actual motive power was provided by hydrazine and nitrogen peroxide.
Contractors may have fewer rights (or may not, in an at-will employment state). But this article doesn't show it. Any company can tell its employees to take a 10% pay cut or hit the road.
Because pimping yourself out is difficult.
It's actually a testament to just how good petroleum-derived liquid fuels are. They're lighter and burn cleaner and hotter than coal. They're easy to transport, being liquid. They're easy to store, again, liquid. They're plentiful compared to vegetable-derived fuels (and not by a little bit; by orders of magnitude). They have high energy density both by weight and by volume.
Hydrogen has basically one advantage, and that's a dubious one -- it has no carbon. It's a stone cold bitch to store and transport, since it leaks out of very small pores and embrittles metals. It has very low energy density by volume at practical pressures, and any advantage of its high energy density by weight is negated by the weight of its handling system. Most ways of producing it take more energy than can possibly be released by burning it; the other ways (producing it from coal or natural gas) produce CO2, which wrecks the advantage it has.
Wrong players. Using corn is all a scam by the Archer Daniels Midland company. They were around before Bush/Cheney and they'll be around after Obama/Biden is gone.