I mean, suppose you think about something that could be done, not the how, really, but the product, the result. You just go ahead and patent it. One day, someone creative, resourceful will be able to implement it and -- there -- you pull your patent out of the drawer!
Yes. The Supreme Court noticed this tendency in Atlantic Works v. Brady in 1882.
"It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts."
Whoever rated this "+1, Insightful" must have just been trying to substitute for the missing "-1, Wrong". Anonymous speech is protected. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech...", not "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech so long as you post your name so the cop can retaliate".
GMail requires you to authenticate with their SMTP servers to send mail. His choices were to include the account password, implement his own SMTP server and build it into the program, or use an open SMTP server.
Or door #4: Use the victim's authentication information to send mail.
So could someone enlighten me as to how I could design a PC to die in exactly one or two years so I can make a fortune in warranty repair costs?
There's a maxim to the effect that anyone can build a bridge; almost anyone can build a bridge to carry a load. But it takes an engineer to build a bridge that will carry the load, but fail to carry any more. Same thing with designing devices to fail just outside of warranty; it probably took hundreds of man-years of engineering experience to perfect that.
Yeah, but with Trinitron, you didn't need the scare quotes. Well, except for the high voltage cutoff capacitor in some 13"/14" monitors, but that wasn't the tube's fault.
The reason is that ING allows the users to KNOW that they are on the correct website through the use of a custom image of their choice.
Bank of America has the same system, so that fails to explain the difference in ID theft.
Probably one reason is that ING Direct gets more savvy users than BoA.
Unlikely. I can't remember where I read it originally, but a quick Google search brings up a report with details of a study of top universities. Turns out in the top 146 universities, 74% of the students are from the top economic quartile, 17% from the second, 6% from the third, and 3% from the last. I don't know how egalitarian Canada's top collages are, but if they're anything like the ones here in the States, it is unlikely that the average student is dirt poor.
You're conflating the students with the families they come from. Students don't have a lot of spending money just because their parents have decent incomes.
There may be all sorts of trickery involved in what makes Akamai work, but the patent covers more than that trickery. It covers any system where a webserver modifies a URL to include a hostname whose DNS entry is served up by two DNS servers in the system, and whose content is served up by a host other than the webserver.
For examle, if I have a webserver at example.com, and it modifies image URLs within it to point to foo.bar.example.com, and there's an 'example.com' DNS server which contains the NS record for 'bar.example.com', and a 'bar.example.com' which has an A record pointing 'foo.bar.example.com' to some machine other than example.com, I've infringed claim 1 of the patent. If there are two nameservers for example.com, I've also infringed claim 2. If there are two nameservers for bar.example.com, I've infringed claim 3.
Maybe it's just me, but I was under the impression that you couldn't move any more heat by using waste heat for power than you could by letting the waste heat move passively across the gradient in the first place.
With wireless services, you're fighting with the laws of physics. You can probably still get all those 9s, but you'd be doing things like using multiple frequency bands and paths. Your phone would get heavier and draw more power and cost a lot more, as would service, but you could do it. Wireline services just don't have to deal with the same kind of problems; barring equipment failure (or software failure, if anyone remembers the outages associated with the SS7 upgrade), your call will go through.
Satellite, same thing. Want more nines? Use more satellites and frequencies simultaneously.
Cable TV is a fairer comparison. The issue here is no one cares. It's just not worth the extra cost to do; it's just TV. Internet? You can get as much reliability as you're willing to pay for.
You and I know that if copyright Law were to be abolished, source code would be treated as Trade Secrets by those who don't currently believe in Free Software.
Without copyright law, lack of source code is just an engineering problem. I've reverse-engineered some stuff from assembler to C by hand, and there are plenty of (probably patented) techniques for automating the process. Remove copyright law from the equation and anything interesting released as a binary blob will end up as reverse-engineered source soon enough.
They tried to serve Wikileaks with a notice, and Wikileaks was rude and evasive.
No, Baer's lawyers were rude and evasive. They started out with a demand to "immediately" send information on notices with respect to Wikileaks's wrongdoing, which is rude. When asked for jurisdiction and the identity of their client, they responded "California, the UK, and Switzerland" -- that's evasive, as California comprises many jurisdictions (both State and Federal), and I'm sure the UK and Switzerland have different jurisdictions as well. And they refused to disclose the identity of their client.
They went on to claim that Wikileaks was legally obliged to provide DMCA contact information, which is simply a lie; if you don't claim shelter under the DMCA, you need not provide such information.
Baer's lawyers then threatened to sue Wikileaks in California, a threat they made good on. They still didn't name the jurisdiction, though at least they said it was Federal. Only after that threat did Wikileaks get snippy with them.
Problem solved. I bet the backlog drops by at least 3/4 what it is today.
Sure. But you'd throw out a lot of legitimate patents. A patent covering e.g. "A method to produce chemical X..." which goes on to specify the method (not one which uses that verbiage to cover all methods, as do many bad patents) is not a bad patent, unless you're opposed to all patents.
I'd pose to you a give-a-man-a-fish metaphor. Why work on finding good programmers when you can find a good project manager - probably with a PhD - who can forge hard-working programmers into good and hard-working programmers.
You're kidding, right? A good programming project manager with a Ph.D? Not nonexistent, but certainly rare at least outside academia. And turning a hard-working programmer into a good and hard-working programmer? Not going to happen if the programmer doesn't have the talent.
Instead, turn down the guy who can do integral approximations in his head and hire the guy who took an hour but did it all on paper without taking a break. Why? Because if you hire savants, they'll do their work in 10 minutes and bill you for 2 hours because that's the time it takes for everyone else to build the same amount of code.
Apologies to most of/. for ruining your perfect scam.
If you're hiring them, you're probably not paying them by the hour anyway. You'll have to pay more for the savant, but not 12 times as much. So you win big.
If you're taking them on as contractors, that's also a win for both parties. You get the same amount of work done, in less time, for the same money, by hiring the savant. What do you have to complain about?
Uhh, how long does it take to notice that someone is wearing something? It's not particularly hard or time consuming. With all the IQ points available to people who often make statements like that, one would figure that a half-second of processing in your head would be OK.
It's not a matter of noticing what they're wearing. It's noticing that something's wrong with it. Many people find black shoes with a brown belt to be jarring; it looks obviously wrong. Many other people do not. A lot more of the former are in management, a lot more of the latter are geeks. (BTW, blue socks with black pants is a more subtle but similar issue.).
Particularly for males, fashion isn't that difficult to do properly, just take the few minutes to do so. Women's fashion is a whole other animal. Fortunately or not; I haven't decided.
Well, if you're at a suit-and-tie place, like the old IBM, fashion for men is trivial. If you're expected to pull off some range of "business casual", it's a lot harder.
I'm a hacker, not a corporate type. If I want a key to the executive washroom, I'll make one myself.
If you believe this article and the many like it (and I do), geeks will never make it to the boardroom as long as they continue to be geeks, unless they're damn good actors. And acting like an executive means spending all your working hours (which will be long) pretending to be something you're not; that's pretty stressful. You generally can't be a geek and an executive at the same time (Bill Gates is the exception; you're not him). The mindsets required are totally different. If fund raising, corporate strategic planning, finance, or managing the day to day operations of a company are your thing, you're probabaly not a geek. If they aren't, you're probably not an executive.
Even libel is only rarely a criminal offense. And some of the things, like making fun of a teacher's "fat legs", aren't even libel. Juvenile namecalling isn't libel.
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi
on
Internet Pranks in Schools
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· Score: 4, Insightful
For example, I have never heard of teachers were the pupils posted posters all over town describing how much they disliked them. And if it happened, I'm sure it would involve a criminal case.
On what grounds, littering? It's legal to dislike someone. It's legal to say you dislike someone. It's legal to make posters describing how much you dislike someone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. The Supreme Court noticed this tendency in Atlantic Works v. Brady in 1882.
"It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts."
Whoever rated this "+1, Insightful" must have just been trying to substitute for the missing "-1, Wrong". Anonymous speech is protected. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech...", not "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech so long as you post your name so the cop can retaliate".
ObCite: http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity
In most cases where that's asserted, "land of the free" means the law shouldn't exist in the first place.
Sure, but just because the broken window is a net negative for society doesn't mean that glaziers don't benefit.
There's a maxim to the effect that anyone can build a bridge; almost anyone can build a bridge to carry a load. But it takes an engineer to build a bridge that will carry the load, but fail to carry any more. Same thing with designing devices to fail just outside of warranty; it probably took hundreds of man-years of engineering experience to perfect that.
You're conflating the students with the families they come from. Students don't have a lot of spending money just because their parents have decent incomes.
It's called the MacBook Pro. I'm sure he has a few. The Air isn't for him.
And of course everyone wants 3G on the iPhone. Judging from the sales, it's not a fatal flaw.
There may be all sorts of trickery involved in what makes Akamai work, but the patent covers more than that trickery. It covers any system where a webserver modifies a URL to include a hostname whose DNS entry is served up by two DNS servers in the system, and whose content is served up by a host other than the webserver.
For examle, if I have a webserver at example.com, and it modifies image URLs within it to point to foo.bar.example.com, and there's an 'example.com' DNS server which contains the NS record for 'bar.example.com', and a 'bar.example.com' which has an A record pointing 'foo.bar.example.com' to some machine other than example.com, I've infringed claim 1 of the patent. If there are two nameservers for example.com, I've also infringed claim 2. If there are two nameservers for bar.example.com, I've infringed claim 3.
Maybe it's just me, but I was under the impression that you couldn't move any more heat by using waste heat for power than you could by letting the waste heat move passively across the gradient in the first place.
With wireless services, you're fighting with the laws of physics. You can probably still get all those 9s, but you'd be doing things like using multiple frequency bands and paths. Your phone would get heavier and draw more power and cost a lot more, as would service, but you could do it. Wireline services just don't have to deal with the same kind of problems; barring equipment failure (or software failure, if anyone remembers the outages associated with the SS7 upgrade), your call will go through. Satellite, same thing. Want more nines? Use more satellites and frequencies simultaneously. Cable TV is a fairer comparison. The issue here is no one cares. It's just not worth the extra cost to do; it's just TV. Internet? You can get as much reliability as you're willing to pay for.
Without copyright law, lack of source code is just an engineering problem. I've reverse-engineered some stuff from assembler to C by hand, and there are plenty of (probably patented) techniques for automating the process. Remove copyright law from the equation and anything interesting released as a binary blob will end up as reverse-engineered source soon enough.
When the patent backlog reaches 20 years, the whole bad patent problem will have been solved. By the time patents are approved, they'll have expired!
No, Baer's lawyers were rude and evasive. They started out with a demand to "immediately" send information on notices with respect to Wikileaks's wrongdoing, which is rude. When asked for jurisdiction and the identity of their client, they responded "California, the UK, and Switzerland" -- that's evasive, as California comprises many jurisdictions (both State and Federal), and I'm sure the UK and Switzerland have different jurisdictions as well. And they refused to disclose the identity of their client.
They went on to claim that Wikileaks was legally obliged to provide DMCA contact information, which is simply a lie; if you don't claim shelter under the DMCA, you need not provide such information.
Baer's lawyers then threatened to sue Wikileaks in California, a threat they made good on. They still didn't name the jurisdiction, though at least they said it was Federal. Only after that threat did Wikileaks get snippy with them.
This is all on the Wikileaks site.
Sure. But you'd throw out a lot of legitimate patents. A patent covering e.g. "A method to produce chemical X..." which goes on to specify the method (not one which uses that verbiage to cover all methods, as do many bad patents) is not a bad patent, unless you're opposed to all patents.
You're kidding, right? A good programming project manager with a Ph.D? Not nonexistent, but certainly rare at least outside academia. And turning a hard-working programmer into a good and hard-working programmer? Not going to happen if the programmer doesn't have the talent.
If you're hiring them, you're probably not paying them by the hour anyway. You'll have to pay more for the savant, but not 12 times as much. So you win big.
If you're taking them on as contractors, that's also a win for both parties. You get the same amount of work done, in less time, for the same money, by hiring the savant. What do you have to complain about?
It's not a matter of noticing what they're wearing. It's noticing that something's wrong with it. Many people find black shoes with a brown belt to be jarring; it looks obviously wrong. Many other people do not. A lot more of the former are in management, a lot more of the latter are geeks. (BTW, blue socks with black pants is a more subtle but similar issue.).
Well, if you're at a suit-and-tie place, like the old IBM, fashion for men is trivial. If you're expected to pull off some range of "business casual", it's a lot harder.
I'm a hacker, not a corporate type. If I want a key to the executive washroom, I'll make one myself.
If you believe this article and the many like it (and I do), geeks will never make it to the boardroom as long as they continue to be geeks, unless they're damn good actors. And acting like an executive means spending all your working hours (which will be long) pretending to be something you're not; that's pretty stressful. You generally can't be a geek and an executive at the same time (Bill Gates is the exception; you're not him). The mindsets required are totally different. If fund raising, corporate strategic planning, finance, or managing the day to day operations of a company are your thing, you're probabaly not a geek. If they aren't, you're probably not an executive.
Even libel is only rarely a criminal offense. And some of the things, like making fun of a teacher's "fat legs", aren't even libel. Juvenile namecalling isn't libel.
On what grounds, littering? It's legal to dislike someone. It's legal to say you dislike someone.
It's legal to make posters describing how much you dislike someone.