I'm not sure you understand what an IDE is. GoLive and Dreamweaver are not IDEs. An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, needs to have, among other things, a compiler/interpreter and debugger:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment
Eclipse is an IDE, VisualStudio and XCode are also IDEs. They are generally used by developers, and any good web developer in this day and age is typically staring at either CSS, Markup, or Code of some sort.
Designers clearly need a different environment. But for a good developer, writing the markup should be the easy part. Manipulating it reliably across environments, managing state, etc should be the hard nuts to crack.
And notepad is not superior to a good IDE. A GOOD text editor (which notepad is not) is not superior to a good IDE. But I would certainly rather have VIM or TextMate or NotePad++ than plain old notebook if I can't have a decent IDE.
I think we are already seeing where the success of desktop linux will come from, and its affordability. Those cheap Wallmart PCs, the EEEPC, the XO, all point the way to where success will come for linux. Right now, from a hardware perspective, there isn't much driving the need for beefier hardware from a consumer perspective besides memory-hungry OSs.
The average user wants to surf the web, watch video, and do some word processing. That's about it, and they don't need eight cores and sixteen gigs of RAM to do it. I'm old enough to remember the days when the Commodore 64 DESTROYED the (then hardly ubiquitous) IBM in sales by creating a $250 computer that you could take home and just plug in and go.
The fact that you can build a very usable, snappy system with linux on a quarter of the hardware that you need to just make Vista run is going to be very attractive to a certain segment of the consumer world that are not already linux users. And, this, in turn is going to provide a user base that can propell the system forward. System manufacturers seem to be figuring this out, with more and more of these systems, like the new Shuttle KPC, targeting this market.
The sources that you are using are incomplete. They do not seperate anti-theism and atheism. I have looked at both the Merriam-Webster dictionary and here is no definition for anti-theism at all. That is why in their case they have just combined the two definitions into one word. This works fine because that is the definition that is more commonly used (incorrectly however) for the word atheism.
The parent post was titled Please Check Your Definitions. I did, and they did not agree with the gp. That was my entire point. You may want to quarrel with Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia on the definitions of these words, which is fine, but to get snarky at someone for using the words in the contexts that these mainstream sources define them as is just, well, being bitchy.
I did check on the definitions, and I would suggest that you are tilting things a bit in favor of your personal beliefs. Merriam Webster defines as such:
Atheism:
1 archaic : ungodliness, wickedness
2 a: a disbelief in the existence of deity b: the doctrine that there is no deity
Agnostic
1: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god
2: a person unwilling to commit to an opinion about something (political agnostics)
For a second source, here is what Wikipedia says on the matter:
Atheism is the disbelief[1] in the existence of any deities.[2] It is contrasted with theism, the belief in a God or gods. Atheism is commonly defined as the positive belief that deities do not exist, or as the deliberate rejection of theism.[3][4][5] However, others--including most atheistic philosophers and groups--define atheism as the simple absence of belief in deities[6][7][8] (cf. nontheism), thereby designating many agnostics, and people who have never heard of gods, such as newborn children, as atheists as well.[9][10] In recent years, some atheists have adopted the terms strong and weak atheism to clarify whether they consider their stance one of positive belief (strong atheism) or the mere absence of belief (weak atheism).
And here is what it says on agnosticism:
Agnosticism (from the Greek a, meaning "without" and gnosis, "knowledge", translating to unknowable) is the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims--particularly theological claims regarding metaphysics, afterlife or the existence of God, god(s), or deities--is unknown or (possibly) inherently unknowable.
Every source I could find declared atheism to be the disbelief of a higher power, and agnosticism to encompass both lack of belief or the belief in an inability to prove the existence of a higher power. If you are going to criticize people for not doing the research, at least have the courtesy to do it yourself.
Okay, I realize that you are simply making snide comments about the value of traditional investment vehicles, and that I might be feeding a troll here, but I am simply explaining the argument the analyst takes in the article, which you seem to not have read or are ignoring altogether. It does not matter what you think of the stock market, etcetera. The analyst has stated clear, identifiable criteria that differentiate the stock market and what they regard as a market in Second Life. You can dismiss the value of trading ownership in a company, but that doesn't change the fact that it is different than what the analyst claims is happening in Second Life.
Roughly speaking, a Ponzi scheme is one in which the perpetrators make false claims in order to lure investors. Once they have some investors coming in, they begin to pay back the earliest investors in order to create hype and garner more investors. People make money in ponzi schemes, but only by being at the top of the pyramid. What separates a Ponzi scheme from an actual market is that in an actual market, the items being traded have value outside of the system itself, and that access to liquidity is therefore available at levels other than the top. The article claims that because cash exchanges and the corresponding exchange rates are controlled by the people at the 'top', they are the only people with the ability to achieve substantial liquidity, and therefore, to make any money. This is why they say it resembles a Ponzi scheme more than an actual market.
That would be the so-called "book value". However, many healthy companies are worth much more that their assets...
This is a more realistic source of value. Value is based on income versus risk. However, even here, many companies are/were tremendously overvalued (no way the company's income (even future income) could justify the share price), especially during the period before the bubble burst...
Differences in valuation and perception are what make the stock market work, and why people make and loose money speculating in the market (and in other markets and industries as well). You can pay too much for anything, be it a stock, a pig, a bushel of corn, or necklace with fake diamonds you find on ebay. That doesn't make the market a pyramid, because those things have value outside of the market itself, and can be transfered independently of the market place. On the other hand, in a pyramind scheme, the items traded generally have all of their value because of the scheme itself, not because of their value to the outside world, and access to liquidity is not independent of the people who sold you the item.
... as is the case with most shares as well (yes, some companies do have share buyback programs, but these are the exception, rather than the rule...).
This is simply false. Shareholders not only control the company, determine who gets serves on the board, and other items of fiscal policy, but they have very well-defined avenues of legal recourse. Not only that, but the company itself has no control over the valuation of its stock other than how it presents its performance to the outside world. Which once again, is strictly regulated. Once again, you may have issue with the way that the stock market works, but it is clearly different than the way that a pyramid scheme operates. TFA claims that all access to valuation is controlled (and manipulated) by the people at the top to their financial gain, and the detriment of others, and you can make snide comments about how the stock market operates, but it does clearly operate in a manner different than that of a Ponzi scheme.
... or any other thing that may give money to the lucky?
No, because the value of a company's stock is based on real assets, liabilities, and income: all of which are easily translatable to real money, and which commonly pay cash dividends. This is commonly referred to as liquidity- the ability to transform whatever type of investment one has made into actual cash. The article asserts that transferring money from Second Life 'assets' to real-world cash is much more difficult than people are being made to believe, and that the only way to make money is to pass off those 'assets' to some other sucker.
This is yet another reason for artists not to sign with the RIAA and its cronies. This will drive a more consumer oriented driven alternative to this crap. It's just a matter of time... som long as they keep doing stuff like this.
What? This has nothing to do with the RIAA, and it eliminates consumer choice rather than driving it. If you had read the article (or even the summary), you would have learned that the bill seemingly limits how webcasters can distribute their media, locking them into DRM-enabled formats. I don't see what it has to do with who artists sign with- if anything, it adversely effects the independant distribution channels more than the ones advocated by the major labels.
It's not so much that it contains 'rough spelling and grammar' as it was 'written in Middle English'. Middle English is that period in the English language from after Romanticisation (following the Norman invasion in 1066) to roughly a century before Shakespeare.
It's also worth mentioning at this point that the concepts of correct spelling and correct grammar are essentially 20th century concepts within the English language. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the first in the language, was not published until 1755. Webster's Dictionary, the first such book in America, did not appear until 1828. Prior to the advent of Dictionaries, spellings were not considered absolute. In Shakespeare's time, it was not uncommon to spell your name differently on different occasions. Not only are spelling and grammar newcomers to our language, the concept of 'correct grammar' is a bit of a dated one. Linguists have come to realize that usage patterns vary from dialect to dialect and context to context. How we speak whe we are discussing Psychology tends to be very different from say, discussing Philosophy. Instead of saying 'incorrect grammar', it is better to speak of 'poor style'.
Let's face it, airplanes generally last 30 years or more before they are retired. Now, I don't put too much stock in a bunch of non-engineer pilots blaming random problems, but if there are problems with these on-board systems and electronic interferance, they need to be fixed, because electronic devices are not going to become less scarce.
We routinely hear stories on the biomedical front about how embedded electrical devices are solving problems that traditional medicine couldn't, or didn't solve well. Since the Jarvis heart, biomedical devices have bee cropping up at an increasing pace. I don't think you can ask the guy with a life-sustaining device embedded in his body to turn it off for the flight.
Add to this wearable computer technology, RFID tags everywhere, smart consumables, etc., and it is very possible that in 30 years it won't be possible to just tell people to turn their devices off. If there is a problem, fix it. If there isn't, stop scaring people.
Netflix is great for people like me and my roommate. The best part about netflix, IMHO, is the fact that you can keep a DVD for as long as you want it. We were the sort of people who always were paying late fees before Netflix. Now, we can keep it around until we're done with it, and then return it without the effort of even leaving the house.
And as for your lack of organization issue, remember that you get to keep a certain number of movies on hand. The number varies depending on how much you pay, but if you send your movies back after you watch them, you will have half a dozen DVDs sitting around at any one time that you haven't watched yet.
So, in other words, next time your wife and you decide on the spur of the moment to go and get a movie, instead of getting in your vehicle and driving to the DVD store, you simply walk over to your DVD player and pick one of the movies that you have lying about that you'd already decided you wanted to watch.
Prior art? I find it awefully strange that Navigator 2.0 was released in the fall of 1995, introducing frames to the HTML worl, and months later some corporation is trying to patent one of the primary purposes of this innovation. From the Netscape website:
These properties offer new possibilities:
Elements that the user should always see, such as control bars, copyright notices, and title graphics can be placed in a static, individual frame. As the user navigates the site in "live" frames, the static frame's contents remain fixed, even though adjoining frames redraw.
Table of contents are more functional. One frame can contain TOC links that, when clicked, display results in an adjoining frame.
Frames side-by-side design allows queries to be posed and answered on the same page, with one frame holding the query form, and the other presenting the results.
If you read the legal letter they sent, it seems this is precisely what they think they're patent covers. I'm beginning to get to the point where I think we need to enact criminal penalties for this type of obvious scum-mongering.
This is awesome! This has plausable commercial implications. How nice would it be to goto a bar and not have to worry about tipping someone, you just slide your credit card or insert your money and select your drink and you get it in 10 seconds. If I owned a bar I would consider it.
You obviously haven't spent enough time in a bar, and have never been a bartender. Bars don't sell liqour - they sell socialization. You already have a self-service bartender, it's called your home liqour cabinet. Most humans go out becuase they want to socialize. They like talking sports with Jeff behind the bar, or flirting with Suzy the cocktail waitress.
Any bar using these would loose revenue quickly. I've been a bartender, and I can tell you this - a good tender, or a good staff can easily double or triple a bar's income. A bad one can drive customers away. A good bartender makes customers feel good... so they stay and spend more money. If that bartender makes a good enough impression, they might keep coming back and doing so on different nights. A bad bartender makes people go elsewhere. So you can have your robot bar, but I'll stick to my old-fashioned, human charisma driven service model. And come Friday night, I bet my bar will be the one that's packed.
Why would a company want to stop this free advertising?
There's actually a pretty good reason for this. The sales prices in question were advanced information on prices on the most competitive shopping day of the year. Typically, each year, consumers spend more money on the day after Thanksgiving than any other day. Knowing this, most of the big retailers slash their margins on certain key products to almost nothing (sometimes even to loss levels) in order to woo customers into their store. In other words - Wal-Mart might take a loss on a certain hot item, knowing that this would bring tons of customers into their stores. They will make up their money when these customers buy other items as well.
Now here's the problem: this technique only works well when you have the lowest price around. If your competitor (let's say Kmart or Target) finds out in advance and udercuts you a few dollars, not only are they getting those customers you hoped to woo, but you've got an item on your hands that's losing you money. Ideally, in the capitalist world, you'd simply lower your prices another notch, right? Well, unfortunately, circulars and advertising take time and money to create, and assuming you knew about your competitor's decision, you probably don't have the time to adjust. And you can be damn sure that your competitor isn't just going to call you up and tell you about THEIR promotion.
These types of games can end up making companies millions, or losing them. I used to work in advertising at a newspaper. This is why our clients could never come back to our production areas. We placed a great deal of importance on safeguarding this information for our clients. So THAT's why they want to stop this 'free advertising.'
That having been said, FatWallet is obviously beeing abused by the BigCompany/Lot'sOLawyers syndrome and I'm glad they're fighting back. It seem's to me that the main reason that they used the DMCA in this case and one of the worst features of the bill is because of it's ability to suppress content prior to due process. And trade secrets or no, in my books that's just plain wrong.
I felt that I needed to reply to this. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I guess maybe it's because I'm involved in the arts I see this differently, but for me not only is there no question that this is wrong, it is the type of thing that I would fight and die for.
Anyone who thinks this is alright needs to read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and this essay. Not all films are made purely for entertainment. Many films are made by large groups of people who care deeply about them, have spent their life perfecting their craft, and have come together to make something they feel is important. They have spent anywhere from six months to several years of their lives. When it is all over, regardless of how great the result is, people involved in such a work often think of it like a child. What these people do is the equivolent of saying "Sure, I'll watch your kid for the afternoon - I'm just going to need to chop off his hand first."
I know to some of the less culturally sophisticated, movies might just mean an afternoon at a Suburban multiplex watching some trashy action flick with millions of dollars in special effects, but to others, art has been instrumental in shaping the world we live in. It can be a powerful force, which is the reason artists are so often oppressed and their work destroyed. Before you so wantonly advocate the destruction of other's work, remember that right now their are people fighting for these rights you wish to discard. Many of these works deal with political, sociological, or philosophical issues and contribute to the way people view the world. Maintaining the right of people to express themselves freely without interlocution is the single most essential building block of a free society.
I heard a local actor/playwright talk about performing in Prague before the fall, and how everyone had met at a spot in the woods, and how he realized as he looked around at the nervous spectators that they had risked their lives to come see him perform. Now mind you, it wasn't that these people couldn't see theatre - they actually had some great theatre there - it was just all 'cleaned up' for them by an authoratarian government.
As Ray Bradbury says, you have a choice to view my work or not to view it. If I make a movie about something that offends you, don't watch it. If you can't find enough movies you really like, make your own. But for the sake of everything good in this world, don't destroy someone elses blood sweat and passion because you have a queasy stomache.
The way I see it, telling an ISP to block access to child porn sites is like telling Interstate 80 to prevent motorists from going to Texas.
I feel sorry for the ISPs who are going to be jerked around by a government who has no idea how to implement an unworkable law. This is just another case where uniformed legislation is going to raise price for the public and make life difficult for private business.
Insect evolution rates are problematic
on
Every Species on Earth
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
In order to understand why these estimates are so large, you have to realize the incredible biodiversity of the plan and insect kingdoms. Plants make up to 22 percent of the total number of species, and insects pretty much account for the rest. Mammals take up considerably less than 1% of that total.
Many of these species have such high evolutionary rates that they can evolve very quickly and often fill extremely specialized roles in a niche environment. Given this high rate of evolution, the mind-bogelling estimates of the total number, and the intrusionary nature of detection techniques, isn't this goal a little too unrealistic? It would seem to me that by the time you finally have catalogued them 'all,' a good percentage will have become extinct and whole bunch of new players will have emerged. In addition, verifying the continued existance of these species whould be an enourmous job.
The biggest problem I see with this proposal is that the creators of this effort have neglected to give the journals enough credit for the services they do provide: quality controll and topic selection.
A person who reads Journal of Academic Subject X does so partially because that journal has cultivated a reputation for quality in their field. Researchers are busy people, and they don't want to read every article by every crackpot out there. They want to keep current on the groundbreaking research and be aware of the new work that might apply to their own.
In other words, it's probably not enough to just 'get a critical mass' of work, especially if the critical mass is composed entirely of articles rejected for publication by journals. It's also not enough to just have a lot of information available - there must be some way of determining the quality of the work as well.
It seems to me what these guys really need, more than anything, is some sort of peer review process, similar to the moderation process here, that could help to filter out the bad stuff, make the truly groundbreaking work visible, and make sure that articles are categorized correctly. This would be an affordable way of providing the services that the editors of these journals normally provide while keeping the advantages that come with having a large electronic archive.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure you understand what an IDE is. GoLive and Dreamweaver are not IDEs. An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, needs to have, among other things, a compiler/interpreter and debugger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment Eclipse is an IDE, VisualStudio and XCode are also IDEs. They are generally used by developers, and any good web developer in this day and age is typically staring at either CSS, Markup, or Code of some sort. Designers clearly need a different environment. But for a good developer, writing the markup should be the easy part. Manipulating it reliably across environments, managing state, etc should be the hard nuts to crack. And notepad is not superior to a good IDE. A GOOD text editor (which notepad is not) is not superior to a good IDE. But I would certainly rather have VIM or TextMate or NotePad++ than plain old notebook if I can't have a decent IDE.
I think we are already seeing where the success of desktop linux will come from, and its affordability. Those cheap Wallmart PCs, the EEEPC, the XO, all point the way to where success will come for linux. Right now, from a hardware perspective, there isn't much driving the need for beefier hardware from a consumer perspective besides memory-hungry OSs. The average user wants to surf the web, watch video, and do some word processing. That's about it, and they don't need eight cores and sixteen gigs of RAM to do it. I'm old enough to remember the days when the Commodore 64 DESTROYED the (then hardly ubiquitous) IBM in sales by creating a $250 computer that you could take home and just plug in and go. The fact that you can build a very usable, snappy system with linux on a quarter of the hardware that you need to just make Vista run is going to be very attractive to a certain segment of the consumer world that are not already linux users. And, this, in turn is going to provide a user base that can propell the system forward. System manufacturers seem to be figuring this out, with more and more of these systems, like the new Shuttle KPC, targeting this market.
The parent post was titled Please Check Your Definitions. I did, and they did not agree with the gp. That was my entire point. You may want to quarrel with Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia on the definitions of these words, which is fine, but to get snarky at someone for using the words in the contexts that these mainstream sources define them as is just, well, being bitchy.
I did check on the definitions, and I would suggest that you are tilting things a bit in favor of your personal beliefs. Merriam Webster defines as such:
Atheism:
1 archaic : ungodliness, wickedness
2 a: a disbelief in the existence of deity b: the doctrine that there is no deity
Agnostic
1: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god
2: a person unwilling to commit to an opinion about something (political agnostics)
For a second source, here is what Wikipedia says on the matter:
And here is what it says on agnosticism:
Every source I could find declared atheism to be the disbelief of a higher power, and agnosticism to encompass both lack of belief or the belief in an inability to prove the existence of a higher power. If you are going to criticize people for not doing the research, at least have the courtesy to do it yourself.
Okay, I realize that you are simply making snide comments about the value of traditional investment vehicles, and that I might be feeding a troll here, but I am simply explaining the argument the analyst takes in the article, which you seem to not have read or are ignoring altogether. It does not matter what you think of the stock market, etcetera. The analyst has stated clear, identifiable criteria that differentiate the stock market and what they regard as a market in Second Life. You can dismiss the value of trading ownership in a company, but that doesn't change the fact that it is different than what the analyst claims is happening in Second Life.
Roughly speaking, a Ponzi scheme is one in which the perpetrators make false claims in order to lure investors. Once they have some investors coming in, they begin to pay back the earliest investors in order to create hype and garner more investors. People make money in ponzi schemes, but only by being at the top of the pyramid. What separates a Ponzi scheme from an actual market is that in an actual market, the items being traded have value outside of the system itself, and that access to liquidity is therefore available at levels other than the top. The article claims that because cash exchanges and the corresponding exchange rates are controlled by the people at the 'top', they are the only people with the ability to achieve substantial liquidity, and therefore, to make any money. This is why they say it resembles a Ponzi scheme more than an actual market.
Differences in valuation and perception are what make the stock market work, and why people make and loose money speculating in the market (and in other markets and industries as well). You can pay too much for anything, be it a stock, a pig, a bushel of corn, or necklace with fake diamonds you find on ebay. That doesn't make the market a pyramid, because those things have value outside of the market itself, and can be transfered independently of the market place. On the other hand, in a pyramind scheme, the items traded generally have all of their value because of the scheme itself, not because of their value to the outside world, and access to liquidity is not independent of the people who sold you the item.
This is simply false. Shareholders not only control the company, determine who gets serves on the board, and other items of fiscal policy, but they have very well-defined avenues of legal recourse. Not only that, but the company itself has no control over the valuation of its stock other than how it presents its performance to the outside world. Which once again, is strictly regulated. Once again, you may have issue with the way that the stock market works, but it is clearly different than the way that a pyramid scheme operates. TFA claims that all access to valuation is controlled (and manipulated) by the people at the top to their financial gain, and the detriment of others, and you can make snide comments about how the stock market operates, but it does clearly operate in a manner different than that of a Ponzi scheme.
No, because the value of a company's stock is based on real assets, liabilities, and income: all of which are easily translatable to real money, and which commonly pay cash dividends. This is commonly referred to as liquidity- the ability to transform whatever type of investment one has made into actual cash. The article asserts that transferring money from Second Life 'assets' to real-world cash is much more difficult than people are being made to believe, and that the only way to make money is to pass off those 'assets' to some other sucker.
What? This has nothing to do with the RIAA, and it eliminates consumer choice rather than driving it. If you had read the article (or even the summary), you would have learned that the bill seemingly limits how webcasters can distribute their media, locking them into DRM-enabled formats. I don't see what it has to do with who artists sign with- if anything, it adversely effects the independant distribution channels more than the ones advocated by the major labels.
"I would have your report, but, uh, Floyd smoked the second disc of your backup."
It's not so much that it contains 'rough spelling and grammar' as it was 'written in Middle English'. Middle English is that period in the English language from after Romanticisation (following the Norman invasion in 1066) to roughly a century before Shakespeare.
It's also worth mentioning at this point that the concepts of correct spelling and correct grammar are essentially 20th century concepts within the English language. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the first in the language, was not published until 1755. Webster's Dictionary, the first such book in America, did not appear until 1828. Prior to the advent of Dictionaries, spellings were not considered absolute. In Shakespeare's time, it was not uncommon to spell your name differently on different occasions. Not only are spelling and grammar newcomers to our language, the concept of 'correct grammar' is a bit of a dated one. Linguists have come to realize that usage patterns vary from dialect to dialect and context to context. How we speak whe we are discussing Psychology tends to be very different from say, discussing Philosophy. Instead of saying 'incorrect grammar', it is better to speak of 'poor style'.
From the list of Operating Systems:
What's not there?I think we all knew that already...
....by 'not there', he does mean 'one monkey short of a circus', right?
Let's face it, airplanes generally last 30 years or more before they are retired. Now, I don't put too much stock in a bunch of non-engineer pilots blaming random problems, but if there are problems with these on-board systems and electronic interferance, they need to be fixed, because electronic devices are not going to become less scarce.
We routinely hear stories on the biomedical front about how embedded electrical devices are solving problems that traditional medicine couldn't, or didn't solve well. Since the Jarvis heart, biomedical devices have bee cropping up at an increasing pace. I don't think you can ask the guy with a life-sustaining device embedded in his body to turn it off for the flight.
Add to this wearable computer technology, RFID tags everywhere, smart consumables, etc., and it is very possible that in 30 years it won't be possible to just tell people to turn their devices off. If there is a problem, fix it. If there isn't, stop scaring people.
Netflix is great for people like me and my roommate. The best part about netflix, IMHO, is the fact that you can keep a DVD for as long as you want it. We were the sort of people who always were paying late fees before Netflix. Now, we can keep it around until we're done with it, and then return it without the effort of even leaving the house.
And as for your lack of organization issue, remember that you get to keep a certain number of movies on hand. The number varies depending on how much you pay, but if you send your movies back after you watch them, you will have half a dozen DVDs sitting around at any one time that you haven't watched yet.
So, in other words, next time your wife and you decide on the spur of the moment to go and get a movie, instead of getting in your vehicle and driving to the DVD store, you simply walk over to your DVD player and pick one of the movies that you have lying about that you'd already decided you wanted to watch.
Prior art? I find it awefully strange that Navigator 2.0 was released in the fall of 1995, introducing frames to the HTML worl, and months later some corporation is trying to patent one of the primary purposes of this innovation. From the Netscape website:
If you read the legal letter they sent, it seems this is precisely what they think they're patent covers. I'm beginning to get to the point where I think we need to enact criminal penalties for this type of obvious scum-mongering.
This is awesome! This has plausable commercial implications. How nice would it be to goto a bar and not have to worry about tipping someone, you just slide your credit card or insert your money and select your drink and you get it in 10 seconds. If I owned a bar I would consider it.
You obviously haven't spent enough time in a bar, and have never been a bartender. Bars don't sell liqour - they sell socialization. You already have a self-service bartender, it's called your home liqour cabinet. Most humans go out becuase they want to socialize. They like talking sports with Jeff behind the bar, or flirting with Suzy the cocktail waitress.
Any bar using these would loose revenue quickly. I've been a bartender, and I can tell you this - a good tender, or a good staff can easily double or triple a bar's income. A bad one can drive customers away. A good bartender makes customers feel good... so they stay and spend more money. If that bartender makes a good enough impression, they might keep coming back and doing so on different nights. A bad bartender makes people go elsewhere. So you can have your robot bar, but I'll stick to my old-fashioned, human charisma driven service model. And come Friday night, I bet my bar will be the one that's packed.
Why would a company want to stop this free advertising?
There's actually a pretty good reason for this. The sales prices in question were advanced information on prices on the most competitive shopping day of the year. Typically, each year, consumers spend more money on the day after Thanksgiving than any other day. Knowing this, most of the big retailers slash their margins on certain key products to almost nothing (sometimes even to loss levels) in order to woo customers into their store. In other words - Wal-Mart might take a loss on a certain hot item, knowing that this would bring tons of customers into their stores. They will make up their money when these customers buy other items as well.
Now here's the problem: this technique only works well when you have the lowest price around. If your competitor (let's say Kmart or Target) finds out in advance and udercuts you a few dollars, not only are they getting those customers you hoped to woo, but you've got an item on your hands that's losing you money. Ideally, in the capitalist world, you'd simply lower your prices another notch, right? Well, unfortunately, circulars and advertising take time and money to create, and assuming you knew about your competitor's decision, you probably don't have the time to adjust. And you can be damn sure that your competitor isn't just going to call you up and tell you about THEIR promotion.
These types of games can end up making companies millions, or losing them. I used to work in advertising at a newspaper. This is why our clients could never come back to our production areas. We placed a great deal of importance on safeguarding this information for our clients. So THAT's why they want to stop this 'free advertising.'
That having been said, FatWallet is obviously beeing abused by the BigCompany/Lot'sOLawyers syndrome and I'm glad they're fighting back. It seem's to me that the main reason that they used the DMCA in this case and one of the worst features of the bill is because of it's ability to suppress content prior to due process. And trade secrets or no, in my books that's just plain wrong.
I felt that I needed to reply to this. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I guess maybe it's because I'm involved in the arts I see this differently, but for me not only is there no question that this is wrong, it is the type of thing that I would fight and die for.
Anyone who thinks this is alright needs to read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and this essay. Not all films are made purely for entertainment. Many films are made by large groups of people who care deeply about them, have spent their life perfecting their craft, and have come together to make something they feel is important. They have spent anywhere from six months to several years of their lives. When it is all over, regardless of how great the result is, people involved in such a work often think of it like a child. What these people do is the equivolent of saying "Sure, I'll watch your kid for the afternoon - I'm just going to need to chop off his hand first."
I know to some of the less culturally sophisticated, movies might just mean an afternoon at a Suburban multiplex watching some trashy action flick with millions of dollars in special effects, but to others, art has been instrumental in shaping the world we live in. It can be a powerful force, which is the reason artists are so often oppressed and their work destroyed. Before you so wantonly advocate the destruction of other's work, remember that right now their are people fighting for these rights you wish to discard. Many of these works deal with political, sociological, or philosophical issues and contribute to the way people view the world. Maintaining the right of people to express themselves freely without interlocution is the single most essential building block of a free society.
I heard a local actor/playwright talk about performing in Prague before the fall, and how everyone had met at a spot in the woods, and how he realized as he looked around at the nervous spectators that they had risked their lives to come see him perform. Now mind you, it wasn't that these people couldn't see theatre - they actually had some great theatre there - it was just all 'cleaned up' for them by an authoratarian government.
As Ray Bradbury says, you have a choice to view my work or not to view it. If I make a movie about something that offends you, don't watch it. If you can't find enough movies you really like, make your own. But for the sake of everything good in this world, don't destroy someone elses blood sweat and passion because you have a queasy stomache.
The way I see it, telling an ISP to block access to child porn sites is like telling Interstate 80 to prevent motorists from going to Texas.
I feel sorry for the ISPs who are going to be jerked around by a government who has no idea how to implement an unworkable law. This is just another case where uniformed legislation is going to raise price for the public and make life difficult for private business.
In order to understand why these estimates are so large, you have to realize the incredible biodiversity of the plan and insect kingdoms. Plants make up to 22 percent of the total number of species, and insects pretty much account for the rest. Mammals take up considerably less than 1% of that total.
Many of these species have such high evolutionary rates that they can evolve very quickly and often fill extremely specialized roles in a niche environment. Given this high rate of evolution, the mind-bogelling estimates of the total number, and the intrusionary nature of detection techniques, isn't this goal a little too unrealistic? It would seem to me that by the time you finally have catalogued them 'all,' a good percentage will have become extinct and whole bunch of new players will have emerged. In addition, verifying the continued existance of these species whould be an enourmous job.
The biggest problem I see with this proposal is that the creators of this effort have neglected to give the journals enough credit for the services they do provide: quality controll and topic selection.
A person who reads Journal of Academic Subject X does so partially because that journal has cultivated a reputation for quality in their field. Researchers are busy people, and they don't want to read every article by every crackpot out there. They want to keep current on the groundbreaking research and be aware of the new work that might apply to their own.
In other words, it's probably not enough to just 'get a critical mass' of work, especially if the critical mass is composed entirely of articles rejected for publication by journals. It's also not enough to just have a lot of information available - there must be some way of determining the quality of the work as well.
It seems to me what these guys really need, more than anything, is some sort of peer review process, similar to the moderation process here, that could help to filter out the bad stuff, make the truly groundbreaking work visible, and make sure that articles are categorized correctly. This would be an affordable way of providing the services that the editors of these journals normally provide while keeping the advantages that come with having a large electronic archive.