Manufacturing a good firearm means this. But in reality, any decently equipped machine shop can churn out firearms if it so chooses.
Yeah - and how many decently-equipped machine shops are there, as compared to the number of individuals? Orders of magnitude less - far easier to keep tabs on. And like you say, the vast majority of them are going to obey the law, and don't need tracking - you just need to add them to the list so that they can be investigated if an illegal weapon turns up. How many metal lathes are purchased each year? I've got no idea, but I can't imagine it'd be enough to stretch the resources of a federal agency.
That's for metal guns. As for plastic, injection moulding systems aren't particularly common either. If a batch of plastic guns turn up, investigating all the plants capable of producing it in a geographical area shouldn't be too onerous. And of course, if you're producing guns in batches, you then have distribution and sales channels that can be identified, traced back to the manufacturer, and shut down. On the other hand, if anyone can print up a gun whenever they feel like it, then the chances of being able to control firearm distribution via control of the manufacturing process is pretty much nil, as every residence in the country is suddenly a very small-run manufacturer.
I don't follow physics journals, but in the areas I follow, stuff in journals that's patented is usually indicated as such. I'd take that as an instance of #2, myself.
Even so, I'm pretty sure Apple and Amazon, at least, aren't in the LED manufacturing game themselves, although Samsung might be. Still sounds like #3.
The term "zip gun" isn't particularly well-defined - it usually just means an improvised gun, put together with whatever parts are around. 3D printed guns don't really meet that definition. Besides, 3D printing is in its infancy. Yeah, the Liberator, is a one-shot gun just as likely to take out the shooter's fingers as it is the target, but it's also the very first iteration of these things. People aren't reacting to the capability of 3D-printed guns now, they're trying to anticipate the impact of 3D printed guns in 20 years time when they're far more widespread and capable.
The difference is the means of manufacture. Manufacturing guns used to mean specialist equipment, specialist suppliers. They could be tracked, their activities monitored, and authorities could be sure they were only manufacturing legal (ie: detectable) weapons. The easy accessibility of 3D printing means that every basement in the world is now a potential (albeit, crappy) gunsmithy. Decentralization of manufacture means that tracking and monitoring no longer cut it to keep tabs on production.
The analogous situation is the centralized printing press, versus the decentralized internet in the field of copyright.
And of course, like drugs, murder and copyright circumvention, the fact that it's banned means it longer happens. Thus, security officers don't need to take it into consideration when securing an area.
This is _exactly_ the kind of thing the patent system was designed for! They're not goofy/obvious/stupid software patents - they are extremely complicated and non-trivial processes.
So how are all these companies using this technology? I can see three scenarios:
1) They figured the processes out themselves, from scratch, despite them being complex and non-trivial. Complexity and non-triviality don't make something patentable; the standard is non-obvious to a person skilled in the art. If multiple other parties developed it from scratch, it is obvious to a person skilled in the art, hence the person is invalid, and the case trolling.
2) All these companies accessed the patent in order to develop their process, but didn't pay for it. This could be the result of a license dispute, or just outright douchery. In this case, the case is legitimate.
3) A manufacturer either performed point 1 or point 2, and is a common supplier to the targets. In this case, the patent holder should have gone after that manufacturer; using a scatter-gun approach to target end-users is abusive, just as much as the people who send threatening letters to small companies using fax machines. In this case, they may have a legitimate case against the original manufacturer, but their cases against the retailers are illegitimate.
And a bonus thought, for good measure - For those talking about the NSA or Bitcoin - This involves regional protection of content, a favor to Hollywood, nothing more and nothing less. At least direct your vitriol in the right direction, folks.
This is a favor to Hollywood; last time it was a favour to Government so they could try to starve out Wikileaks. It's a question of control. With the current system, Visa can vritually control who you can and cannot buy goods and services from, putting them in the position of being able to exert de facto control over the economy.
A decentralized payment method (like cash, or bitcoin) puts the control in the owners of the money. Cash has too many historical roots to destroy, but its inherently limited in its ability to make large payments across wide geographical separation. Which is why bitcoin (and any other new, decentralized, electronic currency) is a threat to the existing system.
The best example I can think of is in Britain, where the unions shut down most of the country's industrial capacity for a year, until Margaret Thatcher broke them. I'm Australian, and even here, where unions never got to that point, we still had problems. My grandfather worked for an engineering company, and he told about being unable to fire people who were stealing from the company, because the union threatened to strike and shut down the company if he'd tried, even after acknowledging what the employee was doing.
I'm not as familiar with the US, but even you guys have union shops, where the union basically becomes a de facto labour monopoly, and got legislation passed legalising their ability to compel workers to join. So they definitely had strength at some point, there.
about:config is the browser equivalent of the Windows registry or/etc/ files. Unless you're actually doing something a computer professional would need to do, it's a failure of user interface to require the user to do it.
Which means its entirely the right place to put disabling core functionality, like a javascript engine.
If you're on the run from people who want to prosecute you for acts you admit you did, that doesn't make you stateless, that makes you a wanted criminal.
Uh, no. For you to be a wanted criminal, you have to have committed a crime. As he says, there has been no judicial order, and no conviction.
Then most people are being dumb with their money. Weekly or monthly, you're still getting paid the same amount. If you can't manage on monthly, it means either: 1) You have no self-control, and spend all your money when you earn it, leaving the last few weeks bare 2) You have no self-control, and can't save any of your money to keep back as a buffer
Now, there are some people who earn so little that they legitimately cannot save. But that's not "most", or even "many" - it's the people living just this side of the poverty line. For most people who say they can't save, it's more that they won't - either they've over-extended themselves with commitments (think, bigger mortgage than they can afford) or they're unwilling to sacrifice some luxuries in the short term.
Exactly. Which throws his whole argument out. Because the company takes as much money out as profit as it can, the worker isn't paid according to how much values they add to the company. They're paid as much as the market will bear, and the difference is kept as profit.
I'm in Australia, so our banking system is probably different. My mortgage here is just like another bank account; it can be direct-deposited into just like any other account. It has a web interface that lets me setup regular payments, which is what I use to transfer my weekly "allowance" into my general transaction account - my mortgage has far more limits on transfers and payments than my normal account, which is why I don't just use if for transactions.
The employee's take-home pay is that added value minus *all* costs associated with hiring *and* managing the employee. That includes the "employer contribution" to Social Security and all those worker-friendly regulations like OSHA.
Ahhhhh ha ha ha ha ha ha.
So what you're saying is that no multinational corporations ever make any profit, because all the value added by their employees goes directly to those employees? I reiterate:
Well, yeah, if you like to skew your history to suit your political bias, that's the story.
There's plenty examples of cycles like that in history. What really happens is that there's an inequality (employers vs employees), the employees band together to address the inequality (unions), then the inequality slowly slips the other way (union corruption), forces gather to displace the unions, and the cycle starts again. It's an alternation between two inequalities, with only a brief period of equilibrium. Portraying either the employers or the unions as pure of heart is equally disingenuous.
It's not hard. Really, unless you're saving absolutely nothing, you should have enough of a cushion to be able to spend into that in advance of the paycheck. If you budget properly, the dint in your savings is only short-term.
I get paid monthly; it goes into my mortgage, and I transfer out a weekly sum for day-to-day needs. I pay my bills straight from the mortgage.
No; Apple are planning to not need Samsung in the future. They are doing that precisely because they do need Samsung now. They're getting rid of a single point of failure.
Facebook, twitter, hulu, etc probably use their ticketing system, Jira, which is what they're most well-known for. I doubt they use Crowd, which is one of their lesser-known offerings.
with wow it just boils down as a social problem of getting everyone in the place - so that becomes the actual game. it's like ballet practice every fucking saturday, the mobs lack initiative totally. that's why I stopped playing - it does a very poor simulation of going to fight a dragon, or giant or whatever.
At launch, going through Deadmines for the first time was very fun, because you had to do the analysis and formulate strategies yourself, on the fly.
These days, before you ever get to try content, it's been done a hundred times by top-tier guilds, the behaviour has been pulled apart, an optimal strategy devised, and all you do it follow someone else's playbook.
I don't think people play tower defense games over and over again too much.
Replayability might be a good metric for measuring value-for-money, but not necessarily good for measuring the quality of a game. Whole genres have zero replayability (like tower defence, as you say, but also puzzle games and adventure games - like the Sierra Quest lines) and yet are popular and enjoyable.
my original comment was simply about that people who can predict how mobs act by knowing their algorithm inside and out don't need to be super geniuses. but a game where you can see it plainly usually get to be boring form purely gameplay perspective. of course games have stories etc to follow and to hook you as well.
And my point was that that's true of some games, where the main element is defeating the AI, but there can be other elements to games (resource management, puzzle solving, twitch reflexes, team co-operation, etc) that don't depend on the AI algorithm being unknown to generate fun.
It's somewhat effective; sure, it's not how Grand Masters play. But when I was learning chess, at a certain level, everyone was encouraged to start memorising positions and rote responses to those positions - not the underlying positional play, just "in this situation, do this". I found that boring, didn't do it, and quickly started losing. Sure, if I'd had the natural ability to skip that step and go straight to an understanding of positional play, maybe I'd have found it more enjoyable, but as it is, rote memorisation of position and response gives a player a large advantage at a low skill level, and I never had the motivation to get over that hump.
Slashdot Mirror
Manufacturing a good firearm means this. But in reality, any decently equipped machine shop can churn out firearms if it so chooses.
Yeah - and how many decently-equipped machine shops are there, as compared to the number of individuals? Orders of magnitude less - far easier to keep tabs on. And like you say, the vast majority of them are going to obey the law, and don't need tracking - you just need to add them to the list so that they can be investigated if an illegal weapon turns up. How many metal lathes are purchased each year? I've got no idea, but I can't imagine it'd be enough to stretch the resources of a federal agency.
That's for metal guns. As for plastic, injection moulding systems aren't particularly common either. If a batch of plastic guns turn up, investigating all the plants capable of producing it in a geographical area shouldn't be too onerous. And of course, if you're producing guns in batches, you then have distribution and sales channels that can be identified, traced back to the manufacturer, and shut down. On the other hand, if anyone can print up a gun whenever they feel like it, then the chances of being able to control firearm distribution via control of the manufacturing process is pretty much nil, as every residence in the country is suddenly a very small-run manufacturer.
I don't follow physics journals, but in the areas I follow, stuff in journals that's patented is usually indicated as such. I'd take that as an instance of #2, myself.
Even so, I'm pretty sure Apple and Amazon, at least, aren't in the LED manufacturing game themselves, although Samsung might be. Still sounds like #3.
The term "zip gun" isn't particularly well-defined - it usually just means an improvised gun, put together with whatever parts are around. 3D printed guns don't really meet that definition. Besides, 3D printing is in its infancy. Yeah, the Liberator, is a one-shot gun just as likely to take out the shooter's fingers as it is the target, but it's also the very first iteration of these things. People aren't reacting to the capability of 3D-printed guns now, they're trying to anticipate the impact of 3D printed guns in 20 years time when they're far more widespread and capable.
The difference is the means of manufacture. Manufacturing guns used to mean specialist equipment, specialist suppliers. They could be tracked, their activities monitored, and authorities could be sure they were only manufacturing legal (ie: detectable) weapons. The easy accessibility of 3D printing means that every basement in the world is now a potential (albeit, crappy) gunsmithy. Decentralization of manufacture means that tracking and monitoring no longer cut it to keep tabs on production.
The analogous situation is the centralized printing press, versus the decentralized internet in the field of copyright.
And of course, like drugs, murder and copyright circumvention, the fact that it's banned means it longer happens. Thus, security officers don't need to take it into consideration when securing an area.
Right?
This is _exactly_ the kind of thing the patent system was designed for! They're not goofy/obvious/stupid software patents - they are extremely complicated and non-trivial processes.
So how are all these companies using this technology? I can see three scenarios:
1) They figured the processes out themselves, from scratch, despite them being complex and non-trivial. Complexity and non-triviality don't make something patentable; the standard is non-obvious to a person skilled in the art. If multiple other parties developed it from scratch, it is obvious to a person skilled in the art, hence the person is invalid, and the case trolling.
2) All these companies accessed the patent in order to develop their process, but didn't pay for it. This could be the result of a license dispute, or just outright douchery. In this case, the case is legitimate.
3) A manufacturer either performed point 1 or point 2, and is a common supplier to the targets. In this case, the patent holder should have gone after that manufacturer; using a scatter-gun approach to target end-users is abusive, just as much as the people who send threatening letters to small companies using fax machines. In this case, they may have a legitimate case against the original manufacturer, but their cases against the retailers are illegitimate.
It sounds like #3 is the most likely
And a bonus thought, for good measure - For those talking about the NSA or Bitcoin - This involves regional protection of content, a favor to Hollywood, nothing more and nothing less. At least direct your vitriol in the right direction, folks.
This is a favor to Hollywood; last time it was a favour to Government so they could try to starve out Wikileaks. It's a question of control. With the current system, Visa can vritually control who you can and cannot buy goods and services from, putting them in the position of being able to exert de facto control over the economy.
A decentralized payment method (like cash, or bitcoin) puts the control in the owners of the money. Cash has too many historical roots to destroy, but its inherently limited in its ability to make large payments across wide geographical separation. Which is why bitcoin (and any other new, decentralized, electronic currency) is a threat to the existing system.
And with enough energy and malice, I could burn the galaxy. Your point?
The best example I can think of is in Britain, where the unions shut down most of the country's industrial capacity for a year, until Margaret Thatcher broke them. I'm Australian, and even here, where unions never got to that point, we still had problems. My grandfather worked for an engineering company, and he told about being unable to fire people who were stealing from the company, because the union threatened to strike and shut down the company if he'd tried, even after acknowledging what the employee was doing.
I'm not as familiar with the US, but even you guys have union shops, where the union basically becomes a de facto labour monopoly, and got legislation passed legalising their ability to compel workers to join. So they definitely had strength at some point, there.
If these were being installed on motorcycles, you may have a point. Cars, however, frequently have multiple occupants.
about:config is the browser equivalent of the Windows registry or /etc/ files. Unless you're actually doing something a computer professional would need to do, it's a failure of user interface to require the user to do it.
Which means its entirely the right place to put disabling core functionality, like a javascript engine.
Reasoning; I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
If you're on the run from people who want to prosecute you for acts you admit you did, that doesn't make you stateless, that makes you a wanted criminal.
Uh, no. For you to be a wanted criminal, you have to have committed a crime. As he says, there has been no judicial order, and no conviction.
No; by that reasoning, if Samsung needed Apple, you'd be seeing Samsung frantically wooing customers so they're not dependant on one company.
Then most people are being dumb with their money. Weekly or monthly, you're still getting paid the same amount. If you can't manage on monthly, it means either:
1) You have no self-control, and spend all your money when you earn it, leaving the last few weeks bare
2) You have no self-control, and can't save any of your money to keep back as a buffer
Now, there are some people who earn so little that they legitimately cannot save. But that's not "most", or even "many" - it's the people living just this side of the poverty line. For most people who say they can't save, it's more that they won't - either they've over-extended themselves with commitments (think, bigger mortgage than they can afford) or they're unwilling to sacrifice some luxuries in the short term.
Exactly. Which throws his whole argument out. Because the company takes as much money out as profit as it can, the worker isn't paid according to how much values they add to the company. They're paid as much as the market will bear, and the difference is kept as profit.
I'm in Australia, so our banking system is probably different. My mortgage here is just like another bank account; it can be direct-deposited into just like any other account. It has a web interface that lets me setup regular payments, which is what I use to transfer my weekly "allowance" into my general transaction account - my mortgage has far more limits on transfers and payments than my normal account, which is why I don't just use if for transactions.
The employee's take-home pay is that added value minus *all* costs associated with hiring *and* managing the employee. That includes the "employer contribution" to Social Security and all those worker-friendly regulations like OSHA.
Ahhhhh ha ha ha ha ha ha.
So what you're saying is that no multinational corporations ever make any profit, because all the value added by their employees goes directly to those employees? I reiterate:
Ahhhhh ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Well, yeah, if you like to skew your history to suit your political bias, that's the story.
There's plenty examples of cycles like that in history. What really happens is that there's an inequality (employers vs employees), the employees band together to address the inequality (unions), then the inequality slowly slips the other way (union corruption), forces gather to displace the unions, and the cycle starts again. It's an alternation between two inequalities, with only a brief period of equilibrium. Portraying either the employers or the unions as pure of heart is equally disingenuous.
The GP wasn't talking about payroll debit cards; he was talking about the difficulties of a monthly pay-cycle versus weekly/fortnightly.
It's not hard. Really, unless you're saving absolutely nothing, you should have enough of a cushion to be able to spend into that in advance of the paycheck. If you budget properly, the dint in your savings is only short-term.
I get paid monthly; it goes into my mortgage, and I transfer out a weekly sum for day-to-day needs. I pay my bills straight from the mortgage.
No; Apple are planning to not need Samsung in the future. They are doing that precisely because they do need Samsung now. They're getting rid of a single point of failure.
Facebook, twitter, hulu, etc probably use their ticketing system, Jira, which is what they're most well-known for. I doubt they use Crowd, which is one of their lesser-known offerings.
with wow it just boils down as a social problem of getting everyone in the place - so that becomes the actual game. it's like ballet practice every fucking saturday, the mobs lack initiative totally. that's why I stopped playing - it does a very poor simulation of going to fight a dragon, or giant or whatever.
At launch, going through Deadmines for the first time was very fun, because you had to do the analysis and formulate strategies yourself, on the fly.
These days, before you ever get to try content, it's been done a hundred times by top-tier guilds, the behaviour has been pulled apart, an optimal strategy devised, and all you do it follow someone else's playbook.
I don't think people play tower defense games over and over again too much.
Replayability might be a good metric for measuring value-for-money, but not necessarily good for measuring the quality of a game. Whole genres have zero replayability (like tower defence, as you say, but also puzzle games and adventure games - like the Sierra Quest lines) and yet are popular and enjoyable.
my original comment was simply about that people who can predict how mobs act by knowing their algorithm inside and out don't need to be super geniuses. but a game where you can see it plainly usually get to be boring form purely gameplay perspective. of course games have stories etc to follow and to hook you as well.
And my point was that that's true of some games, where the main element is defeating the AI, but there can be other elements to games (resource management, puzzle solving, twitch reflexes, team co-operation, etc) that don't depend on the AI algorithm being unknown to generate fun.
It's somewhat effective; sure, it's not how Grand Masters play. But when I was learning chess, at a certain level, everyone was encouraged to start memorising positions and rote responses to those positions - not the underlying positional play, just "in this situation, do this". I found that boring, didn't do it, and quickly started losing. Sure, if I'd had the natural ability to skip that step and go straight to an understanding of positional play, maybe I'd have found it more enjoyable, but as it is, rote memorisation of position and response gives a player a large advantage at a low skill level, and I never had the motivation to get over that hump.