AD&D players will find it more balanced, and bereft of THAC0 insanity. 3e players will like the skill simplification, and overall feel of the mechanics. 4e players will... be glad to get rid of 4e's powers, forced movement, positioning, Opportunity Attacks, and all other combat clutter.
How can you speak for all these classes of players?
I, as (currently) a 4e player, really don't want to get rid of 4es powers (Yay! Less options! And a return to Vancian casting!), forced movement and positioning are crucial for a tactical game, and OAs are essential for making a defender actually defend. That said, my group plays D&D for tactical skirmish combat, because really, that's what it does. If we want a roleplay-heavy game, we use a different system. D&D has been a combat game with roleplaying tacked-on the end since Chainmail. That's not a bad thing, it just scratches a specific itch.
Oh come on... Magic is built around obtaining rare cards from booster packs. We all know this. Maybe if you don't ever play with anyone using cards out of your base starter pack.. sure.
I haven't played M:TG since highschool, where what you say was true. But it seems these days, people plan their decks by looking up cards on the net, then go out and buy the singles they want to construct the deck; no luck involved. In fact, these days people just wait until some people on the internet crunch the numbers, assemble the "best" decks, and then fork out money for decks other people constructed.
Anonymous is releasing some "historic" data files with "limited personal customer information" that came from a web server of an outsourced company hosting the website for Australia's third or fourth largest ISP... in protest against the Australian Government's data retention policies?
While I'll be the first to say that Anonymous' actions are frequently useless and counter-productive, this particular one isn't. It's a perfect example of (one of the reasons) why these data retention laws suck. The people required to retain them will not secure them properly, as Anonymous just demonstrated. Reassurances that only authorized people will be able to access them are lies.
...or these guys are just releasing what they've got - which isn't much...
Probably. But that's the point. They're releasing data that the ISPs should have protected, and didn't.
Seriously, this is supposed to be an elite group of hackers.... Is this the best they can do?
Haha, seriously? Anonymous are a group of trolls who hang out on an image board. They're might be some hackers among them, but that's not what Anonymous is known for.
If you're writing for Nature, yes, you should use scientific jargon. Your audience are scientists, or those interested enough in science to buy Nature. Maybe include a glossary, or a quick definition in an aside, but your audience is looking for technical details, not a quick summary.
If you're writing for the Times, don't. Your audience doesn't care about the ins-and-outs, they want to hear about practical effects.
I did one single subject in Journalism at university almost ten years ago and I know this. This is not rocket science.
Given that it's an Australian court, and Australia is required by treaty to recognise American patents, I'm not sure it's even possible for an Australian judge to invalidate them. At best, they could only be invalidated in Australia.
He'll probably get a lot further than you. He's going to be right every day until he's wrong, and when he's wrong, it's not going to matter any more anyway.
Take virus, I'm so damned tired of listening to the geeks have a royal shitfit over whether something is a virus, a rootkit, or a trojan because for all intents and purposes the common word for ALL computer bugs is virus.
Nobody said that computer PROFESSIONALS would not still have the words trojan, backdoor, rootkit, etc because they have a need to know specifics and thus need more specific words.
That may not be what you meant, but it sure as hell is what you said. Maybe you should proofread your posts before calling people obtuse asshole douchebag flamebaiting grammar nazis. Because, with that loud of perjoratives in your post, I know who's sounding like a troll, and it ain't me.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
No, people shouldn't be allowed to have many, many orders of magnitude more then the average person.
Let me counter your opinion with my own: the problem isn't that people have more. It's that it's unearned.
If you're making orders of magnitude more than the average person, then you should be providing orders of magnitude more benefit. That's the fundamental principle of capitalism - you get rewarded commensurate with your productive capacity. There are very few people that are more effective than most others to that degree. Sure, people in positions like CEO have great influence over productivity, but that's the result of the office, not the person. The problem comes when people start getting rewarded, not due to their productive capacity, but due to who they know. That's not capitalism gone wild, it's capitalism that's ceased to be capitalism.
The other problem is that the biggest predictor of being wealthy isn't being productive, but being born wealthy. That feedback loop needs to be fixed if capitalism is ever to truly work. Of course, the generations of benefiting from that feedback loop have made the wealthy essentially dominate politics, and they have no desire to see a true meritocracy emerge.
Take virus, I'm so damned tired of listening to the geeks have a royal shitfit over whether something is a virus, a rootkit, or a trojan because for all intents and purposes the common word for ALL computer bugs is virus.
Hooray, and now we have no way to distinguish between self-propagating malware code and code that exploits a naive user. Popular usage - reducing the language to the lowest common denominator since the advent of human speech. I guess we should just change the definition of "terrorist" in the dictionary to "Muslim", and "web browser" to "internet". After all, the public has spoken.
The word car came from carriage...do they LOOK like a carriage to you? No and in fact i doubt most of the public even knows that word came from the era of the horse and buggy, nor do they care.
And if both cars and carriages were still relatively common, smooshing the two words together, then coming onto a vehicle site and telling all the professionals there that they shouldn't try and distinguish between cars and carriages because Gary down the road doesn't would be as stupid as your previous statement.
Terrorism (except for the sort spouted about by politicians looking for a catch-phrase) comes down to intent. It's not a case of terrorism being a "worse" crime than murder, just different in nature.
A terrorist attacking a cinema full of crowded people is doing so in order to draw attention to a cause, extort some response out of the government, or in some way use force to coerce and intimidate the populace (or their representatives) into doing his will. This terrorist is also a mass murderer. However, if some guy shoots up the cinema because he just lost his job, broke up with his girlfriend, and is pissed at life, it's not terrorism, even if he kills just as many people as the prior nutjob.
Likewise, a campaign of regular bomb threats or hoaxes to get people scared on or on-edge could be considered terrorism, even if nobody died.
The dude saying "no terrorism link has been established" isn't saying that you therefore don't need to be worried, he's saying "and we don't know why he did it yet, but it doesn't look like terrorism."
Depends. The algae blooms described by the article seem to be short-lived. you could repeat the process over and over again in the same area, limiting the effects on sealife to that locale. It's not describing having permanent patches covering half the ocean.
Seems no more far-fetched than the current plan, which is assuming world leaders of developed and developing nations can all agree to limit the economic function and development of their respective countries, and not fall into a prisoner's dilemma.
Sorry, apology? Looks through my posting history - I'm exactly the opposite of a Microsoft apologist. When I see a headline saying Microsoft's taken a quarterly loss for the first time, and it's due to struggling online services, I'm expecting it to be the thin end of the wedge - that MS' new strategies are failing, and that it's OS and Office divisions are no longer drawing enough money to keep the behemoth lumbering.
That's not what's happening. Rather, they've taken the losses of the last 5 years, and conglomerated them into a single, large, writedown that is only really meaningful for tax purposes. In short, it's an accounting glitch, and it's being spun as the opening turn of the company's death spiral. I'm annoyed, not because I want MS to be shown as profitable, but because it's a) spin, and deceptive, and b) disappointing. I was hoping for a real decline, not some accountancy artifact.
It's not from their "continued struggles", it's from a single acquisition 5 years ago. And it says nothing about their online services division as a whole, just the advertising segment represented by aQuantive. It'd be like saying "Google's online services take 600 million dollar hit" if Google decided to scrap Google Flights.
Flamebait? I hate MS as much as the next guy, but the AC above is accurately pointing out factual errors in the summary. It's deceptive (and raises false hope in some).
Keeping your settings on Facebook where you want them (if that is even feasible) is a full time job.
Man, I wish I had your job. Fiddle with some security settings for a bit each month, spend the rest of the time lying on the beach drinking cocktails with little umbrellas.
Apple didn't "patent rounded freaking corners", they submitted a design patent for their product in much the same way that thousands and thousands of other design patents are submitted, like that of the Ford Mustang. Zomg! Ford patented a transportation device with four wheels and an engine! Like the world has never seen that before!
Uh, no. The Ford Mustang had distinctive features that differentiated it from other "transportation device[s] with four wheels and an engine". Apple likes minimalist designs; that's cool, so do a lot of people. But it also means they have a lesser ability to protect their designs, because they are inherently more generic.
Yes, that's the point of a design patent. It doesn't have to be something new, just a design specific to your product
Except it's not specific to their product. Due to its minimalist design and lack of distinguishing features, its a design that's general across the entire field of tablet computing.
So, for instance, if we have touchscreen apps, scroll bars, and elements that only appear on activation, an application that combines the three of them would be rejected for non-obviousness?
Submit your padded stool patent - I give it 50/50 of being accepted.
Currently, the test is that if one or more pieces of prior art references or products, alone or in combination, teach or suggest each and every element in the patent claim, either inherently or expressly, the claim is obvious. This eliminates hindsight - all references must be from before the application was filed - and eliminates gut feelings - since references must be shown and mapped to the claims.
That's all fine and dandy, and probably judicially correct. Who cares about judicial correctness? It's a bad test. Why? Because it always passes. Everything was done first, once. That means everything's patentable (if applied by for the person who did it first, or at least, the person who first published it). Which totally discards the "non-obvious" portion of the patentability requirement, which leaves the current useless mess the USPTO is currently in.
"In some portable devices, scroll bars are used to indicate the position in the document or list of the displayed portion. But scroll bars are fixed user interface features that take up valuable display screen area on an already small display screen."
It's a scrollbar that disappears when you aren't using it. They're just trying to divorce it from the usual scrollbar to make it seem more novel.
If someone is hit with a frivolous lawsuit and have a loose million, they have legal recourse available and could conceivably countersue Apple for court fees.
FTFY
If you don't think that this patent is valid, find some prior art. Otherwise if no one else has up to this point been using this idea, perhaps its more novel than most would consider now that it has been patented.
Patents need more than to be novel. They need to be non-obvious to one skilled in the art. Just because you're the first to do something, doesn't mean you get a government-enforced monopoly on it. It's supposed to be something that significantly contributes to the body of human knowledge, something significant enough to be worth placing restrictions on the rest of the populace in order to find out how you did it.
As for nobody using it, Ubuntu's had something very similar for over a year. Of course, this wasn't on using a touchscreen, so of course, that makes Apple's implementation totally novel and innovative.
Actually you're wrong. In the first claim of the patent they explicitly state the following: "and the vertical bar is not a scroll bar;"
They say that. But they don't offer any definitions of a "scroll bar", and they go on to describe exactly the function of a scroll bar.
Essentially if you have a scroll bar in your implementation, you can't be sued with this patent as it's explicitly stated that it's not a scroll bar.
You can be sued for anything. They may not be successful in their suite, however...
Also, it was filed in March of this year. It would be pretty damned easy to show prior art or that in fact your own implementation of this existed prior to Apple's filing of their application.
...assuming you can afford the requisite legal costs to actually make it to court and argue that claim, along with the slew of other patent violations you'd undoubtedly be served with at the same time.
Wait, wait, get this - it's a a scrollbar, but it's on a touchscreen. What innovation! Oh, the humanity! Nobody has ever used such an interface before across so many different devices and interfaces it could possibly be called "general"!
How about the business model of filing an idiotically general patent, suing a new entrant to your market before they have millions of dollars to defend themselves in court, sucking their coffers dry and driving them out of the market, thus ensuring your market position?
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AD&D players will find it more balanced, and bereft of THAC0 insanity. 3e players will like the skill simplification, and overall feel of the mechanics. 4e players will... be glad to get rid of 4e's powers, forced movement, positioning, Opportunity Attacks, and all other combat clutter.
How can you speak for all these classes of players?
I, as (currently) a 4e player, really don't want to get rid of 4es powers (Yay! Less options! And a return to Vancian casting!), forced movement and positioning are crucial for a tactical game, and OAs are essential for making a defender actually defend. That said, my group plays D&D for tactical skirmish combat, because really, that's what it does. If we want a roleplay-heavy game, we use a different system. D&D has been a combat game with roleplaying tacked-on the end since Chainmail. That's not a bad thing, it just scratches a specific itch.
Oh come on... Magic is built around obtaining rare cards from booster packs. We all know this. Maybe if you don't ever play with anyone using cards out of your base starter pack.. sure.
I haven't played M:TG since highschool, where what you say was true. But it seems these days, people plan their decks by looking up cards on the net, then go out and buy the singles they want to construct the deck; no luck involved. In fact, these days people just wait until some people on the internet crunch the numbers, assemble the "best" decks, and then fork out money for decks other people constructed.
It seems rather...boring.
Anonymous is releasing some "historic" data files with "limited personal customer information" that came from a web server of an outsourced company hosting the website for Australia's third or fourth largest ISP ... in protest against the Australian Government's data retention policies?
While I'll be the first to say that Anonymous' actions are frequently useless and counter-productive, this particular one isn't. It's a perfect example of (one of the reasons) why these data retention laws suck. The people required to retain them will not secure them properly, as Anonymous just demonstrated. Reassurances that only authorized people will be able to access them are lies.
...or these guys are just releasing what they've got - which isn't much...
Probably. But that's the point. They're releasing data that the ISPs should have protected, and didn't.
Seriously, this is supposed to be an elite group of hackers.... Is this the best they can do?
Haha, seriously? Anonymous are a group of trolls who hang out on an image board. They're might be some hackers among them, but that's not what Anonymous is known for.
If you're writing for Nature, yes, you should use scientific jargon. Your audience are scientists, or those interested enough in science to buy Nature. Maybe include a glossary, or a quick definition in an aside, but your audience is looking for technical details, not a quick summary.
If you're writing for the Times, don't. Your audience doesn't care about the ins-and-outs, they want to hear about practical effects.
I did one single subject in Journalism at university almost ten years ago and I know this. This is not rocket science.
Given that it's an Australian court, and Australia is required by treaty to recognise American patents, I'm not sure it's even possible for an Australian judge to invalidate them. At best, they could only be invalidated in Australia.
He'll probably get a lot further than you. He's going to be right every day until he's wrong, and when he's wrong, it's not going to matter any more anyway.
Take virus, I'm so damned tired of listening to the geeks have a royal shitfit over whether something is a virus, a rootkit, or a trojan because for all intents and purposes the common word for ALL computer bugs is virus.
Nobody said that computer PROFESSIONALS would not still have the words trojan, backdoor, rootkit, etc because they have a need to know specifics and thus need more specific words.
That may not be what you meant, but it sure as hell is what you said. Maybe you should proofread your posts before calling people obtuse asshole douchebag flamebaiting grammar nazis. Because, with that loud of perjoratives in your post, I know who's sounding like a troll, and it ain't me.
Your own sig is applicable here:
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
No, people shouldn't be allowed to have many, many orders of magnitude more then the average person.
Let me counter your opinion with my own: the problem isn't that people have more. It's that it's unearned.
If you're making orders of magnitude more than the average person, then you should be providing orders of magnitude more benefit. That's the fundamental principle of capitalism - you get rewarded commensurate with your productive capacity. There are very few people that are more effective than most others to that degree. Sure, people in positions like CEO have great influence over productivity, but that's the result of the office, not the person. The problem comes when people start getting rewarded, not due to their productive capacity, but due to who they know. That's not capitalism gone wild, it's capitalism that's ceased to be capitalism.
The other problem is that the biggest predictor of being wealthy isn't being productive, but being born wealthy. That feedback loop needs to be fixed if capitalism is ever to truly work. Of course, the generations of benefiting from that feedback loop have made the wealthy essentially dominate politics, and they have no desire to see a true meritocracy emerge.
Take virus, I'm so damned tired of listening to the geeks have a royal shitfit over whether something is a virus, a rootkit, or a trojan because for all intents and purposes the common word for ALL computer bugs is virus.
Hooray, and now we have no way to distinguish between self-propagating malware code and code that exploits a naive user. Popular usage - reducing the language to the lowest common denominator since the advent of human speech. I guess we should just change the definition of "terrorist" in the dictionary to "Muslim", and "web browser" to "internet". After all, the public has spoken.
The word car came from carriage...do they LOOK like a carriage to you? No and in fact i doubt most of the public even knows that word came from the era of the horse and buggy, nor do they care.
And if both cars and carriages were still relatively common, smooshing the two words together, then coming onto a vehicle site and telling all the professionals there that they shouldn't try and distinguish between cars and carriages because Gary down the road doesn't would be as stupid as your previous statement.
Terrorism (except for the sort spouted about by politicians looking for a catch-phrase) comes down to intent. It's not a case of terrorism being a "worse" crime than murder, just different in nature.
A terrorist attacking a cinema full of crowded people is doing so in order to draw attention to a cause, extort some response out of the government, or in some way use force to coerce and intimidate the populace (or their representatives) into doing his will. This terrorist is also a mass murderer. However, if some guy shoots up the cinema because he just lost his job, broke up with his girlfriend, and is pissed at life, it's not terrorism, even if he kills just as many people as the prior nutjob.
Likewise, a campaign of regular bomb threats or hoaxes to get people scared on or on-edge could be considered terrorism, even if nobody died.
The dude saying "no terrorism link has been established" isn't saying that you therefore don't need to be worried, he's saying "and we don't know why he did it yet, but it doesn't look like terrorism."
Depends. The algae blooms described by the article seem to be short-lived. you could repeat the process over and over again in the same area, limiting the effects on sealife to that locale. It's not describing having permanent patches covering half the ocean.
Seems no more far-fetched than the current plan, which is assuming world leaders of developed and developing nations can all agree to limit the economic function and development of their respective countries, and not fall into a prisoner's dilemma.
Sorry, apology? Looks through my posting history - I'm exactly the opposite of a Microsoft apologist. When I see a headline saying Microsoft's taken a quarterly loss for the first time, and it's due to struggling online services, I'm expecting it to be the thin end of the wedge - that MS' new strategies are failing, and that it's OS and Office divisions are no longer drawing enough money to keep the behemoth lumbering.
That's not what's happening. Rather, they've taken the losses of the last 5 years, and conglomerated them into a single, large, writedown that is only really meaningful for tax purposes. In short, it's an accounting glitch, and it's being spun as the opening turn of the company's death spiral. I'm annoyed, not because I want MS to be shown as profitable, but because it's a) spin, and deceptive, and b) disappointing. I was hoping for a real decline, not some accountancy artifact.
That's exactly my point - the loss isn't from Bing's success or lack thereof. It's from aQuantative's write off.
It's not from their "continued struggles", it's from a single acquisition 5 years ago. And it says nothing about their online services division as a whole, just the advertising segment represented by aQuantive. It'd be like saying "Google's online services take 600 million dollar hit" if Google decided to scrap Google Flights.
Flamebait? I hate MS as much as the next guy, but the AC above is accurately pointing out factual errors in the summary. It's deceptive (and raises false hope in some).
Keeping your settings on Facebook where you want them (if that is even feasible) is a full time job.
Man, I wish I had your job. Fiddle with some security settings for a bit each month, spend the rest of the time lying on the beach drinking cocktails with little umbrellas.
Apple didn't "patent rounded freaking corners", they submitted a design patent for their product in much the same way that thousands and thousands of other design patents are submitted, like that of the Ford Mustang. Zomg! Ford patented a transportation device with four wheels and an engine! Like the world has never seen that before!
Uh, no. The Ford Mustang had distinctive features that differentiated it from other "transportation device[s] with four wheels and an engine". Apple likes minimalist designs; that's cool, so do a lot of people. But it also means they have a lesser ability to protect their designs, because they are inherently more generic.
Yes, that's the point of a design patent. It doesn't have to be something new, just a design specific to your product
Except it's not specific to their product. Due to its minimalist design and lack of distinguishing features, its a design that's general across the entire field of tablet computing.
So, for instance, if we have touchscreen apps, scroll bars, and elements that only appear on activation, an application that combines the three of them would be rejected for non-obviousness?
Submit your padded stool patent - I give it 50/50 of being accepted.
Currently, the test is that if one or more pieces of prior art references or products, alone or in combination, teach or suggest each and every element in the patent claim, either inherently or expressly, the claim is obvious. This eliminates hindsight - all references must be from before the application was filed - and eliminates gut feelings - since references must be shown and mapped to the claims.
That's all fine and dandy, and probably judicially correct. Who cares about judicial correctness? It's a bad test. Why? Because it always passes. Everything was done first, once. That means everything's patentable (if applied by for the person who did it first, or at least, the person who first published it). Which totally discards the "non-obvious" portion of the patentability requirement, which leaves the current useless mess the USPTO is currently in.
"In some portable devices, scroll bars are used to indicate the position in the document or list of the displayed portion. But scroll bars are fixed user interface features that take up valuable display screen area on an already small display screen."
It's a scrollbar that disappears when you aren't using it. They're just trying to divorce it from the usual scrollbar to make it seem more novel.
If someone is hit with a frivolous lawsuit and have a loose million, they have legal recourse available and could conceivably countersue Apple for court fees.
FTFY
If you don't think that this patent is valid, find some prior art. Otherwise if no one else has up to this point been using this idea, perhaps its more novel than most would consider now that it has been patented.
Patents need more than to be novel. They need to be non-obvious to one skilled in the art. Just because you're the first to do something, doesn't mean you get a government-enforced monopoly on it. It's supposed to be something that significantly contributes to the body of human knowledge, something significant enough to be worth placing restrictions on the rest of the populace in order to find out how you did it.
As for nobody using it, Ubuntu's had something very similar for over a year. Of course, this wasn't on using a touchscreen, so of course, that makes Apple's implementation totally novel and innovative.
Actually you're wrong. In the first claim of the patent they explicitly state the following: "and the vertical bar is not a scroll bar;"
They say that. But they don't offer any definitions of a "scroll bar", and they go on to describe exactly the function of a scroll bar.
Essentially if you have a scroll bar in your implementation, you can't be sued with this patent as it's explicitly stated that it's not a scroll bar.
You can be sued for anything. They may not be successful in their suite, however...
Also, it was filed in March of this year. It would be pretty damned easy to show prior art or that in fact your own implementation of this existed prior to Apple's filing of their application.
...assuming you can afford the requisite legal costs to actually make it to court and argue that claim, along with the slew of other patent violations you'd undoubtedly be served with at the same time.
Wait, wait, get this - it's a a scrollbar, but it's on a touchscreen. What innovation! Oh, the humanity! Nobody has ever used such an interface before across so many different devices and interfaces it could possibly be called "general"!
How about the business model of filing an idiotically general patent, suing a new entrant to your market before they have millions of dollars to defend themselves in court, sucking their coffers dry and driving them out of the market, thus ensuring your market position?
In that case, I think the answer to "what is the greatest tool?" would be "the person asking the question".