The gun component issue of the story is really a red herring. It's there to make it exciting and controversial, not because it has any fundamental importance in itself. As lots of posters have mentioned, there are many ways already to make gun parts. People have been doing it for centuries. IMHO, the patent or copyright enforceability issue is relatively moot also. Anyone can do all sorts of illegal things in the privacy of their home and get away with it. If one is careful, discreet, and harms nobody, it can be done indefinitely. If the authorities discover the activity somehow, then prevailing law is applied. The same thing will occur with 3D printing. Make stuff at home without getting caught and you can do it indefinitely. Make thousands of copies of patented or copyrighted items and sell them at flea markets, and you'll get busted sooner or later. Nothing new here except that it will now be cheap and easy to make things that are far more elaborate or complex than ever before. It is the empowering nature of a generic 3D printer that is the interesting part.
By "soon" they must mean within the next millisecond? Retrospectively over the past 20 years? Are they actually suggesting that we need to wait a few months and examine empirical data, otherwise there is some sort of doubt regarding the outcome? Microsoft investors believe it is worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars over a year or two of going through the motions in order to be certain that the answer is a clear-cut "no?" Why don't they just give me the money? I can fuck things up just as well as they can.
That is patently ludicrous. It's the sort of shallow, simple-minded, short-sighted mentality that defines faux-libertarianism. It is the same as saying "let any kind of hazardous object or material be freely sold to anyone, and consider those injured or killed as both unavoidable collateral damage and cautionary tales to the survivors." Maybe you grew up on a pirate ship, and are cool with it, but I prefer that sane regulations protecting both the consumer and the manufacturer be developed and implemented.
What has to occur for you to actually get it? When two or more magnets are swallowed, and they come together on opposite sides of intestinal tissue (note that the intestine is intricately folded), life-threatening pinching can occur. Do we have to show you pictures for you to get it? Sock puppets? A video game where you chase little magnets through a child's intestine? A raunchy cartoon on Comedy Central? What, Dude, what?
When did the Common Lisp find-if procedure appear? What other similar built-in collection-searching functions have there been in programming languages? Would that not be a generic prior art preventing anyone from patenting the ability to search through a collection of entries? Searching a list must have been obvious to anyone "skilled in the art" since some time in the 1960s.
I honestly think the various Corporations involved in the Corporate Greed Policy, know their days are numbered, and are getting what they can, while they can, before enough people wake up and put a stop to it.
This is meaningless. It is a perennial empty claim usually made by naive teenagers and early twenty-somethings. It will not ever happen. If people are paying so much for a product or service that makes the provider a huge amount of money, the only choice is to break a monopoly if it exists. In this case it does not, there are many providers. If it ever gets too expensive for consumers, demand will drop and so will profits. If they drop a lot, there will be a shake out and only a few providers will survive.
I do agree with your contention that something doesn't make sense. All of the streaming providers use the same three CDNs (Akamai, Level3, and Limelight), so their base costs are the same. No movie studio can create their own. It just isn't do-able in practical terms. Content providers can't charge so much that Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc. can't make money on it, nor can they flagrantly engage in anti-competitive behavior. Bottom line: they will have to suck it up and Netflix will survive.
There is a finite cost to providing people with water, gas, electricity, and of course network bandwidth. Are you suggesting that people should get infinite bandwidth for a low fixed monthly price?
I get the Netflix DVD service, not the streaming. The streaming is heavily skewed to boring, hyper-commercial new releases, whereas the DVD collection is a vast library of indie, foreign, and artistic films and videos essentially unavailable anywhere else. Losing that would be a tragedy. I don't give a flying fuck about the latest movie star vehicles or blockbuster action crap. I can't stand the cardboard acting or shallow and contrived writing of most commercial movies that are on the streaming service. Bummer.
I wholehertedly agree. The WYSIWYG tools produce sites that tend to look and function alike, and reading the code they produce is nightmarish. The pages are often heavy, their techniques tend to be behind the times, re-working a site is needlessly more difficult than it has to be (unless you start over from scratch), etc. Far better to use a CMS with templates and code minimal, lean, and fast code on cleverlywell-organized pages. To do that, it's hand-coding all the way. Not to mention using something like Google App Engine.
No probs, Dude, although we certainly disagree. Twenty bucks and a beer (or a goblet of wine) say that you and I both will be very disappointed regardless of how it all comes out. C'est la vie.
I gather you are conservative? Obama is not even close to "marxist." He is center right. Center right. Much more important than left or right, and more important than how much to the right you seem to be to consider him "marxist," he is staunchly pro-establishment. Romney is also staunchly pro-establishment, and I would wager that if elected he will be very much to the left of your politics, and you will almost certainly feel the same way about him as I do about Obama. In practice, in everyday, banal, sausage-making, hot-air spewing, political base-manipulating politics as usual, the differences between Romney and Obama are inconsequential.
Don't believe it? Well, we'll all find out one way or another, won't we.
"Anyone but Bush." Remember? Way back when large masses of suckers (myself included, lamentably), thought that we were able to vote for "anyone but Bush." Someone different. Someone who was not a corrupt ass-kissing stooge of war criminals, financial scammers, drug traffickers (legal or illegal), deranged religious fanatics, or the usual parade of fascist sociopaths. Supposedly, there was some guy who would not be that way. I didn't fully buy it, but what the hell. Who else would I vote for? Now that odious palinism "hopey changey" comes annoyingly to mind. Not this time, though. It's Green Party or Peace and Freedom, and quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass who their candidate is.
the pager is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers,' akin to an address book.
If a phone is like a pager, then by this reasoning, opening your snail mail is fine, because an envelope is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for street addresses, akin to an address book.' Note that the envelope contains the communication itself, which is protected. That in itself should preclude responding to the letter by a police impostor. The cell phone also contains protected communication, and that in itself should also preclude the spoofing.
In the absence of RTFA, this sounds like soviet-style rubbish.
Let it be known henceforth and herafter that 1) using any kind of electronic device to store, process, or display any kind of information, and 2) providing graphical, aural, tactile, or physical controls to manipulate, browse, or otherwise act upon the data are obvious to all skilled in the art and therefore not patentable!
Important difference: The LHC was built to be a certain level of massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be required. Ignition of sustained fusion in the lab has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently the theory behind sustained fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That was the point behind my typically snarky/. remark. Of course I support further research into nuclear fusion, but there are moments where humor and sarcasm are just too damn tempting. Sorry to hurt your feelings or whatever.
Important difference: The LHC was built to be massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be needed. Ignition of a fusion reaction has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
No. This more like "doing the same thing over and over again hoping it will work." The hope is that with enough power it will eventually ignite. At this point, a layman such as myself wonders what the hope:science ratio is. It has been several decades.
Where do you work? In cubeland, practically everybody has been forced to use MS Outlook for about 20 years or however long it's been around. If their phone can't use Outlook properly, boy, they in a heap o' trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
The gun component issue of the story is really a red herring. It's there to make it exciting and controversial, not because it has any fundamental importance in itself. As lots of posters have mentioned, there are many ways already to make gun parts. People have been doing it for centuries. IMHO, the patent or copyright enforceability issue is relatively moot also. Anyone can do all sorts of illegal things in the privacy of their home and get away with it. If one is careful, discreet, and harms nobody, it can be done indefinitely. If the authorities discover the activity somehow, then prevailing law is applied. The same thing will occur with 3D printing. Make stuff at home without getting caught and you can do it indefinitely. Make thousands of copies of patented or copyrighted items and sell them at flea markets, and you'll get busted sooner or later. Nothing new here except that it will now be cheap and easy to make things that are far more elaborate or complex than ever before. It is the empowering nature of a generic 3D printer that is the interesting part.
By "soon" they must mean within the next millisecond? Retrospectively over the past 20 years? Are they actually suggesting that we need to wait a few months and examine empirical data, otherwise there is some sort of doubt regarding the outcome? Microsoft investors believe it is worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars over a year or two of going through the motions in order to be certain that the answer is a clear-cut "no?" Why don't they just give me the money? I can fuck things up just as well as they can.
I think.
*there
That is patently ludicrous. It's the sort of shallow, simple-minded, short-sighted mentality that defines faux-libertarianism. It is the same as saying "let any kind of hazardous object or material be freely sold to anyone, and consider those injured or killed as both unavoidable collateral damage and cautionary tales to the survivors." Maybe you grew up on a pirate ship, and are cool with it, but I prefer that sane regulations protecting both the consumer and the manufacturer be developed and implemented.
What has to occur for you to actually get it? When two or more magnets are swallowed, and they come together on opposite sides of intestinal tissue (note that the intestine is intricately folded), life-threatening pinching can occur. Do we have to show you pictures for you to get it? Sock puppets? A video game where you chase little magnets through a child's intestine? A raunchy cartoon on Comedy Central? What, Dude, what?
Thanks, Dude. Is it just this thread in particular or are all the faux-libertarian dipshits on the planet posting something here at the same time?
When did the Common Lisp find-if procedure appear? What other similar built-in collection-searching functions have there been in programming languages? Would that not be a generic prior art preventing anyone from patenting the ability to search through a collection of entries? Searching a list must have been obvious to anyone "skilled in the art" since some time in the 1960s.
I honestly think the various Corporations involved in the Corporate Greed Policy, know their days are numbered, and are getting what they can, while they can, before enough people wake up and put a stop to it.
This is meaningless. It is a perennial empty claim usually made by naive teenagers and early twenty-somethings. It will not ever happen. If people are paying so much for a product or service that makes the provider a huge amount of money, the only choice is to break a monopoly if it exists. In this case it does not, there are many providers. If it ever gets too expensive for consumers, demand will drop and so will profits. If they drop a lot, there will be a shake out and only a few providers will survive.
I do agree with your contention that something doesn't make sense. All of the streaming providers use the same three CDNs (Akamai, Level3, and Limelight), so their base costs are the same. No movie studio can create their own. It just isn't do-able in practical terms. Content providers can't charge so much that Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc. can't make money on it, nor can they flagrantly engage in anti-competitive behavior. Bottom line: they will have to suck it up and Netflix will survive.
There is a finite cost to providing people with water, gas, electricity, and of course network bandwidth. Are you suggesting that people should get infinite bandwidth for a low fixed monthly price?
I get the Netflix DVD service, not the streaming. The streaming is heavily skewed to boring, hyper-commercial new releases, whereas the DVD collection is a vast library of indie, foreign, and artistic films and videos essentially unavailable anywhere else. Losing that would be a tragedy. I don't give a flying fuck about the latest movie star vehicles or blockbuster action crap. I can't stand the cardboard acting or shallow and contrived writing of most commercial movies that are on the streaming service. Bummer.
These people add a whole new scale of meaning to the phrase ex recto.
I wholehertedly agree. The WYSIWYG tools produce sites that tend to look and function alike, and reading the code they produce is nightmarish. The pages are often heavy, their techniques tend to be behind the times, re-working a site is needlessly more difficult than it has to be (unless you start over from scratch), etc. Far better to use a CMS with templates and code minimal, lean, and fast code on cleverly well-organized pages. To do that, it's hand-coding all the way. Not to mention using something like Google App Engine.
No probs, Dude, although we certainly disagree. Twenty bucks and a beer (or a goblet of wine) say that you and I both will be very disappointed regardless of how it all comes out. C'est la vie.
I gather you are conservative? Obama is not even close to "marxist." He is center right. Center right. Much more important than left or right, and more important than how much to the right you seem to be to consider him "marxist," he is staunchly pro-establishment. Romney is also staunchly pro-establishment, and I would wager that if elected he will be very much to the left of your politics, and you will almost certainly feel the same way about him as I do about Obama. In practice, in everyday, banal, sausage-making, hot-air spewing, political base-manipulating politics as usual, the differences between Romney and Obama are inconsequential.
Don't believe it? Well, we'll all find out one way or another, won't we.
"Anyone but Bush." Remember? Way back when large masses of suckers (myself included, lamentably), thought that we were able to vote for "anyone but Bush." Someone different. Someone who was not a corrupt ass-kissing stooge of war criminals, financial scammers, drug traffickers (legal or illegal), deranged religious fanatics, or the usual parade of fascist sociopaths. Supposedly, there was some guy who would not be that way. I didn't fully buy it, but what the hell. Who else would I vote for? Now that odious palinism "hopey changey" comes annoyingly to mind. Not this time, though. It's Green Party or Peace and Freedom, and quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass who their candidate is.
the pager is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers,' akin to an address book.
If a phone is like a pager, then by this reasoning, opening your snail mail is fine, because an envelope is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for street addresses, akin to an address book.' Note that the envelope contains the communication itself, which is protected. That in itself should preclude responding to the letter by a police impostor. The cell phone also contains protected communication, and that in itself should also preclude the spoofing.
In the absence of RTFA, this sounds like soviet-style rubbish.
Let it be known henceforth and herafter that 1) using any kind of electronic device to store, process, or display any kind of information, and 2) providing graphical, aural, tactile, or physical controls to manipulate, browse, or otherwise act upon the data are obvious to all skilled in the art and therefore not patentable !
Jesus Fucking Christ...
Somebody provided an interesting reply here.
Sorry, this post somehow got displaced (?).
Important difference: The LHC was built to be a certain level of massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be required. Ignition of sustained fusion in the lab has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently the theory behind sustained fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That was the point behind my typically snarky /. remark. Of course I support further research into nuclear fusion, but there are moments where humor and sarcasm are just too damn tempting. Sorry to hurt your feelings or whatever.
Important difference: The LHC was built to be massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be needed. Ignition of a fusion reaction has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
No. This more like "doing the same thing over and over again hoping it will work." The hope is that with enough power it will eventually ignite. At this point, a layman such as myself wonders what the hope:science ratio is. It has been several decades.
It still won't ignite a sustainable fusion reaction.
Where do you work? In cubeland, practically everybody has been forced to use MS Outlook for about 20 years or however long it's been around. If their phone can't use Outlook properly, boy, they in a heap o' trouble.
Whelp, there goes a big toe...