I hear that argument, but is CA really some sort of global optimum for latency of a data center? It's a reasonably well connected location, but I can't help but think it's being somewhat overvalued because many of the engineers are in CA, and it lowers latency to them. But most users are not in CA, and isn't latency to the end-users the main issue?
That's precisely the problem we're trying to fix. It hasn't been a huge issue until now, because they've historically operated roughly as if they were common carriers.
In this case, the City of West Allis is a "government", not a "business", and its emergency dispatchers are government employees, not private employees in some sort of dispatching industry. The First Amendment has been held to apply to state and local governments since 1925, and applies to some extent even when the government is acting as employer.
There's hardware heterogeneity issues also, though: some phones have multitouch and some don't, for example, and the processor speeds and screen sizes are different. Even for devices with the same sensors, the sensors can behave differently, e.g. what kind of control over the camera you have and what data it feeds you, and what the accelerometer's characteristics are.
Doesn't matter for a decent number of apps, but matters for, say, mobile games.
Hmm, with oil it seems that might work, if it's all large companies, which is an interesting possibility.
The usual problem with liability (after the fact) instead of regulation (before the fact) for catastrophic situations is that the company will just go bankrupt at much lower levels of liability, so large liabilities don't really provide an economic incentive to avoid catastrophic failures. Say a company with $100m in assets has two unlikely but major failure scenarios: one causes $1b of damages, and the other causes $50b of damage. They have no real reason to avoid the second one any more than the first, because they'll be bankrupt in either case.
Now if you add personal criminal liability for the directors or management, that does change the stakes interestingly. I suppose the main thing would be to come up with a way of making the right people personally liable, so it doesn't result in perverse incentives and scapegoats, or, worse, just end up with everyone doing a lot of cover-your-ass paperwork with no real change.
So what has really been done by any regulations so far? Seems that nothing has been done.
Well, it's a counterfactual, so rather hard to prove, but I'd guess that what's been done is prevent many additional spills that would've happened. Look at how frequent spills were in the early-20th-c before the industry got more heavily regulated, sometimes even devolving into rivers of oil on land. There's a reason wildcat drilling, i.e. unregulated drilling, has a bad reputation, and nobody wants to return to those wild-west days.
Although this old pseudolibertarian meme seems to always come up, that's not actually how markets work. BP is a corporation with a variable rate of profit, in a competitive market in which they have almost no pricing power (oil prices are set in a global market whose price is controlled much more by OPEC than by western oil corporations). The most likely outcome is that BP's shareholders will be the ones to ultimately pay, through lower profits.
It sounds like some of the photographers in question are avoiding flash by setting up tripods, which somehow also seems pretty tacky to do in a restaurant, at least unless you're an official photographer brought in by the restaurant.
Yeah, I'd be pretty annoyed if I were at some high end-restaurant and someone next to me was setting up a tripod with flash to photograph his food. Taking a photo with your iPhone or whatever is fine, if a bit gauche, but setting up a whole production isn't really something people with decent manners should do in someone else's establishment, at least unless they've cleared it ahead of time.
They make power supplies also. But I sort of agree, I suspect graphics cards were a large part of their total business, and this signals either a significant downsize for the company, or a big gamble on moving to new markets.
I believe this is the first time in its history that a videogame focus group has been given an official role within the Chinese Communist Party. Congratulations comrades!
If one of the common ways it's being played is via Flash 10, then Firefox doesn't need support, does it, since Firefox hands that off to the Flash plugin?
The only thing that matters for Firefox is HTML5 video-tag h.264 that does not come with a Flash primary or fallback alternative. And that is still quite rare.
Partly yes, but partly for the opposite reason as well: lots of entities makes it possible to play shell games. There are a lot of biochem profs who have biotech companies on the side, and you might not be surprised that what often happens is that 90% of the research is done in academia on grant funding, and then the last 10% migrates to their startup, which patents the result.
I agree that's often the case, but even for obvious things, someone has to be the first to do them. I don't think you should get a patent for something just because you were first, unless it was also sufficiently novel...
My comment wasn't a prior-art comment, but an obviousness comment. It's sending a list of software, and getting back a list of updates, which can then be installed. I have trouble believing that someone "skilled in the art" as of 1995 would have considered that to be an actual invention, as opposed to an obvious and straightforward application of existing technology.
Some of the patents do have claims are more specific than the titles would lead you to suspect, but some of them actually aren't much more specific. The '077 patent, for example, is literally patenting the following: generate a list of installed software, send it to a remote server, the remote server checks for updates, and sends back notification of available updates to installed software, with a description of the problems those updates fix. Essentially, any update scheme that checks on the server side (fortunately, this means something like Debian's 'aptitude' is not covered, since it compares the list of available updates to the list of installed software on the client side). Is the idea of asking for a list of updates to a list of installed software really non-obvious, even in 1995?
For reference, this is Claim 1 in its entirety:
In a computer system having a first computer in communication with a remote second computer, the second computer having access to a database identifying software remotely available to the first computer, wherein at least one item in the database identifies software installable on the first computer, a computer implemented method for identifying computer software available for installation on the first computer, the method comprising, at the second computer:
retrieving from the first computer to the second computer an inventory identifying at least certain computer software installed on the first computer;
comparing the inventory of computer software with the database to identify computer software available to the first computer and not installed on the first computer;
preparing for presentation at the first computer software information indicating software available to the first computer and not installed on the first computer; and
sending the software information to the first computer, said information including an alert about a defect in software on the first computer correctable by software available to the first computer and not installed thereon.
Re: the postscript -- excellent, glad you liked it! I took a class from that prof. a few years back which was excellent, and feel the book deserves a read outside of academia, so I've had it hanging out in my sig.
It seems to make it reasonably okay to me. The point of the law isn't to be a set of rules that exists solely for the point of having rules, like some sort of game-theory problem or videogame diversion, but to keep society reasonably in order. On the list of things that cause significant problems for society, and which are worth allocating resources and authority to stop, a crackpot trying to find UFO evidence is pretty low; the only real damage such a person causes is essentially accidental, and doesn't seem worth extraditing someone to another country or jailing them for decades over (even if you're purely selfish: remember, jailing people for decades costs you lots and lots of money).
I'd say the proper response to a slightly crazy person breaking into computers to find UFO evidence is to institutionalize them for some period, and then try to wean them back into society, probably while keeping their computer use restricted or monitored initially.
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I hear that argument, but is CA really some sort of global optimum for latency of a data center? It's a reasonably well connected location, but I can't help but think it's being somewhat overvalued because many of the engineers are in CA, and it lowers latency to them. But most users are not in CA, and isn't latency to the end-users the main issue?
That's precisely the problem we're trying to fix. It hasn't been a huge issue until now, because they've historically operated roughly as if they were common carriers.
It was also one of the earliest persistent online communities (before the WELL, Usenet, and BBS eras).
You can even read it that way with the original wording, if you read "founder" as the verb meaning "to sink; to fail".
What if you don't post about it on a website, but the boss sees you entering the bar while he's driving home? Can he still fire you?
In this case, the City of West Allis is a "government", not a "business", and its emergency dispatchers are government employees, not private employees in some sort of dispatching industry. The First Amendment has been held to apply to state and local governments since 1925, and applies to some extent even when the government is acting as employer.
There's hardware heterogeneity issues also, though: some phones have multitouch and some don't, for example, and the processor speeds and screen sizes are different. Even for devices with the same sensors, the sensors can behave differently, e.g. what kind of control over the camera you have and what data it feeds you, and what the accelerometer's characteristics are.
Doesn't matter for a decent number of apps, but matters for, say, mobile games.
Hmm, with oil it seems that might work, if it's all large companies, which is an interesting possibility.
The usual problem with liability (after the fact) instead of regulation (before the fact) for catastrophic situations is that the company will just go bankrupt at much lower levels of liability, so large liabilities don't really provide an economic incentive to avoid catastrophic failures. Say a company with $100m in assets has two unlikely but major failure scenarios: one causes $1b of damages, and the other causes $50b of damage. They have no real reason to avoid the second one any more than the first, because they'll be bankrupt in either case.
Now if you add personal criminal liability for the directors or management, that does change the stakes interestingly. I suppose the main thing would be to come up with a way of making the right people personally liable, so it doesn't result in perverse incentives and scapegoats, or, worse, just end up with everyone doing a lot of cover-your-ass paperwork with no real change.
Well, it's a counterfactual, so rather hard to prove, but I'd guess that what's been done is prevent many additional spills that would've happened. Look at how frequent spills were in the early-20th-c before the industry got more heavily regulated, sometimes even devolving into rivers of oil on land. There's a reason wildcat drilling, i.e. unregulated drilling, has a bad reputation, and nobody wants to return to those wild-west days.
Although this old pseudolibertarian meme seems to always come up, that's not actually how markets work. BP is a corporation with a variable rate of profit, in a competitive market in which they have almost no pricing power (oil prices are set in a global market whose price is controlled much more by OPEC than by western oil corporations). The most likely outcome is that BP's shareholders will be the ones to ultimately pay, through lower profits.
It sounds like some of the photographers in question are avoiding flash by setting up tripods, which somehow also seems pretty tacky to do in a restaurant, at least unless you're an official photographer brought in by the restaurant.
Yeah, I'd be pretty annoyed if I were at some high end-restaurant and someone next to me was setting up a tripod with flash to photograph his food. Taking a photo with your iPhone or whatever is fine, if a bit gauche, but setting up a whole production isn't really something people with decent manners should do in someone else's establishment, at least unless they've cleared it ahead of time.
They make power supplies also. But I sort of agree, I suspect graphics cards were a large part of their total business, and this signals either a significant downsize for the company, or a big gamble on moving to new markets.
I believe this is the first time in its history that a videogame focus group has been given an official role within the Chinese Communist Party. Congratulations comrades!
If one of the common ways it's being played is via Flash 10, then Firefox doesn't need support, does it, since Firefox hands that off to the Flash plugin?
The only thing that matters for Firefox is HTML5 video-tag h.264 that does not come with a Flash primary or fallback alternative. And that is still quite rare.
Partly yes, but partly for the opposite reason as well: lots of entities makes it possible to play shell games. There are a lot of biochem profs who have biotech companies on the side, and you might not be surprised that what often happens is that 90% of the research is done in academia on grant funding, and then the last 10% migrates to their startup, which patents the result.
I was hoping this would be a long, drawn-out standoff that somehow ended up damaging both companies.
I agree that's often the case, but even for obvious things, someone has to be the first to do them. I don't think you should get a patent for something just because you were first, unless it was also sufficiently novel...
My comment wasn't a prior-art comment, but an obviousness comment. It's sending a list of software, and getting back a list of updates, which can then be installed. I have trouble believing that someone "skilled in the art" as of 1995 would have considered that to be an actual invention, as opposed to an obvious and straightforward application of existing technology.
My understanding is that patent claims are standalone, so it's not only the most narrow conjunction of claims that's actually claimed.
Some of the patents do have claims are more specific than the titles would lead you to suspect, but some of them actually aren't much more specific. The '077 patent, for example, is literally patenting the following: generate a list of installed software, send it to a remote server, the remote server checks for updates, and sends back notification of available updates to installed software, with a description of the problems those updates fix. Essentially, any update scheme that checks on the server side (fortunately, this means something like Debian's 'aptitude' is not covered, since it compares the list of available updates to the list of installed software on the client side). Is the idea of asking for a list of updates to a list of installed software really non-obvious, even in 1995?
For reference, this is Claim 1 in its entirety:
Re: the postscript -- excellent, glad you liked it! I took a class from that prof. a few years back which was excellent, and feel the book deserves a read outside of academia, so I've had it hanging out in my sig.
It seems to make it reasonably okay to me. The point of the law isn't to be a set of rules that exists solely for the point of having rules, like some sort of game-theory problem or videogame diversion, but to keep society reasonably in order. On the list of things that cause significant problems for society, and which are worth allocating resources and authority to stop, a crackpot trying to find UFO evidence is pretty low; the only real damage such a person causes is essentially accidental, and doesn't seem worth extraditing someone to another country or jailing them for decades over (even if you're purely selfish: remember, jailing people for decades costs you lots and lots of money).
I'd say the proper response to a slightly crazy person breaking into computers to find UFO evidence is to institutionalize them for some period, and then try to wean them back into society, probably while keeping their computer use restricted or monitored initially.
As far as I can tell, the "big crunch" hypothesis isn't yet totally ruled out, though majority opinion is probably against it.
To be fair, Slashdot has known both the affirmation and negation of nearly all propositions.