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While many may argue that this supresses truth, is it really so? Does American-style "free" journalism really give a balanced view of what is happening in society?
I argue not. Most "news" is heavily slanted to doom and gloom. Why? Probably because doom and gloom sells. People have a voyeuristic tendancy to be drawn to shootings, car crashes etc. In reality, 99.99% of were not in a car crash, got raped or any such mishap. Many had a good time.
The media is not interested in truth, they are interested in what attracts eyeballs, and thereby ratings and advertising, and need to compete with comedy shows and other entertainment.
Some of this is pure ego-rubbing (We've got the biggest cars, aircraft carriers,...), but I suspect this is mostly used for lobbying purposes and used as "evidence" to underline some irrational argument.
Our kids are falling behind in math. Well, what do you expect if there is such low broadband? Lets start "No kid left on dial up"!
If US had huge broadband uptake, it would be bandied about to show that current policies are working.
The facts are unimportant. They are just anchors for the spin.
If you buy a printer and pay the per-print costs then clearly HP wants the comsumables to cost more (== more revenue for them) and that is pretty much the business model with cheap inkjets - low selling price, gouge them with ink prices. When HP sells prints, the per-print costs come out of their pocket and they are motivated to reduce those costs. Thus it would not be suprising to see these being ink efficient.
When MS pays for patents, they are in part legitimizing the patent holder's claim. Doing this successfully and selectively can help set a barrier for entry by others, in particular the free OSs. This can effectively add features to MS products that likely will then not show up in open source products.
Interestingly, MS did pretty much the same thing by paying license fees to SCO. Doing so legitimised SCO's claims and helped cause confusion amongst potential Linux users.
At last, a post that understands the diffeence between costs and pricing.
This is also a reason MS spends so much effort on spinning Vista sales etc. MS revenues are not hugely affected by Vista because pretty much every Vista sale would have been an XP sale if Vista had not come about (discounting for a moment XP to Vista upgrades, which are close to non-exixtant). Therefore, for the next few years anyway, Vista is a pure cost with no revenue upside. That's $5bn of Vista development costs straight out of shareholders pockets. That's perhaps 50c per share or so, approx 2% of the share value. This is mildly bad news, but it also coincides with the Zune turd. Two new product releases that are stacking up as failures. Clearly MS needs o do a good job of selling themselves to the stock market.
This legal costs come out of prifits and are a cost of doing business, not direct development costs.
Saying that the legal costs are $x per unit implies that that the Microsoft would have charged less for XP if there were no patent costs. That is patently false. MS chanrged as much as they could for XP without scaring away the customers.
This form of reproduction is not natural for animals (except maybe geeks). Cloning should be labelled because there are a bunch of unknowns and unnatural processes involved. Apart from potential health issues there are also ethical ones. As a consumer I might choose to not support cloning.
M16s have a long history of failing in battle situations. They were supposed to be self cleaning (like the AK), but are not. In fact, the first issues did not even have cleaning kits. Vietnam served up a lot of US corpses where the poor bastard was shot while trying to strip down his M16 and get it working again.I have not used an M16 but I have used an FN-FAL which has comparable reliability to the M16. Both these rifles are very accurate, but far in excess of what is required for realistic battle situations (for which AK47/74 accuraccy is more than sufficient). The M16 and FN-FAL gas chamber is particularly succeptable to fouling. In comparison, the AK's self cleaning is a dream making them suitable for untrained troops as well as making them very reliable in dusty environments.
Marksmanship is less important in today's infantry. The game is now more about firing lots of rounds at shorter ranges than single well-placed bullets from longer distance. This puts much more emphasis on reliability since a jammed rifle will cost you your life.
The army I was in switched from FN-FAL to a derrivative of the Isreali Galil which was far more suited to jumping in and out of vehicles etc.
Let's talk about up to date weapons. The AK47 is 9.5 poounds, the M16 7.8 pounds and the AK74 is about 7.2 pounds and also has the lightest ammunition. Weight is only of benefit in controlling recoil from overpowered rounds. The AK74 has a fansastic recoils supression system in its muzzle brake. This means that the AK74 is very easy to use at high rates of fire.
If we're haggling about weight, the electronic crap that this article is about weights 16 pounds. About as much as two rifles.
"The M16 is much better"? By what measure? Sure it's more accurate and has more range, but those are not very important in an urban battle scenario.
The M16 uses a light round and would be more fairly compared with an AK74, where the AKxx state of play is at, than the AK47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-74.
In an infantry situation, and yes, I have been in the military, sophistication counts for nothing. The mosty important issue is reliability where the AKxx have proven to be superior.
Most of the problems in US/NATO rifles are due to US politics and obsolete thinking rather than modern practices. That thinking got NATO/US stuck with the heavier 7.62 for a long time.
All this money/effort going into high tech ignores the most basic points: soldiers would rather have a reliable rifle and body armor than all the geek toys in the world.
With zero accountability the USPTO basically encourages bums and benefits from having slack employees. It can't improve without getting some quality metric in.
Sure these folk would have been bums anywhere else, but then they'd probably have been fired too!
How many desktop distros does the planet need? I can see the need for a few, each customised for a niche with something like Ubuntu probably scooping the lion's share of x86 desktops. Gentoo is for kids who play with matches. Debian for hippies. We need a few distros (well they're not really distros) to cover embedded and a few more for non-x86 hardware (PowerPC etc). How long can the community keep so many distros going?
It seems like an awful waste of talent. Perhaps focusing on fewer distro might get things moving along faster. I'm sure all that infighting and dilution of effort keeps MS smiling.
We're all human and even patent examiners make mistakes!
Well I don't buy it! I think the USPTO is broken in a few ways.
First off, the examiners are likely working to some sort of quota: Gotta process 10 claims a week or whatever. They can spend a reasonable amount of time investigating the application, or they can process it quickly. If they find some prior art, they send it back to the applicant who will send in a more supporting paperwork resulting in more work for the examiner to clear the patent application. The shortest route to clearing the patent is to just grant it. Come Friday and you're a few behind for the week, well they get slipped through double-quick.
Secondly Uncle Sam makes a bundle out of the USPTO. Each examiner can crank out a few grand's worth of work a day. Make it harder to get patents and less people will apply (and the processing costs would increase). It is easier to just make patents as easy to get as one of those credit card college degrees.
Thirdly, the USPTO is not held accountable to any quality measures. USPTO does not wear the costs of bad patents. Heads don't roll if patents get overturned. The lawyers love it. All the patent applications bring in money. Bad patents == more work. Nobody is motivated to improve patent quality.
Basically everything is stacked to delivering poor patents. I have a few patents, more than half of which I think are crap. I recently searched one of my patents and was suprised to see that other patents were granted for the same idea, even though the application quoted my patent. This really sucks. A patent is supposed to be property, but here the USPTO have clearly sold the same property many times over.
Is there a solution to this all? Perhaps. Firstly, patent quality needs to improve. That can only happen if the USPTO is help accountable. For example, if they grant a patent that is later overturned, then the USPTO could be held accountable for costs and losses incurred.
Technology actually does make us different. Technology significantly reduces the dependence on "survival of the fittest" and natural selection, and in many cases slows down or even reverses evolution of our species.
This is obvious with morern technology, especially medical technology, where people that would naturally die as infants are kept alive or have heart defects etc that should be removed from the gene pool or infertile people who are artificially made fertile... the list is endless.
Less obviously, even primitive technologies like fire, clothing and tools meant that we no longer needed to adapt as we could adapt then environment to us.
The measure of intelligence should be how slowly we evolve, not how fast. Bacteria etc evolve really fast(hours/days), as do insects(months). We would expect that humans, being king of the shitpile, should evolve slowest.
How should I have known it was not for public use?
I think that the courts are likely to take reasonable public access into account. If you just stumble across an AP that does not make it public any more than if you happen to find an unlocked door on a house.
Slashdot Mirror
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Server Too Busy
with your SSN!
I argue not. Most "news" is heavily slanted to doom and gloom. Why? Probably because doom and gloom sells. People have a voyeuristic tendancy to be drawn to shootings, car crashes etc. In reality, 99.99% of were not in a car crash, got raped or any such mishap. Many had a good time.
The media is not interested in truth, they are interested in what attracts eyeballs, and thereby ratings and advertising, and need to compete with comedy shows and other entertainment.
I thought they were messages from God, kinda like cyber age writing on the wall.
Our kids are falling behind in math. Well, what do you expect if there is such low broadband? Lets start "No kid left on dial up"!
If US had huge broadband uptake, it would be bandied about to show that current policies are working.
The facts are unimportant. They are just anchors for the spin.
Area codes can be huge. The whole of NZ South Island is one area code.
If you buy a printer and pay the per-print costs then clearly HP wants the comsumables to cost more (== more revenue for them) and that is pretty much the business model with cheap inkjets - low selling price, gouge them with ink prices. When HP sells prints, the per-print costs come out of their pocket and they are motivated to reduce those costs. Thus it would not be suprising to see these being ink efficient.
Now you're stupid if you RTFS.
Interestingly, MS did pretty much the same thing by paying license fees to SCO. Doing so legitimised SCO's claims and helped cause confusion amongst potential Linux users.
This is also a reason MS spends so much effort on spinning Vista sales etc. MS revenues are not hugely affected by Vista because pretty much every Vista sale would have been an XP sale if Vista had not come about (discounting for a moment XP to Vista upgrades, which are close to non-exixtant). Therefore, for the next few years anyway, Vista is a pure cost with no revenue upside. That's $5bn of Vista development costs straight out of shareholders pockets. That's perhaps 50c per share or so, approx 2% of the share value. This is mildly bad news, but it also coincides with the Zune turd. Two new product releases that are stacking up as failures. Clearly MS needs o do a good job of selling themselves to the stock market.
Saying that the legal costs are $x per unit implies that that the Microsoft would have charged less for XP if there were no patent costs. That is patently false. MS chanrged as much as they could for XP without scaring away the customers.
Of course any hacker with intentions of being a naughty boy is not going to show up and (a) make himself known or (b) reveal the holes.
This form of reproduction is not natural for animals (except maybe geeks). Cloning should be labelled because there are a bunch of unknowns and unnatural processes involved. Apart from potential health issues there are also ethical ones. As a consumer I might choose to not support cloning.
Marksmanship is less important in today's infantry. The game is now more about firing lots of rounds at shorter ranges than single well-placed bullets from longer distance. This puts much more emphasis on reliability since a jammed rifle will cost you your life.
The army I was in switched from FN-FAL to a derrivative of the Isreali Galil which was far more suited to jumping in and out of vehicles etc.
If we're haggling about weight, the electronic crap that this article is about weights 16 pounds. About as much as two rifles.
The M16 uses a light round and would be more fairly compared with an AK74, where the AKxx state of play is at, than the AK47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-74.
In an infantry situation, and yes, I have been in the military, sophistication counts for nothing. The mosty important issue is reliability where the AKxx have proven to be superior.
Most of the problems in US/NATO rifles are due to US politics and obsolete thinking rather than modern practices. That thinking got NATO/US stuck with the heavier 7.62 for a long time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of _the_AK-47_and_M16.
Grand cock-ups become coveted collector's items. Vista is going to be Microsoft's version of the Edsel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel
I just want to set an upper limit before everyone goes crazy.
Sure these folk would have been bums anywhere else, but then they'd probably have been fired too!
It seems like an awful waste of talent. Perhaps focusing on fewer distro might get things moving along faster. I'm sure all that infighting and dilution of effort keeps MS smiling.
Well I don't buy it! I think the USPTO is broken in a few ways.
First off, the examiners are likely working to some sort of quota: Gotta process 10 claims a week or whatever. They can spend a reasonable amount of time investigating the application, or they can process it quickly. If they find some prior art, they send it back to the applicant who will send in a more supporting paperwork resulting in more work for the examiner to clear the patent application. The shortest route to clearing the patent is to just grant it. Come Friday and you're a few behind for the week, well they get slipped through double-quick.
Secondly Uncle Sam makes a bundle out of the USPTO. Each examiner can crank out a few grand's worth of work a day. Make it harder to get patents and less people will apply (and the processing costs would increase). It is easier to just make patents as easy to get as one of those credit card college degrees.
Thirdly, the USPTO is not held accountable to any quality measures. USPTO does not wear the costs of bad patents. Heads don't roll if patents get overturned. The lawyers love it. All the patent applications bring in money. Bad patents == more work. Nobody is motivated to improve patent quality.
Basically everything is stacked to delivering poor patents. I have a few patents, more than half of which I think are crap. I recently searched one of my patents and was suprised to see that other patents were granted for the same idea, even though the application quoted my patent. This really sucks. A patent is supposed to be property, but here the USPTO have clearly sold the same property many times over.
Is there a solution to this all? Perhaps. Firstly, patent quality needs to improve. That can only happen if the USPTO is help accountable. For example, if they grant a patent that is later overturned, then the USPTO could be held accountable for costs and losses incurred.
Move along please!
This is obvious with morern technology, especially medical technology, where people that would naturally die as infants are kept alive or have heart defects etc that should be removed from the gene pool or infertile people who are artificially made fertile... the list is endless.
Less obviously, even primitive technologies like fire, clothing and tools meant that we no longer needed to adapt as we could adapt then environment to us.
The measure of intelligence should be how slowly we evolve, not how fast. Bacteria etc evolve really fast(hours/days), as do insects(months). We would expect that humans, being king of the shitpile, should evolve slowest.
I think that the courts are likely to take reasonable public access into account. If you just stumble across an AP that does not make it public any more than if you happen to find an unlocked door on a house.