One of the requirements of owning a patent is that you promptly and vigorously act to protect your rights. If you wait, you lose your patent rights.
This is a common misconception, but sadly it's not true. The IP you are thinking of is Trademark, which is why Apple Legal sends you a nastygram every time you put out a theme with partially-eaten apple on it.
Patents can initiate lawsuits on the last friggin' day and reap huge sums.
I think the biggest problem is not the publicity but the broadness of patents--originally you had to produce a working model and a detailed description of the implementation. Now that there are "idea" patents, you basically don't have to do anything except say "I've thougt of a system comprising blah, blah, and blah, and 'a com-pu-tor' in which you fetang fetang bullhockey malarkey fizbin." No implementation details, and hence Science and the Useful Arts to not receive any Progress.
This sadly is the domain of lawyers who pass laws that they and their friends will practice under, so surprisingly they don't respond well to anything that would limit the fees they can collect for filing and suing. Which is why they should be banned from legislative and regulatory positions and made to be government employees like judges are.
The same playlist 10 times sounds like a way to appease ignorant music execs.
Exactly. Unfortunately, they are still gatekeepers so if you want to play, you have to make them feel all warm and fuzzy. Would it were different, but it's not.
Later, when we digitize Hillary Rosen at the stake, we can dispense with the silliness, but for now...
I have plenty of ideas about what I'm talking about. And even if you don't directly get sued, you still get screwed: the price you pay for things reflects litigation costs, especially "protective" legal services vis a vis liability, trademark, patents, regulation, and taxes.
Additionally, our environment gets thousands of tons of extra packaging dumped back into it each year because some idiot laced some Tylenol with cyanide. Sure the safety hue and cry is not the legal system's fault, but the fear of lawsuits for any company that doesn't immediately take ineffective steps to put their product in blister packs is.
And the threat to free speech is quite real, go read chillingeffects.org for a second, would you? Then you can go back to your law books and plan a career tracking me down and suing me to the ground for disagreeing with you.
Yes, but then it is equal suckage. Now it just sucks for 50%.
I would love it if there were an institution with a centuries long unbroken tradition of fairness and impartiality, but unfortunately the tort system ain't it.
It has become notoriously unfair and partial, in addition to being simply ludicrous at times.
So maybe people could not take every conflict to court in the hopes of winning the lottery, and maybe companies would find something other to do than suing to keep their business model afloat.
AAC is MPEG-4 standard. So it's a standard format.
The only restriction is that you can only burn a given playlist 10 times. So if you want to knock off 100 copies of the latest Hootie and the Blowfish album, you're SOL. Given that you probably won't be buying entire albums like this, the odds of you wanting to burn the exact same playlist more than 10 times is fairly low.
As to the price, well, enjoy your non-copy-protected $15 CDs with all the crap you didn't want to buy. You can burn and reburn the same shitty playlist over and over and over without restriction that way.
Really, this "It's not perfect therefore WAAAH" attitude needs some serious LARTing.
Which is why lawyers, if they are officers of the court, should be court employees as well, and free to anyone who wants them.
This of course will mean they are civil service rather than high-flight professional jobs, but will democratize access to legal representation. Since it won't be he-who-has-the-best-lawyer-on-retainer wins, it will be a much chancier thing to threaten a lawsuit.
It might even make people take a deep breath, step back, and think whether we really need 1/5 of our economy or more to be tied up suing one another.
Yeah, I noticed that they didn't say if men experienced similar boosts in performance if they were given larger screens and smoother animations too.
Actually it said the gender difference disappeared in that case. So presumably, the men experienced a slight increase or no increase at all, and women experienced a larger increase to bring them to parity.
This might explain why my ex-gf would wait until I was cruising past an intersection in the left-hand lane to shout "TURN RIGHT!!!" and could never tell me in advance where a turn was coming up.
I got The Wealthy Barber for Christmas one year and saw both TV specials the next. It is incredibly readable, and gives very common-sense advice.
The main advantage of the book, other than being told as a fictional story, is that it assumes you're basically lazy and don't want to have to be disciplined all the time. You don't have to.
Pay yourself first, i.e., put away 10% of your check over and above your maxed-out 401(k) contribution. I do this, and it's amazing how little I miss the money. Then I basically make sure I don't spend my way into debt, and let everything else ride. Most of my money is in stock mutual funds, and though they've been terrible lately, they'll be fine when I'm old and grey.
And this is despite having bought a mildly expensive car with cash and keeping my computer habit fed--and I don't miss meals, either (fortunately, I go to the gym).
Do that stuff, then relax and don't think about it, especially when a broker tells you to think about it. Let the money ride, reinvest, keep putting some away, stay away from non-house debt, and you'll be fine.
But I like Apple and don't like Universal, won't this simply create a contradiction in the universe that will require the universe to implode and be replaced by a more confusing one?
I'm confused, I thought that had already happened.
Singapore is to authoritarianism as Sweden is to Socialism. It makes it look very nice and attractive and proves that it's a viable way to run a country. Singapore is Ashcroftism taken to a whole new level. Before you dismiss it, you have to deal with Singapore.
That being said, there's much to criticize in either example, and of course just because one place gets it right; a) doesn't mean it will work everywhere, and b) doesn't mean you would personally want that offal where you live.
NB, I am not saying that Sweden and Singapore are completely comperable, just that they are the standout "see, it's not so bad" exemplars of their respective political philosophies. Although both are well-kempt and relatively free of gum on the sidewalks. And both have controls on the content of movies and television. And both allow gun-running if you're rich en--ok, I'll stop.
European governments are notorious for subverting international law for the benefit of business. In fact, in Europe, governments own whole swaths of industry that are private in the US. German firms seeing rough times? Hey, sell chemical weapons to Libya. French weapons firms on the skids? Break the military embargo to Iraq. Need oil from Arabia? Bribe any dictator there who will sell it to you. (Europe gets the majority of its oil from the Gulf, whereas the US gets 16% from there.)
I agree with your point that a firm separation between government and business is needed, but the idea that the US is somehow worse than the rest of the world displays some weird blind spots.
The solution is not technical issues of campaign finance reform, but to limit the power of government to affect business outcomes. As long as government is the key to success or failure, businesses with money will find a way to subvert the system. Taking the power of government to favor one at the expense of the other is the only solution, and this applies even more to Europe.
Re:If Ars Technica is so concerned about usability
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually one usability found that black or brown text (I forget) against a light-pink background was easiest on CRTs.
Gag me with a spoon, but it's more readable once you get your lunch wiped off it.
All studies have found that dark text against a plain light background is easier than the opposite on CRTs with reasonable refresh rates.
Umm...no one said Global Warming wasn't real. The debate is the matter of "why".
Yeah, but "Global Warming" is usually shorthand for "anthropogenic global warming," both in its use by evil conservatives and evil greenies. And I've seen several posts basically postulating that very thesis.
republicans and conservatives who will acknowledge that yes...temperatures are on an upward trend
Not as many as should, now that the science is better. It's slightly understandable given the greenie rush to assert consensus before it existed (though now the concensus is there on the temp increase and 90% there on anthropogenic greenhouse gasses as a cause, if not yet THE cause). However, more bad science doesn't defeat bad science. Time to stop trotting out Dixie Lee Ray, Mount Pinatubo, and the upper atmosphere measurements.
you have to ask yourself whether its worth spending trillions of dollars to get that 1% back.
True, but if a) we can control emissions, and 2) emissions lead to heating, and iii) we can't control the sun, it's a measure we should consider. Using market-based incentives can reduce the cost by orders of magnitude as well.
Personally, I like Brin's (or was it Pournelle's?) idea to increase the albedo of earth by painting all the rooves and roads white. Cultivating rooftop gardens is also a fun and low-cost way to sink carbon, temporarily. But moving to fuels that aren't as valuable for their other products as fossils should be on the table.
If the Sun is indeed warming, then we may still need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The last thing you want to do on a hotter stove is clamp the lid tighter.
Sigh. If Greenies had just concentrated on the fact of global temperature increase or decrease, the debate would be simply on technical solutions. Instead they made it a religious issue. Now any time something like this comes out, those of the other religion will start demanding sacrifices of oil.
So what you're saying is that he makes verbal blunders that would make W blush. Or he claimed he invented the internet, just as he claimed Love Story was based on him and Tipper "I Make Ashcroft Feel Like a Libertine" Gore. Take your pick.
'Cuz even his boss would have had problems parsing that in any other way.
Though seriously, it says a lot about his mindset and the mindset of our masters in DC that it doesn't REALLY exist until it has a congressional sponsor.
Never mind that it had congressional sponsors when Al was figuring out how to be a (really bad) reporter, risking paper cuts for his country (oh, but at least he wasn't in Texas doing anything cowardly like flying fighters). Never mind that he wasn't even the primary sponsor of the High Performance Supercomputing Act. Never mind that the act served the Internet by getting it OUT of government just as he was getting strong.
So he's a delusional babbling ignoramus but he didn't claim he invented the Internet. He "took the initiative in creating" it.
Of course, there are dates and places and people in history, but the "hard facts" aren't generally important.
While there would be little need for historians (and a paucity of historical research papers) if the whats of history were considered to the exclusion of the whys, the whats are in fact a necessary precondition to understanding, as well as sufficient for some basic questions.There are several things one can learn from history that don't include the "interpretation of data through our modern worldview and understanding" (aka whys).
For instance, understanding how it came to pass that English has both Germanic and Romantic vocabulary roots, and that the vulgar words are of Germanic extraction and the high words of Romantic extraction requires simply knowing that the Normans (from the area now known as France) conquered a previously Anglic England, and installed themselves as the elites. Why did they do it? Well, that way lies history papers. But now I have an explanation I didn't have before, and I understand that English didn't arise sui generis. It's enough to know the invasion happened, without delving into motivations.
For general education, the level of understanding--imperfect and simplistic as it may be--that I display above is all that is required. For history majors, I'd expect a bit deeper exploration. But for high school students and non-majors, I hope they learn at least events in rough sequence even if names and dates get a bit fuzzy.
Slashdot Mirror
We find out that Ewoks and Jar-jar form a new, dark empire who crush the evil alliance of script-leakers and Kazaa users.
Only if you count the useless miles that the shuttle takes on its circuitous route.
Well, those circuitous routes are pretty much the whole reason to be up there, so it would be kinda silly to discount them.
Don't you mean "upper-middle-class-media-American?
Actually, it's "unfairly-advantaged-media-American."
it's it good that they are not the size of a VW
Yes, but in America we are working on making humans that size by default.
One of the requirements of owning a patent is that you promptly and vigorously act to protect your rights. If you wait, you lose your patent rights.
This is a common misconception, but sadly it's not true. The IP you are thinking of is Trademark, which is why Apple Legal sends you a nastygram every time you put out a theme with partially-eaten apple on it.
Patents can initiate lawsuits on the last friggin' day and reap huge sums.
I think the biggest problem is not the publicity but the broadness of patents--originally you had to produce a working model and a detailed description of the implementation. Now that there are "idea" patents, you basically don't have to do anything except say "I've thougt of a system comprising blah, blah, and blah, and 'a com-pu-tor' in which you fetang fetang bullhockey malarkey fizbin." No implementation details, and hence Science and the Useful Arts to not receive any Progress.
This sadly is the domain of lawyers who pass laws that they and their friends will practice under, so surprisingly they don't respond well to anything that would limit the fees they can collect for filing and suing. Which is why they should be banned from legislative and regulatory positions and made to be government employees like judges are.
That's a PC term if I ever heard one. No, that ad isn't ultra annoying, it's just rich media. Rich indeed.
Actually, to be truly PC, it should be "rich media-American."
The same playlist 10 times sounds like a way to appease ignorant music execs.
Exactly. Unfortunately, they are still gatekeepers so if you want to play, you have to make them feel all warm and fuzzy. Would it were different, but it's not.
Later, when we digitize Hillary Rosen at the stake, we can dispense with the silliness, but for now...
I have plenty of ideas about what I'm talking about. And even if you don't directly get sued, you still get screwed: the price you pay for things reflects litigation costs, especially "protective" legal services vis a vis liability, trademark, patents, regulation, and taxes.
Additionally, our environment gets thousands of tons of extra packaging dumped back into it each year because some idiot laced some Tylenol with cyanide. Sure the safety hue and cry is not the legal system's fault, but the fear of lawsuits for any company that doesn't immediately take ineffective steps to put their product in blister packs is.
And the threat to free speech is quite real, go read chillingeffects.org for a second, would you? Then you can go back to your law books and plan a career tracking me down and suing me to the ground for disagreeing with you.
Yes, but then it is equal suckage. Now it just sucks for 50%.
I would love it if there were an institution with a centuries long unbroken tradition of fairness and impartiality, but unfortunately the tort system ain't it.
It has become notoriously unfair and partial, in addition to being simply ludicrous at times.
So maybe people could not take every conflict to court in the hopes of winning the lottery, and maybe companies would find something other to do than suing to keep their business model afloat.
You missed a step:
7. Earn $1.75 per year.
8. Get Drunk.
9. Work at McDonald's.
Please, if there was that much of a market for indie artists, CD Baby would be edging out Amazon by now.
Eh?
AAC is MPEG-4 standard. So it's a standard format.
The only restriction is that you can only burn a given playlist 10 times. So if you want to knock off 100 copies of the latest Hootie and the Blowfish album, you're SOL. Given that you probably won't be buying entire albums like this, the odds of you wanting to burn the exact same playlist more than 10 times is fairly low.
As to the price, well, enjoy your non-copy-protected $15 CDs with all the crap you didn't want to buy. You can burn and reburn the same shitty playlist over and over and over without restriction that way.
Really, this "It's not perfect therefore WAAAH" attitude needs some serious LARTing.
Which is why lawyers, if they are officers of the court, should be court employees as well, and free to anyone who wants them.
This of course will mean they are civil service rather than high-flight professional jobs, but will democratize access to legal representation. Since it won't be he-who-has-the-best-lawyer-on-retainer wins, it will be a much chancier thing to threaten a lawsuit.
It might even make people take a deep breath, step back, and think whether we really need 1/5 of our economy or more to be tied up suing one another.
Yeah, I noticed that they didn't say if men experienced similar boosts in performance if they were given larger screens and smoother animations too.
Actually it said the gender difference disappeared in that case. So presumably, the men experienced a slight increase or no increase at all, and women experienced a larger increase to bring them to parity.
This might explain why my ex-gf would wait until I was cruising past an intersection in the left-hand lane to shout "TURN RIGHT!!!" and could never tell me in advance where a turn was coming up.
I got The Wealthy Barber for Christmas one year and saw both TV specials the next. It is incredibly readable, and gives very common-sense advice.
The main advantage of the book, other than being told as a fictional story, is that it assumes you're basically lazy and don't want to have to be disciplined all the time. You don't have to.
Pay yourself first, i.e., put away 10% of your check over and above your maxed-out 401(k) contribution. I do this, and it's amazing how little I miss the money. Then I basically make sure I don't spend my way into debt, and let everything else ride. Most of my money is in stock mutual funds, and though they've been terrible lately, they'll be fine when I'm old and grey.
And this is despite having bought a mildly expensive car with cash and keeping my computer habit fed--and I don't miss meals, either (fortunately, I go to the gym).
Do that stuff, then relax and don't think about it, especially when a broker tells you to think about it. Let the money ride, reinvest, keep putting some away, stay away from non-house debt, and you'll be fine.
But I like Apple and don't like Universal, won't this simply create a contradiction in the universe that will require the universe to implode and be replaced by a more confusing one?
I'm confused, I thought that had already happened.
Singapore is to authoritarianism as Sweden is to Socialism. It makes it look very nice and attractive and proves that it's a viable way to run a country. Singapore is Ashcroftism taken to a whole new level. Before you dismiss it, you have to deal with Singapore.
That being said, there's much to criticize in either example, and of course just because one place gets it right; a) doesn't mean it will work everywhere, and b) doesn't mean you would personally want that offal where you live.
NB, I am not saying that Sweden and Singapore are completely comperable, just that they are the standout "see, it's not so bad" exemplars of their respective political philosophies. Although both are well-kempt and relatively free of gum on the sidewalks. And both have controls on the content of movies and television. And both allow gun-running if you're rich en--ok, I'll stop.
You need to be able to smell the other person's farts
That is the most convincing argument against XP I've yet heard.
European governments are notorious for subverting international law for the benefit of business. In fact, in Europe, governments own whole swaths of industry that are private in the US. German firms seeing rough times? Hey, sell chemical weapons to Libya. French weapons firms on the skids? Break the military embargo to Iraq. Need oil from Arabia? Bribe any dictator there who will sell it to you. (Europe gets the majority of its oil from the Gulf, whereas the US gets 16% from there.)
I agree with your point that a firm separation between government and business is needed, but the idea that the US is somehow worse than the rest of the world displays some weird blind spots.
The solution is not technical issues of campaign finance reform, but to limit the power of government to affect business outcomes. As long as government is the key to success or failure, businesses with money will find a way to subvert the system. Taking the power of government to favor one at the expense of the other is the only solution, and this applies even more to Europe.
Actually one usability found that black or brown text (I forget) against a light-pink background was easiest on CRTs.
Gag me with a spoon, but it's more readable once you get your lunch wiped off it.
All studies have found that dark text against a plain light background is easier than the opposite on CRTs with reasonable refresh rates.
Umm...no one said Global Warming wasn't real. The debate is the matter of "why".
Yeah, but "Global Warming" is usually shorthand for "anthropogenic global warming," both in its use by evil conservatives and evil greenies. And I've seen several posts basically postulating that very thesis.
republicans and conservatives who will acknowledge that yes...temperatures are on an upward trend
Not as many as should, now that the science is better. It's slightly understandable given the greenie rush to assert consensus before it existed (though now the concensus is there on the temp increase and 90% there on anthropogenic greenhouse gasses as a cause, if not yet THE cause). However, more bad science doesn't defeat bad science. Time to stop trotting out Dixie Lee Ray, Mount Pinatubo, and the upper atmosphere measurements.
you have to ask yourself whether its worth spending trillions of dollars to get that 1% back.
True, but if a) we can control emissions, and 2) emissions lead to heating, and iii) we can't control the sun, it's a measure we should consider. Using market-based incentives can reduce the cost by orders of magnitude as well.
Personally, I like Brin's (or was it Pournelle's?) idea to increase the albedo of earth by painting all the rooves and roads white. Cultivating rooftop gardens is also a fun and low-cost way to sink carbon, temporarily. But moving to fuels that aren't as valuable for their other products as fossils should be on the table.
If the Sun is indeed warming, then we may still need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The last thing you want to do on a hotter stove is clamp the lid tighter.
Sigh. If Greenies had just concentrated on the fact of global temperature increase or decrease, the debate would be simply on technical solutions. Instead they made it a religious issue. Now any time something like this comes out, those of the other religion will start demanding sacrifices of oil.
took the initiative in creating the Internet
So what you're saying is that he makes verbal blunders that would make W blush. Or he claimed he invented the internet, just as he claimed Love Story was based on him and Tipper "I Make Ashcroft Feel Like a Libertine" Gore. Take your pick.
'Cuz even his boss would have had problems parsing that in any other way.
Though seriously, it says a lot about his mindset and the mindset of our masters in DC that it doesn't REALLY exist until it has a congressional sponsor.
Never mind that it had congressional sponsors when Al was figuring out how to be a (really bad) reporter, risking paper cuts for his country (oh, but at least he wasn't in Texas doing anything cowardly like flying fighters). Never mind that he wasn't even the primary sponsor of the High Performance Supercomputing Act. Never mind that the act served the Internet by getting it OUT of government just as he was getting strong.
So he's a delusional babbling ignoramus but he didn't claim he invented the Internet. He "took the initiative in creating" it.
Of course, there are dates and places and people in history, but the "hard facts" aren't generally important.
While there would be little need for historians (and a paucity of historical research papers) if the whats of history were considered to the exclusion of the whys, the whats are in fact a necessary precondition to understanding, as well as sufficient for some basic questions.There are several things one can learn from history that don't include the "interpretation of data through our modern worldview and understanding" (aka whys).
For instance, understanding how it came to pass that English has both Germanic and Romantic vocabulary roots, and that the vulgar words are of Germanic extraction and the high words of Romantic extraction requires simply knowing that the Normans (from the area now known as France) conquered a previously Anglic England, and installed themselves as the elites. Why did they do it? Well, that way lies history papers. But now I have an explanation I didn't have before, and I understand that English didn't arise sui generis. It's enough to know the invasion happened, without delving into motivations.
For general education, the level of understanding--imperfect and simplistic as it may be--that I display above is all that is required. For history majors, I'd expect a bit deeper exploration. But for high school students and non-majors, I hope they learn at least events in rough sequence even if names and dates get a bit fuzzy.
People are suprisingly trainable.
Apparently, you've never tried to switch users from WP 5.1 to MS Word.
"Where are the codes? I can't reveal codes!"