Re:Live By the Sword, Die By the Sword
on
Adobe Gets Hit By DMCA
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Free Market ueber Alles types should take note... this is the kind of karmic returns such ill-considered, anti-social behavior in the name of padding stockholders pockets at the expense of the public good warrent, and perhaps now a little more often will actually receive.
Hell, that's what we've been arguing all these years. What comes around in the market will go around in the market.
Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, since this isn't the Free Market but the Unfree Government enforcing laws at the point of a gun and demanding bribes^Wdonations in return for protection, those with protection money will get away scott free and you and I will be under their thumb.
I'd agree with that, but they certainly have some other nasty effects on us...and then you tell me about how they affect rats.
But you ignore the numerous longitudinal and statistical studies before and since on cell phone usage in humans, and the absolute LACK of increased cancer rates or other diseases relative to controls.
Besides, as Drumanskiy, et. all 1974 demonstrates, much more powerful electric fields have been around far longer, so the proximity of your cell phone to your brain is nothing compared to, say, sitting next to the air conditioner for an hour. (don't believe me? get a gaussometer and check)...or using one of those nifty electric vehicles. Or stepping onto an electric train (3rd rail, anyone?). Or standing next to a running automotive engine. Or having a transformer outside your room. Or sitting behind a CRT. Or being anywhere close to a lightning strike.
Actually, what you have here is the opposite of a free market--you have an over-regulated series of local monopolies with rent-seeking regulatory bodies.
Adam Smith's insight was when you put business and government together, you get corruption and the consumer gets screwed. If it's senators and laws are making the decisions of who gets to buy what and what gets sold, then it's not a free market.
Telecommunications de-regulation was simply telecom re-regulation, a botched job, and is being attributed to everything except the inability of governments to fairly and productively regulate a "public resource" such as privately-built wires over private property.
True. See e.g. Urbanlegends.com's beta vs vhs [urbanlegends.com] page.
Horsehockey. We had a betamax player in '81-'82 or thereabouts, and for five years, its low speed was significantly better than the VHS, including the Hi Fi format. In particular, images didn't blur as much on playback. There was simply no comparison between it and standard VHS. Only HiFi came close, and yes, we did A/B comparisons on the same TV. At high speeds, the difference was less noticeable, but if you're taping off TV you don't use high quality except for a very few things.
The area that it wasn't as good as HiFi VHS was in sound, since HiFi VHS adopted the spinning head, giving an effective 30 ips playback rate, whereas the Sony was doing it linearly, at something like 1 or 2 ips. Otherwise, HiFi VHS only had about the picture quality of mid-level betamax.
This was obvious to anybody who had access to both, and it makes me really question their research and sources. Oh, yeah, Popular Electronics is their source. Well, that says it, man. I'm sure they can't hear the difference between Dahlquist and Pioneer speakers, either.
Thanks for that link. Now I feel much better about buying progressive rock, as none of the labels I listen to (except for the big 70's acts) are on there!!!!
All I hear is "Wytajcie, istoty zaswiatu," which would basically mean "Greetings, otherworldly beings," or better, "Greetings to beings from beyond Earth." The "outer world" is at best a rather poetic (or possibly condescending) translation.
I think it would be an equivalent of "Greetings, creatures from Outer Space," but they didn't intone it pretentiously, right before Ed Wood hovers the hubcap from a string and a theremin plays in the background as his boustier intrudes into the picture, as we are wont to do over here.
Or just have 2 'modes'. 1 default user mode that allows little adjustment (and most importantly... doesn't need it). And have an expert mode, which allows you to do whatever you want.
Not only must I shout out a "Hell Yeah!" to this idea, I wish Apple would loosen up to do the same. They have great themeing, multiple-desktop hooks built in to the OS--lots of hooks actually to do lots and lots of customization. It can't kill them to put an advanced tab on there, with maybe a control panel that lets you switch from all your customizations to the default in a single click. Then part of troubleshooting an app will be "set your Desktop preferences back to 'Default.'"
It doesn't have to be either or, people--a unified, well implemented system is a requirement for a good UI, but it doesn't have to be the only part of it.
Nobody without an axe to grind ever checks sources, and additionally, people are statistically innumerate.
For example, when you hear some group come out and say "1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted every year they're at college," you have to get into Clintonesque parsings of the meaning of "sexual assault", because it means that if assaults are truly random, almost all women will have been victimized by the time they get out of school. Advocates will say "yes, that's true" and invent a reason they think 90% of women don't report an assault.
It usually turns out that assault means "felt uncomfortable and/or threatened in an ecounter with the opposite sex." How many of us haven't felt uncomfortable? I'm surprised the statistic is a mere 1/3.
Then there are ones that advocates make up out of whole cloth or unrepresentative samples, like 10% of us are homosexuals (based on a self-reporting study of inmates defining homosexual as having had a sexual situation or thought dealing with the same sex--IN PRISON) or that there are a million homeless.
In each case, people fail to translate a statistic to its logical outcome or don't apply Occam's Razor to decide that it's more likely someone is inflating a statistic for personal gain (get funding for your issue/company) than it is that life is severely different than we think and we've been indulging in false consciousness all these years.
let the user turn off the 'helpful' feature that puts the last user's name on the login screen
You can do this:
System Preferences->Login->Login Window->Display Login Window as->Name and password entry fields
This displays a blank name field instead of the picture/name combo. I don't at work since the PC admin has an account on this box too, but then, he rarely has to mess with it so he's apt to forget it.;-)
A different "stink" is the lack of Macdrive support for other OSses.
Huh? Macs have supported Windows file formats for YEARS, like since at least '92. The Mac CD Burner supports different formats, even. This is just Windoze FUD.
A favorite trick of mine was to recover files for people when their Windows machine could no longer read the disk, but pop it into my Mac and it would open it beautifully. It's the Windows world that cuts itself off from anything but Windows formats. In the Mac world it comes standard with the OS.
This oldschool MacFreak is helping transition his office and customers back to Macs.
Someone makes an MP-3 player, printer, external hard drive, whatever, that only runs under Windows.
If Microsoft did it, they'd be leveraging their monopoly. If a 3rd party did it, they'd be cutting themselves off from some of the market. Not yet that big a segment, but when competition is as cutthroat as it is on the PC side, every bit can count if you can make back the extra R&D and support costs for supporting other platforms.
It's obviously a good enough segment that Microsoft itself has a highly profitable Mac business unit, including some of their peripherals to Mac users (this is typed on a PowerMac G4 800 with MS Natural Pro keyboard and Intellimouse Explorer optical mouse).
Agreed, but you'd have to crack an American password system to fall prey to those laws. While we are the world's policeman, our laws can only be extended so far beyond our borders before right-minded people start ignoring them.
Hell, some of us do it inside the borders.
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 3, Funny
We have this too: National People's Radio. It's a command system, ruled by the government even though they only have a 10% stake. The only problem is that in order to be alternative there needs to be diversity--and only in large cities is there market enough for public radio stations to do anything than run "Talk of the Nation" all day long, which is just NPR trying to compete with AM radio. So what you have is this:
The unwashed masses listen to pablum.
The right-wing masses listen to AM radio and country music stations.
The monied left-wingers listen to NPR.
The monied right-wingers listen to NPR and complain about the slant.
The left-wing masses (college students who wear black and listen to the Cure) listen to College Radio and bitch about how the man is opressing them by playing Meat Beat Manifesto instead of the Cure.
And guess what? It's been like this for years and CC's ownership has been a marginal change at most.
Just don't bother in the DC area--Mid Atlantic AAA takes about 3 to 4 hours to respond, even if you're stranded in the middle of the night in a dangerous part of town (or the middle of the day in a safe neighborhood). I speak from personal experience in both extremes. They should be taken out and shot.
AAA Carolinas, on the other hand, is a bargain at twice the price.
So this is basically the RIAA saying, "Hey, you know, we tried to buy influence to assert more control over what listeners hear, and now a company with enough clout has arisen to force us to keep doing what we've been doing all along. Stop us before we skirt the payola laws again!"
I mean, they're saying that only the payee and not the payer of payola is at fault. They are probably enviously eyeing Bill Gate's mansion, while theirs is only on the level of, say, Aaron Spelling.
So they'd like to cut their marketing costs (remember, this is why they say CDs cost so much and that they are a vital part of the process despite the fact that CD recording and distribution no longer requires the resources of a major corporation to undertake), and they'd like the Senator from Disney to do it for them.
Then later on they'll get bored and command him to mud-wrestle midgets for campaign contributions.
In short, they teach facts, rather than teaching the tools to THINK
My experience, sadly, was the opposite--and it's not as much fun as you might think. I can't count the number of times I had teachers say "well, I'm not here to fill your head with facts and figures, I'm here to teach you how to think."
Casting aside for a moment the idea that the current denizens of the teaching profession are the ones best suited to teaching anybody how to think, they basically tried to give me a lot of tools to think with, but nothing to think about.
When you're younger, abstract thinking methods aren't as useful as some basic facts. My education left me at a woeful disadvantage when I reached university--I had to make up for the lack of facts and figures that my classmates took for granted. It really smarted when I got out-argued over a point of history. It turned out the person arguing against me had it wrong--but I didn't know enough history to object. And this was in a graduate class.
My point is that without the fundamental shared beginnings, you can't think about much of anything usefully, nor can you communicate and discuss it intelligently with anyone else.
PS - Once I started filling my head with facts, I began to question what I believed much more regularly. Fortunately my parents were in the sciences and it turns out many of my beliefs have withstood the test--but many more haven't. C'est la vie.
A cousin of mine is an entymologist and got a grant during the Carter administration to do the insect studies on what were to be the collector farms (which, IIRC, were just wires strung up over a several square kilometer area in the desert). He got 27 negative papers out of it. "Microwaves fail to harm bees. Microwaves fail to harm ants. etc." Not exactly a dream section of his resume, but he was pretty convinced they'd be safe.
I hate to disillusion you, but throughout the real Bible belt, you could get Christians falling for this in droves--literally likely over 50% of the population. I grew up in South Carolina, and had the local public radio station tell me that if you play Van Halen's "Stairway to Heaven" backwards, it exhorted you to smoke marijuana. This during our previous Secretary of Education's term as governor.
They're pretty much equivalent to the political correctness freaks of the left that I met in college--everything you owned had to be checked for PC/TC (theological correctness). No products from countries with incorrect regimes/godless commies, thousands of "scholarly works" with lots of propaganda and incredibly self-referential citations, and an extreme ingroup-outgroup separation.
So it gets to the point where you could take the PC-ers and tell them that Apple was exploiting the working class and get them to boycott it and take the religious right and tell them they were in league with the devil, and take both of them and tell them they were involved in the illuminati/corporate/UN conspiracy and they'd both believe you uncritically.
The thing that gave it away for me is that the site's design is too good. Fundies always have crappy design.
P.S. If reading this as a Christian offends you, go out and tell your bible-thumping bretheren not to be such complete morons. Same goes if you're a World Bank protester and you don't like what I said about the Politically Correct--tell them to read a book or newspaper not written by the collective.
Really? The USPTO whines that it is 'overworked and underpaid'...dismissing this patent would have been 30 minutes or more that could have been spent examining whether serving a page with a computer system such that it appears the same to many users has any prior art or not.
I have a sense of humor--I just don't like it when real life starts to be indistinguishable from the Onion.
How many of you have ever had to pay for an email which has been sent to you?
I have. Many times. I still have to pay for my connectivity, both upload and download, on my personal account. It's just a flat rate now, but it used to be metered when I had dialup. So a big Nigerian scam email with lots of HTML cost me more than a two-liner from a US friend.
Think of this as an incentive to actually link Africa to Africa and remove its dependence on the rest of the world. Then they can prove all those Marxist Dependencia theorists right!
I bet Africa has to pay when they import more agricultural products than they export, too...
Probably, but the problem with patents is that you can never be sure, can you? Unlike with trademark, which is subject to dilution, patents can be allowed to exist as long as the term is granted and even on the last day, someone can sue another person (even if they ignore someone standing next to them doing the same thing--it's totally up to them). It's a great harassment tool.
The fact that such a waste of the taxpayers' money was able to go through the system indicates just how easy it is to do...provided you can afford a patent lawyer. If not, you're SOL.
Corporations patent things largely because they fear just these things--so everybody sets up a system where they think they can scare everyone else from suing them because they might also be sued for some obscure patent. In effect, they don't expect anyone to NOT violate their patents--they just want it to make sure you can't sue them over one of yours.
That is an increasing trend in law. Laws and regulations exist not to be adhered to, but to insure that someone has broken some law and that fact can be used against them as leverage. So if the city decides they can't afford eminent domain (where they have to pay you usually below-market prices for any property of yours they take to widen a road, for example), they simply find you guilty of one of the many ordinances they have and stick you with a massive fine--unless you agree to settle with them for the property they want.
The danger with this is, aside from the obvious abuses, that it degrades respect for the law. Eventually, it fuels a very combative relationship with the government--which, combined with the size and intrusiveness of modern government is why you can't even drive past the White House on one side anymore. They're afraid of you.
So no, this patent by itself isn't anything to worry about...it's a symptom of the larger set of problems, not all of which have to do purely with the patent office.
Why is wishing for a stronger foundation for a woman's right to choose mysogynist? That would be like saying hoping that someone has a better reason for not killing a man than because they don't feel like it today is misandry.
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Free Market ueber Alles types should take note ... this is the kind of karmic returns such ill-considered, anti-social behavior in the name of padding stockholders pockets at the expense of the public good warrent, and perhaps now a little more often will actually receive.
Hell, that's what we've been arguing all these years. What comes around in the market will go around in the market.
Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, since this isn't the Free Market but the Unfree Government enforcing laws at the point of a gun and demanding bribes^Wdonations in return for protection, those with protection money will get away scott free and you and I will be under their thumb.
If only the market were involved...
I'd agree with that, but they certainly have some other nasty effects on us ...and then you tell me about how they affect rats.
But you ignore the numerous longitudinal and statistical studies before and since on cell phone usage in humans, and the absolute LACK of increased cancer rates or other diseases relative to controls.
Besides, as Drumanskiy, et. all 1974 demonstrates, much more powerful electric fields have been around far longer, so the proximity of your cell phone to your brain is nothing compared to, say, sitting next to the air conditioner for an hour. (don't believe me? get a gaussometer and check)...or using one of those nifty electric vehicles. Or stepping onto an electric train (3rd rail, anyone?). Or standing next to a running automotive engine. Or having a transformer outside your room. Or sitting behind a CRT. Or being anywhere close to a lightning strike.
Actually, what you have here is the opposite of a free market--you have an over-regulated series of local monopolies with rent-seeking regulatory bodies .
Adam Smith's insight was when you put business and government together, you get corruption and the consumer gets screwed. If it's senators and laws are making the decisions of who gets to buy what and what gets sold, then it's not a free market.
Telecommunications de-regulation was simply telecom re-regulation, a botched job, and is being attributed to everything except the inability of governments to fairly and productively regulate a "public resource" such as privately-built wires over private property.
True. See e.g. Urbanlegends.com's beta vs vhs [urbanlegends.com] page.
Horsehockey. We had a betamax player in '81-'82 or thereabouts, and for five years, its low speed was significantly better than the VHS, including the Hi Fi format. In particular, images didn't blur as much on playback. There was simply no comparison between it and standard VHS. Only HiFi came close, and yes, we did A/B comparisons on the same TV. At high speeds, the difference was less noticeable, but if you're taping off TV you don't use high quality except for a very few things.
The area that it wasn't as good as HiFi VHS was in sound, since HiFi VHS adopted the spinning head, giving an effective 30 ips playback rate, whereas the Sony was doing it linearly, at something like 1 or 2 ips. Otherwise, HiFi VHS only had about the picture quality of mid-level betamax.
This was obvious to anybody who had access to both, and it makes me really question their research and sources. Oh, yeah, Popular Electronics is their source. Well, that says it, man. I'm sure they can't hear the difference between Dahlquist and Pioneer speakers, either.
Thanks for that link. Now I feel much better about buying progressive rock, as none of the labels I listen to (except for the big 70's acts) are on there!!!!
Yes, I can buy new music again!
All I hear is "Wytajcie, istoty zaswiatu," which would basically mean "Greetings, otherworldly beings," or better, "Greetings to beings from beyond Earth." The "outer world" is at best a rather poetic (or possibly condescending) translation.
I think it would be an equivalent of "Greetings, creatures from Outer Space," but they didn't intone it pretentiously, right before Ed Wood hovers the hubcap from a string and a theremin plays in the background as his boustier intrudes into the picture, as we are wont to do over here.
Or just have 2 'modes'. 1 default user mode that allows little adjustment (and most importantly... doesn't need it). And have an expert mode, which allows you to do whatever you want.
Not only must I shout out a "Hell Yeah!" to this idea, I wish Apple would loosen up to do the same. They have great themeing, multiple-desktop hooks built in to the OS--lots of hooks actually to do lots and lots of customization. It can't kill them to put an advanced tab on there, with maybe a control panel that lets you switch from all your customizations to the default in a single click. Then part of troubleshooting an app will be "set your Desktop preferences back to 'Default.'"
It doesn't have to be either or, people--a unified, well implemented system is a requirement for a good UI, but it doesn't have to be the only part of it.
Nobody without an axe to grind ever checks sources, and additionally, people are statistically innumerate.
For example, when you hear some group come out and say "1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted every year they're at college," you have to get into Clintonesque parsings of the meaning of "sexual assault", because it means that if assaults are truly random, almost all women will have been victimized by the time they get out of school. Advocates will say "yes, that's true" and invent a reason they think 90% of women don't report an assault.
It usually turns out that assault means "felt uncomfortable and/or threatened in an ecounter with the opposite sex." How many of us haven't felt uncomfortable? I'm surprised the statistic is a mere 1/3.
Then there are ones that advocates make up out of whole cloth or unrepresentative samples, like 10% of us are homosexuals (based on a self-reporting study of inmates defining homosexual as having had a sexual situation or thought dealing with the same sex--IN PRISON) or that there are a million homeless.
In each case, people fail to translate a statistic to its logical outcome or don't apply Occam's Razor to decide that it's more likely someone is inflating a statistic for personal gain (get funding for your issue/company) than it is that life is severely different than we think and we've been indulging in false consciousness all these years.
let the user turn off the 'helpful' feature that puts the last user's name on the login screen
;-)
You can do this:
System Preferences->Login->Login Window->Display Login Window as->Name and password entry fields
This displays a blank name field instead of the picture/name combo. I don't at work since the PC admin has an account on this box too, but then, he rarely has to mess with it so he's apt to forget it.
From the link you gave:
If your parliament can't avoid being a lemming, you can always boot them out of office.
No, I was making a politically aware comment on the amount of "Freedom" NPR really has. They have their stakeholders and respond to their interests.
A different "stink" is the lack of Macdrive support for other OSses.
Huh? Macs have supported Windows file formats for YEARS, like since at least '92. The Mac CD Burner supports different formats, even. This is just Windoze FUD.
A favorite trick of mine was to recover files for people when their Windows machine could no longer read the disk, but pop it into my Mac and it would open it beautifully. It's the Windows world that cuts itself off from anything but Windows formats. In the Mac world it comes standard with the OS.
This oldschool MacFreak is helping transition his office and customers back to Macs.
Someone makes an MP-3 player, printer, external hard drive, whatever, that only runs under Windows.
If Microsoft did it, they'd be leveraging their monopoly. If a 3rd party did it, they'd be cutting themselves off from some of the market. Not yet that big a segment, but when competition is as cutthroat as it is on the PC side, every bit can count if you can make back the extra R&D and support costs for supporting other platforms.
It's obviously a good enough segment that Microsoft itself has a highly profitable Mac business unit, including some of their peripherals to Mac users (this is typed on a PowerMac G4 800 with MS Natural Pro keyboard and Intellimouse Explorer optical mouse).
Boy, do you americans have stupid laws...
Agreed, but you'd have to crack an American password system to fall prey to those laws. While we are the world's policeman, our laws can only be extended so far beyond our borders before right-minded people start ignoring them.
Hell, some of us do it inside the borders.
We have this too: National People's Radio. It's a command system, ruled by the government even though they only have a 10% stake. The only problem is that in order to be alternative there needs to be diversity--and only in large cities is there market enough for public radio stations to do anything than run "Talk of the Nation" all day long, which is just NPR trying to compete with AM radio. So what you have is this:
The unwashed masses listen to pablum.
The right-wing masses listen to AM radio and country music stations.
The monied left-wingers listen to NPR.
The monied right-wingers listen to NPR and complain about the slant.
The left-wing masses (college students who wear black and listen to the Cure) listen to College Radio and bitch about how the man is opressing them by playing Meat Beat Manifesto instead of the Cure.
And guess what? It's been like this for years and CC's ownership has been a marginal change at most.
Just don't bother in the DC area--Mid Atlantic AAA takes about 3 to 4 hours to respond, even if you're stranded in the middle of the night in a dangerous part of town (or the middle of the day in a safe neighborhood). I speak from personal experience in both extremes. They should be taken out and shot.
AAA Carolinas, on the other hand, is a bargain at twice the price.
So this is basically the RIAA saying, "Hey, you know, we tried to buy influence to assert more control over what listeners hear, and now a company with enough clout has arisen to force us to keep doing what we've been doing all along. Stop us before we skirt the payola laws again!"
I mean, they're saying that only the payee and not the payer of payola is at fault. They are probably enviously eyeing Bill Gate's mansion, while theirs is only on the level of, say, Aaron Spelling.
So they'd like to cut their marketing costs (remember, this is why they say CDs cost so much and that they are a vital part of the process despite the fact that CD recording and distribution no longer requires the resources of a major corporation to undertake), and they'd like the Senator from Disney to do it for them.
Then later on they'll get bored and command him to mud-wrestle midgets for campaign contributions.
Dance, puppets! Dance!
I so don't care who wins this battle.
In short, they teach facts, rather than teaching the tools to THINK
My experience, sadly, was the opposite--and it's not as much fun as you might think. I can't count the number of times I had teachers say "well, I'm not here to fill your head with facts and figures, I'm here to teach you how to think."
Casting aside for a moment the idea that the current denizens of the teaching profession are the ones best suited to teaching anybody how to think, they basically tried to give me a lot of tools to think with, but nothing to think about.
When you're younger, abstract thinking methods aren't as useful as some basic facts. My education left me at a woeful disadvantage when I reached university--I had to make up for the lack of facts and figures that my classmates took for granted. It really smarted when I got out-argued over a point of history. It turned out the person arguing against me had it wrong--but I didn't know enough history to object. And this was in a graduate class.
My point is that without the fundamental shared beginnings, you can't think about much of anything usefully, nor can you communicate and discuss it intelligently with anyone else.
PS - Once I started filling my head with facts, I began to question what I believed much more regularly. Fortunately my parents were in the sciences and it turns out many of my beliefs have withstood the test--but many more haven't. C'est la vie.
Hey, let's tax poverty, as they're the ones likely to benefit from poverty programs. Plus it will discourage it, a la cigarette taxes.
;-)
Hey, it works in my computer simulation...
PS
A cousin of mine is an entymologist and got a grant during the Carter administration to do the insect studies on what were to be the collector farms (which, IIRC, were just wires strung up over a several square kilometer area in the desert). He got 27 negative papers out of it. "Microwaves fail to harm bees. Microwaves fail to harm ants. etc." Not exactly a dream section of his resume, but he was pretty convinced they'd be safe.
I hate to disillusion you, but throughout the real Bible belt, you could get Christians falling for this in droves--literally likely over 50% of the population. I grew up in South Carolina, and had the local public radio station tell me that if you play Van Halen's "Stairway to Heaven" backwards, it exhorted you to smoke marijuana. This during our previous Secretary of Education's term as governor.
They're pretty much equivalent to the political correctness freaks of the left that I met in college--everything you owned had to be checked for PC/TC (theological correctness). No products from countries with incorrect regimes/godless commies, thousands of "scholarly works" with lots of propaganda and incredibly self-referential citations, and an extreme ingroup-outgroup separation.
So it gets to the point where you could take the PC-ers and tell them that Apple was exploiting the working class and get them to boycott it and take the religious right and tell them they were in league with the devil, and take both of them and tell them they were involved in the illuminati/corporate/UN conspiracy and they'd both believe you uncritically.
The thing that gave it away for me is that the site's design is too good. Fundies always have crappy design.
P.S. If reading this as a Christian offends you, go out and tell your bible-thumping bretheren not to be such complete morons. Same goes if you're a World Bank protester and you don't like what I said about the Politically Correct--tell them to read a book or newspaper not written by the collective.
This is not a waste of taxpayers money.
Really? The USPTO whines that it is 'overworked and underpaid'...dismissing this patent would have been 30 minutes or more that could have been spent examining whether serving a page with a computer system such that it appears the same to many users has any prior art or not.
I have a sense of humor--I just don't like it when real life starts to be indistinguishable from the Onion.
How many of you have ever had to pay for an email which has been sent to you?
I have. Many times. I still have to pay for my connectivity, both upload and download, on my personal account. It's just a flat rate now, but it used to be metered when I had dialup. So a big Nigerian scam email with lots of HTML cost me more than a two-liner from a US friend.
Think of this as an incentive to actually link Africa to Africa and remove its dependence on the rest of the world. Then they can prove all those Marxist Dependencia theorists right!
I bet Africa has to pay when they import more agricultural products than they export, too...
Nobody will ever be sued for infringement.
Probably, but the problem with patents is that you can never be sure, can you? Unlike with trademark, which is subject to dilution, patents can be allowed to exist as long as the term is granted and even on the last day, someone can sue another person (even if they ignore someone standing next to them doing the same thing--it's totally up to them). It's a great harassment tool.
The fact that such a waste of the taxpayers' money was able to go through the system indicates just how easy it is to do...provided you can afford a patent lawyer. If not, you're SOL.
Corporations patent things largely because they fear just these things--so everybody sets up a system where they think they can scare everyone else from suing them because they might also be sued for some obscure patent. In effect, they don't expect anyone to NOT violate their patents--they just want it to make sure you can't sue them over one of yours.
That is an increasing trend in law. Laws and regulations exist not to be adhered to, but to insure that someone has broken some law and that fact can be used against them as leverage. So if the city decides they can't afford eminent domain (where they have to pay you usually below-market prices for any property of yours they take to widen a road, for example), they simply find you guilty of one of the many ordinances they have and stick you with a massive fine--unless you agree to settle with them for the property they want.
The danger with this is, aside from the obvious abuses, that it degrades respect for the law. Eventually, it fuels a very combative relationship with the government--which, combined with the size and intrusiveness of modern government is why you can't even drive past the White House on one side anymore. They're afraid of you.
So no, this patent by itself isn't anything to worry about...it's a symptom of the larger set of problems, not all of which have to do purely with the patent office.
misogynists. opinionated, and never humble.
Why is wishing for a stronger foundation for a woman's right to choose mysogynist? That would be like saying hoping that someone has a better reason for not killing a man than because they don't feel like it today is misandry.