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User: rollingcalf

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  1. Re:Looks like a legit patent. on Form1 3D Printer and Kickstarter Get Sued For Patent Infringment · · Score: 1

    Why should the legal system enable Form1 to use litigation to eradicate the competition?

  2. Re:seriously? not this again on Hounded By Recruiters, Coders Put Themselves Up For Auction · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do your job ads mention the $150K+ salary?

    Many job ads don't mention the salary. If you're not listing the salary, developers will only have your reputation as a company and the type of work described in the ad to use as their basis for deciding whether to apply. If those aspects are not outstanding, you'll get mostly unemployed applicants (who will be rare in San Fran), not already-employed developers who want to know that they'll get a salary increase.

  3. Re:Not Likely Reproducible in Production Environme on Attack Steals Crypto Key From Co-Located Virtual Machines · · Score: 1

    It also appears that it doesn't work if there are more than two virtual machines running on the same physical CPU, or if the attacking VM is the only one running on a given CPU.

    With 3 or more VMs on the same CPU, the cache gets populated by virtual machines other than the targeted "victim" machine, so the attacker doesn't know which is affecting what. And if the attacking VM is alone on the CPU, it can't find any other VMs to attack.

  4. Sell them. on Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Over 500 Used DIMMs? · · Score: 1

    Either sell them all as one big batch, or in lots of 100. There are businesses and nonprofits that will buy them.

  5. Re:Do Not Want on FCC To Allow Cable Companies To Encrypt Over-the-Air Channels · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Except that when people build or buy an HTPC, it's usually not just for recording TV shows, it's also for playing games, music, ripped DVDs or Blu-Rays, Netflix, and other uses. The cable company's box won't do that.

  6. Do you have a sign? on Ask Slashdot: Video Monitors For Areas That Are Off the Grid? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's possible that the more recent dumpers don't even know they're not supposed to dump there; after seeing junk already piled up some may assume that it's a legitimate dumping ground.

    A sign or two saying something like "PRIVATE PROPERTY NO DUMPING" might help, if you don't already have a sign like that which is being ignored.

  7. Article is misleading on Supreme Court To Decide Whether Or Not You Own What You Own · · Score: 4, Informative

    What matters is where the authorized "first sale" occurred, not where it was manufactured.

    So if a book publisher has books printed outside the US, then imports them and sells them retail for the first time in the US, you can freely resell it because the first sale occurred within the US.

    What is being disputed in this court case is whether you can resell a copyrighted item in the US if the first sale occurred outside the US.

  8. Re:A liberal convinced me to take a second look... on Study Shows Tech Execs Slightly Prefer Romney Over Obama · · Score: 1

    "I don't know about the 47% figure, but I know that the number of people on disability has increased over 50% over the last decade, which is much faster than the growth of the population. You can't tell me that more people are becoming sick and disablfed; SOMETHING is wrong, and the system IS being abused."

    The system is being abused, but the system is also abusing people.

    There are many on disability who can do some form of work and some who were actually working before the recession, but the bad economy and the way the system works strongly discourages them from working again.

    When a disabled person gets a job, their disability benefits are reduced or eliminated, and then if/when they lose the job they have to go through the long bureaucracy to prove their disability all over again which can take over a year. Before the recession when jobs were easier to find, many would take jobs knowing that the job would either last a long time or they'd be able to find a new job reasonably quickly.

    But with high unemployment, any job they get is less secure, and finding a new job takes much longer than it used to, and their job search time is longer than average due to the limited types of jobs they can do. So they don't want to take a job that will reduce or eliminate their disability benefits, knowing that the job could disappear tomorrow and then they could be without work and without disability benefits for the next year. It's safer to just sit back and keep collecting disability.

  9. Re:This is not a bad patent on Boeing Proposes Using Gas Clouds To Bring Down Orbital Debris · · Score: 2

    The evil would lie in how it's enforced.

    Unless they've already implemented it, it's possible that their solution doesn't work as specified in the patent. Then if somebody else comes along with a similar idea but different implementation (for example, maybe a different temperature or density of the gas) that actually works, Boeing can sue them.

    The patent system has degenerated into protecting the results rather than the specific implementations, so somebody can put some words on paper for something that doesn't work as specified, and then sue somebody else who later makes a working implementation that accomplishes the same goal.

  10. Re:Australian citizenship. on Woz Applying For Australian Citizenship Because of the NBN · · Score: 1

    He's probably applying for permanent residence in Australia, with the intention to eventually become a citizen.

    Many journalists aren't savvy with immigration terminology, and they confuse or equate permanent residence with citizenship. Some think having a green card in the US means you are a naturalized US citizen.

  11. Re:Australian citizenship. on Woz Applying For Australian Citizenship Because of the NBN · · Score: 1

    It's probably more difficult to obtain citizenship in those countries. Australia has a points system where you qualify to immigrate based on your education, work experience, and other factors. Woz's achievements likely make him a slam dunk to get approved.

    In addition, none of those 5 countries you mentioned have English as a primary language.

  12. Re:Why is "obvious" so hard? on US Patent Office Seeks Aid To Spot Bogus Patent Claims · · Score: 1

    Because the legal definition of obvious isn't so obvious.

    They don't can't reject a patent for being intuitively obvious; they have to point to specific prior art and show that the patent application is for a trivial improvement or dead-simple combination of the prior art. Which effectively makes obviousness practically the same thing as having prior art.

  13. Re:Office Needs New Structure on US Patent Office Seeks Aid To Spot Bogus Patent Claims · · Score: 1

    How about making the patent office pay 50% of the legal fees for any defendant who was sued for infringing a patent that got invalidated in court (plaintiff pays the other 50%).

  14. Re:Hah! Take that, my bank! on Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You · · Score: 1

    If they've found the password file with the hashes, they can run the brute forcing on their own system without any tracking of failed login attempts.

  15. The contradictions of management on Why Non-Coders Shouldn't Write Code · · Score: 1

    On one hand, they think programming is so hard to learn that they require job applicants to have experience in the exact set of languages and tools the company needs, because it supposedly would take too long to learn something new.

    But on the other hand, they think programming is so easy that they're willing to outsource it to the lowest bidder in Whereverstan, or in this case they expect people with no education or experience in programming to be capable of producing production code after a few weeks of part-time training.

  16. Re:I'll believe it when I see... on Warp Drive Might Be Less Impossible Than Previously Thought · · Score: 1

    The laws of physics allow for space-time itself to be warped or stretched faster than light. It's traveling through space which is limited by the speed of light.

  17. Re:Couldn't we all just get along? on Wozniak On the Samsung Patent Verdict · · Score: 1

    'Well, no, I don't think it fair to say it "morphed" into what it is today. The patent system was created precisely to be "a legally-empowered version of 'I call dibs on that'" with the idea that by doing so, you'd "encourage inventors to share and explain their eventions" but their "call dibs on that" would be "a short period of official monopoly". To that end, the rather high-profile, high-tech boom of patenting anything and everything "on the internet" would seem to be a great boon in that it means in ~20 years we'll have a massive slew of technology of which "on the internet" won't work to grant a patent and meanwhile we'll have countless permutations of ideas all spelling out ideas.'

    I understood that the GP meant "I call dibs on that" is basically about claiming ownership on things that already exist which somebody else created, as opposed to creating something genuinely new and claiming ownership on that.

  18. Robots are people, my friend. on Social Robots May Gain Legal Rights, Says MIT Researcher · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... says the Roboplican nominee.

  19. Re:Only 22 hours of deliberations on Victory For Apple In "Patent Trial of the Century," To the Tune of $1 Billion · · Score: 1

    Juries in civil cases usually give the plaintiff the benefit of the doubt, not the defendant.

  20. Re:Yes and no. on Are 12-16 Hour Workdays Productive? · · Score: 1

    How are people without a family going to find somebody to start a family if they constantly work 12-16 hours a day?

  21. $6600 per Kindle! on State Dept. Cancels $16.5M Kindle Contract · · Score: 5, Insightful

    $16.5 million divided by 2500 = $6600.

    Even though that includes some content and services on top of the Kindle itself, I don't see how it reaches $6600 per unit without most of it being waste and kickbacks.

  22. Re:He REALLY pissed off governments.... on UK Authorities Threaten To Storm Ecuadorian Embassy To Arrest Julian Assange · · Score: 1

    He might already be in Ecuador.

  23. Re:Flash still unlikely to go away. on Adobe Officially Kills New Flash Installations On Android · · Score: 1

    The emergence of tools to convert Flash to other formats would allow developers to continue using Flash for development while still enabling web sites to avoid delivering Flash.

  24. Re:How hard can it be? on The Tricky Science of Olympic Gender Testing · · Score: 1

    If they separated runners into different divisions based on genetic differences other than sex, you might have a point. But they don't.

    The men's division of sport is really an open division where anybody* can compete if they're good enough, regardless of sex or genes. Women have occasionally competed in men's college-level sports and even professional.

    *for safety reasons some sports such as boxing will exclude women from competing against men

  25. Re:OT: fizz buzz on Goodbye, IQ Tests: Brain Imaging Predicts Intelligence Levels · · Score: 1

    Maybe you need better HR. Or bypass HR altogether with your recruitment. Your HR is probably selecting people who play buzzword bingo on their resumes and claim 5 years of experience with Windows 7, because those applicants look the most impressive to the tech-uninformed HR staff even though the reality is that they are among the worst.