The patent covers something like being able to stop calls from a customer who has run out of minutes I believe. Anyway, it's a paent over a specific technical solution to a problem.
Would you consider a Television to be patentable? If I invent a television, should I not be able to patent it just because there's only one obvious way to make a television? (It took 50 years to move beyond cathod ray tubes.)
Patentable inventions are not just about obvious - yes, paying in advance for cell minutes is obvious. But just because the general concept is obvious doesn't mean that a workable instantiation of it is.
IS this a patent for pay-as-you-go wireless, or a particular implementation?
I think this particular patent covers the way they link a phone to an account and properly deduct the right amount of money from the account based on the number of minutes. So the patent isn't "pay as you go wireless", the patent is "a particular method to make this cellular phone system able to handle real-time billing".
The patent isn't on pre-paid phones, it's on one way of making pre-paid phones work. If you want to start your own pre-paid phone network, you shouldn't steal Freedom Wireless's way of doing it.
You need to take the time to educate your kids about th ekind of thigns they could encounter online, and then you're just going to have to accept that your kids are going to be hit up by a pedophile at some point and also accept that since you've taken the time to train your kids how to deal with the situation that they will handle it, on their own, accordingly. Kids, especially 13 and up, are perfectly capable of handling the internet as adults when properly prepared.
Properly raising kids isn't a matter of making sure they never encounter a potentially dangerous situation. It's PREPARING them so that they can avoid dangerous situations on their own, or behave in a manner that a potentially dangerous situation isn't dangerous anymore.
If you don't do that, all you get is a very gullible, naive 18 year old who becomes a walking victim.
What insensitive clod would design something to replace a sexy, breasty, scantily clad bar girl???
You don't understand how the invention works - it's not intended to replace the bar girl, it's intended to SUMMON the bar girl. The faster you drink your beer, the more often the bar girl comes to see you.
The reason we need to protect ALL speech is because it's very hard, in advance, to know if your speech is legal or not. If we know that "deviant" porn is legal, well, how do we know if our particular flavor of porn is legal or not?
We don't, until we're in court. So by allowing the government ot prosecute any speech, even if it legitimately "deviant", we've also restricted LEGAL speech that is not deviant, because nobody can tell where the line is.
This is, of course, entirely separate from the issue that if you have limitted resources in the FBI, which we do, and you have the choice of fighting terrorism or fightinging pornography, and you choose to fight pornography, you're a moron.
Reproduction is easy, and is not a service to society.
ADEQUATELY RAISING CHILDREN TO ADULTS WHO CONTRIBUTE TO SOCIETY is a service to society. If you raise a kid who ends up in prison, you did society a disservice. If you gave birth to a crack baby, you did society a service. If your child ends up in foster care because the sheriff found a meth lab in your kitchen, you did socieity a disservice.
This doesn't mean the RIAA should run around suing people because they perform an antiquated economic function that now requires lawsuits to support, but the assumption that merely reproducing is inherently valuable is wrong.
I've stopped believing that the goal of copy protection is to stop piracy. That's not it. Pirates arn't going to pay for the music anyway, copy protection just ups the hassle factor a bit. Most people don't make illegal copies from CDs anyway - they make them from already existing files on the internet somewhere.
The goal of copy protection is to make people who ARE willing to pay for music pay more than once. Use to be able to buy a song once and then copy it to the various formats you use? No more - the music industry wants to change your purchase of the song to a purchase of the media - pay for the CD, pay for the tape, pay for the MP3.
What the record companies havn't figured out is artists usually don't make their money from the media - they make their money from touring. So the more expensive it gets for consumers to buy music, the more incentive consumers will have to give their patronage, and concert sale dollars, to articsts who give the music away.
You'd have to go and read the actual final bill to tell. The INTENT here seems to be to prevent your ISP from, say, blocking your ability to use any VoIP provider other than the one your ISP owns, for example. This is a real concern - I can get WiMAX in my area, for example, but the provider blocks vonage - something they don't tell you so you find it out after you've paid your money and try to use Vonage. Fortunately, I have alternative service providers, but it could be a problem if you only had one alternative in your area.
What's fair is fair - if an ISP wants the protection of not having to regulate the content of transmissions on their networks, then they shouldn't be regulating the content of transmissions on their networks.
If they started making a reasonable return instead of the ass raping they give now, gasoline would be at a more reasonable price.
That's a fallacy. What would happen is all of the gas stations would run out of gas, and then a secondary market would develop where people would resell the gas at the price determined by the market. The consumers are screwed either way; its better for us if the oil companies get the money as they'll at least spend some of it on getting more expensive oil out of the ground to sell later.
A good analogy is concert or sporting event tickets. The promoters have decided to make a "reasonable" profit on the tickets, and sell them at a price below market value. Does the consumer get less expensive tickets? No - scalpers buy them all up, and then sell them at the appropriate price. The only people who benefit from that are the ticket scalpers.
At $120,000 a pop, it's probably not worth it. What is the operational life of the system? How much does it cost to maintain? How many of the systems will actually save a life?
Like it or not, life DOES have a monetary value. If we only save one life per $10 million spent, that's probably not worth it (as we could save many more lives spending $10 million elsewhere.) The FAA values a life at about 2.3 million dollars - and only mandates changes where the cost of changes is less than 2.3 million dollars times lives expected to be saved.
The reality of life is that if we're all going to have MEANINGFUL lives, some of us are just going to have to die sometimes.
You're SUPPOSED to apologize, send flowers or something...
Then do the same thing you apologized for again.
THAT'S what keeps 'em keen. If you don't apologize, they can't show their friends how nice you are, and if you don't do it again they'll have fixed you and move on.
If the measure of "intelligence" used is an IQ test,I don't find it surprising that white men are found to be, on average, more intelligent than either women or blacks. In fact, if the study is of IQ test results, that's exactly the result I'd expect.
But not because white men are, at birth, smarter than black men or women. It's because you can be trained to do better at IQ tests, and also because IQ tests show a bias towards certain skills.
If you have done a lot of problems that are similar to the problems on IQ tests, you'll do better at IQ tests. People who have access to good education will do better on IQ tests than people who do not, a trend that follows wealth, which in the United States at least, tends to follow race.
I'd also expect men to do better on IQ tests than women because a lot of IQ test questions relate to spacial reasoning (figures that need to be manipulated in space), something men's brains may be better at doing that women's brains. This may make men naturally ore "intelligent" in regards to this particular subset of problems, but put some emotional reasoning questions on that IQ test and you may find that bias goes away.
If you were to do this same study with POOR white people and POOR black people, at a young age, in the same set of school districts, I would guess you would find that the IQ scores were pretty much the same.
Anyway, the moral ofthe story is that if this test is based on IQ test scores, it doesn't say 'Men are smarter than women". It says that "Men get better IQ test scores than women", which could very well just show a gender bias in the test.
Slashdot Mirror
now they can charge a whole bunch extra for printers...
The printers are free. But the ink costs $1,000 per cartridge.
The patent covers something like being able to stop calls from a customer who has run out of minutes I believe. Anyway, it's a paent over a specific technical solution to a problem.
Would you consider a Television to be patentable? If I invent a television, should I not be able to patent it just because there's only one obvious way to make a television? (It took 50 years to move beyond cathod ray tubes.)
Patentable inventions are not just about obvious - yes, paying in advance for cell minutes is obvious. But just because the general concept is obvious doesn't mean that a workable instantiation of it is.
IS this a patent for pay-as-you-go wireless, or a particular implementation?
I think this particular patent covers the way they link a phone to an account and properly deduct the right amount of money from the account based on the number of minutes. So the patent isn't "pay as you go wireless", the patent is "a particular method to make this cellular phone system able to handle real-time billing".
The patent isn't on pre-paid phones, it's on one way of making pre-paid phones work. If you want to start your own pre-paid phone network, you shouldn't steal Freedom Wireless's way of doing it.
Internet Media DataBase.
Maybe you just missed the memo.
Is there one ref to it on the web?
Way to ruin it buddy.
And it's also probably not healthy.
You need to take the time to educate your kids about th ekind of thigns they could encounter online, and then you're just going to have to accept that your kids are going to be hit up by a pedophile at some point and also accept that since you've taken the time to train your kids how to deal with the situation that they will handle it, on their own, accordingly. Kids, especially 13 and up, are perfectly capable of handling the internet as adults when properly prepared.
Properly raising kids isn't a matter of making sure they never encounter a potentially dangerous situation. It's PREPARING them so that they can avoid dangerous situations on their own, or behave in a manner that a potentially dangerous situation isn't dangerous anymore.
If you don't do that, all you get is a very gullible, naive 18 year old who becomes a walking victim.
Patent tin-foil garbage bags.
You're mistaking what you are BILLED with what you PAY. You may rack up $990/minute in charges, but that doesn't mean you have to pay them...
What insensitive clod would design something to replace a sexy, breasty, scantily clad bar girl???
You don't understand how the invention works - it's not intended to replace the bar girl, it's intended to SUMMON the bar girl. The faster you drink your beer, the more often the bar girl comes to see you.
And have the same salary, 2-3 years earnings, and no debt.
The reason we need to protect ALL speech is because it's very hard, in advance, to know if your speech is legal or not. If we know that "deviant" porn is legal, well, how do we know if our particular flavor of porn is legal or not?
We don't, until we're in court. So by allowing the government ot prosecute any speech, even if it legitimately "deviant", we've also restricted LEGAL speech that is not deviant, because nobody can tell where the line is.
This is, of course, entirely separate from the issue that if you have limitted resources in the FBI, which we do, and you have the choice of fighting terrorism or fightinging pornography, and you choose to fight pornography, you're a moron.
Reproduction is easy, and is not a service to society.
ADEQUATELY RAISING CHILDREN TO ADULTS WHO CONTRIBUTE TO SOCIETY is a service to society. If you raise a kid who ends up in prison, you did society a disservice. If you gave birth to a crack baby, you did society a service. If your child ends up in foster care because the sheriff found a meth lab in your kitchen, you did socieity a disservice.
This doesn't mean the RIAA should run around suing people because they perform an antiquated economic function that now requires lawsuits to support, but the assumption that merely reproducing is inherently valuable is wrong.
I've stopped believing that the goal of copy protection is to stop piracy. That's not it. Pirates arn't going to pay for the music anyway, copy protection just ups the hassle factor a bit. Most people don't make illegal copies from CDs anyway - they make them from already existing files on the internet somewhere.
The goal of copy protection is to make people who ARE willing to pay for music pay more than once. Use to be able to buy a song once and then copy it to the various formats you use? No more - the music industry wants to change your purchase of the song to a purchase of the media - pay for the CD, pay for the tape, pay for the MP3.
What the record companies havn't figured out is artists usually don't make their money from the media - they make their money from touring. So the more expensive it gets for consumers to buy music, the more incentive consumers will have to give their patronage, and concert sale dollars, to articsts who give the music away.
You'd have to go and read the actual final bill to tell. The INTENT here seems to be to prevent your ISP from, say, blocking your ability to use any VoIP provider other than the one your ISP owns, for example. This is a real concern - I can get WiMAX in my area, for example, but the provider blocks vonage - something they don't tell you so you find it out after you've paid your money and try to use Vonage. Fortunately, I have alternative service providers, but it could be a problem if you only had one alternative in your area.
What's fair is fair - if an ISP wants the protection of not having to regulate the content of transmissions on their networks, then they shouldn't be regulating the content of transmissions on their networks.
That's not related - ticketmaster makes money off the ridiculous fees they charge ON TOP of the ticket price.
That's nothing to do with the artificially low price charged by the promoter/team/venue.
If they started making a reasonable return instead of the ass raping they give now, gasoline would be at a more reasonable price.
That's a fallacy. What would happen is all of the gas stations would run out of gas, and then a secondary market would develop where people would resell the gas at the price determined by the market. The consumers are screwed either way; its better for us if the oil companies get the money as they'll at least spend some of it on getting more expensive oil out of the ground to sell later.
A good analogy is concert or sporting event tickets. The promoters have decided to make a "reasonable" profit on the tickets, and sell them at a price below market value. Does the consumer get less expensive tickets? No - scalpers buy them all up, and then sell them at the appropriate price. The only people who benefit from that are the ticket scalpers.
Steps for submitting an article on Slashdot:
1) Figure out what you want people to believe.
(The government is hoarding secrets!)
2) Find the single figure that appears to most severely support your position.
($148 spent classifying secrets per $1 spent declassifying secrets.)
3) Hope nobody notices that your figure is utter bullshit.
I was really expecting that to be a bad porn-knockoff link. And then I clicked on it... what the hell? No boobies?
At $120,000 a pop, it's probably not worth it. What is the operational life of the system? How much does it cost to maintain? How many of the systems will actually save a life?
Like it or not, life DOES have a monetary value. If we only save one life per $10 million spent, that's probably not worth it (as we could save many more lives spending $10 million elsewhere.) The FAA values a life at about 2.3 million dollars - and only mandates changes where the cost of changes is less than 2.3 million dollars times lives expected to be saved.
The reality of life is that if we're all going to have MEANINGFUL lives, some of us are just going to have to die sometimes.
It *IS* recognized as humor. That's why it's modded +1 Insightful. If it were ACTUALLY insightful, then it would be modded +1 Funny.
Which is also why this very informative post will be modded -1 Troll.
You're SUPPOSED to apologize, send flowers or something...
Then do the same thing you apologized for again.
THAT'S what keeps 'em keen. If you don't apologize, they can't show their friends how nice you are, and if you don't do it again they'll have fixed you and move on.
More of the really stupid people are male too.
There's a word for that.
Married.
If the measure of "intelligence" used is an IQ test,I don't find it surprising that white men are found to be, on average, more intelligent than either women or blacks. In fact, if the study is of IQ test results, that's exactly the result I'd expect.
But not because white men are, at birth, smarter than black men or women. It's because you can be trained to do better at IQ tests, and also because IQ tests show a bias towards certain skills.
If you have done a lot of problems that are similar to the problems on IQ tests, you'll do better at IQ tests. People who have access to good education will do better on IQ tests than people who do not, a trend that follows wealth, which in the United States at least, tends to follow race.
I'd also expect men to do better on IQ tests than women because a lot of IQ test questions relate to spacial reasoning (figures that need to be manipulated in space), something men's brains may be better at doing that women's brains. This may make men naturally ore "intelligent" in regards to this particular subset of problems, but put some emotional reasoning questions on that IQ test and you may find that bias goes away.
If you were to do this same study with POOR white people and POOR black people, at a young age, in the same set of school districts, I would guess you would find that the IQ scores were pretty much the same.
Anyway, the moral ofthe story is that if this test is based on IQ test scores, it doesn't say 'Men are smarter than women". It says that "Men get better IQ test scores than women", which could very well just show a gender bias in the test.
Because he's the only public servant I know who actually IS a PUBLIC servant- as opposed to a bribed-and-bought puppet of the corporations.
That's exactly what a puppet of the corporations would want you to think.
It hasn't even murdered my family yet.
I've had the same problem. Do I need to change something in my control panel to get this feature to work?