So, if I get this straight, patenting this 'technique' will make sure that people who choose to buy a non-apple phone wont be able to call emergency services untill the last drop of battery power unless the other phone manufacturers break this patent.
With the added bonus of not having to pay patent ransom or waste battery with bullshit functions you didn't really want in the first place.
It's become quite difficult to avoid adds for the Jitterbug - at least as you approach a certain age.
But the feature-rich multifunction cell phone sells. It solves too many problems - and eliminates too many other gadgets that you would otherwise be carrying.
The cell phone can be your navigator, your portable radio, your game machine, your video player and your access to the web.
Yes, it certainly is a total piece of crap because it doesn't suit your lifestyle. Of course, forget about it in the US, except maybe in Oregon.
Then it isn't a lifestyle issue after all.
Or at least not one that can't be shoved aside by a one-liner.
Youngstown, New York is a small village about one mile square in size at the mouth of the Niagara River - historically, a satellite of the river, the lake, and Fort Niagara.
It's business district is and always has been microscopic. In 1900 your grandmother could have walked the whole length of it in under five minutes.
She would have been rightfully wary of the raucous saloon known then and now as The Stone Jug.
A man went to the Jug to do his serious boozing - and bruising.
But there was also a substantial three story brick department store, a drugstore and corner grocery - and that is really the point of this story.
You can't shop for quality in a world like this. You can't shop for variety in a world like this. You can't shop for bulk in world like this. You can't shop for price in a world like this.
You can shop the Sears catalog.
But that isn't the same as listening to the piano or trying on the pair of shoes.
Niagara Falls is a half hour south by the electric line. Downtown Buffalo at least ninety minutes with transfers, if your timing is flawless.
Managing kids and parcels will be hellish.
Imagine that you doing this in February for the authentic upstate experience.
The downtown merchant's home delivery service may be available. But it is not going to be fast and it is not going to be cheap.
If your ISP provided a free service where it would text or phone you and offer to help clean up your systems if it detected malware-ish behavior coming from your computer or network, would you sign up?
I'll take the odds that your cable ISP has a free Internet security bundle for Windows.
Not sure why everyone persists in believing all lawyers are stupid.
But it is a pretty good bet that your client will make a fool of himself on the stand - dead certain if your client thinks he is smarter than all the lawyers, the judge, the jury and the lord god almighty.
There was no ruling that it was legal. There was a ruling that it did not violate any of the three particular laws the defense argued it violated.
The defenses you did not raise before the trial judge are as good as dead. The court of appeal almost certainly won't allow you a second bite of the apple.
The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated.
But in fact the world does depend day-to-day on the "semi-skilled" worker. The worker who understands the problem well enough to get the job done.
The plumber - to use your own example - knows the basics of sanitation. He knows how to work with pipe.
He will have learned quite a bit of about water, electricity. Methane. Natural Gas. Carbon Monoxide. Carbon Monoxide - and the many and interesting ways they can combine to kill you.
That does not make him a hydraulic engineer, a microbiologist or toxicologist.
IMO universities should be teaching core principles and methods, not attempting to impart up-to-date job skills.
But whose core principles and methods do you teach?
There are other majors besides CS.
If you are going to teach FORTRAN because it's of use in the real world, then why stop there? Why not also (god forbid) teach.NET. JavaScript, C#, etc. May as well teach them Excel macros and how to interact with Microsoft Clippy while you're at it.
The modern university is quite practical-minded. That decision was made when the classic Latin and Greek curricula was overthrown.
Mastering the Excel spreadsheet has become - in many settings - as essential a skill as a basic command of the English language.
1 The gas station, the auto mechanic, scarcely exist in recognizable form.
The materials science and engineering that went into the Model T engine is actually quite impressive.
2 There are no hard-surfaced roads beyond the city limits. Sand and gravel was the best you could hope for.
3. Tire pressures are high - and blowouts frequent.
Until that problem is solved, you are not going to be taking your car to very high speeds and you are not going to be doing much fancy maneuvering.
However, corporations have our society by the balls, so what is to be expected? In short, we have given corporations too much rights
The geek has this entertaining notion that "the corporation" does not serve the interests of its stake-holders.
That there is some heart-felt desire to weaken the corporation.
If you live in the U.S. the odds that your home town was founded as a purely commercial enterprise approach 100%.
Yet it still surprises the geek when Redmond [population 45,000] makes some small accommodation for a company that employees 30,000 or so high-skilled - high-paid - workers in about the city and owns or leases eight million square feet of office space.
Slashdot Mirror
And Linux users are techies, who almost by definition have high income.
There's so much fun to made of this. So little time.
when asked they admitted that only about 35% of desktop users had Silverlight installed. Even if that is not a high estimate, it's pathetic
It's not pathetic at all.
Flash has been around since 1996.
Silverlight is a product two years in beta.
If the geek calls a 35% share of the client desktop "pathetic" - what is one to make of Firefox at 20% and Linux at 1%?
eh? go to any tech conference and the only people not using Mac laptops are the ones running linux. Maybe 1 or 2 Windows machines per hundred.
The tech conference is - let us say - somewhat - unrepresentative of the larger world!
The first rule of data centers is: don't talk about data centers.
You know, for all his talk of openness, the geek can be pretty shut-mouthed at times.
Isn't that about the same thing?
Your car analogy isn't prior art.
It is simply suggestive, it might get someone thinking.
The idea isn't what you patent. It's the machine - or system - that you patent.
So, if I get this straight, patenting this 'technique' will make sure that people who choose to buy a non-apple phone wont be able to call emergency services untill the last drop of battery power unless the other phone manufacturers break this patent.
No one has to break the patent.
They only have to solve the problem on their own.
With the added bonus of not having to pay patent ransom or waste battery with bullshit functions you didn't really want in the first place.
It's become quite difficult to avoid adds for the Jitterbug -
at least as you approach a certain age.
But the feature-rich multifunction cell phone sells. It solves too many problems - and eliminates too many other gadgets that you would otherwise be carrying.
The cell phone can be your navigator, your portable radio, your game machine, your video player and your access to the web.
Yes, it certainly is a total piece of crap because it doesn't suit your lifestyle.
Of course, forget about it in the US, except maybe in Oregon.
Then it isn't a lifestyle issue after all.
Or at least not one that can't be shoved aside by a one-liner.
Youngstown, New York is a small village about one mile square in size at the mouth of the Niagara River - historically, a satellite of the river, the lake, and Fort Niagara.
It's business district is and always has been microscopic. In 1900 your grandmother could have walked the whole length of it in under five minutes.
She would have been rightfully wary of the raucous saloon known then and now as The Stone Jug.
A man went to the Jug to do his serious boozing - and bruising.
But there was also a substantial three story brick department store, a drugstore and corner grocery - and that is really the point of this story.
You can't shop for quality in a world like this. You can't shop for variety in a world like this. You can't shop for bulk in world like this. You can't shop for price in a world like this.
You can shop the Sears catalog.
But that isn't the same as listening to the piano or trying on the pair of shoes.
Niagara Falls is a half hour south by the electric line. Downtown Buffalo at least ninety minutes with transfers, if your timing is flawless.
Managing kids and parcels will be hellish.
Imagine that you doing this in February for the authentic upstate experience.
The downtown merchant's home delivery service may be available. But it is not going to be fast and it is not going to be cheap.
If your ISP provided a free service where it would text or phone you and offer to help clean up your systems if it detected malware-ish behavior coming from your computer or network, would you sign up?
I'll take the odds that your cable ISP has a free Internet security bundle for Windows.
Security Center
OK, this is slashdot, so most people would say "no," but how many regular people would say "yes" and would that make much of a difference?
The uncomfortable truth about privacy is that is you are most likely to have it when you don't want it. But that is a lesson lost on the young.
Your Bell Telephone service was monitored for quality control for one hundred years. For most of those years, the phone was your lifeline.
Securing the network was in everyone's best interest.
There are more than you think. Old home computers are quickly becoming Linux computers.
More likely they are going to the dumpster.
The most conspicuous thing about Slashdot conversion stories is that you never see the numbers.
You never see the competition.
Repairing or rebuilding an aging system is going to take a little time.
That sets an upper limit to how much product will be moving out of the geek's one man shop.
There are other curiosities.
Such as the customer who wants to see a four, five - six or eight - year investment in Windows software erased from his hard drive.
Nah. It's just a lawyer throwing paint against a wall in the hope that some it will stick.
I think there would be a lot less sympathy for her if a guilty verdict wasn't going to destory her life.
There is no such thing as a guilty verdict in a civil trial, only a decision for the plaintiff or the defendant.
She took the option of going into court knowing the risk of statutory damages if the case went to a verdict.
In the first trial she took to stand and was savaged on cross-examination. That is not an unusual fate for the defendant that comes across as a liar.
You got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.
If she loses this case - her life will not be destroyed but there will be consequences.
She will simply be counted among the millions who have faced a civil judgment and survived.
Martyrdom is the geek fantasy, and fundamentally adolescent.
Not sure why everyone persists in believing all lawyers are stupid.
But it is a pretty good bet that your client will make a fool of himself on the stand -
dead certain if your client thinks he is smarter than all the lawyers, the judge, the jury and the lord god almighty.
"I don't recall"
To a man - and woman - the jury will take you for a liar and a fool. You think the jury won't know bullshit when they see it?
There was no ruling that it was legal. There was a ruling that it did not violate any of the three particular laws the defense argued it violated.
The defenses you did not raise before the trial judge are as good as dead. The court of appeal almost certainly won't allow you a second bite of the apple.
Take a PC into the courtroom and hook it to a cablemodem. Then tell the guys at Defcon to give the judge a live demonstration of pwnage.
If the demo fails your defense dies on the table.
The live demo has to reproduce the state of the defendant's system and internet connection exactly.
Congratulations.
You have just opened the door wide open to a full forensic examination of his software, hardware and peripherals.
In a civil trial the jury is most likely to accept the simpler and most likely explanation over the more complex and improbable.
It would of course be pure coincidence that the system was "owned" every time the defendant is alleged to have uploaded an infringing file -
and BTW how did that DiVX screener of "Up" get on his drive?
XP 62%
Vista 24%
OSX 8%
W2K 1%
Linux 0.99%
Win7 0.42%
Operating System Market Share [May}
So about 1 in 4 in the consumer market have migrated to Vista - I'd say almost certainly to a new mid-line laptop or desktop.
It will be a tad embarrassing for the geek if Win7 overtakes Linux before its RTM in October.
A friend who uses an indoor antenna bought a digital TV, and now only has four stations
Are the digital signals being broadcast at full power?
Analog TV has much better range than Digital TV, and has much better tolerances with a bad signal.
The short and simple solution to this problem is to do what your Grandad did in 1950 and his Grandad in 1925:
You spring for a good external antenna - and you install it by-the-book.
In contrast to the Electrovair, GM's 512 Series Urban Cars weren't designed for real roads.
Speaking of which...
I can't put a date or name to this idea.
The concept owes a debt to both the third rail electric line and to the slot-car racing fad of the sixties.
You would manually take your electric car onto the fully automated expressway lane and a pick-up would draw power from underneath.
You would punch in your destination and the central computer - the mainframe - would take control from there.
One blatantly obvious flaw in this scheme is that it places under computer control the least dangerous part of the drive.
The first result will be that more people will use Linux.
Does the Chinese parent [who can turn the filter off] object to limiting his kid's access to porn?
If the answer is "No," then the take-up of Linux is likely to be less, not more.
The geek has a remarkably parochial mind.
Nothing outside the values of his own culture ever seems quite real.
The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated.
But in fact the world does depend day-to-day on the "semi-skilled" worker. The worker who understands the problem well enough to get the job done.
The plumber - to use your own example - knows the basics of sanitation. He knows how to work with pipe.
He will have learned quite a bit of about water, electricity. Methane. Natural Gas. Carbon Monoxide. Carbon Monoxide - and the many and interesting ways they can combine to kill you.
That does not make him a hydraulic engineer, a microbiologist or toxicologist.
Studying arcane programming languages like COBOL doesn't prepare you well to write a business application
Taking that to its logical conclusion implies that you should be studying how business works before writing a program to be used in business.
The COBOL program reads as it does because it was assumed code would have to be reviewed by an accountant or other specialist.
IMO universities should be teaching core principles and methods, not attempting to impart up-to-date job skills.
But whose core principles and methods do you teach?
There are other majors besides CS.
If you are going to teach FORTRAN because it's of use in the real world, then why stop there? Why not also (god forbid) teach
The modern university is quite practical-minded. That decision was made when the classic Latin and Greek curricula was overthrown.
Mastering the Excel spreadsheet has become - in many settings - as essential a skill as a basic command of the English language.
The Model T was designed for its environment.
1 The gas station, the auto mechanic, scarcely exist in recognizable form.
The materials science and engineering that went into the Model T engine is actually quite impressive.
2 There are no hard-surfaced roads beyond the city limits. Sand and gravel was the best you could hope for.
3. Tire pressures are high - and blowouts frequent.
Until that problem is solved, you are not going to be taking your car to very high speeds and you are not going to be doing much fancy maneuvering.
However, corporations have our society by the balls, so what is to be expected? In short, we have given corporations too much rights
The geek has this entertaining notion that "the corporation" does not serve the interests of its stake-holders.
That there is some heart-felt desire to weaken the corporation.
If you live in the U.S. the odds that your home town was founded as a purely commercial enterprise approach 100%.
Yet it still surprises the geek when Redmond [population 45,000] makes some small accommodation for a company that employees 30,000 or so high-skilled - high-paid - workers in about the city and owns or leases eight million square feet of office space.