The actual arguments presented in court were a bit cumbersome to understand without reading the briefs and such, but what I got from the arguments was that the Circuit Courts have (in the absence of guidance from the SCOTUS) devised their own test for figuring out whether or not something is obvious: in particular, they rely on there being a teaching, suggestion, or motivation to combine prior art in a particular way before they consider a new invention to be an "obvious" extension of the old one.
This is, er, obviously beyond the layman's definition of obvious, and it is far harder to find that an invention is an obvious combination of prior art under that definition than under the layman's definition. I believe that "doing away with" the test refers to eliminating the Circuit Courts' definition and returning to a more literal reading of the statute that doesn't require an intermediate test to declare obviousness.
I've been saying for years now to put McCain and Lieberman on the same ticket. Neither one has much love left for their respective political parties, both have the respect of centrists, and both have the recognition necessary to make a successful third-party move.
Among the most dangerous things you can give your small child are magnets - particularly the small pea-sized sort that are used in toys that are moved around on a platform by other magnets placed underneath.
If a child swallows more than one of these magnets, they can find each other through bowel tissue and clamp together, eventually killing the tissue that ends up between them due to lack of blood flow and possibly perforating the bowel.
The magnets they are talking about can break bones if you don't handle them correctly, and if you've ever handled smaller magnets before (who hasn't), you know that it can be tricky trying to arrange more than one magnet (even small ones) without allowing them to collide. You could probably also kill yourself with these magnets in freak circumstances.
Well, you can use a cell phone camera to do OCR on the giant "20" in the corner of a $20 bill, and you can get a cell phone with a camera for free from most cell phone companies, so I'd say yes (more or less).
When I graduated high school years ago, our Chemistry II class used a college-level textbook. The education I got from that class was good enough that I sailed through freshman Chemistry in college.
The year after I graduated, I went back to visit a few teachers I considered to be friends, including the chemistry teacher. She told me with some disgust that the school board had decided to replace the chemistry textbooks for both Chem I and II, and she handed me one of the books so I could see what the problem was. Instead of college-prep chemistry, most of the textbook was filled with text and pictures (rather than equations and homework problems) about protecting the environment. The quality of the actual chemistry education provided in that book was so low that I suspected that many students would have insufficient background for their freshman-level chemistry classes they'd be taking next year.
In other words, Big Oil isn't the only lobbying group that attempts to influence high school education.
I can't even get my cell phone company to block a number from calling me now. I had to download a silent ringtone to my phone and use up an entry in my phone's memory just to be able to selectively silence certain numbers. You really think a telecom company will bother implementing that feature in the future?
This article is really just political FUD. Games are notorious for having poor adaptation in their AI, and very few FPSes have weapons that can jam or break. Complaining about these flaws which are really just industry-standard "features" is really just an excuse to accuse the US Army of shortsightedness under the guise of reviewing a game.
There are only two (duopoly) broadband ISPs in most US markets: your cable company and your phone company, where, in each case, we are talking the company that actually owns the wires going to your home. In the spheres of cable TV and telephone service, these are each highly regulated monopoly utilities that derive their monopoly power from physical limitations that the government acceded to decades ago.
And? A network company that pulls that will hemorrhage customers.
Crap, my cable company is throttling my Google access because they won't pay. I guess I'll have to switch to my phone compa - oh, they're doing it too? Never mind.
Consider an ISP who licenses a local cache of Google Movie to improve customer performance, with a dedicated pipe for priming the cache. That's illegal under network neutrality. Consider a company who runs their own fiber across town to link two sites. Illegal under network neutrality, because TCP/IP is only permitted to run on publicly-accessible links with zero quality-of-service guarantees. Anything else would be unfair, you see.
Network neutrality is a lot simpler than you are trying to make it out to be. If I am a customer of your ISP, then network neutrality requires two things: one, you don't throttle my access based on the type of data I am transmitting. And two, you don't throttle my access based on whether a particular content provider is sending you a kickback. Nothing about that prohibits you from contracting with content providers to provide better-than-baseline service to them, and nothing prevents you from providing better-than-baseline access to your company's VoIP/VoD services. But if your ISP is the limiting bandwidth factor in a connection to any two hosts that aren't on your network, then I had better get the same QoS to those two sites.
You're welcome to explain your position, because I'm confused how anybody who's not working for the telecom industry could possibly be against network neutrality.
Network neutrality ensures that broadband providers can't leverage their governmentally-created regional duopolies for nefarious purposes. The phone and cable companies want to be able to (a) double-dip by charging both their home consumers and content providers (who, by the way, already pay their own ISPs) for the same bandwidth and (b) shut out online content providers that threaten their governmentally-created regional monopolies in telephone service (VoIP) and television service (VoD).
Claiming that government interference is always a bad thing is pretty much a colossal load. We already have (much needed) antitrust laws to prevent natural monopolies and cartels from becoming too powerful. In this case, governmentally-regulated wire access creates a situation where there is very little competition in the marketplace, and just as with other monopolistic utilities, broadband access requires legislation to ensure that consumers aren't overburdened by a noncompetitive market.
Ray: You! You worthless piece of slime! You ignorant disgusting blob! Egon: You're nothing but an unstable short-chained molecule! Ray: You foul obnoxious muck! Egon: You have a weak electrochemical bond! Ray: I have seen some disgusting crud in my time, but you take the cake!
All LSI really produces nowadays is intellectual property. They got rid of their last fabrication facility a year or so ago, and subcontract all their fabrication needs to other companies now.
Why exactly can't, for example, you and I come to some agreement that, for example, you write some song and I am allowed to listen to it exactly once since this we came to a mutually agreed upon price for which I agreed to listen to it only once?
Sure, why not. In fact, that's what happens when you go to a concert - the musician(s) perform(s) the song once, you enjoy it, and you're not allowed (usually) to make a bootleg copy. If I subscribe to certain music services, for example, the agreement I have is that I can listen to the music as long as I'm a subscriber, and I've agreed not to make copies of music from that source outside the agreement. The penalty for violating the agreement is that my service gets terminated, at which point I have to destroy all the copies I've made so that I'm not violating copyright laws also.
The thing is, that's not what happens when you buy music on a CD or a movie on a DVD. The copy you buy is intended to be limited for use by copyright law, which forbids things like playing it for the public or making copies for other people. The "arbitrary limit" you describe is essentially proscribed by law.
The problem is that DRM prevents (or attempts to prevent) us from doing legal things like watching a DVD on a computer using the software of our choice, or ripping a DRMed CD to our iPod, or any of a number of other uses of things we buy and should (but somehow don't) have free access to for personal use.
Actually, I think a lot of the operation of a fast food restaurant hinges on its management. Not far from where I live, there's an Arby's that I and a few friends affectionately called the "best-run fast food restaurant in the universe". The people there were always friendly and courteous, they usually had smiles on, and the service was great. It was obvious where this came from - the manager (who was pictured in several national awards given by Arby's Corporation that were hanging on the wall) positively radiated charisma and was always talking cheerfully with the customers and the employees while also staying busy.
Eventually, the manager left - perhaps given a much-deserved promotion - and the mood and quality of service simultaneously diminished back to "mere mortal" levels.
On the other hand, the "worst-run fast food restaurant in the universe" is also near here. It's a Taco Bell that tends to close anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes before closing time. Once, a friend and I stopped there, and were waved off by an employee standing outside the door who told us that they were "out of product".
I guess what I'm getting at is that even fast food employees will do a good job for $6 or $7 an hour, if they have a leader to bolster their work ethic. You can be a good manager - ensuring things get ordered before they run out, making good hiring and firing decisions, and delegating tasks appropriately - but to be a great manager, you also have to be a great leader.
(And don't think I'm trying to put you down personally, parent poster - I know I wouldn't make a good leader either. I suspect that it's a rare soul whose leadership skills are sufficient to work in the demoralizing industry of fast food.)
Temperature = energy coming in to the Earth (radiation/light, gravitational effects) + energy released in the Earth (nuclear, burning fossil fuels, etc...) - Energy stored in the each (creating fossil fuels, etc...) - energy irradiated away from the Earth (radiation/light, gravitational effects)
Your assumption is that global warming is the result of increased energy released from storage, but the concept behind global warming is that it is caused by a decrease in energy radiated away from the planet. In actuality, the amount of energy arriving and leaving the planet drastically dwarfs the amount of energy that is either stored or released (by about four orders of magnitude).
Religion is about explicitly ignoring facts and information, and believing in something that not only has no basis in reality, but is actually diametrically opposed to the facts that we DO know.
Nothing about "religion" specifically requires that it involve a belief in something diametrically opposed to the truth. If a person believes that a deity caused the Big Bang (and therefore, the subsequent evolution of the universe) to occur, that's a religious belief, but nothing about that belief contradicts the widely-accepted scientific view of what happened.
I actually think the grandparent poster has a legitimate (and perhaps important) point in ascribing a religion-like aspect to science, when it comes to the "sheeple" who accept an opinion based upon scientific research without (a) critically evaluating that research along with the research done by others that has an opposing result or (b) even bothering to understand that research beyond its political significance.
To bring us back to the topic at hand, there is research suggesting that the largest component of short-term climate change is actually due to changes in cloud formation caused by solar activity (the idea being that more sunspots, as in the mid-to-late 20th century, means fewer cosmic rays, which means less ionization in the lower atmosphere, which means fewer seeds for water droplets to form, which means fewer clouds in the lower atmosphere, which means less reflected energy, which means global warming). Research is ongoing. Rather than take an interest in important research which could change the way we think about climate change, such research is underreported by the media and underconsidered by the public because it doesn't fit with the "humans destroying their own planet" motif.
That is what the GP was talking about by comparing science with religion.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual arguments presented in court were a bit cumbersome to understand without reading the briefs and such, but what I got from the arguments was that the Circuit Courts have (in the absence of guidance from the SCOTUS) devised their own test for figuring out whether or not something is obvious: in particular, they rely on there being a teaching, suggestion, or motivation to combine prior art in a particular way before they consider a new invention to be an "obvious" extension of the old one.
This is, er, obviously beyond the layman's definition of obvious, and it is far harder to find that an invention is an obvious combination of prior art under that definition than under the layman's definition. I believe that "doing away with" the test refers to eliminating the Circuit Courts' definition and returning to a more literal reading of the statute that doesn't require an intermediate test to declare obviousness.
I ANAL and all that.
I've been saying for years now to put McCain and Lieberman on the same ticket. Neither one has much love left for their respective political parties, both have the respect of centrists, and both have the recognition necessary to make a successful third-party move.
Courts are not known for haste in posting official transcripts.
Except for the Supreme Court, which posts its transcripts the same day.
Among the most dangerous things you can give your small child are magnets - particularly the small pea-sized sort that are used in toys that are moved around on a platform by other magnets placed underneath.
If a child swallows more than one of these magnets, they can find each other through bowel tissue and clamp together, eventually killing the tissue that ends up between them due to lack of blood flow and possibly perforating the bowel.
The magnets they are talking about can break bones if you don't handle them correctly, and if you've ever handled smaller magnets before (who hasn't), you know that it can be tricky trying to arrange more than one magnet (even small ones) without allowing them to collide. You could probably also kill yourself with these magnets in freak circumstances.
are the readers free?
Well, you can use a cell phone camera to do OCR on the giant "20" in the corner of a $20 bill, and you can get a cell phone with a camera for free from most cell phone companies, so I'd say yes (more or less).
When I graduated high school years ago, our Chemistry II class used a college-level textbook. The education I got from that class was good enough that I sailed through freshman Chemistry in college.
The year after I graduated, I went back to visit a few teachers I considered to be friends, including the chemistry teacher. She told me with some disgust that the school board had decided to replace the chemistry textbooks for both Chem I and II, and she handed me one of the books so I could see what the problem was. Instead of college-prep chemistry, most of the textbook was filled with text and pictures (rather than equations and homework problems) about protecting the environment. The quality of the actual chemistry education provided in that book was so low that I suspected that many students would have insufficient background for their freshman-level chemistry classes they'd be taking next year.
In other words, Big Oil isn't the only lobbying group that attempts to influence high school education.
I can't even get my cell phone company to block a number from calling me now. I had to download a silent ringtone to my phone and use up an entry in my phone's memory just to be able to selectively silence certain numbers. You really think a telecom company will bother implementing that feature in the future?
This article is really just political FUD. Games are notorious for having poor adaptation in their AI, and very few FPSes have weapons that can jam or break. Complaining about these flaws which are really just industry-standard "features" is really just an excuse to accuse the US Army of shortsightedness under the guise of reviewing a game.
Imagine a world where all anyone needs to know is your unique identifier - the "network cloud" figures out how to complete the connection.
I'd prefer not to. I get enough spam in my primitive twentieth-century "inbox" as it is.
What governmentally-created duopolies?
There are only two (duopoly) broadband ISPs in most US markets: your cable company and your phone company, where, in each case, we are talking the company that actually owns the wires going to your home. In the spheres of cable TV and telephone service, these are each highly regulated monopoly utilities that derive their monopoly power from physical limitations that the government acceded to decades ago.
And? A network company that pulls that will hemorrhage customers.
Crap, my cable company is throttling my Google access because they won't pay. I guess I'll have to switch to my phone compa - oh, they're doing it too? Never mind.
Consider an ISP who licenses a local cache of Google Movie to improve customer performance, with a dedicated pipe for priming the cache. That's illegal under network neutrality. Consider a company who runs their own fiber across town to link two sites. Illegal under network neutrality, because TCP/IP is only permitted to run on publicly-accessible links with zero quality-of-service guarantees. Anything else would be unfair, you see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Network neutrality is a lot simpler than you are trying to make it out to be. If I am a customer of your ISP, then network neutrality requires two things: one, you don't throttle my access based on the type of data I am transmitting. And two, you don't throttle my access based on whether a particular content provider is sending you a kickback. Nothing about that prohibits you from contracting with content providers to provide better-than-baseline service to them, and nothing prevents you from providing better-than-baseline access to your company's VoIP/VoD services. But if your ISP is the limiting bandwidth factor in a connection to any two hosts that aren't on your network, then I had better get the same QoS to those two sites.
Hey, reversing the polarity always worked for The Doctor, so why shouldn't it work for your telephone, too? 8)
You're welcome to explain your position, because I'm confused how anybody who's not working for the telecom industry could possibly be against network neutrality.
Network neutrality ensures that broadband providers can't leverage their governmentally-created regional duopolies for nefarious purposes. The phone and cable companies want to be able to (a) double-dip by charging both their home consumers and content providers (who, by the way, already pay their own ISPs) for the same bandwidth and (b) shut out online content providers that threaten their governmentally-created regional monopolies in telephone service (VoIP) and television service (VoD).
Claiming that government interference is always a bad thing is pretty much a colossal load. We already have (much needed) antitrust laws to prevent natural monopolies and cartels from becoming too powerful. In this case, governmentally-regulated wire access creates a situation where there is very little competition in the marketplace, and just as with other monopolistic utilities, broadband access requires legislation to ensure that consumers aren't overburdened by a noncompetitive market.
Remember, these are the same companies that are running ads claiming that network neutrality is somehow bad for the consumer.
Ray: You! You worthless piece of slime! You ignorant disgusting blob!
Egon: You're nothing but an unstable short-chained molecule!
Ray: You foul obnoxious muck!
Egon: You have a weak electrochemical bond!
Ray: I have seen some disgusting crud in my time, but you take the cake!
Pop culture lesson comin' at yo' ass, beotch!
All LSI really produces nowadays is intellectual property. They got rid of their last fabrication facility a year or so ago, and subcontract all their fabrication needs to other companies now.
Damn, I guess this water cooling system isn't going to cut it for my next upgrade.
Sorry, I was making two assumptions there, based entirely on the fact that this is Slashdot.
Why exactly can't, for example, you and I come to some agreement that, for example, you write some song and I am allowed to listen to it exactly once since this we came to a mutually agreed upon price for which I agreed to listen to it only once?
Sure, why not. In fact, that's what happens when you go to a concert - the musician(s) perform(s) the song once, you enjoy it, and you're not allowed (usually) to make a bootleg copy. If I subscribe to certain music services, for example, the agreement I have is that I can listen to the music as long as I'm a subscriber, and I've agreed not to make copies of music from that source outside the agreement. The penalty for violating the agreement is that my service gets terminated, at which point I have to destroy all the copies I've made so that I'm not violating copyright laws also.
The thing is, that's not what happens when you buy music on a CD or a movie on a DVD. The copy you buy is intended to be limited for use by copyright law, which forbids things like playing it for the public or making copies for other people. The "arbitrary limit" you describe is essentially proscribed by law.
The problem is that DRM prevents (or attempts to prevent) us from doing legal things like watching a DVD on a computer using the software of our choice, or ripping a DRMed CD to our iPod, or any of a number of other uses of things we buy and should (but somehow don't) have free access to for personal use.
In other words, you'd give up a blood sample now for a small chance at the opportunity to give up a semen sample later?
Actually, I think a lot of the operation of a fast food restaurant hinges on its management. Not far from where I live, there's an Arby's that I and a few friends affectionately called the "best-run fast food restaurant in the universe". The people there were always friendly and courteous, they usually had smiles on, and the service was great. It was obvious where this came from - the manager (who was pictured in several national awards given by Arby's Corporation that were hanging on the wall) positively radiated charisma and was always talking cheerfully with the customers and the employees while also staying busy.
Eventually, the manager left - perhaps given a much-deserved promotion - and the mood and quality of service simultaneously diminished back to "mere mortal" levels.
On the other hand, the "worst-run fast food restaurant in the universe" is also near here. It's a Taco Bell that tends to close anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes before closing time. Once, a friend and I stopped there, and were waved off by an employee standing outside the door who told us that they were "out of product".
I guess what I'm getting at is that even fast food employees will do a good job for $6 or $7 an hour, if they have a leader to bolster their work ethic. You can be a good manager - ensuring things get ordered before they run out, making good hiring and firing decisions, and delegating tasks appropriately - but to be a great manager, you also have to be a great leader.
(And don't think I'm trying to put you down personally, parent poster - I know I wouldn't make a good leader either. I suspect that it's a rare soul whose leadership skills are sufficient to work in the demoralizing industry of fast food.)
Temperature = energy coming in to the Earth (radiation/light, gravitational effects) + energy released in the Earth (nuclear, burning fossil fuels, etc...) - Energy stored in the each (creating fossil fuels, etc...) - energy irradiated away from the Earth (radiation/light, gravitational effects)
Your assumption is that global warming is the result of increased energy released from storage, but the concept behind global warming is that it is caused by a decrease in energy radiated away from the planet. In actuality, the amount of energy arriving and leaving the planet drastically dwarfs the amount of energy that is either stored or released (by about four orders of magnitude).
Religion is about explicitly ignoring facts and information, and believing in something that not only has no basis in reality, but is actually diametrically opposed to the facts that we DO know.
Nothing about "religion" specifically requires that it involve a belief in something diametrically opposed to the truth. If a person believes that a deity caused the Big Bang (and therefore, the subsequent evolution of the universe) to occur, that's a religious belief, but nothing about that belief contradicts the widely-accepted scientific view of what happened.
I actually think the grandparent poster has a legitimate (and perhaps important) point in ascribing a religion-like aspect to science, when it comes to the "sheeple" who accept an opinion based upon scientific research without (a) critically evaluating that research along with the research done by others that has an opposing result or (b) even bothering to understand that research beyond its political significance.
To bring us back to the topic at hand, there is research suggesting that the largest component of short-term climate change is actually due to changes in cloud formation caused by solar activity (the idea being that more sunspots, as in the mid-to-late 20th century, means fewer cosmic rays, which means less ionization in the lower atmosphere, which means fewer seeds for water droplets to form, which means fewer clouds in the lower atmosphere, which means less reflected energy, which means global warming). Research is ongoing. Rather than take an interest in important research which could change the way we think about climate change, such research is underreported by the media and underconsidered by the public because it doesn't fit with the "humans destroying their own planet" motif.
That is what the GP was talking about by comparing science with religion.
Since stem cells come from embryos, and stem cells also cause cancer, the solution is obvious.
We must eradicate all embryos.
(We should probably eradicate all babies while we're at it, just to be safe.)
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30990