Setting aside why anyone would need to spend that kind of money developing a time and attendance system, why not just buy an already established system? For example, web-based T&A systems are already used heavily in the federal government.
Seriously, give the problem to any skilled individual and look at the solution they come up with, then tell me it wasn't obvious
The threshold for obviousness involves one having ordinary skill in the art. Not one who's an expert in the field, not generally one with years of experience. Ordinary skill. This varies depending on the field, but a lot of times, you're talking about the skill of someone fresh out of college, or maybe with enough experience to get past the OTJ portion of their job.
and why we had to waste our tax dollars getting it invalidated
The USPTO is funded entirely by the fees it collects from patentees and applicants. In fact, a portion of those fees end up diverted to other government projects. Not a single penny of tax revenue goes into patent examination.
That's not what their statement is arguing. They're saying that there's no way to develop a viable online market for music sales in the face of file sharing, which simply isn't true. In fact, despite the decrease in sales overall, there has been a significant increase in online sales over the past several years. The CD is dying, and digital sales will take over regardless of whether file sharing sites like TPB are accessible or not.
As for the decline in sales overall (and I'd like to see a reputable reference for your statistic, preferably one with a nice graph), one could attribute this to several things other than file sharing: one, a shift to other forms of entertainment in the Internet age; two, the ability of people to preview music before buying (e.g., 30-second clips on iTunes or Amazon); three, the ability of people to purchase only the songs they're interested in rather than having to buy complete albums; four, a perceived reduction in the quantity of high-quality music over the past several years; five, a reduction in marketing "bandwidth" resulting from fewer people listening to radio and MTV no longer showing videos; six, the increased accessibility of the non-RIAA "long tail" associated with being able to discover music online. I'm sure there are others, but that's what I could come up with right now.
The development of a legal online market is impossible in Finland if illegal services like The Pirate Bay are freely allowed to continue their operations.
Well, duh. I mean, it totally turned out that way in the US and various other countries with unfettered access to TPB. Nobody ever buys music online from iTunes or Amazon.
That's so when the good folks at TinyURL (or wherever) go to check the destination of the link, the spammers can instead display a clean article somewhere. But when anyone else visits, they get the malware version.
Another interesting thing about Groom Lake is its status as restricted airspace. If you find R-4808N on the FAA's Las Vegas sectional map (e.g., at http://skyvector.com/ ), you'll see that it covers two things: a large area over the old Nevada Testing Site, where the Department of Energy used to test nuclear weapons, and a big conspicuously square area with a large dry lake bed called Groom Lake smack dab in the center. The fairly large airport that's been built next to and extending onto the lake bed is also not labeled on those maps, despite the fact that various other land features and manmade structures just a few miles away (including in the Nevada Testing Site) are labeled to serve as landmarks to pilots.
Restricted airspace listings (the text versions, to be used in conjunction with various airspace maps, e.g., http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/SUA.pdf ) tell you a few things that provide a mechanism for legally accessing them. For instance, they tell you what hours they are restricted (such as a fixed pattern of hours each week, or by specifically issued FAA notice, etc.), what elevations are restricted, the using agency (the agency for the benefit of which the airspace is restricted), and the controlling agency (whom you would contact to try to get clearance to enter the airspace) in the case of "joint use" airspace.
If you look up R-4808N in the restricted airspace listings, it tells you (a) that the restricted airspace is in continuous operation, i.e., it's restricted 24 hours a day every day; (b) it's restricted at all elevations from the ground up; (c) there is no "controlling agency" listed, meaning the airspace is not joint use; and (d) the using agency is the Department of Energy, meaning that the block of restricted airspace is lumped in with the Nevada Test Site even though the Air Force actually runs the Groom Lake facility. All of these characteristics are fairly unusual as restricted airspace goes, and I've only found one other bit of restricted airspace in the listings that doesn't list a controlling facility (a tiny bit of airspace at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah).
Nellis AFB near Las Vegas manages almost all of the restricted and military operation airspace in that area, and they're the ones who will angrily contact you via radio if you even approach the restricted airspace in that area. The restricted airspace is more of a legal mechanism to deal with pilots who encroach on the airspace after they land, and Nellis AFB will send fighters out to strongly dissuade anyone who comes too close to the airspace even if they don't enter it.
One other thing to note is that the runways at Groom Lake are actually quite busy. There is a restricted access terminal at McCarran (Las Vegas) Airport where some thousand or so people board planes that make trips to and from Groom Lake throughout the day. The flights use the name "Janet" when talking to the tower at McCarran (similar to how a United Airlines flight would be referred to as, e.g., "United 123").
The press release is almost as bad, providing only one paragraph that actually mentions in extremely general terms what they did (something about observing galaxy and cluster distributions).
Also, the distinction not made here is that confirming the accelerating expansion of the universe is not the same thing as confirming the existence of dark energy. (And that's aside from "supporting evidence" not being the same as "confirming evidence".) There may be some other phenomenon at work here (e.g., something occurring off-brane and affecting our universe from outside, if the brane world theory turns out to be right), and observations of the structure of matter in the universe may not be sufficient to distinguish between dark energy and other possible phenomena.
At the time, however, the equipment that allowed you to create and/or view the motion pictures was covered by Edison's patents, and so it gave him significant leverage in imposing morality codes on what people produced using that equipment. Read up on Edison sometime - he was a complete asshole not satisfied with making shitloads of money when he could also gain total control over whatever he touched.
So city governments never wind up corrupt and still get repeatedly re-elected? How long have you lived on Planet Earth, exactly?
And the money flow isn't the same. The problem is that if you support the city service with tax dollars, then even the people who opt out of the service end up paying for it anyway, even if they are also paying some other provider for similar service at a non-subsidized price.
The problem is that it's anticompetitive to run the service using tax dollars. If Business A (run by the city) is tax subsidized, then nobody will choose Business B's service. If they did, they would have to pay Business B more for the same service even though they're already essentially paying Business A through their taxes. This pretty much ensures that Business B will never expand service to that area, even if it would have been profitable otherwise.
If you instead do what this bill appears to propose, then the city government can ensure that their service goes to places that the private companies won't go right now, but it still leaves the door open for the private companies to go there later once the population grows enough to make it worthwhile.
he was pressing on it as if it were a mechanical button and so his touches never registered
It's pretty amazing how frequently this happens. Even with buttons that are obviously just electric switches, old people will mash down as hard as they can, as if the force they apply is correlated to the success of the operation. Maybe they're reminded of old typewriters, where you actually did have to mash down on the keys to make it work.
Actually, the really poor (at least, the employed ones) also don't pay payroll taxes, because the Earned Income Credit is an approximate credit of payroll taxes from the government back to the taxpayer.
Yes, you're the only person who has done research on this topic. Out of the hundreds of millions of people affected by the tax code, nobody has ever thought to sue the federal government over income taxes or to use this as an affirmative defense against charges of tax evasion. You could be the hero who leads us all into a tax-free future by finding that honest judge of which you speak.
Get to work on that. Good luck, and let us know how it turns out.
Actually, they're doing it for the same reason any politician does something: because it's politically popular. The fact that it can be done by not spending money is just a bonus.
True, but they would get sued in a US court over a US patent. Whether or not the patentee could actually get money out of them is anyone's guess, but it would probably limit their ability to do business in the US (which, since they're using Apple's App Store for much of their business, may make their incoming payments vulnerable).
In the case of Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629, 652 (1999), the Court held that peer harassment in the educational context is limited to only that conduct that is "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims' educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities."
Maybe this is true in this case. But the recourse is either for the school to take disciplinary action or for the victims to sue him.
Slashdot Mirror
Setting aside why anyone would need to spend that kind of money developing a time and attendance system, why not just buy an already established system? For example, web-based T&A systems are already used heavily in the federal government.
You're going to have to explain why that's a problem, then.
Seriously, give the problem to any skilled individual and look at the solution they come up with, then tell me it wasn't obvious
The threshold for obviousness involves one having ordinary skill in the art. Not one who's an expert in the field, not generally one with years of experience. Ordinary skill. This varies depending on the field, but a lot of times, you're talking about the skill of someone fresh out of college, or maybe with enough experience to get past the OTJ portion of their job.
and why we had to waste our tax dollars getting it invalidated
The USPTO is funded entirely by the fees it collects from patentees and applicants. In fact, a portion of those fees end up diverted to other government projects. Not a single penny of tax revenue goes into patent examination.
That's not what their statement is arguing. They're saying that there's no way to develop a viable online market for music sales in the face of file sharing, which simply isn't true. In fact, despite the decrease in sales overall, there has been a significant increase in online sales over the past several years. The CD is dying, and digital sales will take over regardless of whether file sharing sites like TPB are accessible or not.
As for the decline in sales overall (and I'd like to see a reputable reference for your statistic, preferably one with a nice graph), one could attribute this to several things other than file sharing: one, a shift to other forms of entertainment in the Internet age; two, the ability of people to preview music before buying (e.g., 30-second clips on iTunes or Amazon); three, the ability of people to purchase only the songs they're interested in rather than having to buy complete albums; four, a perceived reduction in the quantity of high-quality music over the past several years; five, a reduction in marketing "bandwidth" resulting from fewer people listening to radio and MTV no longer showing videos; six, the increased accessibility of the non-RIAA "long tail" associated with being able to discover music online. I'm sure there are others, but that's what I could come up with right now.
The development of a legal online market is impossible in Finland if illegal services like The Pirate Bay are freely allowed to continue their operations.
Well, duh. I mean, it totally turned out that way in the US and various other countries with unfettered access to TPB. Nobody ever buys music online from iTunes or Amazon.
'I wonder what the "memory" could be â" could be a good subject for a science fiction story.'
Considering that they had just jolted it with a pulse of electricity, my guess would be, "OMFGTURNITOFFTURNITOFF!!!"
That's so when the good folks at TinyURL (or wherever) go to check the destination of the link, the spammers can instead display a clean article somewhere. But when anyone else visits, they get the malware version.
The only problem is a I feel like bionic limb replacements are going to cost an arm and a leg.
We take lungs now, gills come next week.
I was indeed wondering. Thanks much!
Another interesting thing about Groom Lake is its status as restricted airspace. If you find R-4808N on the FAA's Las Vegas sectional map (e.g., at http://skyvector.com/ ), you'll see that it covers two things: a large area over the old Nevada Testing Site, where the Department of Energy used to test nuclear weapons, and a big conspicuously square area with a large dry lake bed called Groom Lake smack dab in the center. The fairly large airport that's been built next to and extending onto the lake bed is also not labeled on those maps, despite the fact that various other land features and manmade structures just a few miles away (including in the Nevada Testing Site) are labeled to serve as landmarks to pilots.
Restricted airspace listings (the text versions, to be used in conjunction with various airspace maps, e.g., http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/SUA.pdf ) tell you a few things that provide a mechanism for legally accessing them. For instance, they tell you what hours they are restricted (such as a fixed pattern of hours each week, or by specifically issued FAA notice, etc.), what elevations are restricted, the using agency (the agency for the benefit of which the airspace is restricted), and the controlling agency (whom you would contact to try to get clearance to enter the airspace) in the case of "joint use" airspace.
If you look up R-4808N in the restricted airspace listings, it tells you (a) that the restricted airspace is in continuous operation, i.e., it's restricted 24 hours a day every day; (b) it's restricted at all elevations from the ground up; (c) there is no "controlling agency" listed, meaning the airspace is not joint use; and (d) the using agency is the Department of Energy, meaning that the block of restricted airspace is lumped in with the Nevada Test Site even though the Air Force actually runs the Groom Lake facility. All of these characteristics are fairly unusual as restricted airspace goes, and I've only found one other bit of restricted airspace in the listings that doesn't list a controlling facility (a tiny bit of airspace at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah).
Nellis AFB near Las Vegas manages almost all of the restricted and military operation airspace in that area, and they're the ones who will angrily contact you via radio if you even approach the restricted airspace in that area. The restricted airspace is more of a legal mechanism to deal with pilots who encroach on the airspace after they land, and Nellis AFB will send fighters out to strongly dissuade anyone who comes too close to the airspace even if they don't enter it.
One other thing to note is that the runways at Groom Lake are actually quite busy. There is a restricted access terminal at McCarran (Las Vegas) Airport where some thousand or so people board planes that make trips to and from Groom Lake throughout the day. The flights use the name "Janet" when talking to the tower at McCarran (similar to how a United Airlines flight would be referred to as, e.g., "United 123").
The press release is almost as bad, providing only one paragraph that actually mentions in extremely general terms what they did (something about observing galaxy and cluster distributions).
Also, the distinction not made here is that confirming the accelerating expansion of the universe is not the same thing as confirming the existence of dark energy. (And that's aside from "supporting evidence" not being the same as "confirming evidence".) There may be some other phenomenon at work here (e.g., something occurring off-brane and affecting our universe from outside, if the brane world theory turns out to be right), and observations of the structure of matter in the universe may not be sufficient to distinguish between dark energy and other possible phenomena.
The username of this "Windows developer" is "javaman".
Methinks this is a plant...though I'm not sure for what.
Juan Valdez?
At the time, however, the equipment that allowed you to create and/or view the motion pictures was covered by Edison's patents, and so it gave him significant leverage in imposing morality codes on what people produced using that equipment. Read up on Edison sometime - he was a complete asshole not satisfied with making shitloads of money when he could also gain total control over whatever he touched.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company
What kind of idiot agrees to let someone else have the copyright on something that is permanently on your face?
Oh, wait, I forgot we were talking about Mike Tyson here. Never mind.
So city governments never wind up corrupt and still get repeatedly re-elected? How long have you lived on Planet Earth, exactly?
And the money flow isn't the same. The problem is that if you support the city service with tax dollars, then even the people who opt out of the service end up paying for it anyway, even if they are also paying some other provider for similar service at a non-subsidized price.
The problem is that it's anticompetitive to run the service using tax dollars. If Business A (run by the city) is tax subsidized, then nobody will choose Business B's service. If they did, they would have to pay Business B more for the same service even though they're already essentially paying Business A through their taxes. This pretty much ensures that Business B will never expand service to that area, even if it would have been profitable otherwise.
If you instead do what this bill appears to propose, then the city government can ensure that their service goes to places that the private companies won't go right now, but it still leaves the door open for the private companies to go there later once the population grows enough to make it worthwhile.
The only thing worse than the attention to this ridiculous "story" is all the predictable jokes that come from it.
Can I have your stereo?
he was pressing on it as if it were a mechanical button and so his touches never registered
It's pretty amazing how frequently this happens. Even with buttons that are obviously just electric switches, old people will mash down as hard as they can, as if the force they apply is correlated to the success of the operation. Maybe they're reminded of old typewriters, where you actually did have to mash down on the keys to make it work.
And if they added this to Picasa, I'd finally have an easy way to sort my porn collection.
Oh, so that's what they mean by facial recognition.
Actually, the really poor (at least, the employed ones) also don't pay payroll taxes, because the Earned Income Credit is an approximate credit of payroll taxes from the government back to the taxpayer.
Yes, you're the only person who has done research on this topic. Out of the hundreds of millions of people affected by the tax code, nobody has ever thought to sue the federal government over income taxes or to use this as an affirmative defense against charges of tax evasion. You could be the hero who leads us all into a tax-free future by finding that honest judge of which you speak.
Get to work on that. Good luck, and let us know how it turns out.
As long as we're turning humans into batteries, we need to start pharmaceutical research on developing blue and red pills.
I get e-mails from people offering me blue pills all the time.
Actually, they're doing it for the same reason any politician does something: because it's politically popular. The fact that it can be done by not spending money is just a bonus.
True, but they would get sued in a US court over a US patent. Whether or not the patentee could actually get money out of them is anyone's guess, but it would probably limit their ability to do business in the US (which, since they're using Apple's App Store for much of their business, may make their incoming payments vulnerable).
...not a criminal offense.
Lifting a paragraph from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:
In the case of Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629, 652 (1999), the Court held that peer harassment in the educational context is limited to only that conduct that is "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims' educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities."
Maybe this is true in this case. But the recourse is either for the school to take disciplinary action or for the victims to sue him.