..high-powered lasers that could 'outshine the sun by a factor of 10,000'
Also known as the "Illudian Q35 Explosive Space Modulator".
Seriously though. I'm pretty sure that if any light sources appear in the sky with 10,000 times the luminence of the sun, they'll be noticed by scientist and non-scientist alike.
Courts almost never allow people to sign away their own rights. That's a good thing. People have rights because we, as a society, decide they should have those rights.
What would happen if any contract at all were enforceable? Well, for starters, the world would become a lot more dangerous. After all, you wouldn't be able to buy an air conditioner, automobile, or even a pair of shoes without signing a contract which releases the manufacturer of all liability -- even liability for known defects which the manufacturer kept secret.
Obviously you can forget about flying anywhere without first signing a contract which absolves the airline of any responsibility for death or injury -- even if the flight crew has a 0.15% blood alchohol level and decides to try a barrel roll, just for fun. The company is just protecting its interests, you understand.
..but it totally rewards the people who bid lower and still get at least some of the stock whereas those that bid high get all they bid for.
That's not like any Dutch auction I've ever heard of. Maybe you should use Google to do some research before holding forth about it?
In fact, everyone in a Dutch auction pays exactly the same price. Specifically, they pay the highest price which will allow all the shares to be sold. If you bid $75 and the final sale price ends up being $95, you will get -zero- shares. If you bid $170, you will get as many shares as you asked for, and you will pay $95 for each share.
I've seen a few responses advising people use a credit card on big-ticket items. Of course, scammers are hip to this and will often require a cashier's check or money order. They want cash, as quickly as possible.
How To Buy Big-Ticket Items on EBay
Use the postal service!!! Don't send a check via FedEx, UPS, or any other method. If you get scammed, these people will not help you.
Local police, and even the FBI, will often ignore "petty" scams less than $3,000 or $5,000. I don't know about you, but five grand is a lot of money to me.
Go buy a USPS Money Order, and send it Express or Priority Mail, signature required. Note exactly what goods the Money Order is for. If you get scammed, contact the Postal Inspection service. These people do nothing except investigate mail fraud.
The minute a con-artist signs for his package, or cashes the Money Order, he is on the hook for a federal felony. Unlike the FBI or your Local PD, the USPS doesn't regard mail fraud as a "minor crime".
you can't be sure a message has reached the recieving MX until you recieve a delivery failure report or a response
Which is generally true anyway. Almost no modern mail servers will bounce an email during the SMTP session, since that makes it much easier to probe for valid addresses. Heck, many SMTP servers are configured not to even send failure notices.
Neither is relaying through your ISP's mail server ever going to be as fast as sending direct
My goodness. Emails will be in transit for an extra 2 or 3 seconds. By all means, please provide an example for which that represents a loss of functionality.
Of course, if you're sending to a place like hotmail.com or yahoo.com, etc, then your emails will arrive much much faster. That's because emails sent directly from your private IP address from Comcast's block will be accepted, and then silently disrcarded.
But I have in the past!
You're not an ISP, Mr. Anonymous Coward. In any case, if you think you'll get better connectivity running a private server on an IP flagged as "Dial-Up" than using Comcast's email servers to relay, well, you've got another think coming.
I run my own email server. I get all of these benefits. Yet I still route outgoing mail through Comcast's mail servers.
It costs me nothing in terms of functionality. And, because no ISP in their right mind would blackhole comcast.net (4 million+ subscribers), I don't have to worry about my mail not getting through.
And that's why supersonic travel is still something of a white elephant. When you have to add two-to-four hours of "overhead" to each end of a trip, reducing your flight time by 75% doesn't really save you that much time.
If it costs five or ten times as much, no one except the stupidly-rich will pay for it. And, of course, if they can't market it to the masses, it will always cost that much.
Of course, people do cross-development for PDA's because there aren't any "native" PDA development tools. And obviously you can't compile firmware on the same microwave-oven which is going to run the results.
Developing windows apps under Wine just for the sake of "abandoning Windows" doesn't seem wise. Putting your own hobby horse ahead of the needs of people who use your product (and pay your salary) is not very professional.
I'm sure the type of hacker who would exploit this really needs slashdot to clue him in.
He would never be able to recover the username and password from the BIOS file, where it's stored in plaintext. He wouldn't just google for it. He doesn't subscribe to BugTraq. Right.
In November, Amnesty International named 33 companies including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems that it said were providing the Chinese with technology to achieve its Internet censorship aims.(article)
Remember, anything these people do is "OK", as long as they're increasing shareholder value (ie, trying to make a buck). TNR is running an excellent article about the Internet in authoritarian countries.
It would be the equivalent of car makers telling me what I could do with my engine
You're behind the times. Car makers have been locking out independent garages and tinkerers for years.
Modern engines are completely computer-controlled, and these computers are intentionally designed with proprietary interfaces -- in effect forcing you to take your Ford car to a Ford dealer for any serious maintenance.
No. They don't get to "spend" the new $20 bills, because they have to give them to this nutjob. Replacing destroyed currency costs the government money.
Just a quick note. I had, essentially, the same run-around from Pacific Bell. Twice -- same problem, different addresses. Many of these telco's will absolutely blow you off in an effort to get you to switch to "their" ISP.
The first time, I spent almost two weeks going nowhere. Eventually, I was so mad that I filed formal complaints with both the FCC and the California Public Utilities Commission.
You have no idea how quickly this will turn the company around. 99.99% of troublesome customers will not bother getting government regulators involved. The company will bend over backwards to make your problem go away. They want the PUC's statistics to show that they're solving all their customers' complaints, so they can continue to ignore or steal from the vast majority of their customers.
I'm not kidding. Someone from Pacific Bell called me three times while I was out of town. She wanted to know how they could fix the problem. She was polite, for goodness sake. They flew a fucking technician up from LA, because none were available. I thought I was in the Twilight Zone.
The important thing to do when dealing with Cable and/or Phone companies is, log every phone call you make, including time/date, whom you talked to, etc. I did this from the get-go the second time, and it was enormously helpful.
The above "Informative" comment is 100% horse shit.
The U.S. imposed a one year moratorium on the export of antipersonnel mines in 1992. It was extended for three years in 1993, and again 1996. In 1997, Clinton made it permanent. So whos comment was "spin", hmm?
Can't speak for the other countries on the list, but I can tell you why the U.S. didn't sign on.
America offered to sign this treaty. We liked this treaty. Landmines make no distinction between civilian and military personnel. They maim and kill civilians. However, the U.S. made it clear that the use of landmines within designated demilitarized zones was within the rules of war. And within what the United States considered "fair play".
There had never been a coherent case why landmines can't be used in, for example, the DMZ between North and South Korea. There are no civilians there. No civilians would ever "blunder into" this area. In fact, it's impossible to trespass even if that's your intention. Landmines are there for the express purpose of destroying an invading army. That's the military's job: to kill enemy soldiers and armor.
If the ICBL had acceded to this U.S. condition, we would have signed on. In fact, Clinton issued an executive order which de facto banned the use of landmines outside of declared demilitarized zones which were free of civilians. To be blunt, everywhere except the Korean DMZ.
Has anyone got a good reason why landmines are a bad thing in such an area? They don't kill people any more dead than a machine gun would. And please skip arguments involving civilian casualties, since there aren't any civilians anywhere near the landmines. In fact, by killing soldiers in an area far from civilian populations, such landmines would certainly reduce civilian casualties in a conflict.
who in 1954 could envision a machine that "see, identify, and measure something", much less design one?
Certainly not this asshole. The nature of a submarine patent is to "invent" something by describing it. Like this: "Wouldn't it be cool if machines could see!!" *PATENT PENDING*
You then "refine" your patent application as real inventors do the actual work of teaching machines to see. Once someone else has put in the long hours making your "vision" a reality, you hit them up for ten million bucks.
Getting back to your original question -- it's actually two questions. Who in 1954 could envision a machine that could see? Plenty of people. Really, anyone who spent a lot of time daydreaming about the future. Who could actually design a machine that sees? Very few people, and it took them a long time. It was a lot of work, and the people who did it were the ones getting extorted by these pricks.
This is only a District Court decision (District of Nevada) so it is not binding precendent elsewhere.
This ruling isn't a matter of "precedent". Precedent is what judges use to interpret the law. Precedent is only binding within a court's district or circuit.
The ruling itself is binding. Unless a higher court reverses, the patents are gone. Once a federal court invalidates a US Patent, it's invalid everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though. I'm pretty sure that if any light sources appear in the sky with 10,000 times the luminence of the sun, they'll be noticed by scientist and non-scientist alike.
Courts almost never allow people to sign away their own rights. That's a good thing. People have rights because we, as a society, decide they should have those rights.
What would happen if any contract at all were enforceable? Well, for starters, the world would become a lot more dangerous. After all, you wouldn't be able to buy an air conditioner, automobile, or even a pair of shoes without signing a contract which releases the manufacturer of all liability -- even liability for known defects which the manufacturer kept secret.
Obviously you can forget about flying anywhere without first signing a contract which absolves the airline of any responsibility for death or injury -- even if the flight crew has a 0.15% blood alchohol level and decides to try a barrel roll, just for fun. The company is just protecting its interests, you understand.
That's pretty good, but a lawyer would have refered to it as "my client's domain", not "your domain".
In fact, everyone in a Dutch auction pays exactly the same price. Specifically, they pay the highest price which will allow all the shares to be sold. If you bid $75 and the final sale price ends up being $95, you will get -zero- shares. If you bid $170, you will get as many shares as you asked for, and you will pay $95 for each share.
3D printing in stone?
They've had that for a while!
How To Buy Big-Ticket Items on EBay
Use the postal service!!! Don't send a check via FedEx, UPS, or any other method. If you get scammed, these people will not help you.
Local police, and even the FBI, will often ignore "petty" scams less than $3,000 or $5,000. I don't know about you, but five grand is a lot of money to me.
Go buy a USPS Money Order, and send it Express or Priority Mail, signature required. Note exactly what goods the Money Order is for. If you get scammed, contact the Postal Inspection service. These people do nothing except investigate mail fraud.
The minute a con-artist signs for his package, or cashes the Money Order, he is on the hook for a federal felony. Unlike the FBI or your Local PD, the USPS doesn't regard mail fraud as a "minor crime".
They will go to bat for you.
Also, Lance Armstrong kicks ass. Just one more reason.
Of course, if you're sending to a place like hotmail.com or yahoo.com, etc, then your emails will arrive much much faster. That's because emails sent directly from your private IP address from Comcast's block will be accepted, and then silently disrcarded.
You're not an ISP, Mr. Anonymous Coward. In any case, if you think you'll get better connectivity running a private server on an IP flagged as "Dial-Up" than using Comcast's email servers to relay, well, you've got another think coming.I run my own email server. I get all of these benefits. Yet I still route outgoing mail through Comcast's mail servers.
It costs me nothing in terms of functionality. And, because no ISP in their right mind would blackhole comcast.net (4 million+ subscribers), I don't have to worry about my mail not getting through.
And that's why supersonic travel is still something of a white elephant. When you have to add two-to-four hours of "overhead" to each end of a trip, reducing your flight time by 75% doesn't really save you that much time.
If it costs five or ten times as much, no one except the stupidly-rich will pay for it. And, of course, if they can't market it to the masses, it will always cost that much.
Some games considered by the East German government, but ultimately rejected:
Developing windows apps under Wine just for the sake of "abandoning Windows" doesn't seem wise. Putting your own hobby horse ahead of the needs of people who use your product (and pay your salary) is not very professional.
Hell, if you want to spend some real money, buy one of these babies.
3840 x 2400. 9,216,000 pixels for about $6,300. Per pixel, that's cheaper than buying two 30" Cinema displays.
Right.
I'm sure the type of hacker who would exploit this really needs slashdot to clue him in.
He would never be able to recover the username and password from the BIOS file, where it's stored in plaintext . He wouldn't just google for it. He doesn't subscribe to BugTraq. Right.
Call me back when I can buy Win Server 2K3 on a per-CPU basis. Client Access Licenses can bite me.
Modern engines are completely computer-controlled, and these computers are intentionally designed with proprietary interfaces -- in effect forcing you to take your Ford car to a Ford dealer for any serious maintenance.
No. They don't get to "spend" the new $20 bills, because they have to give them to this nutjob. Replacing destroyed currency costs the government money.
The first time, I spent almost two weeks going nowhere. Eventually, I was so mad that I filed formal complaints with both the FCC and the California Public Utilities Commission.
You have no idea how quickly this will turn the company around. 99.99% of troublesome customers will not bother getting government regulators involved. The company will bend over backwards to make your problem go away. They want the PUC's statistics to show that they're solving all their customers' complaints, so they can continue to ignore or steal from the vast majority of their customers.
I'm not kidding. Someone from Pacific Bell called me three times while I was out of town. She wanted to know how they could fix the problem. She was polite, for goodness sake. They flew a fucking technician up from LA, because none were available. I thought I was in the Twilight Zone.
The important thing to do when dealing with Cable and/or Phone companies is, log every phone call you make, including time/date, whom you talked to, etc. I did this from the get-go the second time, and it was enormously helpful.
Only if you're accessing a backdoor.
The above "Informative" comment is 100% horse shit.
The U.S. imposed a one year moratorium on the export of antipersonnel mines in 1992. It was extended for three years in 1993, and again 1996. In 1997, Clinton made it permanent. So whos comment was "spin", hmm?
America offered to sign this treaty. We liked this treaty. Landmines make no distinction between civilian and military personnel. They maim and kill civilians. However, the U.S. made it clear that the use of landmines within designated demilitarized zones was within the rules of war. And within what the United States considered "fair play".
There had never been a coherent case why landmines can't be used in, for example, the DMZ between North and South Korea. There are no civilians there. No civilians would ever "blunder into" this area. In fact, it's impossible to trespass even if that's your intention . Landmines are there for the express purpose of destroying an invading army. That's the military's job: to kill enemy soldiers and armor.
If the ICBL had acceded to this U.S. condition, we would have signed on. In fact, Clinton issued an executive order which de facto banned the use of landmines outside of declared demilitarized zones which were free of civilians. To be blunt, everywhere except the Korean DMZ.
Has anyone got a good reason why landmines are a bad thing in such an area? They don't kill people any more dead than a machine gun would. And please skip arguments involving civilian casualties, since there aren't any civilians anywhere near the landmines. In fact, by killing soldiers in an area far from civilian populations, such landmines would certainly reduce civilian casualties in a conflict.
You then "refine" your patent application as real inventors do the actual work of teaching machines to see. Once someone else has put in the long hours making your "vision" a reality, you hit them up for ten million bucks.
Getting back to your original question -- it's actually two questions. Who in 1954 could envision a machine that could see? Plenty of people. Really, anyone who spent a lot of time daydreaming about the future. Who could actually design a machine that sees? Very few people, and it took them a long time. It was a lot of work, and the people who did it were the ones getting extorted by these pricks.
The ruling itself is binding. Unless a higher court reverses, the patents are gone. Once a federal court invalidates a US Patent, it's invalid everywhere.