So someone else can meter it and charge you for it. Think of their children.
While Slashdot has been broken I "lost" a response in the crap power story. Someone suggested that crap power could only be useful if it scaled. My response; a simple "Why?"
My goal is independence, not servitude.
The reason we have centralized power generation is efficiency. Most of our power is generated by engines that convert heat into mechanical power, which is then converted to electricity. The efficiency of a heat engine is governed by the temperature and pressure differential over which it operates. The larger those differentials, the more efficient.
Of course, the larger those differentials, the more specialized the expertise needed to operate and maintain those engines properly and safely. A large scale power plant can operate at much higher temperatures and pressures because the operators know what they are doing. Your neighbor can operate his diesel or gasoline powered generator without posing too much threat to you, but you wouldn't want him running a high pressure steam turbine system. Just imagine him banging on a stuck valve with a hammer, causing a major steam explosion that injures your family ans destroys your home.
So central power plants can run at substantially higher efficiency, and thus lower fuel costs and less pollution, but they need to be run by professionals.
Can you figure out a way to lift an anvil into the air using less energy than you get by dropping it?
I'm sick and tired of you naysayers and skeptics bringing up conservation laws. Didn't the conservatives just get thrown out of congress? Now those pesky conservation laws can get repealed once and for all!
And maybe they'll do the laws of Thermodynamics while they are at it.
Some of my clients have tight security regulations. I recently was sent for an extended engagement at a lab where I wasn't allowed to bring anything with a camera on site. I went out to the verizon store and bought a Motorola V65S for only $20. It does almost nothing.
To laymen like me, this sounds rather cryptic. Could any of you web gurus please elaborate, and/or list other advantages of XHTML?
Think about learning English grammar. Most of the time, a sentence has the subject first, then the verb, then the direct object. When you learn grammar in school, you spend one day learning this pattern, then spend the rest of the year studying all the exceptions. Imagine if someone came along and redefined English so that there were no exceptions. They could call it xEnglish. The grammar class would take a few days instead of the whole year.
HTML is like English. It has lots and lots of exceptions and special cases. This means that every HTML parser must be tediously programmed to handle all the special cases. This makes the programs complex, slow, more prone to bugs, difficult to maintain, etc.
xHTML is similar enough to HTML, but doesn't have any exceptions. With no special cases, XML parsers are simpler, faster, less buggy, less complex, easier to maintain, etc.
T-SQL works smoothly with temporary and permanent tables and table variables, together.
This is actually a pet peeve of mine with T-SQL, or more properly T-SQL developers. All too often I see T-SQL developers load up a temp table, then update it from an additional table, and then update it again, etc. I shake my head and ask myself "How did someone become a SQL developer without understanding how to use a join?"
I understand Oracle is an industry juggernaut, but $160,000 for a 4-CPU license (from the Guardian article)? Is Oracle really that superior to Ingres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and especially PostgreSQL or MySQL?
Remember that we are talking list price for one server.
I can speak from experience that Oracle's architecture is better than DB2, substantially better than SQL Server, and completely blows Sybase out of the water. Oracle 7 or 8 years ago was handling concurrency and large transactions better than Sybase does today. The CBO is much better than everyone's except maybe DB2. The hardware support is broader than just about everyone else with the exception of DB2. Locking is better handled. Indexes are efficient even on columns that aren't integers. VARCHAR support is clean. PL/SQL is quirky but less quirky than the alternatives. The trigger support is richer.
What generally happens is that a customer will go with Oracle for a handful of critical apps that justify the high price. Then once Oracle has their foot in the door, they'll come back and offer an expanded deal to host the databases that could run perfectly fine in any db, and do it all at a discount. The end cost is going to be substantially less than one would suppose by scaling up the quoted numbers.
We have a significant portion of the population that deliberately aborts unwanted pregnancies. If someday we benefit from the use of their medical waste to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or even just slow down plain ol' ageing - Good for me, good for you, good for everyone!
This doesn't require any sort of moral relativism to accept. It can provide nearly miraculous benefits for no (extra) cost. Sounds like a win/win, even if you take the FUD spewed by its worst opponents (tempered by a small dose of reality).
The ethical problem is that, if the raw material is "medical waste" and the results are successful, how long will it take before the demand out-strips the supply and people start looking for ways intentional generate the raw material? I'm already concerned about the outsourcing of pharmaceutical testing to thrid world countries - whether the test subjects are actually giving informed consent. Are we going to find out in ten or twenty years that these new wonder drugs are being produced by intentionally impregnating women and then harvesting their fetuses?
Before you respond that I'm being ridiculous, do a little research into the blood diamonds mined in Africa or children forced into the sex industry in southeast Asia. People will be "farmed" if there is a market for it, and it cna be hidden behind enough shell corporations that the big biotech firms have plausible deniability.
Doesn't sound exactly earth shaking, even for 1990. This seems to have had a B to B flavor to it; wasn't this already established back then, even if not specifically internet oriented?
The interesting stuff here is creating a private replica, modifying it, and receiving updates from the public version as it changes. This is useful and non-trivial.
You're correct that this is B2B oriented. B2C processes wouldn't generally involve creating private replicas nor would they be modified with specially negotiated pricing arrangements.
The interesting thing is that Froogle has done a lot of similar work in the B2C world.
Well, after all this is/. You should be happy that I at least even read part of TFA. Now you expect me to actually go and look up the applications before getting all up in arms? I mean knee-jerking and jumping to conclusions is the closest thing to excercise some of us get here.:oP Thanks for the chuckle. Now, I'm off to the library to get my smart on...
I'm still waiting for comments like "What is a card catalog?".:)
Ok then, here's claim 8 from the 5,319,542 patent: ...
Its scope is not all that much narrower than the title.
Sure, when you exclude claims 9 through 14, as well as ignore what was already cited as background art in section 2. B2C style e-commerce as typically implemented today is not claimed by this patent, having been already cited as background art using Prodigy as an example.
A more interesting area to examine is the Objects:
Therefore, it is an object of this invention to provide a new electronic procurement/requisition system and method which allow a purchaser's requisition system to be integrated with a catalog system, and a supplier computer system.
It is another object of this invention to provide an electronic requisition system which includes public and private catalogs.
It is another object of this invention to provide an electronic requisition system which allows individual customers to control the products and suppliers that may be ordered.
It is still another object of this invention to provide an electronic catalog ordering system that allows the simultaneous display of competitive product information.
It is still another object of this invention to provide private catalogs that are supplier maintained through access to the public catalog, thus significantly reducing customer maintenance of their private catalogs.
It is another object of this invention to provide an electronic catalog ordering system which includes direct catalog maintenance by suppliers.
So while the title is broad, the fact is that the actual text of the patent probably only applies to 1% of the catalog based e-commerce going on today.
I find it mind-boggling that slashdot commenters frequently jump to conclusions, quickly skimming a short document looking for something that, out of context, might weakly fit a preconceived notion.
My first thought on this was that one of the criteria of granting a patent is that the concept is "non-obvious". And when I saw that one of the patents was "Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue", I thought "that's very obvious!".
Actually, it isn't as obvious as the title would make it seem. Google it and read the actual application.
Essentially, it is about automating B2B supply chain management. Catalogs from several vendors are stored on publicly available servers. A potential purchaser makes a private copy combining the items from several vendors into a single catalog, then modifying that catalog with privately negotiated price structures and terms for those vendors. Then the PO is generated and transmitted directly to the vendor.
So it is not about simply doing what we've always done with mail-order, it is about efficiently comparison shopping and maintaining private price lists for use by procurement functions in a business.
If IBM holds a patent for 'Posting messages to an interactive service' there may well be. I mean, some of these are pretty broad:
US 5,796,967 - Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service.
US 5,442,771 - Storing Data in an Interactive Network.
US 7,072,849 - Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service.
US 5,446,891 - Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities.
US 5,319,542 - Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue.
Without reading the actual applications, it sounds to me like that covers like 99% of anyone selling or storing anything on-line. I mean, WTF? Storing data in an interactive network? How broad is that net?
And I'm absolutely sure that there is no point in reading the applications. After all, there is no possible way that the actual claims might be substantially more specific and narrow.
The other day I flipped through the card catalog at my local library. In a few hours I absorbed a subtantial fraction of Western culture and learning.
The video is up and no longer flagged. A video becomes flagged when enough users mark it and then a YouTube employee will either verify it should be removed/flagged. In this case they removed the initial flag and kept the video.
If that is the case, then no problem. According to the article the a video is flagged only when a YouTube employee reviews the video - at the request of the community - and decides that it should be flagged. Do you have any references that say the article got it wrong?
Assuming for the moment that YouTube did flag it, rather than the community, the question then comes down to whether this was within policy or whether some YouTube employee acted on his own.
In the end, there are too many unknowns that need to be clarified before anyone condems YouTube.
I've honestly no idea why Microsoft backed down against Adobe. Perhaps it's because of the monopoly status or something....
Exactly. One of the restrictions placed on a monopoly is that they can't use their monopoly status in one area to help them create a monopoly in another area. By adding PDF capability to Office, they would be expanding their near-total monopoly in "Office" to create a second monopoly in "PDF authoring tools".
Apple, not having a monopoly - at least in the personal computer space - has more flexibility to add a feature like this.
Volume of ethanol per area of farmland: 410 gallons per acre
Area required to replace gasoline use: 520 million acres, or 2.1 million km^2
Total land area of United States: 9,161,000 km^2
Fraction of land required to meet gasoline energy needs: 23%
That fraction declines with other, more efficient stocks, but there are sometimes other expenses involved depending on the particular crop. Corn is the most widely-known and -used input, but sugarcane and sugarbeets are also possible. Switchgrass can reportedly yield as much as 1200 gallons per acre (though the energy efficiency is debated) and would thus significantly reduce the area required, but 8% of the country is still almost the size of North and South Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas combined.
You make several simplifications and assumptions. First of all, the only long running research into ethanol has been done by agri-business involved in the corn industry. Other sources of ethanol are only now beginning to be developed. It is very reasonable to expect that some of the sources will be crops that can grow on land that isn't well suited to growing foodstuffs. Second, that 19% is the amount of land actually under active cultivation, not the amount that could be brought under cultivation. It took me a while to run that down, but look at page 3 of this pdf http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_pro files/agr_cou_840.pdf. Third, you assume that the same land - even the same crop - can't generate both foodstuff and fuel. Think about using cornstalks as a driver for fuel. Fourth, you make the assumption that the yield will remain constant. In only the last few years the yield from corn has gone from 400 g/acre to over 500 g/acre. Some people expect that the yield will rise to 2000 g/acre in the next 20 years. Last, you make the assumption that the inputs will only be crops. Non-agricultural inputs can also be applied. For instance, suburban lawn clippings and leaves.
If we convert all the farmland to fuel production for our cars, who will produce the fuel to power our bodies?
We have so much excess farmland that this isn't really an issue. I think that we're using something like only 30% of the very high quality farmland available in the United States. There's plenty of land available, not even including the cases where we use different parts of the same crop for food and fuel, like using corn for food, and corn stalks as a fuel source.
I mean who can take these folks seriously? Oil production will never peak, because oil is an infinite resource. When you want more, you pump more out of the ground. How hard is this to understand?
"Peak oil" can't be taken seriously because, although their basic premise is fundamentally true, they fail to take into account that the entire world economy adjust gradually.
Yes, the currently exploitable oil reserves are limited and if everything else remains constant will be depleted in some finite number of years. The only thing we can say with absolute certainty is that everything else won't remain constant. All the following will happen...
New reserves will be discovered.
New technology will allow better yield from existing reserves.
Known reserves that were not economical to harvest will become economical as prices rise.
Other resources like coal will become economical to harvest as prices rise.
New technology will make renewable fuels more competitive.
Rising prices will make renewable fuels more competitive.
Rising prices will make conservation more economically prudent.
When you add up all these factors, the "peak oil" predictions of massive tragedy and a return to the stone age become nonsense.
Personally, I believe that bio-fuels (Ethanol, BioDiesel, etc) will become widely used in the next 20 years or so for transportation, primarily because they can be integrated with our current technology quite easily. The delta cost to manufacture a "flex-fuel" vehicle capable of running on E85 is roughly $35. The stuff is just bordering on economically feasible right now and big-agriculture only recently started making it a big R&D focus. In fifty years Iowa will be the Saudi Arabia of a new world.
So doncha think a good ol' fashioned tax on gasoline (perhaps all hydrocarbons) to keep the price elevated and keep alternatives economical would be a good idea? The thing I noticed about the high gas prices this summer is that, while people I knew did complain a little, it wasn't as vitriolic and panic-ridden as they were portraying on the news People were bothered a bit, but payed up. People who I knew to be in a bind just bought smaller cars or changed their life habits a bit, but life went on.
From a strictly economic perspective I hate altering the markets like this. Taking more of a geopolitical view I'm more interested.
My personal standpoint is that the Fed Gov should institute the following rules:
Starting with the 2008 model year, all auto manufacturers that sell 1,000 or more new gasoline powered road legal vehicles in the United States must make at least 20% of them E85 capable.
In 2009, 2010, and 2011 that percentage increases to 40, 60 then 80%.
Starting in 2010, all other manufactures of 1,000 or more units of gasoline powered devices excluding aircraft must make then E85 capable. (lawn mowers, snow mobiles, boats, chainsaws)
Starting in 2008, anyone constructing a new retail gasoline filling station, or substantially renovating an existing gasoline filling station that can dispense two or more grades of gasoline must make provisions so that at least one tank and set of pumps can accomodate E85.
The cost of doing this is rather small, since the building an E85 capable vehicle in the factory is only a delta of about $35. The cost of an E85 capable tank and pump is also negligible when compared to the cost of building a new filling station. In this way the infrastructure to use E85 is put in place gradually as people and business repace aging vehicles and equipment. As our ability to produce ethanol improves, our ability to consume it also improves. By 2020 or so we will have almost completely phased in E85, sharply reducing our need for oil.
You're exactly right, something always comes along. We should disregard any concerns for an expected shortage in supply in the future, because as history has shown, something will clearly come along. I'm gonna go smoke a big bottle of light sweet crude right now.
Exactly.
I expect that we'll see a long term trend of gradual price increases. As the prices goes up, it will spur investment in alternative sources - as we've already been seeing - as well as an increase in conservation - as we've already been seeing and an increase in innovation - as we've already been seeing. As the prices increase, new supplies will become economical and will hep restrain further price increases. As alternatives develop, demand will decrease further restraining production.
Basically, we'll never run out of oil. As oil becomes more expensive, alternatives will be used in greater quantity. Eventually there will be some oil left but the alternatives will be cheaper and so we won't even bother pumping out of the ground.
Yes! We'll just replace every vehicle and every oil-driven power station with something we haven't invented yet IN THE NEXT 20 YEARS!! How blindingly obvious!
Yep we'll have to do that, since absolutely nothing out there consuming oil will reach the end of its useful life in 20 years and would be up for replacement anyway. Also none of the alternatives like extracting oil from tar sands, from deep water wells, or producing oil from coal could feasibly be used in any equipment currently in use. All those people currently driving around in biodiesel fueled cars are just imagining that they are using a petroleum alternative. And while people are willing to spend $30,000 on a new car, spending $30,035 on a flex-fuel vehicle capable of also running on E85 will put the world economy into a tailspin.
Let's assume, however, that we don't find new reserves, we don't find ways to more efficiently recover our current reserves, and that tar sands and the like don't pay off in a big way.
We could easily do a 70-80% replacement of petroleum as a motor fuel source in only 10 years based n bio-fuels like ethanol and bio-diesel. Big consumers like oil fired power plants can be refueled fairly easily for coal. They're big, but there are relatively few of them so they are easy to do. And you only need to replace a few pieces, the boilers and turbines and generators continue to operate as before. What you are left with is the medium sized plants. Large diesel generators at industrial plants, railroad locomotives, things with 40 year lifespans but are too numerous to convert easily. After removing the motor fuels and big power plants from the equation, however, you've halved the demand for oil, which means that you now hav 40 years to update this infrastructure. And as the updating procedes, it pushes back the date when we run out of oil.
Wait a minute! Let me see if I can boil this down...
When a something is in high demand and becomes scarce it becomes more expensive. Because it is more expensive, people will seek out and develop alternative sources for the product, as well as alternative products.
Is this just crazy talk? Are you saying that we didn't go back to candles when we ran out of whale oil? But instead we developed an alternative - petroleum? Or that when since cane sugar is expensive we sweeten lots of food products with corn syrup?
Holy freshman year economics, Batman!
Someone better tell these simple proven facts to the prophets of doom. I'm sure that they'd rather have a hand in informing the public of all this, rather than exploit the public with their gloomy predictions for personal gain.
This would be a good time to remove control of ICANN from the US government. A judgement in an Illinois court has no juristriction in an organization based in the UK.
The same way the US court has jurisdiction over a piece of property in NYC owned by a UK organization. Just because the 'owner' is foreign doesn't mean that the 'property' is suddenly foreign as well. This isn't an embassy or consulate.
If they go ahead and suspend Spamhaus I can see the EU and the rest going their own way and setting up their own version of ICANN.
Wonderful. So we'll have to contend with French or German courts imposing their watered down versions of free speech and free association upon the internet. Everything is so wonderful in Europe that they need to prosecute people based solely on expressing their (admittedly repugnant) political views.
Imagine what would happen if China arbitrally suspended falun.gong.org.
I'll bite. How will removing ICANN from the control of the US Gov't possibly increase the protection that falun.gong.org receives? Maybe we could put it in contro of the UN? How long before the same group of thugs that form the Human Right Commission start delisting Amnesty International?
Maybe if would be better to put this in perspective this way: How many sites have been delisted by the US Gov't for openly supporting Al Qaeda?
The simple fact is that, if one puts aside their knee-jerk anti-american sentiments for just a moment, the US is a far better steward than just about any other major country on earth today. It is China and France and Germany that are censoring, not the US. Spamhaus took a bad legal strategy and it backfired. Even with that, however, I'm happier with this internet than one under European jurisdiction.
While google is only displaying excerpts, they are making digital copies of the entire book to drive their searches. And those copies are likely dupicated multiple times within their infrastructure.
No problems there. In order to scan the book, they have to buy it. In my understanding, after buying a copyrighted work, I can do with it whatever I please, under what is called the First Sale Doctrine in the US.
Thats not quite right on two counts. First, the first sale doctrine only covers reselling the originally purchased copy of the work. "First Sale" says that a publisher can't prevent a customer from selling the book to a used book shop, on ebay, or donating it to a library. It says nothing about whether the purchaser can make copies of the book.
Second, whether copying is allowed has a lot to do with the environment in which copies are made. If a person rips a CD in order to put the music on an MP3 player, or even copy it to multiple places to which only they and their family have access, it is unlikely that the publisher is being damaged in any way. It is unlikely that the household in question would consume more than one copy of the work no matter what. Publishers have not brought a case like this to judgement, probably because they realize they would likely lose and having a grey area in the law is better than black law against them.
In contrast, corporation can't act as a single person in this way. Corps have to purchase material for each of the users, because it is likely - almost certain - that multiple copies will be in use at once. So they would need to either purchase enough copies to cover all the users or limit acces to only the number of copies they have.
Of course, there is fair use, which is all that google is doing. They have not exposed 100% of the writing.
And here is the rub.
While google is only displaying excerpts, they are making digital copies of the entire book to drive their searches. And those copies are likely dupicated multiple times within their infrastructure.
If they only took excerpts and made them searchable, then they would likely be well within fair use and the authors and publishers couldn't touch them. But they are doing much more than that.
This is the same legal hole that MP3.com found themselves in several years ago. They were providing streaming music to people who could prove that they already owned the CDs. This way you could listen to your CD collection while at work, etc. (This was pre-iPod). In order to drive this system, however, they made digital copies of tens of thousands of cds. They only made the digital versions available to people who alredy owned the CD, but they were still found to be infringing because they made the copies in their own database in the first place.
Now, if you want my opinion, this is bs, and copyright law and the fair use doctrine needs to be adjusted to allow this kind of use.
This is called Piercing the corporate veil. It is not easy, but not impossible either. If IBM was able to show that the major shareholders were using SCO as a sacrificial pawn to go after IBM, but prevent IBM from being able to collect damages, then IBM might be able to go after those shareholders directly.
I don't think MSFT is a SCOX shareholder. I think MSFT "funded" SCOX by making some lame licensing deals. I wonder how creative IBM's lawyers are willing to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason we have centralized power generation is efficiency. Most of our power is generated by engines that convert heat into mechanical power, which is then converted to electricity. The efficiency of a heat engine is governed by the temperature and pressure differential over which it operates. The larger those differentials, the more efficient.
Of course, the larger those differentials, the more specialized the expertise needed to operate and maintain those engines properly and safely. A large scale power plant can operate at much higher temperatures and pressures because the operators know what they are doing. Your neighbor can operate his diesel or gasoline powered generator without posing too much threat to you, but you wouldn't want him running a high pressure steam turbine system. Just imagine him banging on a stuck valve with a hammer, causing a major steam explosion that injures your family ans destroys your home.
So central power plants can run at substantially higher efficiency, and thus lower fuel costs and less pollution, but they need to be run by professionals.
I'm sick and tired of you naysayers and skeptics bringing up conservation laws. Didn't the conservatives just get thrown out of congress? Now those pesky conservation laws can get repealed once and for all!
And maybe they'll do the laws of Thermodynamics while they are at it.
Some of my clients have tight security regulations. I recently was sent for an extended engagement at a lab where I wasn't allowed to bring anything with a camera on site. I went out to the verizon store and bought a Motorola V65S for only $20. It does almost nothing.
Think about learning English grammar. Most of the time, a sentence has the subject first, then the verb, then the direct object. When you learn grammar in school, you spend one day learning this pattern, then spend the rest of the year studying all the exceptions. Imagine if someone came along and redefined English so that there were no exceptions. They could call it xEnglish. The grammar class would take a few days instead of the whole year.
HTML is like English. It has lots and lots of exceptions and special cases. This means that every HTML parser must be tediously programmed to handle all the special cases. This makes the programs complex, slow, more prone to bugs, difficult to maintain, etc.
xHTML is similar enough to HTML, but doesn't have any exceptions. With no special cases, XML parsers are simpler, faster, less buggy, less complex, easier to maintain, etc.
This is actually a pet peeve of mine with T-SQL, or more properly T-SQL developers. All too often I see T-SQL developers load up a temp table, then update it from an additional table, and then update it again, etc. I shake my head and ask myself "How did someone become a SQL developer without understanding how to use a join?"
Remember that we are talking list price for one server.
I can speak from experience that Oracle's architecture is better than DB2, substantially better than SQL Server, and completely blows Sybase out of the water. Oracle 7 or 8 years ago was handling concurrency and large transactions better than Sybase does today. The CBO is much better than everyone's except maybe DB2. The hardware support is broader than just about everyone else with the exception of DB2. Locking is better handled. Indexes are efficient even on columns that aren't integers. VARCHAR support is clean. PL/SQL is quirky but less quirky than the alternatives. The trigger support is richer.
What generally happens is that a customer will go with Oracle for a handful of critical apps that justify the high price. Then once Oracle has their foot in the door, they'll come back and offer an expanded deal to host the databases that could run perfectly fine in any db, and do it all at a discount. The end cost is going to be substantially less than one would suppose by scaling up the quoted numbers.
The ethical problem is that, if the raw material is "medical waste" and the results are successful, how long will it take before the demand out-strips the supply and people start looking for ways intentional generate the raw material? I'm already concerned about the outsourcing of pharmaceutical testing to thrid world countries - whether the test subjects are actually giving informed consent. Are we going to find out in ten or twenty years that these new wonder drugs are being produced by intentionally impregnating women and then harvesting their fetuses?
Before you respond that I'm being ridiculous, do a little research into the blood diamonds mined in Africa or children forced into the sex industry in southeast Asia. People will be "farmed" if there is a market for it, and it cna be hidden behind enough shell corporations that the big biotech firms have plausible deniability.
Doesn't sound exactly earth shaking, even for 1990. This seems to have had a B to B flavor to it; wasn't this already established back then, even if not specifically internet oriented?
The interesting stuff here is creating a private replica, modifying it, and receiving updates from the public version as it changes. This is useful and non-trivial.
You're correct that this is B2B oriented. B2C processes wouldn't generally involve creating private replicas nor would they be modified with specially negotiated pricing arrangements.
The interesting thing is that Froogle has done a lot of similar work in the B2C world.
I'm still waiting for comments like "What is a card catalog?". :)
Its scope is not all that much narrower than the title.
Sure, when you exclude claims 9 through 14, as well as ignore what was already cited as background art in section 2. B2C style e-commerce as typically implemented today is not claimed by this patent, having been already cited as background art using Prodigy as an example.
A more interesting area to examine is the Objects:
So while the title is broad, the fact is that the actual text of the patent probably only applies to 1% of the catalog based e-commerce going on today.
I find it mind-boggling that slashdot commenters frequently jump to conclusions, quickly skimming a short document looking for something that, out of context, might weakly fit a preconceived notion.
Actually, it isn't as obvious as the title would make it seem. Google it and read the actual application.
Essentially, it is about automating B2B supply chain management. Catalogs from several vendors are stored on publicly available servers. A potential purchaser makes a private copy combining the items from several vendors into a single catalog, then modifying that catalog with privately negotiated price structures and terms for those vendors. Then the PO is generated and transmitted directly to the vendor.
So it is not about simply doing what we've always done with mail-order, it is about efficiently comparison shopping and maintaining private price lists for use by procurement functions in a business.
And I'm absolutely sure that there is no point in reading the applications. After all, there is no possible way that the actual claims might be substantially more specific and narrow.
The other day I flipped through the card catalog at my local library. In a few hours I absorbed a subtantial fraction of Western culture and learning.
If that is the case, then no problem. According to the article the a video is flagged only when a YouTube employee reviews the video - at the request of the community - and decides that it should be flagged. Do you have any references that say the article got it wrong?
Assuming for the moment that YouTube did flag it, rather than the community, the question then comes down to whether this was within policy or whether some YouTube employee acted on his own.
In the end, there are too many unknowns that need to be clarified before anyone condems YouTube.
Exactly. One of the restrictions placed on a monopoly is that they can't use their monopoly status in one area to help them create a monopoly in another area. By adding PDF capability to Office, they would be expanding their near-total monopoly in "Office" to create a second monopoly in "PDF authoring tools".
Apple, not having a monopoly - at least in the personal computer space - has more flexibility to add a feature like this.
You make several simplifications and assumptions. First of all, the only long running research into ethanol has been done by agri-business involved in the corn industry. Other sources of ethanol are only now beginning to be developed. It is very reasonable to expect that some of the sources will be crops that can grow on land that isn't well suited to growing foodstuffs. Second, that 19% is the amount of land actually under active cultivation, not the amount that could be brought under cultivation. It took me a while to run that down, but look at page 3 of this pdf http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_pro files/agr_cou_840.pdf. Third, you assume that the same land - even the same crop - can't generate both foodstuff and fuel. Think about using cornstalks as a driver for fuel. Fourth, you make the assumption that the yield will remain constant. In only the last few years the yield from corn has gone from 400 g/acre to over 500 g/acre. Some people expect that the yield will rise to 2000 g/acre in the next 20 years. Last, you make the assumption that the inputs will only be crops. Non-agricultural inputs can also be applied. For instance, suburban lawn clippings and leaves.
We have so much excess farmland that this isn't really an issue. I think that we're using something like only 30% of the very high quality farmland available in the United States. There's plenty of land available, not even including the cases where we use different parts of the same crop for food and fuel, like using corn for food, and corn stalks as a fuel source.
"Peak oil" can't be taken seriously because, although their basic premise is fundamentally true, they fail to take into account that the entire world economy adjust gradually.
Yes, the currently exploitable oil reserves are limited and if everything else remains constant will be depleted in some finite number of years. The only thing we can say with absolute certainty is that everything else won't remain constant. All the following will happen...
When you add up all these factors, the "peak oil" predictions of massive tragedy and a return to the stone age become nonsense.
Personally, I believe that bio-fuels (Ethanol, BioDiesel, etc) will become widely used in the next 20 years or so for transportation, primarily because they can be integrated with our current technology quite easily. The delta cost to manufacture a "flex-fuel" vehicle capable of running on E85 is roughly $35. The stuff is just bordering on economically feasible right now and big-agriculture only recently started making it a big R&D focus. In fifty years Iowa will be the Saudi Arabia of a new world.
The world will change - gradually.
From a strictly economic perspective I hate altering the markets like this. Taking more of a geopolitical view I'm more interested.
My personal standpoint is that the Fed Gov should institute the following rules:
The cost of doing this is rather small, since the building an E85 capable vehicle in the factory is only a delta of about $35. The cost of an E85 capable tank and pump is also negligible when compared to the cost of building a new filling station. In this way the infrastructure to use E85 is put in place gradually as people and business repace aging vehicles and equipment. As our ability to produce ethanol improves, our ability to consume it also improves. By 2020 or so we will have almost completely phased in E85, sharply reducing our need for oil.
Exactly.
I expect that we'll see a long term trend of gradual price increases. As the prices goes up, it will spur investment in alternative sources - as we've already been seeing - as well as an increase in conservation - as we've already been seeing and an increase in innovation - as we've already been seeing. As the prices increase, new supplies will become economical and will hep restrain further price increases. As alternatives develop, demand will decrease further restraining production.
Basically, we'll never run out of oil. As oil becomes more expensive, alternatives will be used in greater quantity. Eventually there will be some oil left but the alternatives will be cheaper and so we won't even bother pumping out of the ground.
Yep we'll have to do that, since absolutely nothing out there consuming oil will reach the end of its useful life in 20 years and would be up for replacement anyway. Also none of the alternatives like extracting oil from tar sands, from deep water wells, or producing oil from coal could feasibly be used in any equipment currently in use. All those people currently driving around in biodiesel fueled cars are just imagining that they are using a petroleum alternative. And while people are willing to spend $30,000 on a new car, spending $30,035 on a flex-fuel vehicle capable of also running on E85 will put the world economy into a tailspin.
Let's assume, however, that we don't find new reserves, we don't find ways to more efficiently recover our current reserves, and that tar sands and the like don't pay off in a big way.
We could easily do a 70-80% replacement of petroleum as a motor fuel source in only 10 years based n bio-fuels like ethanol and bio-diesel. Big consumers like oil fired power plants can be refueled fairly easily for coal. They're big, but there are relatively few of them so they are easy to do. And you only need to replace a few pieces, the boilers and turbines and generators continue to operate as before. What you are left with is the medium sized plants. Large diesel generators at industrial plants, railroad locomotives, things with 40 year lifespans but are too numerous to convert easily. After removing the motor fuels and big power plants from the equation, however, you've halved the demand for oil, which means that you now hav 40 years to update this infrastructure. And as the updating procedes, it pushes back the date when we run out of oil.
Wait a minute! Let me see if I can boil this down...
When a something is in high demand and becomes scarce it becomes more expensive. Because it is more expensive, people will seek out and develop alternative sources for the product, as well as alternative products.
Is this just crazy talk? Are you saying that we didn't go back to candles when we ran out of whale oil? But instead we developed an alternative - petroleum? Or that when since cane sugar is expensive we sweeten lots of food products with corn syrup?
Holy freshman year economics, Batman!
Someone better tell these simple proven facts to the prophets of doom. I'm sure that they'd rather have a hand in informing the public of all this, rather than exploit the public with their gloomy predictions for personal gain.
The same way the US court has jurisdiction over a piece of property in NYC owned by a UK organization. Just because the 'owner' is foreign doesn't mean that the 'property' is suddenly foreign as well. This isn't an embassy or consulate.
Wonderful. So we'll have to contend with French or German courts imposing their watered down versions of free speech and free association upon the internet. Everything is so wonderful in Europe that they need to prosecute people based solely on expressing their (admittedly repugnant) political views.
I'll bite. How will removing ICANN from the control of the US Gov't possibly increase the protection that falun.gong.org receives? Maybe we could put it in contro of the UN? How long before the same group of thugs that form the Human Right Commission start delisting Amnesty International?
Maybe if would be better to put this in perspective this way: How many sites have been delisted by the US Gov't for openly supporting Al Qaeda?
The simple fact is that, if one puts aside their knee-jerk anti-american sentiments for just a moment, the US is a far better steward than just about any other major country on earth today. It is China and France and Germany that are censoring, not the US. Spamhaus took a bad legal strategy and it backfired. Even with that, however, I'm happier with this internet than one under European jurisdiction.
Thats not quite right on two counts. First, the first sale doctrine only covers reselling the originally purchased copy of the work. "First Sale" says that a publisher can't prevent a customer from selling the book to a used book shop, on ebay, or donating it to a library. It says nothing about whether the purchaser can make copies of the book.
Second, whether copying is allowed has a lot to do with the environment in which copies are made. If a person rips a CD in order to put the music on an MP3 player, or even copy it to multiple places to which only they and their family have access, it is unlikely that the publisher is being damaged in any way. It is unlikely that the household in question would consume more than one copy of the work no matter what. Publishers have not brought a case like this to judgement, probably because they realize they would likely lose and having a grey area in the law is better than black law against them.
In contrast, corporation can't act as a single person in this way. Corps have to purchase material for each of the users, because it is likely - almost certain - that multiple copies will be in use at once. So they would need to either purchase enough copies to cover all the users or limit acces to only the number of copies they have.
And here is the rub.
While google is only displaying excerpts, they are making digital copies of the entire book to drive their searches. And those copies are likely dupicated multiple times within their infrastructure.
If they only took excerpts and made them searchable, then they would likely be well within fair use and the authors and publishers couldn't touch them. But they are doing much more than that.
This is the same legal hole that MP3.com found themselves in several years ago. They were providing streaming music to people who could prove that they already owned the CDs. This way you could listen to your CD collection while at work, etc. (This was pre-iPod). In order to drive this system, however, they made digital copies of tens of thousands of cds. They only made the digital versions available to people who alredy owned the CD, but they were still found to be infringing because they made the copies in their own database in the first place.
Now, if you want my opinion, this is bs, and copyright law and the fair use doctrine needs to be adjusted to allow this kind of use.
This is called Piercing the corporate veil. It is not easy, but not impossible either. If IBM was able to show that the major shareholders were using SCO as a sacrificial pawn to go after IBM, but prevent IBM from being able to collect damages, then IBM might be able to go after those shareholders directly.
I don't think MSFT is a SCOX shareholder. I think MSFT "funded" SCOX by making some lame licensing deals. I wonder how creative IBM's lawyers are willing to be.