Um.. ALL patents are "anticompetitive" in the sense that they exclude others from the technology. That is the quid-pro-quo of the patent system: You tell us about your invention (instead of keeping it secret), and you get exclusive rights for 20 years.
Like all bargains, there is a temptation to renege after the other side has performed.
I realize that. My point, if you read further, was that because technology moves so fast as a whole, this patent ended up stifling innovation rather than encouraging it. A much shorter term on the patent would have allowed Microsoft to still benefit from the patent without putting us in this current mess. I'd say it'd be akin to still having a patent on internal combustion engine, given the rate of development of the industries.
Now if the patent system could just figure out how to keep bullshit patents from getting approved in the first place, we'd be doing a lot better. 20 years is WAY too long to have any kind of process patent like One Click or FAT, not to mention a lot of them are relatively obvious extensions of current technology. Granted, the FAT32 long file name hack is pretty elegant and clever, and I can see why it may have deserved a patent, but now it's just an anticompetitive weapon rather than a technological differentiator. It should have been valid for maybe 10 years, tops.
The problem is that people have too much respect for the government. Most people I talk to trust the government implicitly, and do not think they would do anything bad. They think all this "think of the children" and "terrists!" rights-erosion is perfectly acceptable in order for them to be "safe".
The government doesn't scare me nearly as much as my co-citizens do.
Oops... I forgot to add that some of them even contain caffeine if you want. And your fruit juice? Those often have more calories than soda. An 8oz serving of OJ is 120 calories, so that's 15 calories per ounce, where a 150 calorie 12oz soda is only 12.5. The juice has more nutrients and is better for your nutrition, but it is NOT in any way a "lite" alternative to soda or other sugary drinks.
They're a little expensive, but the Crystal Light singles are enough to flavor a full Nalgene (1L) of water, no matter what their instructions say. Flavoring a 16oz water bottle would be WAY too much. And they add something like 5 calories versus the 150 or so in a typical 12oz soda. I try to keep a couple packs of those at my desk all the time.
They are more than welcome to search any of my devices for child porn and malware, with a proper warrant. I will show them that I have an open AP, with no logging, so it's entirely possible and likely that I did not do the crime. The burden of proof is still on the accuser here in the US, even if they invoke "child porn".
Speak for yourself... I only let people with untrusted computers connect to an untrusted subnet on a rate-limited WAP (no encryption). They can get to the Intarweb, but not any of my machines.
More importantly... how many of your friends bought the game after you introduced them to it with those spawn copies? Blizzard is shooting itself in the foot.
Because fuel is already taxed, and they have decided that it's not enough money. Besides, this is a great way to get ubiquitous surveillance in through the back door. Duh.
Do you have any proof of that, or are you just projecting and conjecturing? I mean, I have no doubt that I'd have no problem hurting or killing someone that threatened me or my family or friends. Does that make me an evil person? I hold doors open for people, go out of my way to help traffic flow smoother when I'm driving, and try to just be a decent person whenever I can. Am I still evil? I play GTA, House of the Dead, and other horribly violent games.
You're like Jack Thompson. You're scared of yourself because you don't know yourself. Spend some time on some introspection. Realize that yes, we all may have that killer inside, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a sociopath. Look at video games like a psychological treatment, getting you in touch with your inner person. People who deny their impulses are MUCH scarier than those who recognize and deal with them.
It doesn't look like they controlled for sex in the first study. The actors were chosen to match the gender of the testee. And perhaps that acted out fight didn't pass the "sniff" test. It sounds exceptionally... forced. Unrealistic, from when I have seen actual people fighting over the same kind of thing. Perhaps the people that play action games are better at catching on to small cues of bullshit?
The second study was just stupid. They had no controls... why didn't they test outside of, say, a sports stadium where people's adrenaline gets similarly high? Or maybe a roller coaster? That's an obvious thing they need to control and check for. Is the correlation with the violence of the movie, or with the adrenaline that the person being tested experienced?
Just because people say they're doing science and write it up doesn't mean it's not bullshit. You have to look at the details, and the details here sound like they did a very half-assed job with specific results in mind.
I've got House of the Dead: Overkill for the Wii. It seems to be an ok trainer for pointing and shooting. Reloading isn't quite realistic, but what're you gonna do?;)
I pay for lots of DVD's. I'll buy 2-3 a month. That's because I can rip them to my media center to access them easily and use them how I want. I can't do the same with Blu-Ray, so I don't own any of them.
Can the VM be implemented in hardware, though? Why the hell not? H.264 decoding is very easy to implement in hardware from what I can tell. Why should the encryption scheme exponentially increase the complexity of the box that plays the movies?
Yahoo! knows exactly what they're doing. They just don't give a shit about users that know better. The ones that know better aren't the type of person to pay for services.
I'm switching to Windows 7 too, for all my gaming. The various DRM bits and bullshit keep me from doing any multimedia work on it, but hey, Windows is just a game loader anyway, right?
PAE adds at minimum one more cycle PER MEMORY ACCESS in latency (often more). That will kill your performance. Don't forget that 64bit also adds a bunch of registers and new instructions. PAE is a hack, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history.
I have 64bit Win7 installed on my desktop here, and it's actually pretty good for gaming. Sucks donkey cock for multimedia, though. I can't even get Handbrake working on it.
For your first point, get a better reader. It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer (and the data is actually in text, not an image of text, which is quite common). For your second point, that again depends on the reader, but I find it quite intuitive, and not really that different from word processors. You press page down, you go down to the next page... select a page number, it jumps to that page. How is that different than most word processors? As for your third comment, again, get another PDF viewer. They all render the text themselves, and can many times do it differently. I like Foxit reader on Windows, and just use kpdf on Linux. Works great, no blurry text.
It's not developed in other countries though. The development happens here in the US. THAT is my point. Medical companies may happily sell to other countries, but they don't develop the treatments there by and large. America's health care system costs twice as much per person because that's a bullshit statistic... did you control for personal investment in healthcare? Type of treatment? Success of treatment? Even having treatments available? Does it count personal investment in excess care as part of the "cost", when that care simply isn't available to people even if they wanted to pay in places like Canada? People jump the border because things are available in the US that simply are not in Canada. Do they count as part of the money spent on health care, but not as part of the "per capita" part of the equation?
Why doesn't Canada mandate that everyone gets the same level of food, too? No junk food, nothing that might impact the health of people. That impacts your health care costs.
I think everyone should have a minimal level of health care. And we have that in the US. Anybody can walk into any emergency room and receive treatment. It's just that our system is set up more capitalistically... those who work are those who have.
Slashdot Mirror
Um.. ALL patents are "anticompetitive" in the sense that they exclude others from the technology. That is the quid-pro-quo of the patent system: You tell us about your invention (instead of keeping it secret), and you get exclusive rights for 20 years.
Like all bargains, there is a temptation to renege after the other side has performed.
I realize that. My point, if you read further, was that because technology moves so fast as a whole, this patent ended up stifling innovation rather than encouraging it. A much shorter term on the patent would have allowed Microsoft to still benefit from the patent without putting us in this current mess. I'd say it'd be akin to still having a patent on internal combustion engine, given the rate of development of the industries.
I think it's simply that more and more people are writing. A lot of those people wouldn't have done so pre-Internet.
Now if the patent system could just figure out how to keep bullshit patents from getting approved in the first place, we'd be doing a lot better. 20 years is WAY too long to have any kind of process patent like One Click or FAT, not to mention a lot of them are relatively obvious extensions of current technology. Granted, the FAT32 long file name hack is pretty elegant and clever, and I can see why it may have deserved a patent, but now it's just an anticompetitive weapon rather than a technological differentiator. It should have been valid for maybe 10 years, tops.
Naah, the NSA wants nothing to do with Linux...
The problem is that people have too much respect for the government. Most people I talk to trust the government implicitly, and do not think they would do anything bad. They think all this "think of the children" and "terrists!" rights-erosion is perfectly acceptable in order for them to be "safe".
The government doesn't scare me nearly as much as my co-citizens do.
Enough of them that Buzz Aldrin had to forcefully give one of them a clue...
At least the planet is mostly harmless to the rest of the galaxy
Oops... I forgot to add that some of them even contain caffeine if you want. And your fruit juice? Those often have more calories than soda. An 8oz serving of OJ is 120 calories, so that's 15 calories per ounce, where a 150 calorie 12oz soda is only 12.5. The juice has more nutrients and is better for your nutrition, but it is NOT in any way a "lite" alternative to soda or other sugary drinks.
They're a little expensive, but the Crystal Light singles are enough to flavor a full Nalgene (1L) of water, no matter what their instructions say. Flavoring a 16oz water bottle would be WAY too much. And they add something like 5 calories versus the 150 or so in a typical 12oz soda. I try to keep a couple packs of those at my desk all the time.
They are more than welcome to search any of my devices for child porn and malware, with a proper warrant. I will show them that I have an open AP, with no logging, so it's entirely possible and likely that I did not do the crime. The burden of proof is still on the accuser here in the US, even if they invoke "child porn".
Speak for yourself... I only let people with untrusted computers connect to an untrusted subnet on a rate-limited WAP (no encryption). They can get to the Intarweb, but not any of my machines.
More importantly... how many of your friends bought the game after you introduced them to it with those spawn copies? Blizzard is shooting itself in the foot.
Because fuel is already taxed, and they have decided that it's not enough money. Besides, this is a great way to get ubiquitous surveillance in through the back door. Duh.
Do you have any proof of that, or are you just projecting and conjecturing? I mean, I have no doubt that I'd have no problem hurting or killing someone that threatened me or my family or friends. Does that make me an evil person? I hold doors open for people, go out of my way to help traffic flow smoother when I'm driving, and try to just be a decent person whenever I can. Am I still evil? I play GTA, House of the Dead, and other horribly violent games.
You're like Jack Thompson. You're scared of yourself because you don't know yourself. Spend some time on some introspection. Realize that yes, we all may have that killer inside, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a sociopath. Look at video games like a psychological treatment, getting you in touch with your inner person. People who deny their impulses are MUCH scarier than those who recognize and deal with them.
It doesn't look like they controlled for sex in the first study. The actors were chosen to match the gender of the testee. And perhaps that acted out fight didn't pass the "sniff" test. It sounds exceptionally... forced. Unrealistic, from when I have seen actual people fighting over the same kind of thing. Perhaps the people that play action games are better at catching on to small cues of bullshit?
The second study was just stupid. They had no controls... why didn't they test outside of, say, a sports stadium where people's adrenaline gets similarly high? Or maybe a roller coaster? That's an obvious thing they need to control and check for. Is the correlation with the violence of the movie, or with the adrenaline that the person being tested experienced?
Just because people say they're doing science and write it up doesn't mean it's not bullshit. You have to look at the details, and the details here sound like they did a very half-assed job with specific results in mind.
I've got House of the Dead: Overkill for the Wii. It seems to be an ok trainer for pointing and shooting. Reloading isn't quite realistic, but what're you gonna do? ;)
I pay for lots of DVD's. I'll buy 2-3 a month. That's because I can rip them to my media center to access them easily and use them how I want. I can't do the same with Blu-Ray, so I don't own any of them.
Any other trolls?
Can the VM be implemented in hardware, though? Why the hell not? H.264 decoding is very easy to implement in hardware from what I can tell. Why should the encryption scheme exponentially increase the complexity of the box that plays the movies?
Yahoo! knows exactly what they're doing. They just don't give a shit about users that know better. The ones that know better aren't the type of person to pay for services.
I'm switching to Windows 7 too, for all my gaming. The various DRM bits and bullshit keep me from doing any multimedia work on it, but hey, Windows is just a game loader anyway, right?
PAE adds at minimum one more cycle PER MEMORY ACCESS in latency (often more). That will kill your performance. Don't forget that 64bit also adds a bunch of registers and new instructions. PAE is a hack, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history.
I have 64bit Win7 installed on my desktop here, and it's actually pretty good for gaming. Sucks donkey cock for multimedia, though. I can't even get Handbrake working on it.
For your first point, get a better reader. It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer (and the data is actually in text, not an image of text, which is quite common). For your second point, that again depends on the reader, but I find it quite intuitive, and not really that different from word processors. You press page down, you go down to the next page... select a page number, it jumps to that page. How is that different than most word processors? As for your third comment, again, get another PDF viewer. They all render the text themselves, and can many times do it differently. I like Foxit reader on Windows, and just use kpdf on Linux. Works great, no blurry text.
It's not developed in other countries though. The development happens here in the US. THAT is my point. Medical companies may happily sell to other countries, but they don't develop the treatments there by and large. America's health care system costs twice as much per person because that's a bullshit statistic... did you control for personal investment in healthcare? Type of treatment? Success of treatment? Even having treatments available? Does it count personal investment in excess care as part of the "cost", when that care simply isn't available to people even if they wanted to pay in places like Canada? People jump the border because things are available in the US that simply are not in Canada. Do they count as part of the money spent on health care, but not as part of the "per capita" part of the equation?
Why doesn't Canada mandate that everyone gets the same level of food, too? No junk food, nothing that might impact the health of people. That impacts your health care costs.
I think everyone should have a minimal level of health care. And we have that in the US. Anybody can walk into any emergency room and receive treatment. It's just that our system is set up more capitalistically... those who work are those who have.
Nice troll. Of course, the government would never wrongfully convict anyone.