No no no - I certainly agree that cliche arguments are vapid and generally useless except to simplify a point to the tolerance of the lowest IQ and shortest attention span (that's why they're such favorites among anybody that sets foot in a studio for CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc.). However, your argument in response stems from a misunderstanding of the point of the original quip.
The point is this: if you have a problem, address the root causes of the problem, don't artificially increase your ability to tolerate it. If you want an excellent example of WHY this is a good point in relation to the original discussion, come join me for a ride in PA once. Thanks to the massive influx of trucking coming off the ports in the east, we have been horribly overrun by our system of roads. As a result, we have sections that do indeed tolerate massive waves of traffic well. However, that's at the expense of other serious problems:
Tangled, difficult to navigate roadways.
Detoriating highway infrastructure is widespread.
Absolutely appalling police coverage on the roadways.
Constant, overbearing construction to try and keep up with the second problem.
To illustrate the last point: I live near Harrisburg - for a year now, there has not been 1 major roadway available into the city that's not been at least partially blocked by contstruction. Getting in and out of the city is absolute Hell, especially since some roads are TOTALLY closed at times.
Simply shrugging one's shoulders and increasing tolerance of a problem is only an option if you know that the problem has a limit, what that limit is, when it will be reached, and that it's tolerable once it's hit. The current glut of personal transportation - especially since it's largely misused (how many idiots do you see in giant SUVs driving by themselves on clear roads each day? I see a lot.) - is a problem that needs to be addressed, not accomodated. Rather than letting these nutjobs continue to waste everyone else's resources and cause additional havoc and congestion, we should be trying to get them to be a bit more sensible.
You don't need a 5000 lb. 4WD SUV on a clear day (odds are good you don't need it at all, actually).
You don't need a full size van to carry yourself.
If you live close to a bus/train/etc. that is on a line that runs close to work, you don't need to drive.
If you're going a 1/4 mile up the road on a sunny day you probably don't need to drive.
If you are driving, you don't need to peel out of every stoplight (man, I hate that... dude... I'm not racing your ****ing Escort! Idiots).
The road is not a speedway. You don't need to drive 95mph so you can get where you're going 2 minutes earlier.
If you live a 1/2 mile from work, you don't need to drive all of the time (in fact - given how hard it is on your car to short trip it, you'd be better off not doing that).
I'm sure there's more, but I think we all get the point: solve the real problems, don't accomodate them.
As for the buses - car pooling works great in the suburbs. Why? Because people in the suburbs tend to work in a concentrated metro area. Odds are pretty damn good that you can find enough people within 1/2 mile of you that work in the same general 3 square mild area as you if you live in a reasonably developed area. I can think of 6 households in the same 38 house development I live in that contain AT LEAST one individual that could be in my carpool. I can think of 3 people that live in my parents' area (don't know the number of houses in their development) that could carpool with them.
Hell, there's even people up in Purry (Perry) county - the middle of freakin' nowhere to the nth degree - that drive halfway to a pull off and carpool the last half. Constantly building to let the problem grow isn't beneficial to anyone (well, anyone important) in the long term - it's just a stick-head-in-the-sand "solution" for people who don't want to actually admit that they can't just keep doing whatever they want at everyone else's expense (a serious problem in this country these days).
Uh, yea - go ahead and try to explain to the big suits up top in TimeWarner what GIF and PNG are, why they should care, and why they should commit a couple hundred grand to litigation over it. AOL-TW is our parent company too. They basically umbrella their underlings in the event of bad storms until they can get back on their own two feet. It's a VERY steep climb to get them to go out on a limb with their money, especially with all the trouble brewing lately, unless you have a REALLY bulletproof plan for it.
Building more buses to combat traffic congestion is like buying a bigger belt to combat obesity.
Umm... the original quip compares expanding the limits around the problems which simply allows for bigger problems. More roads = more potential congestion. Bigger belt = bigger potential gut.
Your unbelievably screwed up quip compares a solution that actually slims the problem to one that simply allows it to grow further. Thank you for proving only that you don't make sense... congratulations..
The wonderful thing about cliche arguments is that they are always so easily turned upside down
Maybe... but I don't think you should be trying to do it... it hasn't gone well so far.
I absolutely agree with your last statement, but I also think it's (currently) more than that. It would be a HUGE risk to give the disc away for free AND give the player the first free month like they expect (how many people would be driven away by having to pay for their first month - I know I was driven off by it on a demo disc I got a few years back) and giving them less than that (like a free week) isn't going to be enough to hook them and secure their money.
I guess that leads me to expand to this: the problem is threefold:
Distribution must bring in some income to ensure short term survival while the game's base grows.
If distribution cannot bring in income, the players must provide some capital to cover expenses and ensure short term survival.
The game must be entertaining enough to hook you quickly and keep you hooked (basically, the article writer's gripe) to ensure both short AND long term survival.
In other words: come up with a better distribution channel and make your games more fun. I think the main problem is the latter, just like the article says: current MMORPGs just aren't a value in most gamers' eyes. I can understand that too. Fleeing through the town gates from a furry bunny so the guards can save my pathetic ass just isn't fun and isn't going to get me to pay for another month. Blowing away my buddies in FP rail-gun competition is. Why pay a monthly fee to NOT have fun? Actually, here's an idea: give away demos where you get to play at a higher level to start out for a week. Give the player +3 Armor of Smiting Everything and +2 Big Ass Sword of Enchantment, plus a couple cool spells. Or, put them in a big ass tank and let them go nuts with other demoers. Then they have a goal to play toward. They know if they dedicate enough time it WILL be a lot of fun for them. But.. make the game fun in the meantime too.
That's great for gamers, but it doesn't fit into the current channel that retail understands. How would you get a company to put a $0.00 box on its shelves? Even if you go the route of making them pay the first month up front, that's still what - a $20.00 box? Not much profit for the sellers unless they give the software out to the retailers for nothing. And they can't sell it at $50.00 a pop and then give you two months for free or they'd go out of business before they could get everyone's 3rd month subscription unless they convinced everyone to extend their existing subscription within the first month.
On top of that, they make a good bit more short term profit, I imagine, by charging you $50.00 for the box and then having you cancel after your first free month, especially if you didn't play much.
Yet another example of where the current market fails to provide capability for supporting new channels of distribution. Software is a massive headache for marketers, distributors, and resellers almost everywhere.
Molding students has already been experimented with, and it's frighteningly simple. A propaganda campaign in the schools could turn the students into MPAA stoolies with little cost and effort.
... the company would probably alert law enforcement officials about an applicant whose name appears on a terrorist watch list.
Well, isn't it nice to know that they're at least considering the possibility of letting law enforcement know of potentially dangerous people getting hold of an Id card that would allow them to quickly bypass security.
Beyond that, I have no comments because, unlike much of the rest of this country, I actually have some patience. I will continue to arrive one hour and a half ahead of my scheduled departure time so that I can snake my way through the lines. As long as they don't become the only way to get through the various checkpoints in life, I don't mind the idea. The only concern I have is that a centralized database of information makes a very tempting target for nefarious individuals (particularly for money-making deeds). But, hey. That's not my problem since I won't be buying one.
You can either set up your own mail server, or, for a couple of bucks, go get a throw-away webspace with someone (I use 4dwebhosting.com - $4.95 a month) who lets you have unlimited e-mail accounts. $4.95 a month, I get some space to play with, my own URL and I have unlimited e-mails. I set up one account for each place that wants my e-mail address, get a password or whatever, then delete it. Viola. No spam on my friends/family account which stays safely away from the Web. If you're feeling spunky, keep a record of which site gets which address, then keep the addresses alive. If you start getting spammed by one, you know who to skewer.
I'm kind of screwed on my one account though. I post my e-mail in newsgroups, my site, and forums so people can contact me about projects we're discussing and whatnot... so I get killed on that one by spambots hunting e-mail addresses, though, Thunderbird handles it pretty well.
I'd like to see backup for your claims of tabbed browsing and gestures. I use both all the time and love them. I've shown them to several people. They all loved tabbed browsing and simply disabled mouse gestures the first time Moz mentioned them.
Feature innovation? I can't tell you when the last time I wanted new "features" in an Office suite was. I want to type shit, save my document, print it, and go. The most advanced "feature" I've ever actually seen used in Word was tables/borders - and they were being misused because the stupid document should've been in Excel (idiot put all the data into tables in a Word doc, then did a bunch of calculations on a calculator and typed the results). I don't need my document editor to do graphics editing, make my coffee, and triangulate the position of all commercial flights currently flying within 150 land miles of my house. It needs to type text and do a couple of basic formatting with fonts and positions. That's all. That's a document editor. Autosave can be nice too. Wordpad does all that. Except the autosave. And I don't have to pay extra for it (although.. I'd have to use it with WINE if I wanted to use it...).
Really... I'd like to see one good reason to move from Office 97... much less to move to Office 2003. Same goes for Windows. XP offered stablity and an ugly UI, but broke all my old DOS games and even a lot of my Win9x stuff. Is that innovation? If so, I'm sure glad the OSS community doesn't have it...
Well no shit it's redundant, moron. It's meant to help draw attention to the PARENT post in a time when mod points are scarce, not stand on it's own as some useful contribution.
Thank you for wasting a mod point to mod me DOWN instead of going and modding another post UP.
I don't have a "take" on software patents in the way you're thinking. In my mind, the Internet and it's digital offspring have forced humanity forward with a rather violent shove. The government, old school businessmen, educational systems (to a lesser degree), etc. have all been left eating dust. Unfortunately, rather than trying to evolve the existing systems - such as the patent process - these buffoons (gov't and corporates), as usual, are trying to break these new, scary technologies so that they either:
Fit into a traditional model of thinking they understand.
Die so they don't have to think about it.
#1 is bad because it ruins the technology or, at the very least, cripples it.
#2 is bad for quite obvious reasons.
In the business world especially, if you only understand something enough to know that it can be profitable, but you don't understand it well enough to actually profit from it, it's in your best interest to kill it before someone else can run with it. Hence legislation like the DMCA, the upcoming FTAA Treaty, and even PATRIOT. As more and more people become cognizant of where they really stand in society in relation to their government and businesses, these stopgap legislative disasters try to plug the information flow so that the proliteriate can be kept exactly where gubment and fat cat suits want it:
Firmly under their big, fat, ugly thumbs.
Nothing is scarier to these people than a truly free, educated populace that knows what it wants...
The best way to keep that from happening - especially for businesses - is to simply legislate the hell out of them until they're too afraid to even think. If every potential thought is going to bring down a multi-million dollar lawsuit, you'll fear to challenege existing power structures and the MBA-weilding twits in power will stay in power, happily gorging themselves on your dime.
Of course... this has always been the case - they usually don't win though. Alas... I fear the tide may have turned and the populace is too apathetic, uninformed, and plain stupid to fight back anymore in any organized fashion...
1) The terribly witty "Haha. Patents are funny." and the fact that it was submitted as a Patent topic is evidence that Slashdot isn't just biased, it's full of idiots. The issue doesn't even involve patents, though the story that's linked is less a story, more a soundbite and doesn't really explain what happened very well. The REAL issue is simply that X10 didn't pay their bills because they thought that they could take advantage of a bunch of punk kids and get some free work. Oops - guess not.
2) If you didn't think to hide the popup windows behind the browser, don't gripe because someone else did several years ago. Besides, stupid patent or not, it's a moot point because the terminology used was "propietary technology", not "patented technology". How JavaScript on the client side can really be made proprietary is beyond me, but whatever - that's an entirely different story.
On a similar note: everyone freaked when Microsoft patented that crap about customized pages on a network, but few understood what really happened or even thought about it first. When the patent was actually filed in 1996, the idea was reasonably unused. Just because it's commonplace today doesn't mean it was then. Beyond that, the document clearly made a bunch of "fodder" claims that noone in their right mind would ever attempt to defend before getting to the meat of the patent where some very precise, legitimate claims are made.
If the average Slashdotter would apply even 5 freaking seconds of critical thinking AND read the goddamn articles before they commented, there'd be half as many dumbass comments because the knee jerk tinfoilers wouldn't always be screaming about things they don't understand. On the -1 side you have trolls and people with unpopular opinions. On the +5 side you just have idiots with popular opinions but no merit to back them up. Hell, they usually don't even understand where the opinions originally came from or what they're about. What's the difference between the trolls and the idiots? Not much, says I, except that the trolls are smart enough to know they're just causing trouble.
I have my share of biases too (being anti-Microsoft is one of my favorites), but at least I don't try to pass them off as a legitimate understanding of complex issues just because the people with mod points think that any formulaic response deserves to be modded to +5.
Funny how the rotation of the spin on a story reverses depending on where it's posted...
I read about this about a week ago on Yahoo.com's WML news site on my cell phone. It was an AP story, I believe, and they presented it basically as these 3 brothers battling out the big evil X10 corp that didn't pay its bills and tried to take advantage of these poor, young kids. Yay for the brothers!
You hit Slashdot and just because it involves "patents" (a 4 letter word as far as many here are concerned, no matter what the context) the spin is that it's this big evil patent abuse and oooohhh run and hide and put your tail between your legs and oh-no-tinfoil-hat-syndrome all over. Oh no! The brothers are evil! Boo!
Give it a rest, already... technology that's only "obvious" after you've already seen it once isn't really "obvious". I hate stupid patents too, but if you look at the facts of the case instead of just saying "oh no - patents - automatic sheep mode on!" you'll realize it was a fair and square fight and a good decision by the court. Get a grip, already.
...but what you, and the EFF, and the rest of the left want...
I read, with interest, your post up to this point. It was at this point, in fact, that I realized you're apparently an unfortunate sheep who can't imagine a world where an individual might develop a point of view indpendent of a political affiliation or label.
I may agree with whatever you said after this, I may not. You and I shall never know, however, because it's obvious that your credibility on the subject is exactly "none", so I'm wasting my time responding rather than wasting my time reading your drivel.
In fact, since your statement suggests you're quite incapable of even thinking for yourself, rather than thinking on imaginary party lines, you likely have no credibility in anything that has a political charge to it. A pity, really, that so many people can combine to know so little by not understanding how to know something as an individual first.
Ahhh... that was totally useless, but it sure felt good. By the way: see my sig! Even though you have no clue why I really put it there, or what purpose it's serving (if any), much less my actual point of view on the subject it refers to, I'm sure it automatically makes me "leftist" or "liberal" or whatever. Yay for ignorance! Why waste time applying critical thinking when you can simply blindly react!?
Yep, nothing like a good old rigged election to take care of those long haired hoodlums, right? Because we all know it's more important to take care of the bleeding hearts than to have a fair, transparent election process.
Maybe we should put armed thugs outside the polling stations so that we can take care of the riff raff who try to vote? Hell, then we could make sure the queers, women, negros, Irish, chinks, reds, hippies, et. al. won't go screwing up your precious rigged elections.
Could you possibly have posted something stupider? Or, can your perceived IQ actually drop into the negative numbers?
I live in the general vicinity of Kecksburg, PA. I can tell you with all certainty that any "UFO" sighting was certainly brought on by a combination of swamp gases, moonshine, and unchecked, rampant coitus among close family members named "Clem" and "Darlita" through several generations...
Then you don't have 'pets', you have tools. I feel the same way about my children since they're just in the house to fetch my beer and my wife since she's just there to mow the lawn and make me dinner.
Yea, anyway! Why should he, not you, choose where he puts his resources!?
Damn the nerve of people who don't think like you! Who do they think they are anyway? Obviously, not you! Otherwise, they'd make brilliant comments like the one you just did instead of the moronic babbling that they do! Damn the nerve of people who aren't you!
Then the computer bitch-slaps you with the keyboard and sticks the mouse up your ass.
The problem is there's no DRM on the laws that govern the Universe. I think Microsoft needs to buy out this whole "heaven" outfit and DRM all of reality. Then, and only then, will we be safe from the original, highly advanced methods of unauthorized duplication and dissemination:
I also didn't see anything that made me thing prison terms would be the likely punishment.
From the 2nd draft of the treaty, article [4.1] under the IP section:
Each Party shall provide criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or infringement of copyrights or neighboring rights on a commercial scale. Each Party shall provide that significant willful infringements of copyrights or neighboring rights that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be considered willful infringement on a commercial scale.
And:
remedies available shall include imprisonment and/or monetary fines sufficiently high to deter future acts of infringement and with a policy to remove the monetary incentive to the infringer.
Emphasis mine.
I don't do well with idiot-lawyer-legal-babble, so read it with whatever level of tinfoil you feel comfortable with.
No drivers. Our company intentionally buys disabled, driver-less boards because they hate us. I found and installed the driver anyway though, because the feeling is mutual.
Slashdot Mirror
No no no - I certainly agree that cliche arguments are vapid and generally useless except to simplify a point to the tolerance of the lowest IQ and shortest attention span (that's why they're such favorites among anybody that sets foot in a studio for CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc.). However, your argument in response stems from a misunderstanding of the point of the original quip.
The point is this: if you have a problem, address the root causes of the problem, don't artificially increase your ability to tolerate it. If you want an excellent example of WHY this is a good point in relation to the original discussion, come join me for a ride in PA once. Thanks to the massive influx of trucking coming off the ports in the east, we have been horribly overrun by our system of roads. As a result, we have sections that do indeed tolerate massive waves of traffic well. However, that's at the expense of other serious problems:
- Tangled, difficult to navigate roadways.
- Detoriating highway infrastructure is widespread.
- Absolutely appalling police coverage on the roadways.
- Constant, overbearing construction to try and keep up with the second problem.
To illustrate the last point: I live near Harrisburg - for a year now, there has not been 1 major roadway available into the city that's not been at least partially blocked by contstruction. Getting in and out of the city is absolute Hell, especially since some roads are TOTALLY closed at times.Simply shrugging one's shoulders and increasing tolerance of a problem is only an option if you know that the problem has a limit, what that limit is, when it will be reached, and that it's tolerable once it's hit. The current glut of personal transportation - especially since it's largely misused (how many idiots do you see in giant SUVs driving by themselves on clear roads each day? I see a lot.) - is a problem that needs to be addressed, not accomodated. Rather than letting these nutjobs continue to waste everyone else's resources and cause additional havoc and congestion, we should be trying to get them to be a bit more sensible.
- You don't need a 5000 lb. 4WD SUV on a clear day (odds are good you don't need it at all, actually).
- You don't need a full size van to carry yourself.
- If you live close to a bus/train/etc. that is on a line that runs close to work, you don't need to drive.
- If you're going a 1/4 mile up the road on a sunny day you probably don't need to drive.
- If you are driving, you don't need to peel out of every stoplight (man, I hate that... dude... I'm not racing your ****ing Escort! Idiots).
- The road is not a speedway. You don't need to drive 95mph so you can get where you're going 2 minutes earlier.
- If you live a 1/2 mile from work, you don't need to drive all of the time (in fact - given how hard it is on your car to short trip it, you'd be better off not doing that).
I'm sure there's more, but I think we all get the point: solve the real problems, don't accomodate them.As for the buses - car pooling works great in the suburbs. Why? Because people in the suburbs tend to work in a concentrated metro area. Odds are pretty damn good that you can find enough people within 1/2 mile of you that work in the same general 3 square mild area as you if you live in a reasonably developed area. I can think of 6 households in the same 38 house development I live in that contain AT LEAST one individual that could be in my carpool. I can think of 3 people that live in my parents' area (don't know the number of houses in their development) that could carpool with them.
Hell, there's even people up in Purry (Perry) county - the middle of freakin' nowhere to the nth degree - that drive halfway to a pull off and carpool the last half. Constantly building to let the problem grow isn't beneficial to anyone (well, anyone important) in the long term - it's just a stick-head-in-the-sand "solution" for people who don't want to actually admit that they can't just keep doing whatever they want at everyone else's expense (a serious problem in this country these days).
Uh, yea - go ahead and try to explain to the big suits up top in TimeWarner what GIF and PNG are, why they should care, and why they should commit a couple hundred grand to litigation over it. AOL-TW is our parent company too. They basically umbrella their underlings in the event of bad storms until they can get back on their own two feet. It's a VERY steep climb to get them to go out on a limb with their money, especially with all the trouble brewing lately, unless you have a REALLY bulletproof plan for it.
Building more buses to combat traffic congestion is like buying a bigger belt to combat obesity.
Umm... the original quip compares expanding the limits around the problems which simply allows for bigger problems. More roads = more potential congestion. Bigger belt = bigger potential gut.
Your unbelievably screwed up quip compares a solution that actually slims the problem to one that simply allows it to grow further. Thank you for proving only that you don't make sense... congratulations..
The wonderful thing about cliche arguments is that they are always so easily turned upside down
Maybe... but I don't think you should be trying to do it... it hasn't gone well so far.
And who doesn't like .png!?
Compuserve.
Probably the only reason they didn't try to litigate .png off the face of the planet is because they can't afford to.
I absolutely agree with your last statement, but I also think it's (currently) more than that. It would be a HUGE risk to give the disc away for free AND give the player the first free month like they expect (how many people would be driven away by having to pay for their first month - I know I was driven off by it on a demo disc I got a few years back) and giving them less than that (like a free week) isn't going to be enough to hook them and secure their money.
I guess that leads me to expand to this: the problem is threefold:
- Distribution must bring in some income to ensure short term survival while the game's base grows.
- If distribution cannot bring in income, the players must provide some capital to cover expenses and ensure short term survival.
- The game must be entertaining enough to hook you quickly and keep you hooked (basically, the article writer's gripe) to ensure both short AND long term survival.
In other words: come up with a better distribution channel and make your games more fun. I think the main problem is the latter, just like the article says: current MMORPGs just aren't a value in most gamers' eyes. I can understand that too. Fleeing through the town gates from a furry bunny so the guards can save my pathetic ass just isn't fun and isn't going to get me to pay for another month. Blowing away my buddies in FP rail-gun competition is. Why pay a monthly fee to NOT have fun? Actually, here's an idea: give away demos where you get to play at a higher level to start out for a week. Give the player +3 Armor of Smiting Everything and +2 Big Ass Sword of Enchantment, plus a couple cool spells. Or, put them in a big ass tank and let them go nuts with other demoers. Then they have a goal to play toward. They know if they dedicate enough time it WILL be a lot of fun for them. But.. make the game fun in the meantime too.That's great for gamers, but it doesn't fit into the current channel that retail understands. How would you get a company to put a $0.00 box on its shelves? Even if you go the route of making them pay the first month up front, that's still what - a $20.00 box? Not much profit for the sellers unless they give the software out to the retailers for nothing. And they can't sell it at $50.00 a pop and then give you two months for free or they'd go out of business before they could get everyone's 3rd month subscription unless they convinced everyone to extend their existing subscription within the first month.
On top of that, they make a good bit more short term profit, I imagine, by charging you $50.00 for the box and then having you cancel after your first free month, especially if you didn't play much.
Yet another example of where the current market fails to provide capability for supporting new channels of distribution. Software is a massive headache for marketers, distributors, and resellers almost everywhere.
Molding students has already been experimented with, and it's frighteningly simple. A propaganda campaign in the schools could turn the students into MPAA stoolies with little cost and effort.
That's a perfectly viable solution. It's not like The Enemy has any money!
You people are UnAmerican suggesting that money isn't the solution to every problem!
excessSarcasm(0);
From the article:
Well, isn't it nice to know that they're at least considering the possibility of letting law enforcement know of potentially dangerous people getting hold of an Id card that would allow them to quickly bypass security.
Beyond that, I have no comments because, unlike much of the rest of this country, I actually have some patience. I will continue to arrive one hour and a half ahead of my scheduled departure time so that I can snake my way through the lines. As long as they don't become the only way to get through the various checkpoints in life, I don't mind the idea. The only concern I have is that a centralized database of information makes a very tempting target for nefarious individuals (particularly for money-making deeds). But, hey. That's not my problem since I won't be buying one.
Easy. Run your own e-mail accounts.
You can either set up your own mail server, or, for a couple of bucks, go get a throw-away webspace with someone (I use 4dwebhosting.com - $4.95 a month) who lets you have unlimited e-mail accounts. $4.95 a month, I get some space to play with, my own URL and I have unlimited e-mails. I set up one account for each place that wants my e-mail address, get a password or whatever, then delete it. Viola. No spam on my friends/family account which stays safely away from the Web. If you're feeling spunky, keep a record of which site gets which address, then keep the addresses alive. If you start getting spammed by one, you know who to skewer.
I'm kind of screwed on my one account though. I post my e-mail in newsgroups, my site, and forums so people can contact me about projects we're discussing and whatnot... so I get killed on that one by spambots hunting e-mail addresses, though, Thunderbird handles it pretty well.
I'd like to see backup for your claims of tabbed browsing and gestures. I use both all the time and love them. I've shown them to several people. They all loved tabbed browsing and simply disabled mouse gestures the first time Moz mentioned them.
Feature innovation? I can't tell you when the last time I wanted new "features" in an Office suite was. I want to type shit, save my document, print it, and go. The most advanced "feature" I've ever actually seen used in Word was tables/borders - and they were being misused because the stupid document should've been in Excel (idiot put all the data into tables in a Word doc, then did a bunch of calculations on a calculator and typed the results). I don't need my document editor to do graphics editing, make my coffee, and triangulate the position of all commercial flights currently flying within 150 land miles of my house. It needs to type text and do a couple of basic formatting with fonts and positions. That's all. That's a document editor. Autosave can be nice too. Wordpad does all that. Except the autosave. And I don't have to pay extra for it (although.. I'd have to use it with WINE if I wanted to use it...).
Really... I'd like to see one good reason to move from Office 97... much less to move to Office 2003. Same goes for Windows. XP offered stablity and an ugly UI, but broke all my old DOS games and even a lot of my Win9x stuff. Is that innovation? If so, I'm sure glad the OSS community doesn't have it...
Well no shit it's redundant, moron. It's meant to help draw attention to the PARENT post in a time when mod points are scarce, not stand on it's own as some useful contribution.
Thank you for wasting a mod point to mod me DOWN instead of going and modding another post UP.
Dolt.
Christ... it was brought up how many times in yesterday's article:
THERE'S NO FREAKING PATENT ISSUE!
I don't have a "take" on software patents in the way you're thinking. In my mind, the Internet and it's digital offspring have forced humanity forward with a rather violent shove. The government, old school businessmen, educational systems (to a lesser degree), etc. have all been left eating dust. Unfortunately, rather than trying to evolve the existing systems - such as the patent process - these buffoons (gov't and corporates), as usual, are trying to break these new, scary technologies so that they either:
- Fit into a traditional model of thinking they understand.
- Die so they don't have to think about it.
#1 is bad because it ruins the technology or, at the very least, cripples it.#2 is bad for quite obvious reasons.
In the business world especially, if you only understand something enough to know that it can be profitable, but you don't understand it well enough to actually profit from it, it's in your best interest to kill it before someone else can run with it. Hence legislation like the DMCA, the upcoming FTAA Treaty, and even PATRIOT. As more and more people become cognizant of where they really stand in society in relation to their government and businesses, these stopgap legislative disasters try to plug the information flow so that the proliteriate can be kept exactly where gubment and fat cat suits want it:
Firmly under their big, fat, ugly thumbs.
Nothing is scarier to these people than a truly free, educated populace that knows what it wants...
The best way to keep that from happening - especially for businesses - is to simply legislate the hell out of them until they're too afraid to even think. If every potential thought is going to bring down a multi-million dollar lawsuit, you'll fear to challenege existing power structures and the MBA-weilding twits in power will stay in power, happily gorging themselves on your dime.
Of course... this has always been the case - they usually don't win though. Alas... I fear the tide may have turned and the populace is too apathetic, uninformed, and plain stupid to fight back anymore in any organized fashion...
Actually, what I'm saying is:
1) The terribly witty "Haha. Patents are funny." and the fact that it was submitted as a Patent topic is evidence that Slashdot isn't just biased, it's full of idiots. The issue doesn't even involve patents, though the story that's linked is less a story, more a soundbite and doesn't really explain what happened very well. The REAL issue is simply that X10 didn't pay their bills because they thought that they could take advantage of a bunch of punk kids and get some free work. Oops - guess not.
2) If you didn't think to hide the popup windows behind the browser, don't gripe because someone else did several years ago. Besides, stupid patent or not, it's a moot point because the terminology used was "propietary technology", not "patented technology". How JavaScript on the client side can really be made proprietary is beyond me, but whatever - that's an entirely different story.
On a similar note: everyone freaked when Microsoft patented that crap about customized pages on a network, but few understood what really happened or even thought about it first. When the patent was actually filed in 1996, the idea was reasonably unused. Just because it's commonplace today doesn't mean it was then. Beyond that, the document clearly made a bunch of "fodder" claims that noone in their right mind would ever attempt to defend before getting to the meat of the patent where some very precise, legitimate claims are made.
If the average Slashdotter would apply even 5 freaking seconds of critical thinking AND read the goddamn articles before they commented, there'd be half as many dumbass comments because the knee jerk tinfoilers wouldn't always be screaming about things they don't understand. On the -1 side you have trolls and people with unpopular opinions. On the +5 side you just have idiots with popular opinions but no merit to back them up. Hell, they usually don't even understand where the opinions originally came from or what they're about. What's the difference between the trolls and the idiots? Not much, says I, except that the trolls are smart enough to know they're just causing trouble.
I have my share of biases too (being anti-Microsoft is one of my favorites), but at least I don't try to pass them off as a legitimate understanding of complex issues just because the people with mod points think that any formulaic response deserves to be modded to +5.
Funny how the rotation of the spin on a story reverses depending on where it's posted...
I read about this about a week ago on Yahoo.com's WML news site on my cell phone. It was an AP story, I believe, and they presented it basically as these 3 brothers battling out the big evil X10 corp that didn't pay its bills and tried to take advantage of these poor, young kids. Yay for the brothers!
You hit Slashdot and just because it involves "patents" (a 4 letter word as far as many here are concerned, no matter what the context) the spin is that it's this big evil patent abuse and oooohhh run and hide and put your tail between your legs and oh-no-tinfoil-hat-syndrome all over. Oh no! The brothers are evil! Boo!
Give it a rest, already... technology that's only "obvious" after you've already seen it once isn't really "obvious". I hate stupid patents too, but if you look at the facts of the case instead of just saying "oh no - patents - automatic sheep mode on!" you'll realize it was a fair and square fight and a good decision by the court. Get a grip, already.
I read, with interest, your post up to this point. It was at this point, in fact, that I realized you're apparently an unfortunate sheep who can't imagine a world where an individual might develop a point of view indpendent of a political affiliation or label.
I may agree with whatever you said after this, I may not. You and I shall never know, however, because it's obvious that your credibility on the subject is exactly "none", so I'm wasting my time responding rather than wasting my time reading your drivel.
In fact, since your statement suggests you're quite incapable of even thinking for yourself, rather than thinking on imaginary party lines, you likely have no credibility in anything that has a political charge to it. A pity, really, that so many people can combine to know so little by not understanding how to know something as an individual first.
Ahhh... that was totally useless, but it sure felt good. By the way: see my sig! Even though you have no clue why I really put it there, or what purpose it's serving (if any), much less my actual point of view on the subject it refers to, I'm sure it automatically makes me "leftist" or "liberal" or whatever. Yay for ignorance! Why waste time applying critical thinking when you can simply blindly react!?
Yep, nothing like a good old rigged election to take care of those long haired hoodlums, right? Because we all know it's more important to take care of the bleeding hearts than to have a fair, transparent election process.
Maybe we should put armed thugs outside the polling stations so that we can take care of the riff raff who try to vote? Hell, then we could make sure the queers, women, negros, Irish, chinks, reds, hippies, et. al. won't go screwing up your precious rigged elections.
Could you possibly have posted something stupider? Or, can your perceived IQ actually drop into the negative numbers?
I live in the general vicinity of Kecksburg, PA. I can tell you with all certainty that any "UFO" sighting was certainly brought on by a combination of swamp gases, moonshine, and unchecked, rampant coitus among close family members named "Clem" and "Darlita" through several generations...
Then you don't have 'pets', you have tools. I feel the same way about my children since they're just in the house to fetch my beer and my wife since she's just there to mow the lawn and make me dinner.
Yea, anyway! Why should he, not you, choose where he puts his resources!?
Damn the nerve of people who don't think like you! Who do they think they are anyway? Obviously, not you! Otherwise, they'd make brilliant comments like the one you just did instead of the moronic babbling that they do! Damn the nerve of people who aren't you!
Then the computer bitch-slaps you with the keyboard and sticks the mouse up your ass.
The problem is there's no DRM on the laws that govern the Universe. I think Microsoft needs to buy out this whole "heaven" outfit and DRM all of reality. Then, and only then, will we be safe from the original, highly advanced methods of unauthorized duplication and dissemination:
"Photography" and "Writing it down".
Ickgh... idiots...
I also didn't see anything that made me thing prison terms would be the likely punishment.
From the 2nd draft of the treaty, article [4.1] under the IP section:
Each Party shall provide criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or infringement of copyrights or neighboring rights on a commercial scale. Each Party shall provide that significant willful infringements of copyrights or neighboring rights that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be considered willful infringement on a commercial scale.
And:
remedies available shall include imprisonment and/or monetary fines sufficiently high to deter future acts of infringement and with a policy to remove the monetary incentive to the infringer.
Emphasis mine.
I don't do well with idiot-lawyer-legal-babble, so read it with whatever level of tinfoil you feel comfortable with.
I'm pretty sure blind people can't see a picture of a car any better than they can see a picture of the word car.
No drivers. Our company intentionally buys disabled, driver-less boards because they hate us. I found and installed the driver anyway though, because the feeling is mutual.