There is no way on earth something like this should be patentable, I think you are simply flaming.
The point is that this new development they are patenting is a fairly obvious development for anyone else who was designing Pocket PC type devices.
The idea of patents, so far as I am aware, are not primarily to reward or recognize the inventor of a thing. Before patents if you had an invention or a unique idea the only way you could stop other people from immediately stealing your idea was to keep it a secret and never release it to the public. This is a bad idea because it means some revolutionary inventions might never become public knowledge, the invention couldn't be improved or developed by the world at large and society in general would be the worse off. Patents are designed so that the invention is explained to the public and placed in the public domain in exchange for allowing the inventor a certain period of time to capitalize and make some money from their invention.
I'm not sure it's Microsoft who should the recipient of our corporate hatred this time.
I think we all agree this is a stupid patent but the real problem is the fact a company ( any company ) is allowed to take out these kinds of patents. Microsoft would be silly not to take advantage of this patent silly season for as long as it lasts.
It is the US patent system which needs to change ( and not infect the EU ) because must be pretty clear that this isn't really an invention or innovation of any kind, it's a pretty bloomin' obvious idea.
Yes but it doesn't make any difference whether the heat source is above or below since you just need to turn the steak over to cook a different side. Looking at it from the steaks point of view when it's flipped it is just the heat source which is moving from above to below.
We generally seem to call it grilling if the heat source is above and probably frying if we are using a frying pan on a gas ring.
To be honest though I don't think steaks or whatever have much concept of "up" or "down" so grilling is an elevation neutral term meaning to apply heat or flames directly onto the surface of food with some air gap between the heat source and food.
No one is talking about giving away your services for free.
There is a difference between plumbers and programmers in that a lot of the plumbers work comes from private individuals whereas a lot of a programmers work comes from companies.
So if everyone learnt how to program open source then the companies would still need to employ some of them if they wanted programming work. Maybe someone already in the company would be able to do the work so they wouldn't hire externally but ultimately a programmer is still getting paid.
If you think about most software packages used in business I'm sure you'll come to the same conclusion I have that 99% of them only do 50% of what they usefully should be able do and trying to get them do the rest ( to fit in with the way the company works for example ) is virtually impossible. With open source it wouldn't be like that, business would demand applications which do exactly what they wanted them to and they'd need people to make that happen for them.
I think Open Source is great, considering that an awful lot of IT jobs rely on knowledge of a particular system e.g. Oracle, SAP etc for which you either have to a pay an awful lot for training/certification or be lucky enough for an employer to pay for you. With open source the training is free, you can train yourself - there are no barriers and it's brilliant. Hurrah for Open Source.
You're right, everyone needs money and luckily there is no reason why you can't make money from Open Source.
Governments ( other than the US ) would definitely be better off not giving their money to the likes of Microsoft or IBM and Open Source provides a way for them to employ their own citizens working on government open source projects.
The benefit is of course that if a project is open source then obviously anyone with the necessary skills will be able to work on it which creates a level playing field and competition amongst your contractors for implementing / maintaining or updating installations. With competition you get the best workers for the lowest price and are able to use the results of their work to build on elsewhere in your government as you like.
Claims from people like Microsoft that Open Source stymies competition and is "unfair" are just nonsense.
I don't believe the cops in the UK do consider themselves to be higher or more powerful than the general population, they are in the main reasonable people doing their job which is to uphold the laws the land.
I'm afraid I can't see any benefit at all in having your police force work under the constant threat of being of being shot at by members of the public. So far as I can see this would lead the police to isolate themselves from the communities which they are serving and foster an attitude of suspicion and parnoia which does not seem likely to help them perfom there jobs effectively.
I disagree with the Parent poster when he claims that anyone carrying a BB gun would be shot out of hand in the UK but what from what you are suggesting if the police did shoot and kill someone for this ( through feelings of paranoia and suspicion ) other concerned citizens or friends of the murdered person would then join in by shooting at the cops with there reals weapons thus causing a lethal bloodbath.
The bottom line is that most people in the UK do trust the cops, they aren't seen as an oppresive arm of the government and they are not treated with suspicion and fear all of which I think is something I am proud of.
Where on earth do you weirdo's get this idea that Europe is some kind of "Socialist Paradise" ?
That's not to say that it would necessarily be a bad thing if it was a socialist paradise.
A national health service ran by the government to help the public makes a lot more sense than a health service run by large companies in order to make money, if you can't see that then you're an idiot.
Presumably it would be menacing Paris from the English Channel where no doubt it's aura of americano would prove an invulnerable shield against any weasly French or English shore defences or military action.
Using WMD may not have been smart but it would hardly put Saddam in any worse position than he is in now, if he had them he'd have been better off using them when he had the chance.
So you are saying that in what must be one of the most closely scrutinised countries in the world Saddam dug an absolutely gigantic hole in the middle of the desert.
He then arranged for the transportation of the millions of tonnes of WMD and there support systems, manufacturing plants, command and control systems to be transported one dark night to be dumped into this big hole and that of the ( surely no more than ) three people who did all fetching, carrying and digging are not now claiming an undoubted reward to reveal the location of this hole.
All this of course being done in the face of an imminent or maybe even actual attack by the US and her allies. Strangely despite the fact that Saddam was an evil dictator in the same league as Hitler he decided that even though he would soon be welcoming the Americans into Baghdad and even though he has these huge stocks of WMD he would not use a single one of them to stop the American forces.
I don't know what anyone else thinks but that UCAV video is hilarious, in my opinion. Check out the enemy, wearing only loin clothes, armed with automatic weapons.
The two of them are menacing a Water Buffalo, a Pagoda ( a religious object ) and some funny guys in hats next to a giant armoured vehicle with a large gun.
Metal Storm in conjunction with only 2 Apache helicopters and 2 ground attack aircraft prove effective in eliminating the threat posed by the 2 loin cloth clad enemy and all without harming either the Water Buffalo or the Pagoda.
Maybe I am just not getting into the spirit of it properly.
I have found that as well, I used to work on a helpdesk where we had to liase with people in Dublin in Ireland and some place in America near Washington and there was quite a considerable difference in attitudes.
Dublin: Would occasionally answer the phone if I left it to ring for 20mins or so and tell me to hang for a bit whilst he finished building this fort in his Age Of Empires game. A 3/4 of an hour conversation would then be had about the best ways of amusing oneself at 3AM ( it was an out of hours helpdesk I was on ). Every 3rd week on full moons they would actually do what we were asking them to do, more often than not they didn't bother.
Some place near Washington: Phone answered immediately by someone determined to tell me his ( full ) name, job title and department. Even though all I needed to do was give them a case number and tell them to check it came through this could often take up to 15minutes of talking to what sounded bad actors reading lines off a broken autocue - small talk was not allowed, attempting to circumvent the process was not allowed, any slight hiccup would result in the person I was talking to immediately pass me over to a succession of supervisors who all needed to go over the exact same process I had just been through originally. Often I felt like shouting "You just need the number, take the number just please won't you just take the number and let me off the phone ?". In the end they were no more efficient than the guy in Dublin.
Obviously I'm not judging all the Irish and all the Americans from these two isolated examples but I always found it amusing and would have loved the two two attempt to deal with each other directly.
I wouldn't bet on that, whenever my friends have asked to me look at their computers I always find their hard drives are infested with various porn dialing exe's and other nasty crap. Quite often IE has been hijacked as well. However it's never these problems I am looking at their computers for but always something else - installing Office etc.
Amusingly all of them claim they have never ever even been near any porn sites and have certainly never downloaded anything and agreed to save it on there drive or run it - never, not once. These things just magically happen to them.
All that swearing makes me picture you as a fat greasy fellow with a beard and an uncontrollable drooling problem covering your monitor in phlegm and spittle.
The post you were replying to never said that Saddam Hussain never ever had any weapons of mass destruction, we know he did because we sold them to him, it said that by the beginning of the war he didn't have any of the weapons we were claiming he did. This would be because he has either destroyed them or used them all up.
A better question would be "Were the justifications for the Iraq war true or were they lies" since you can justify something to yourself any way you like.
The 2 justifications for the war as it was explained to us before the war were that Saddam Hussain had, right now, weapons of mass destruction which he may be preparing to use against us, or maybe someone else and secondly that Saddam Hussain may be in league with Al-Quaida.
Since most people now agree the Al-Quaida connection is nonsense and most people also agree that there weren't actually any WMD either and we haven't found any WMD you have to conclude that the justifications we were given were not true and the was wasn't therefore justified at all.
Since the war ended and it became clear no WMD would be found people have started 'remembering' that the main justification was after all that Saddam Hussain was a really bad man who killed a lot of Kurds and was nasty to his own people. This is a bit of a weak justification for a war now since since we supplied the WMD used against the Kurds themselves and even though we knew what was happening at the time we did nothing whatsoever about it.
Turkey also has a long history of abusing the Kurds ( and human rights abuses ) and yet we aren't doing anything about that except giving them billions of pounds worth of military equipment and aid.
That being the case it looks like all this talk of "an evil regime" whilst true is just being used as a convenient justification after the event since there are a lot of other equally evil actions being carried out in countries all around the world about which we are doing nothing - except perhaps supplying the arms and weaponry to allow it to continue.
It's rapidly getting that way in the UK now as well.
Everyone should watch Chris Morris' Brasseye 2001 Paedophilia special since I now seen several 'current affairs' programs which would be even more ridiculous and sensationalist were they not actually trying to be serious.
I don't understand the justification in giving someone nice easy light sentence if they admit they were guilty or giving them a huge horrible sentence if they are proven guilty.
They are presumably just as guilty either way and so the remedy should be the same in both cases.
I think they are trying to bring this kind of thing into the UK to 'speed things up' but I think it is a really bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is Microsoft trying to start competing with iTunes with this new music service integration?"
Yes, of course they are. Why wouldn't they ?
There is no way on earth something like this should be patentable, I think you are simply flaming.
The point is that this new development they are patenting is a fairly obvious development for anyone else who was designing Pocket PC type devices.
The idea of patents, so far as I am aware, are not primarily to reward or recognize the inventor of a thing. Before patents if you had an invention or a unique idea the only way you could stop other people from immediately stealing your idea was to keep it a secret and never release it to the public. This is a bad idea because it means some revolutionary inventions might never become public knowledge, the invention couldn't be improved or developed by the world at large and society in general would be the worse off. Patents are designed so that the invention is explained to the public and placed in the public domain in exchange for allowing the inventor a certain period of time to capitalize and make some money from their invention.
Agreed and I think those kind of things can be described as "limited resource computing device" as well.
I'm not sure it's Microsoft who should the recipient of our corporate hatred this time.
I think we all agree this is a stupid patent but the real problem is the fact a company ( any company ) is allowed to take out these kinds of patents. Microsoft would be silly not to take advantage of this patent silly season for as long as it lasts.
It is the US patent system which needs to change ( and not infect the EU ) because must be pretty clear that this isn't really an invention or innovation of any kind, it's a pretty bloomin' obvious idea.
Yes but it doesn't make any difference whether the heat source is above or below since you just need to turn the steak over to cook a different side. Looking at it from the steaks point of view when it's flipped it is just the heat source which is moving from above to below.
We generally seem to call it grilling if the heat source is above and probably frying if we are using a frying pan on a gas ring.
To be honest though I don't think steaks or whatever have much concept of "up" or "down" so grilling is an elevation neutral term meaning to apply heat or flames directly onto the surface of food with some air gap between the heat source and food.
It sounds like that's what we'd call "putting it under the griller", or just grilling it if we were in a hurry.
No one is talking about giving away your services for free.
There is a difference between plumbers and programmers in that a lot of the plumbers work comes from private individuals whereas a lot of a programmers work comes from companies.
So if everyone learnt how to program open source then the companies would still need to employ some of them if they wanted programming work. Maybe someone already in the company would be able to do the work so they wouldn't hire externally but ultimately a programmer is still getting paid.
If you think about most software packages used in business I'm sure you'll come to the same conclusion I have that 99% of them only do 50% of what they usefully should be able do and trying to get them do the rest ( to fit in with the way the company works for example ) is virtually impossible. With open source it wouldn't be like that, business would demand applications which do exactly what they wanted them to and they'd need people to make that happen for them.
I think Open Source is great, considering that an awful lot of IT jobs rely on knowledge of a particular system e.g. Oracle, SAP etc for which you either have to a pay an awful lot for training/certification or be lucky enough for an employer to pay for you. With open source the training is free, you can train yourself - there are no barriers and it's brilliant. Hurrah for Open Source.
You're right, everyone needs money and luckily there is no reason why you can't make money from Open Source.
Governments ( other than the US ) would definitely be better off not giving their money to the likes of Microsoft or IBM and Open Source provides a way for them to employ their own citizens working on government open source projects.
The benefit is of course that if a project is open source then obviously anyone with the necessary skills will be able to work on it which creates a level playing field and competition amongst your contractors for implementing / maintaining or updating installations. With competition you get the best workers for the lowest price and are able to use the results of their work to build on elsewhere in your government as you like.
Claims from people like Microsoft that Open Source stymies competition and is "unfair" are just nonsense.
Wow, is that person for real ? It's not some kind of super elaborate troll is it ?
Who are these 'liberals' she hates so much, what do they do ? It must be have been pretty awful.
I don't believe the cops in the UK do consider themselves to be higher or more powerful than the general population, they are in the main reasonable people doing their job which is to uphold the laws the land.
I'm afraid I can't see any benefit at all in having your police force work under the constant threat of being of being shot at by members of the public. So far as I can see this would lead the police to isolate themselves from the communities which they are serving and foster an attitude of suspicion and parnoia which does not seem likely to help them perfom there jobs effectively.
I disagree with the Parent poster when he claims that anyone carrying a BB gun would be shot out of hand in the UK but what from what you are suggesting if the police did shoot and kill someone for this ( through feelings of paranoia and suspicion ) other concerned citizens or friends of the murdered person would then join in by shooting at the cops with there reals weapons thus causing a lethal bloodbath.
The bottom line is that most people in the UK do trust the cops, they aren't seen as an oppresive arm of the government and they are not treated with suspicion and fear all of which I think is something I am proud of.
No it isn't.
Where on earth do you weirdo's get this idea that Europe is some kind of "Socialist Paradise" ?
That's not to say that it would necessarily be a bad thing if it was a socialist paradise.
A national health service ran by the government to help the public makes a lot more sense than a health service run by large companies in order to make money, if you can't see that then you're an idiot.
Presumably it would be menacing Paris from the English Channel where no doubt it's aura of americano would prove an invulnerable shield against any weasly French or English shore defences or military action.
Using WMD may not have been smart but it would hardly put Saddam in any worse position than he is in now, if he had them he'd have been better off using them when he had the chance.
Please at least learn how to spell if you wish to rescue even the faintest trace of credibility from posts like that.
So you are saying that in what must be one of the most closely scrutinised countries in the world Saddam dug an absolutely gigantic hole in the middle of the desert.
He then arranged for the transportation of the millions of tonnes of WMD and there support systems, manufacturing plants, command and control systems to be transported one dark night to be dumped into this big hole and that of the ( surely no more than ) three people who did all fetching, carrying and digging are not now claiming an undoubted reward to reveal the location of this hole.
All this of course being done in the face of an imminent or maybe even actual attack by the US and her allies. Strangely despite the fact that Saddam was an evil dictator in the same league as Hitler he decided that even though he would soon be welcoming the Americans into Baghdad and even though he has these huge stocks of WMD he would not use a single one of them to stop the American forces.
I don't know what anyone else thinks but that UCAV video is hilarious, in my opinion. Check out the enemy, wearing only loin clothes, armed with automatic weapons.
The two of them are menacing a Water Buffalo, a Pagoda ( a religious object ) and some funny guys in hats next to a giant armoured vehicle with a large gun.
Metal Storm in conjunction with only 2 Apache helicopters and 2 ground attack aircraft prove effective in eliminating the threat posed by the 2 loin cloth clad enemy and all without harming either the Water Buffalo or the Pagoda.
Maybe I am just not getting into the spirit of it properly.
I have found that as well, I used to work on a helpdesk where we had to liase with people in Dublin in Ireland and some place in America near Washington and there was quite a considerable difference in attitudes.
Dublin: Would occasionally answer the phone if I left it to ring for 20mins or so and tell me to hang for a bit whilst he finished building this fort in his Age Of Empires game. A 3/4 of an hour conversation would then be had about the best ways of amusing oneself at 3AM ( it was an out of hours helpdesk I was on ). Every 3rd week on full moons they would actually do what we were asking them to do, more often than not they didn't bother.
Some place near Washington: Phone answered immediately by someone determined to tell me his ( full ) name, job title and department. Even though all I needed to do was give them a case number and tell them to check it came through this could often take up to 15minutes of talking to what sounded bad actors reading lines off a broken autocue - small talk was not allowed, attempting to circumvent the process was not allowed, any slight hiccup would result in the person I was talking to immediately pass me over to a succession of supervisors who all needed to go over the exact same process I had just been through originally. Often I felt like shouting "You just need the number, take the number just please won't you just take the number and let me off the phone ?". In the end they were no more efficient than the guy in Dublin.
Obviously I'm not judging all the Irish and all the Americans from these two isolated examples but I always found it amusing and would have loved the two two attempt to deal with each other directly.
"businessmen of the night" They sound cool, I want to be one when I grow up.
I'm not sure they'd let me in.
I wouldn't bet on that, whenever my friends have asked to me look at their computers I always find their hard drives are infested with various porn dialing exe's and other nasty crap. Quite often IE has been hijacked as well. However it's never these problems I am looking at their computers for but always something else - installing Office etc.
Amusingly all of them claim they have never ever even been near any porn sites and have certainly never downloaded anything and agreed to save it on there drive or run it - never, not once. These things just magically happen to them.
All that swearing makes me picture you as a fat greasy fellow with a beard and an uncontrollable drooling problem covering your monitor in phlegm and spittle.
The post you were replying to never said that Saddam Hussain never ever had any weapons of mass destruction, we know he did because we sold them to him, it said that by the beginning of the war he didn't have any of the weapons we were claiming he did. This would be because he has either destroyed them or used them all up.
A better question would be "Were the justifications for the Iraq war true or were they lies" since you can justify something to yourself any way you like.
The 2 justifications for the war as it was explained to us before the war were that Saddam Hussain had, right now, weapons of mass destruction which he may be preparing to use against us, or maybe someone else and secondly that Saddam Hussain may be in league with Al-Quaida.
Since most people now agree the Al-Quaida connection is nonsense and most people also agree that there weren't actually any WMD either and we haven't found any WMD you have to conclude that the justifications we were given were not true and the was wasn't therefore justified at all.
Since the war ended and it became clear no WMD would be found people have started 'remembering' that the main justification was after all that Saddam Hussain was a really bad man who killed a lot of Kurds and was nasty to his own people. This is a bit of a weak justification for a war now since since we supplied the WMD used against the Kurds themselves and even though we knew what was happening at the time we did nothing whatsoever about it.
Turkey also has a long history of abusing the Kurds ( and human rights abuses ) and yet we aren't doing anything about that except giving them billions of pounds worth of military equipment and aid.
That being the case it looks like all this talk of "an evil regime" whilst true is just being used as a convenient justification after the event since there are a lot of other equally evil actions being carried out in countries all around the world about which we are doing nothing - except perhaps supplying the arms and weaponry to allow it to continue.
It's rapidly getting that way in the UK now as well.
Everyone should watch Chris Morris' Brasseye 2001 Paedophilia special since I now seen several 'current affairs' programs which would be even more ridiculous and sensationalist were they not actually trying to be serious.
I don't understand the justification in giving someone nice easy light sentence if they admit they were guilty or giving them a huge horrible sentence if they are proven guilty.
They are presumably just as guilty either way and so the remedy should be the same in both cases.
I think they are trying to bring this kind of thing into the UK to 'speed things up' but I think it is a really bad idea.