There was a kit so you could develop your 35mm film directly to 35mm slides, cut and mount them for the projector in-house. If there wasn't, then I wouldn't know about this process because sending the stuff out for processing was not an option. The slides I was working on were mostly classified Secret/NOFORN or higher.
I don't disagree with you. A deal is a deal. I would guess that our difference lies in the ambiguous difference between "hours worked" and "man hours". The finer points that resolve the issue will be in the contracts, which we now don't have.
Shifting now to the patent troll sockpuppet CEO POV.
I can't get retroactive damages, but I'm not blocked by estoppel in pursuing my claim if I just bought a patent and it wasn't heretofore acted upon because it wasn't me that failed to act. That I worked for the previous owner for twenty years and now work for this transparent spinoff is irrelevant because it's a different legal entity whose ownership and control is cloaked in privacy regulation. I can pursue injunctions in various jurisdictions. The shadows of ownership work for me here. I can keep the matter before the courts and so in doubt for several years - which is the point. With good motion practice just getting to discovery can take over a year, and three years to trial. With luck I can distract real workers in counterparties with depositions and preparing with such, make being in such an adversarial environment personally less pleasant. A distributed array of lawsuits can shut down executives and engineers completely - and that's the point. And while it's in doubt I can encourage the counterparties to settle for the larger damages implicit in their developed dependence without let - and that whole time it's legitimate flackalyst press bait.
I might not be able to win in the courts, but that's OK. Really, a decisive decision in court is like 3% of how these things end up. Some settle after a couple years to fund the puppets like me, and some don't.
If I score a couple good licensing deals I can merit a good bonus and buy a few square miles of Idaho to build a lodge on and retire in - and then sue the same victims again.
I might run out of capital and become a bankrupt shell immune from countersuits, but that's OK because then I can hop back to the corporation I came from as a conquering hero who fought the good fight and took one for the team, and buy the lodge out of my bonus. It's all about keeping the FUD in play for as long as possible to prevent progress. By keeping multiple puppets with multiple claims in play I can use the courts to halt progress, and those that settle pay me to keep this up. One way or another I'm spending my idle years fishing Golden Trout from a Barcalounger in my living room, because a stream runs through it.
Winning the suit is not the goal here. Here the lawyers are just cogs in the machine. The goal is preventing progress I don't control.
The generally accepted way of doing this is to charge for piecework, not hours. I regularly accomplish many hundred pieces of work estimated at a half-hour each in a day, and then hire in most of the execution piece. By managing smartly my team to handle the tedious bulk I can leverage my expertise and experience more efficiently this way. By organizing the work so that each worker can execute several pieces at a time efficiency is obtained and the impacts of overhead are diminished (meetings, training, travel, movement, etc.). In a given project I might have as many as 20 helpers handling the trivia for me, sometimes at multiple sites. The customer is well served, the work gets done on time and within budget, the customers and workers are well treated and both profit from and enjoy the experience. The small fraction of corner cases that need my direct attention get it. We all win, and it's quite profitable without being unfair to anybody. It can be beneficial to not do everything in the worst conceivable way, to engage services with customers with an adversarial stance with sancrosanct terms. When you can accomplish vast multiples of efficiency by organizing your process it's easy to be flexible, to go the extra mile, to deliver the lagniappe. You know what? It's fun to have the margin and initiative to dynamically and gracefully adapt to changing needs in the field on demand without having to call in the legal and sales teams to negotiate a change order for every little thing.
I understand doctors leverage Physicians Assistants and nurses in this way, and lawyers paralegals. There's no reason why IT pros can't be so efficient.
I don't see a problem with TFA. If the book says it takes 3 hours to change out the brake calipers on your car and they do it while you wait in 60 minutes but charge you the three hours, are you going to complain? Would you rather they demanded you came back tomorrow? By being an ass you're insisting on the inconvenience, and they're just going to say they put 4 guys on it and there's a $80 PITA fee. And then before they give it over they'll send the spike in the diagnostic machine that makes your engine light come on on the way home and you get to do the recursive diagnostic/fix routine for a year as they charge you for stuff the book says, when they know what's actually wrong is something different.
Approaching things with an adversarial default position just makes everything more difficult. The ideal is to buy services from people who enjoy getting things done right the first time, and paying a reasonable rate that allows them to profit a little from treating you right. It's admittedly hard to find such folk, so caveat emptor.
Which is why you transfer the patents to an "independent" entity before they file suit. They can claim they didn't know. "We just bought these patents, and find the respondent in violation immediately." The profits from the suit aren't the point. The prevention of competitors' progress is and that motivation can't be tracked back across the transfer - and even if it's eventually found so, it can keep the doubt in play for several years - which is good enough. It's a dirty game, but as I said: completely legal. Patents and copyright are completely broken. They now prevent the "progress of science and the useful arts" they were put in place to promote.
The longer you wait to file suit for patents the more committed your victims get to the underlying methods. They build things on them, and things on top of those things, and frameworks to rapidly implement platforms on top of those so you get to victimize their partners and embarrass them as well. Ideally they build a partner ecosystem around them. And when they've committed the maximum amount of time, money, effort and credibility, when they reach the maximum commitment that maximizes your licensing revenue in event of a settlement, THEN you yank the rug out. But first you transfer the patent to somebody who didn't wait, so the victim can't say "Hey - no fair - you were helping us do this the whole time!" It's how you prevent the maximum amount of progress with just a handful of patents. Then while the suits wend glacially through the courts you have a FUD club to beat the victim with in the press through "analysts" like Enderle and Mueller even while no misdeeds are even proven because nobody wants to build leasehold improvements on property whose ownership is in doubt. And it's perfectly legal.
It seems likely that of 400 billion stars in our galaxy the number with planets in the habitable zone is close enough to 400 billion as makes no difference. It has to do with the distribution of mass in a star forming region, the spin of the galaxy and so forth. When the galaxy was formed the stars without enough inertia to orbit the galactic core fell into the core. The ones with too much were ejected. What we see is what's left.
The planet size thing is an issue, but we'll find that even super-earths have moons of appropriate size. Almost all of the bodies we can see have moons: even Pluto. This things orbiting other things is a pattern.
Water is ridiculously common, and we'll find that it too is almost always present in the habitable zone.
These things make the presence of life elsewhere considerably more likely.
Life has been present on Earth for a very long time. It has had time to travel from here to the nearest stars - even if it originated here in the first place. We may have to go quite a ways before we're sure the life forms we find around foreign stars aren't cousins.
You may as well put a period on that and come full stop. They're thrashing about figuring out how the hell to deal with the current environment, and in the aggregate have no clue. The rumors are trial balloons, and they're hilarious. "What the hell? The world went mobile and we didn't get the memo? What's this app-store shit? What the fuck is a repository? Why didn't Intel tell us this was coming down the pike?"
From my perspective it's a beautiful thing to watch, made more delicious because I warned them here and there, but they were too stupid to understand. Not that I made it easy: I don't like them and knew they wouldn't get it.
Apparently the Gates Foundation is also in the hunt for nuclear power. This one is in China, and supposedly burns mostly depleted uranium. Traveling Wave Reactor.
Papers published by the company claim that the system is 40 times as efficient as current light water reactors and that there is enough available fuel to provide 10 billion people with US per-capita energy usage levels for million-year timescales. As an additional bonus, depleted uranium is plentiful, cheap, and is of limited use in atomic weaponry.
Wow. I just noticed the P/E on RIMM is 3. That's amazing. The world must really believe in their doom. And then I look at their balance sheet and they're carrying half the cash and twice the inventory as usual in August. Almost like people stopped buying their stuff, but they kept making it anyway.
The kiosks around here are Redbox. It's a dollar a day for DVD movies. There is no "late fee". If you keep it two days, you pay for two days. If you keep it for 25 days, they charge only the $24+tax for the movie sale - not the rental plus the sale, and it's yours. If you want to keep the movie, keep it. No biggie.
Almost every time this density thing comes up I point out that in this town - and in the whole county - they have gigabit fiber to the premises at reasonable rates. This is not an urban metropolis. Zoom out the map a little and switch to satellite view to see what I mean.
With a decent amount of write cache this is not a problem. You can force this with a pathological worst-case utility, but in the real world this is not how it works.
The AC is right ('twasn't me). We need one Cathedral (iOS) and one Bazaar (Android) and that's all. There's only two seats at this table and they're both taken.
I know. Isn't it a lot easier to please people who have lower expectations? It so frustrating when they get to try stuff, and then expect it to be at all appealing. What to they think this demo stuff is for, anyway?
My wife owns the Acer Aspire One netbook. I'd ask her now to help you out, but it's her tablet turn and the rule is we don't distract the current tablet geek, or they'll disturb us when it's our turn.
But there are 17 labs on Earth working to weaponize Ebola. This vaccine is unlikely to be effective against the weaponized strain because the infectious genes are likely to be cribbed from influenza with completely different modality. Ebola Reston, the only known airborne variety (and considerably less fatal), is unlikely to have been captured by terrorists, but various interests are patrolling Africa seeking samples of emergent strains, including Hezbolla, the Taliban and the CDC. When they get them they will employ the latest gene splicing techniques as well as Mendellian methods to emerge a hemorrhagic virus that's airborne, incubates for three weeks, and kills 90% of the exposed population. Then they will deliberately infect hundreds of martyrs immediately before their pre-approved flights to various US cities, with instructions to commingle with the population as much as they can - unaware they've been infected with the dire virus.
And then our modern world is over. The US doesn't know who did it, so they have to broad-spectrum nuke the rest of the world back to the stone age so the surviving Americans have a chance. And then the virus wipes out most of the survivors in the rest of the world as they come in contact with it. But there was no time to immunize the US, so it too suffered.
So here's the plot: Nation A immunizes their entire population against Ebola, and - thinking they're safe - launches their Ebola dispensing satellites around the world. The Ebola mutates, so while 80% of the Western world is bleeding to death out their anus, only 60% of the rest of the world is. But then the western labs, knowing it's the end - unleash their version of hemorragic influenza on the world, killing 90% of the survivors. The nukes fly, rendering 98% of the planet uninhabitable. Between the evolutions of the virii and the nukes, the world's population is diminished from 7 billions to maybe 1 million.
And then because CO2 output dropped, the glaciers come and pare us back to maybe 100,000.
You see if I experiment with fission to create the elements I need for a nuclear weapon no matter what I do, no matter how I control it, no matter how well it's shielded, the damned thing is going to give off neutrino emissions that make it glow like the sun to spy satellites and uninterested observers the world over. But if I splice genes in my basement nobody knows but me and my precious virii.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a kit so you could develop your 35mm film directly to 35mm slides, cut and mount them for the projector in-house. If there wasn't, then I wouldn't know about this process because sending the stuff out for processing was not an option. The slides I was working on were mostly classified Secret/NOFORN or higher.
I don't disagree with you. A deal is a deal. I would guess that our difference lies in the ambiguous difference between "hours worked" and "man hours". The finer points that resolve the issue will be in the contracts, which we now don't have.
Shifting now to the patent troll sockpuppet CEO POV.
I can't get retroactive damages, but I'm not blocked by estoppel in pursuing my claim if I just bought a patent and it wasn't heretofore acted upon because it wasn't me that failed to act. That I worked for the previous owner for twenty years and now work for this transparent spinoff is irrelevant because it's a different legal entity whose ownership and control is cloaked in privacy regulation. I can pursue injunctions in various jurisdictions. The shadows of ownership work for me here. I can keep the matter before the courts and so in doubt for several years - which is the point. With good motion practice just getting to discovery can take over a year, and three years to trial. With luck I can distract real workers in counterparties with depositions and preparing with such, make being in such an adversarial environment personally less pleasant. A distributed array of lawsuits can shut down executives and engineers completely - and that's the point. And while it's in doubt I can encourage the counterparties to settle for the larger damages implicit in their developed dependence without let - and that whole time it's legitimate flackalyst press bait.
I might not be able to win in the courts, but that's OK. Really, a decisive decision in court is like 3% of how these things end up. Some settle after a couple years to fund the puppets like me, and some don't.
If I score a couple good licensing deals I can merit a good bonus and buy a few square miles of Idaho to build a lodge on and retire in - and then sue the same victims again.
I might run out of capital and become a bankrupt shell immune from countersuits, but that's OK because then I can hop back to the corporation I came from as a conquering hero who fought the good fight and took one for the team, and buy the lodge out of my bonus. It's all about keeping the FUD in play for as long as possible to prevent progress. By keeping multiple puppets with multiple claims in play I can use the courts to halt progress, and those that settle pay me to keep this up. One way or another I'm spending my idle years fishing Golden Trout from a Barcalounger in my living room, because a stream runs through it.
Winning the suit is not the goal here. Here the lawyers are just cogs in the machine. The goal is preventing progress I don't control.
The generally accepted way of doing this is to charge for piecework, not hours. I regularly accomplish many hundred pieces of work estimated at a half-hour each in a day, and then hire in most of the execution piece. By managing smartly my team to handle the tedious bulk I can leverage my expertise and experience more efficiently this way. By organizing the work so that each worker can execute several pieces at a time efficiency is obtained and the impacts of overhead are diminished (meetings, training, travel, movement, etc.). In a given project I might have as many as 20 helpers handling the trivia for me, sometimes at multiple sites. The customer is well served, the work gets done on time and within budget, the customers and workers are well treated and both profit from and enjoy the experience. The small fraction of corner cases that need my direct attention get it. We all win, and it's quite profitable without being unfair to anybody. It can be beneficial to not do everything in the worst conceivable way, to engage services with customers with an adversarial stance with sancrosanct terms. When you can accomplish vast multiples of efficiency by organizing your process it's easy to be flexible, to go the extra mile, to deliver the lagniappe. You know what? It's fun to have the margin and initiative to dynamically and gracefully adapt to changing needs in the field on demand without having to call in the legal and sales teams to negotiate a change order for every little thing.
I understand doctors leverage Physicians Assistants and nurses in this way, and lawyers paralegals. There's no reason why IT pros can't be so efficient.
I don't see a problem with TFA. If the book says it takes 3 hours to change out the brake calipers on your car and they do it while you wait in 60 minutes but charge you the three hours, are you going to complain? Would you rather they demanded you came back tomorrow? By being an ass you're insisting on the inconvenience, and they're just going to say they put 4 guys on it and there's a $80 PITA fee. And then before they give it over they'll send the spike in the diagnostic machine that makes your engine light come on on the way home and you get to do the recursive diagnostic/fix routine for a year as they charge you for stuff the book says, when they know what's actually wrong is something different.
Approaching things with an adversarial default position just makes everything more difficult. The ideal is to buy services from people who enjoy getting things done right the first time, and paying a reasonable rate that allows them to profit a little from treating you right. It's admittedly hard to find such folk, so caveat emptor.
Which is why you transfer the patents to an "independent" entity before they file suit. They can claim they didn't know. "We just bought these patents, and find the respondent in violation immediately." The profits from the suit aren't the point. The prevention of competitors' progress is and that motivation can't be tracked back across the transfer - and even if it's eventually found so, it can keep the doubt in play for several years - which is good enough. It's a dirty game, but as I said: completely legal. Patents and copyright are completely broken. They now prevent the "progress of science and the useful arts" they were put in place to promote.
The longer you wait to file suit for patents the more committed your victims get to the underlying methods. They build things on them, and things on top of those things, and frameworks to rapidly implement platforms on top of those so you get to victimize their partners and embarrass them as well. Ideally they build a partner ecosystem around them. And when they've committed the maximum amount of time, money, effort and credibility, when they reach the maximum commitment that maximizes your licensing revenue in event of a settlement, THEN you yank the rug out. But first you transfer the patent to somebody who didn't wait, so the victim can't say "Hey - no fair - you were helping us do this the whole time!" It's how you prevent the maximum amount of progress with just a handful of patents. Then while the suits wend glacially through the courts you have a FUD club to beat the victim with in the press through "analysts" like Enderle and Mueller even while no misdeeds are even proven because nobody wants to build leasehold improvements on property whose ownership is in doubt. And it's perfectly legal.
This has been going on for quite a while. Here is another example with Microsoft and Nokia.
It seems likely that of 400 billion stars in our galaxy the number with planets in the habitable zone is close enough to 400 billion as makes no difference. It has to do with the distribution of mass in a star forming region, the spin of the galaxy and so forth. When the galaxy was formed the stars without enough inertia to orbit the galactic core fell into the core. The ones with too much were ejected. What we see is what's left.
The planet size thing is an issue, but we'll find that even super-earths have moons of appropriate size. Almost all of the bodies we can see have moons: even Pluto. This things orbiting other things is a pattern.
Water is ridiculously common, and we'll find that it too is almost always present in the habitable zone.
These things make the presence of life elsewhere considerably more likely.
Life has been present on Earth for a very long time. It has had time to travel from here to the nearest stars - even if it originated here in the first place. We may have to go quite a ways before we're sure the life forms we find around foreign stars aren't cousins.
Before slideshow software this was how we made slideshows. No joke - special camera and all that.
They have made no announcement....
You may as well put a period on that and come full stop. They're thrashing about figuring out how the hell to deal with the current environment, and in the aggregate have no clue. The rumors are trial balloons, and they're hilarious. "What the hell? The world went mobile and we didn't get the memo? What's this app-store shit? What the fuck is a repository? Why didn't Intel tell us this was coming down the pike?"
From my perspective it's a beautiful thing to watch, made more delicious because I warned them here and there, but they were too stupid to understand. Not that I made it easy: I don't like them and knew they wouldn't get it.
If you got paid for this I hope they discounted for lateness and lack of clue.
The GP was John Titor. Please ignore.
When was that? I don't remember that.
Apparently the Gates Foundation is also in the hunt for nuclear power. This one is in China, and supposedly burns mostly depleted uranium. Traveling Wave Reactor.
Papers published by the company claim that the system is 40 times as efficient as current light water reactors and that there is enough available fuel to provide 10 billion people with US per-capita energy usage levels for million-year timescales. As an additional bonus, depleted uranium is plentiful, cheap, and is of limited use in atomic weaponry.
Wow. I just noticed the P/E on RIMM is 3. That's amazing. The world must really believe in their doom. And then I look at their balance sheet and they're carrying half the cash and twice the inventory as usual in August. Almost like people stopped buying their stuff, but they kept making it anyway.
The kiosks around here are Redbox. It's a dollar a day for DVD movies. There is no "late fee". If you keep it two days, you pay for two days. If you keep it for 25 days, they charge only the $24+tax for the movie sale - not the rental plus the sale, and it's yours. If you want to keep the movie, keep it. No biggie.
Almost every time this density thing comes up I point out that in this town - and in the whole county - they have gigabit fiber to the premises at reasonable rates. This is not an urban metropolis. Zoom out the map a little and switch to satellite view to see what I mean.
With a decent amount of write cache this is not a problem. You can force this with a pathological worst-case utility, but in the real world this is not how it works.
The AC is right ('twasn't me). We need one Cathedral (iOS) and one Bazaar (Android) and that's all. There's only two seats at this table and they're both taken.
I know. Isn't it a lot easier to please people who have lower expectations? It so frustrating when they get to try stuff, and then expect it to be at all appealing. What to they think this demo stuff is for, anyway?
It's Windows Phone - on your desktop. Like who wouldn't want that?
The issue isn't "Who will do it". It is "It can be done, therefore it will be done."
My wife owns the Acer Aspire One netbook. I'd ask her now to help you out, but it's her tablet turn and the rule is we don't distract the current tablet geek, or they'll disturb us when it's our turn.
But there are 17 labs on Earth working to weaponize Ebola. This vaccine is unlikely to be effective against the weaponized strain because the infectious genes are likely to be cribbed from influenza with completely different modality. Ebola Reston, the only known airborne variety (and considerably less fatal), is unlikely to have been captured by terrorists, but various interests are patrolling Africa seeking samples of emergent strains, including Hezbolla, the Taliban and the CDC. When they get them they will employ the latest gene splicing techniques as well as Mendellian methods to emerge a hemorrhagic virus that's airborne, incubates for three weeks, and kills 90% of the exposed population. Then they will deliberately infect hundreds of martyrs immediately before their pre-approved flights to various US cities, with instructions to commingle with the population as much as they can - unaware they've been infected with the dire virus.
And then our modern world is over. The US doesn't know who did it, so they have to broad-spectrum nuke the rest of the world back to the stone age so the surviving Americans have a chance. And then the virus wipes out most of the survivors in the rest of the world as they come in contact with it. But there was no time to immunize the US, so it too suffered.
So here's the plot: Nation A immunizes their entire population against Ebola, and - thinking they're safe - launches their Ebola dispensing satellites around the world. The Ebola mutates, so while 80% of the Western world is bleeding to death out their anus, only 60% of the rest of the world is. But then the western labs, knowing it's the end - unleash their version of hemorragic influenza on the world, killing 90% of the survivors. The nukes fly, rendering 98% of the planet uninhabitable. Between the evolutions of the virii and the nukes, the world's population is diminished from 7 billions to maybe 1 million.
And then because CO2 output dropped, the glaciers come and pare us back to maybe 100,000.
You see if I experiment with fission to create the elements I need for a nuclear weapon no matter what I do, no matter how I control it, no matter how well it's shielded, the damned thing is going to give off neutrino emissions that make it glow like the sun to spy satellites and uninterested observers the world over. But if I splice genes in my basement nobody knows but me and my precious virii.
Sounds like a party. I'm in.
Yeah. Then non-LED backlights are the commonest failure mode in an LCD TV or laptop monitor. You're lucky to get five years out of them.