Besides, Obama will be raising everyone's taxes. He admits as much. He wants to repeal all the tax cuts put in place over the last eight years. When he says he won't be raising taxes on the 95% of the public, he's referring to any increases above and beyond that increase.
That is why he says you "won't be paying any more than you were under Clinton." We are currently ALL paying less than we were under Clinton. I know I may be modded down for saying something negative about Obama, but it's true... go look it up.
Utter nonsense that's been debunked over and over. Quotes are false, info's bad, and you're just hoping that enough people don't bother to look at all and just take what you say at face value. You even threw in the old "I'll get modded down for saying the truth!". Unfortunately for you, it seems more likely you'll get modded down for being full of shit.
right now file systems are made in such a way as to maximize reads that are sequential. It is possible that without these, now unneeded, optimizations ssd could run faster.
No, they wouldn't, because removing a competitor's optimizations does not make you faster unless they were slowing you down to begin with. Modern SSDs have the same random and sequential read speeds, they aren't actually slower at sequential reads than random reads. In other words, it's not that the sequential ordering used by modern filesystems slows them down, it just doesn't help them at all. Now, if you could come up with a data structure that both provides some performance benefits to SSDs that traditional drives wouldn't get, and still utilizes wear-leveling for writes (which is something that would mess with most block allocation schemes), then the situation might be different, and may justify a filesystem "optimized" for SSD performance.
It'd have helped if the article title had been "AT&T To Cut Off P2P Users On 3G Wireless" or "AT&T Wireless to Cut Off P2P Users" rather than the inaccurate, alarmist headline that implies that AT&T as a whole is disconnecting P2P users. Sure, sure, should've RTF-summary before commenting, but hell, this is Slashdot, knee-jerk reaction posts are the rule, not the exception.
What you mention seems to equate to what I was saying about consoles being more level playing fields, people are given equal machines for a reason at these events. You don't get that luxury when just bumping around on the 'net.
Bah, I forget this is/. sometimes. Everyone wants to blindly save PC gaming, which requires the use of Windows over 90% of the time unless you want to wait a long time for Wine support or a port. I say let it go down the stinker and don't look back.
No, you're still completely missing the point. Calling console gaming an "equal playing field" is like calling No Child Left Behind "equal education". It's equal because performance is equally handicapped, and because players have equally LIMITED tools. Playing a FPS at a tournament with standardized PCs isn't about handicapping, it's about making sure that every player has the tools they require to play their best, which is the very OPPOSITE of the idea behind console FPSs.
Here's another way to look at it. Say you're playing golf with your buddies, and one of them is a pro golfer. He has his own really nice set of clubs, matching tees, and a personal ball-washer. You have some hand-me-down clubs that you found in the attic, and the rest of your friends are similarly equipped. He solidly trounces all of you every time you play, and eventually you all get tired of it. You tell him that from now on, the only club allowed during your games is a mini-golf putter. Sure, he's still better than you with the putter, he makes nicer shots on the green, but it doesn't really matter, because you ALL suck with the putter compared to regular clubs. But the playing field is equal now, and that's what counts, right?
Console gaming is golfing with nothing but a putter. PC gaming lets you use whatever clubs you can afford, and competitive PC gaming makes sure that everyone has equally nice clubs and that nobody's using a guided missile to drop their ball a foot from the hole when nobody's looking. If you want to keep playing mini-golf, be my guest, I'm sure it's a good time. However, if you run around screaming about how pro golfers are only good because they have nice clubs, and that you'd show them who the real pro is if they came to your mini-golf course for a few games, you WILL be ridiculed, and deservedly so.
Finally, this has nothing to do with Windows or Linux or any other OS for that matter. For fuck's sake, you're playing Microsoft games on a Microsoft console and whining that PC games require Windows? Kindly take your stupid off-topic OS trolling and get the fuck out.
The reason matches tend to be so close in Halo 3 is because, contrary to your assertion, "skill" is almost nonexistant as a factor. It's an easy FPS, designed to be fun for everyone. You don't get big winners, but you don't really get big losers either. Hitboxes are huge, everything moves slowly, and controller controls are horrible for any kind of accuracy. Simple strategy and luck become the only factors, and since most people are devoid of the first and equal on the second, you get close games.
Your implication is that anyone who actually does well in PC FPSs is hacking, but that just tells me that you've never played with anyone with actual skill. While *my* former roommate wasn't into gaming much, his girlfriend played CAL Counterstrike matches, and I usually watched from over-the-shoulder. I'm not horrible myself, but in any kind of 1v1 situation, she'd wipe the floor with me, and did pretty regularly when we played public servers or LAN games. The funny part? She didn't even own her own computer at the time, she played on my roommate's, which was a mid-range Dell with nothing fancy.
About your roommate, while he's probably an idiot who wasn't very good to start with, there's definitely something to be said about your "home" machine. You get used to the feel of the keyboard, the precision and delay of the mouse, even things like the color balance or brightness of your monitor can mess you up if they're changed. Playing on a different PC can really throw someone off their game.
Python 2.5 comes with SQLite3, so you don't even have to install it separately.
Actually, you can't count on that. Google it for details.
Perhaps you should link to a particular site rather than a Google search which has more results contradicting you than supporting you. One of them even specifically mentions that it's part of the standard library now.
This is false -- they bought keys from companies that bought Thai/Russian retail boxes and sell them online. The deal that I found (Already bought the 360 version, so I didn't get it) was from a well-known Thai vendor selling the key at the regular Thai price -- and they would ship the disc/box to you with it if you wanted it. There was no scam, there was no middleman, and no indication (other than in the novel-length EULA) that this was anything other than a good deal.
The scam was that they didn't tell you that the keys were region-locked, which is stated ON THE BOX in those regions. It's possible that they didn't even bother to look at the box, but in that case they're just idiots, not scammers.
Doesn't work at all. Gifts ONLY happen when you buy two different products that have overlapping contents, not two different copies of the same product. Even if you could find two overlapping packages that would result in a complete Orange Box gift, it'd be ridiculously easy to find, since a small handful of Russian Steam accounts would be gifting hundreds of Orange Box gifts.
Strange, electrical appliances are also region locked (110/220V), but people just buy a special "hacking device" to convert the voltage. I'm surprised no authories have gone after them yet.
The difference being that you can't buy a 220v appliance at a retail store in Europe, attach a "hacking device" on it and ship it over to the US and sell it for five times the price.
Besides, 110/220v pales in comparison to the huge array of different plug shapes and sizes found in countries that miraculously share the same voltage standard. As tempting as it would be to call that "region locking", it's more likely just the historic inability for two countries to agree on *anything* short of not invading each other, which doesn't always hold either.
I definitely agree that Valve should allow you to unregister the key and register a proper key in it's place. I'd hope that such functionality will be coming in a Steam update very soon.
It's to stop exactly what people tried to do, mass importation of keys by a third party to be sold for ridiculous profit. Do you think people should be able to buy 500 copies of the the Thai version for the equivalent of $5 USD each, and turn around and sell the keys online for $20 a piece, and have them work just as well as a $50 US key?
"I also find it amazing that in the UK software (and other computer stuff) will retail for the same price as in the US - only in POUNDS. So it's double the price nowadays. Sheesh, I guess CD's are really really expensive to burn in the UK! There's no excuse for this, it's just greed. Valve should not be protecting greed. But then again, it's a racket. Just like the music industry./rant"
Considering that this whole situation is because Valve IS adjusting their prices for the local markets, you really have no idea what you're talking about.
They have retail distributions agreements in Russia and Thailand to sell boxed products at competitive local prices, rather than trying to get people who might earn $300 USD a month to shell out $50 USD for a game. In order to stop people from buying Russian copies en masse for, say, $10 USD a piece and selling the keys online for $20 USD each, they lock the keys to the geographic region in which they're sold. I can't say I've seen the boxes myself since I live in the US, but I've read that they SAY on the box that they won't play outside of country X. Of course, they export the keys anyways and sell them to stupid people who think they're getting a great deal, and that's why we have this retarded article claiming that Orange Box is region locked everywhere.
Don't give me that shit about "I didn't know it was imported" either. If it seems too good to be true, it PROBABLY IS. The only fault I have with Valve for this is that they should let people unregister so they can register the copies they bought afterwards.
After digging around on the Steam forums a bit, I'd like to clear up some misconceptions that people seem to be getting.
1) Orange Box purchased through Steam (online) is NOT REGION LOCKED IN ANY WAY.
2) Codes from retail boxes in America, the EU and most other places are NOT REGION LOCKED.
3) Codes from Thailand and Russia ARE REGION LOCKED. This is done because Steam games are sold in those countries at a tiny fraction of the US retail cost. The boxes are marked (in the appropriate language) that they keys will not work in other countries.
In other words, people are getting "burned" because they bought keys from companies that buy the Thai/Russian retail boxes, opens them up, and sell you the codes for several times what they paid, which is still cheaper than the rest of the world pays. They companies know that the keys don't work anywhere else, so the people are getting basically scammed by the companies selling them keys, not Valve.
They're not military servicemen living overseas or families on vacation in Europe, they're cheapasses who fall for a scam because they're too eager to get a "great deal".
"Since all 535 of these men and women will have a substantial influence on my life, why again shouldn't I be able to influence the elections of all 535?"
Because at the very most 55 (if you live in California) of those men and women are designated to represent the interests of voters in your state. The others should be more interested in what their own constituents need than what an out-of-state lobbying group pays them to vote for.
Then explain to me in a couple of word WHY cookies are so important and releveant other than tracking or making a website recognize me?
Simply put, it's the main way for a website to store any kind of data that remains persistant between pages. Some websites use it to track you for advertising purposes, some use it to provide "comfort" features like automatically logging you in, some use it for very basic functionality like shopping cards on a web store. The most common usage is to store simple preferences, like what language to show the website in, what theme for forums, etc. I'm sorry that that's not a "couple" words, but dumbing down a concept frequently leads to confusion and misunderstanding like your posts display.
Most browsers let you enable/disable cookies on a site-by-site basis, so if you think they AREN'T relevant, just turn them off. If that means you can't access certain sites that claim they require cookies, well, that's too bad.
This article seems very speculative, if not pure fantasy. It assumes Google will somehow turn your search history and ad-clicking history into some kind of predictive model of your brain. The author doesn't really seem to understand any of the technology involved, he repeatedly claims that since Google now owns DoubleClick, they have (legal) access to ALL of your cookies and browsing history. Most of the statistics he quotes are totally useless, for example:
Fayyad (Yahoo R&D VP) proudly says he can predict with 75% certainty which of the 300,000 monthly visitors to Yahoo! Autos will purchase a new car within the next three months.
In other words, 3 out of 4 times, he can predict which of the people visiting an automobile price/review site will buy a car in the next three months. Considering that most people wouldn't go to Yahoo Autos unless they had some interest in buying a car, it's not really rocket science to track users and decide which are the "serious" ones and which are just window-shopping. The whole article is filled with speculation that once Google has access to similar data, they'll be able to accurately predict everything we do online, but what the author fails to deliver on is how they'll be able to make the jump from predicting click-through rates on ads to full behavioral models everyone who surfs the web.
Also, the article feels like it's written by a 5th grade English student with a thesaurus. Run-on sentences galore, wild trips of imagination that aren't supported by the article's sources, and a pathetic lack of proper punctuation besides the occasional period. He even uses a smiley face at the end.
The news news is that Jeff Bezos is giving a speech at an O'Reilly-sponsored conference about something having nothing to do with patents, and everything else in the blurb, from the title on down, is randomly thrown in by the submitter, correct?
Correct, the submitter's just using his soapbox to reiterate a previous story about the patent.
iTunes uses an embedded copy of Quicktime to display the dynamic content used for things like the iTMS. While I believe it uses HTTP for the network transport layer, very little of the rest has to do with the web. No HTML, no GIFs, no cookies in the web browser sense.
You're correct in that it doesn't use HTML, I was mistaken. However, while checking to confirm that, I found out something rather interesting. Apple licensed the famous "1-Click" patent in September of 2000 for use with their web store on Apple.com (source, years before iTMS ever came out. The post that I was replying to claimed that Apple had to license it for iTunes, but that doesn't appear to be true, since it was licensed nearly three years prior to the iTMS being released, for an entirely different service.
iTunes uses an embedded web browser to display the iTunes Music Store. Nice try, though. If you actually read the patent, you'd see that it specifically mentions using a browser that displays HTML as the primary interface for interaction with the online purchasing system.
Yes, they aren't patenting the obvious "give me that and bill me" that has been in use for hundreds of years. They are patenting the unique and non-obvious "give me that and bill me *on a computer*". It seems that many of the stupidest patents are for something where it would be laughed at by the patent clerks if the "on a computer" was taken off the end.
Again, I'm not saying that I believe the patent is valid, I specifically mentioned that I thought it was too broad. However, to be precise, it's actually "give me that and bill me, I'm customer #XXXXXXXXX". The "novel" part (according to Amazon) is using a cookie with a database ID value so the server knows which customer you are and what your billing/shipping addresses are without having to prompt for information or confirmation of existing information, thus only requiring the user to click once on an item's page to order it, as opposed to sites where you have to add it to your shopping cart, then checkout, then confirm your billing information, then submit the order.
I never said it was particularly innovative, I was simply explaining their patent for the benefit of a few of the previous posters in this thread who obviously hadn't read anything about Amazon's claims except the Slashdot blurbs.
Does Amazon have to pay for that wasted time, or do the taxpayers need to shoulder that burden? At what point is the line of absurdity crossed?
From TFA:
Calveley is not acting for any corporation and had to raise the cost of a patent re-examination himself. There is a $2,520 fee which he raised from donations from people who found out about his campaign online.
What the fuck are you smoking? Norm has a bar tab, Amazon has already lost if they take the stance that applying a centuries (millennia?) old concept to web purchases is somehow innovative or unique.
They aren't patenting the general concept of automatic identification and charging of a customer based on a pre-shared secret, which would include any kind of bar tab system, as well as many other kinds of financial transactions. They're patenting the specific method of using a web browser that supports cookies to provide customer identification information along with the HTTP request representing clicking the "Order now!" button, allowing the server to automatically look up the billing info associated with that customer and fulfill the order without any further customer action.
It's a very broad patent that covers any pretty much any online store that uses cookies to identify customers, but it doesn't cover anything not involving the a web browser, web server and cookies. That's why (according to XLawyer's logic) Amazon included the Norm quotes page, as an example of a system that, while similar in concept, is different enough to not invalidate Amazon's claim to originality. It's a bit of a long shot, but out of all the theories I've read today, I think it's the one that makes the most sense. The purpose of Amazon listing prior art on their paperwork isn't to try to invalidate their own patent, it's to clarify the scope and show that their idea is different enough from previous implementations to merit a patent. It's Amazon saying "These are things that may have influenced our concept, but are different enough to be unique."
That said, I don't think Amazon's patent should be ruled valid, and I hope that the USPTO recognizes that the patent is overly broad and covers many situations that have been happening since browsers started supporting cookies.
There's no possible explanation for it other than "Amazon's lawyers trying to bury relevant prior art".
I've read the small portion of the application that the submitter linked to, and I'll be damned if I can figure out why that Norm page would ever be relevant to Amazon's patent. However, I also can't figure out how including a bunch of irrelevant items on a patent application is supposed to "bury relevant prior art". I highly doubt the examiner is going to think "Holy shit, 9 pages, I'll just check one or two per page and totally ignore the rest." Even if he just skims over the rest, he's likely to notice that some if it is relevant, and dismiss things like pages on Norm quotes and Wikipedia articles on Object Pascal as having nothing to do with the patent. It's more work than the examiner should probably have to do, but I don't see any reason why it'd result in a radically different end verdict than if those entries were omitted.*
In fact, I can't see how including it would have any kind of beneficial effect on their patent at all. If I was Jeff Bezos right now, I'd be calling my law firm and politely requesting that whoever decided to just dump their bookmarks file into the patent application be thrown out a 10th floor window.
I have about as much faith in the US patent system as most people around here, I rather strongly believe Amazon's patent should be revoked, but I just don't see a point for Amazon in putting "fluff" items in their prior art declarations. If anything, I think it'll be ruled valid simply because the USPTO won't check ANY of the prior art, not because some of it was irrelevant.
It's more then a few. Most people use the default settings in their audio ripper/compression program, and it's all from the same CD. Even more people never uses an audio ripper and/or compressor, and simply downloads the file from the Internet. Not that many people bother to change ID3-tags either, but every single person that do, leads to a different file.
I think the variation in files would be more due to the fact that the most common CD ripping programs (iTunes, WMP, etc) don't really care that much about getting bit-identical copies. Different models (and even individual units) of CD/DVD drives can have varying amounts of jitter, and most ripping software doesn't use jitter correction or C2 error correction. It's not really noticeable in the result, but when you run slightly different sources through a heavy compression algorithm like MP3, there's no guarantee that the resulting bitstreams will be similar enough to use a tool like the article talks about.
The different tags issue has been discussed in other comments, but it's pretty trivial to strip the tags when you compare or hash files.
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Besides, Obama will be raising everyone's taxes. He admits as much. He wants to repeal all the tax cuts put in place over the last eight years. When he says he won't be raising taxes on the 95% of the public, he's referring to any increases above and beyond that increase.
That is why he says you "won't be paying any more than you were under Clinton." We are currently ALL paying less than we were under Clinton. I know I may be modded down for saying something negative about Obama, but it's true... go look it up.
Utter nonsense that's been debunked over and over. Quotes are false, info's bad, and you're just hoping that enough people don't bother to look at all and just take what you say at face value. You even threw in the old "I'll get modded down for saying the truth!". Unfortunately for you, it seems more likely you'll get modded down for being full of shit.
right now file systems are made in such a way as to maximize reads that are sequential. It is possible that without these, now unneeded, optimizations ssd could run faster.
No, they wouldn't, because removing a competitor's optimizations does not make you faster unless they were slowing you down to begin with. Modern SSDs have the same random and sequential read speeds, they aren't actually slower at sequential reads than random reads. In other words, it's not that the sequential ordering used by modern filesystems slows them down, it just doesn't help them at all. Now, if you could come up with a data structure that both provides some performance benefits to SSDs that traditional drives wouldn't get, and still utilizes wear-leveling for writes (which is something that would mess with most block allocation schemes), then the situation might be different, and may justify a filesystem "optimized" for SSD performance.
It'd have helped if the article title had been "AT&T To Cut Off P2P Users On 3G Wireless" or "AT&T Wireless to Cut Off P2P Users" rather than the inaccurate, alarmist headline that implies that AT&T as a whole is disconnecting P2P users. Sure, sure, should've RTF-summary before commenting, but hell, this is Slashdot, knee-jerk reaction posts are the rule, not the exception.
What you mention seems to equate to what I was saying about consoles being more level playing fields, people are given equal machines for a reason at these events. You don't get that luxury when just bumping around on the 'net.
Bah, I forget this is /. sometimes. Everyone wants to blindly save PC gaming, which requires the use of Windows over 90% of the time unless you want to wait a long time for Wine support or a port. I say let it go down the stinker and don't look back.
No, you're still completely missing the point. Calling console gaming an "equal playing field" is like calling No Child Left Behind "equal education". It's equal because performance is equally handicapped, and because players have equally LIMITED tools. Playing a FPS at a tournament with standardized PCs isn't about handicapping, it's about making sure that every player has the tools they require to play their best, which is the very OPPOSITE of the idea behind console FPSs.
Here's another way to look at it. Say you're playing golf with your buddies, and one of them is a pro golfer. He has his own really nice set of clubs, matching tees, and a personal ball-washer. You have some hand-me-down clubs that you found in the attic, and the rest of your friends are similarly equipped. He solidly trounces all of you every time you play, and eventually you all get tired of it. You tell him that from now on, the only club allowed during your games is a mini-golf putter. Sure, he's still better than you with the putter, he makes nicer shots on the green, but it doesn't really matter, because you ALL suck with the putter compared to regular clubs. But the playing field is equal now, and that's what counts, right?
Console gaming is golfing with nothing but a putter. PC gaming lets you use whatever clubs you can afford, and competitive PC gaming makes sure that everyone has equally nice clubs and that nobody's using a guided missile to drop their ball a foot from the hole when nobody's looking. If you want to keep playing mini-golf, be my guest, I'm sure it's a good time. However, if you run around screaming about how pro golfers are only good because they have nice clubs, and that you'd show them who the real pro is if they came to your mini-golf course for a few games, you WILL be ridiculed, and deservedly so.
Finally, this has nothing to do with Windows or Linux or any other OS for that matter. For fuck's sake, you're playing Microsoft games on a Microsoft console and whining that PC games require Windows? Kindly take your stupid off-topic OS trolling and get the fuck out.
The reason matches tend to be so close in Halo 3 is because, contrary to your assertion, "skill" is almost nonexistant as a factor. It's an easy FPS, designed to be fun for everyone. You don't get big winners, but you don't really get big losers either. Hitboxes are huge, everything moves slowly, and controller controls are horrible for any kind of accuracy. Simple strategy and luck become the only factors, and since most people are devoid of the first and equal on the second, you get close games.
Your implication is that anyone who actually does well in PC FPSs is hacking, but that just tells me that you've never played with anyone with actual skill. While *my* former roommate wasn't into gaming much, his girlfriend played CAL Counterstrike matches, and I usually watched from over-the-shoulder. I'm not horrible myself, but in any kind of 1v1 situation, she'd wipe the floor with me, and did pretty regularly when we played public servers or LAN games. The funny part? She didn't even own her own computer at the time, she played on my roommate's, which was a mid-range Dell with nothing fancy.
About your roommate, while he's probably an idiot who wasn't very good to start with, there's definitely something to be said about your "home" machine. You get used to the feel of the keyboard, the precision and delay of the mouse, even things like the color balance or brightness of your monitor can mess you up if they're changed. Playing on a different PC can really throw someone off their game.
Actually, you can't count on that. Google it for details.
Perhaps you should link to a particular site rather than a Google search which has more results contradicting you than supporting you. One of them even specifically mentions that it's part of the standard library now.
The scam was that they didn't tell you that the keys were region-locked, which is stated ON THE BOX in those regions. It's possible that they didn't even bother to look at the box, but in that case they're just idiots, not scammers.
Doesn't work at all. Gifts ONLY happen when you buy two different products that have overlapping contents, not two different copies of the same product. Even if you could find two overlapping packages that would result in a complete Orange Box gift, it'd be ridiculously easy to find, since a small handful of Russian Steam accounts would be gifting hundreds of Orange Box gifts.
The difference being that you can't buy a 220v appliance at a retail store in Europe, attach a "hacking device" on it and ship it over to the US and sell it for five times the price.
Besides, 110/220v pales in comparison to the huge array of different plug shapes and sizes found in countries that miraculously share the same voltage standard. As tempting as it would be to call that "region locking", it's more likely just the historic inability for two countries to agree on *anything* short of not invading each other, which doesn't always hold either.
I definitely agree that Valve should allow you to unregister the key and register a proper key in it's place. I'd hope that such functionality will be coming in a Steam update very soon.
It's to stop exactly what people tried to do, mass importation of keys by a third party to be sold for ridiculous profit. Do you think people should be able to buy 500 copies of the the Thai version for the equivalent of $5 USD each, and turn around and sell the keys online for $20 a piece, and have them work just as well as a $50 US key?
"I also find it amazing that in the UK software (and other computer stuff) will retail for the same price as in the US - only in POUNDS. So it's double the price nowadays. Sheesh, I guess CD's are really really expensive to burn in the UK! There's no excuse for this, it's just greed. Valve should not be protecting greed. But then again, it's a racket. Just like the music industry. /rant"
Considering that this whole situation is because Valve IS adjusting their prices for the local markets, you really have no idea what you're talking about.
They have retail distributions agreements in Russia and Thailand to sell boxed products at competitive local prices, rather than trying to get people who might earn $300 USD a month to shell out $50 USD for a game. In order to stop people from buying Russian copies en masse for, say, $10 USD a piece and selling the keys online for $20 USD each, they lock the keys to the geographic region in which they're sold. I can't say I've seen the boxes myself since I live in the US, but I've read that they SAY on the box that they won't play outside of country X. Of course, they export the keys anyways and sell them to stupid people who think they're getting a great deal, and that's why we have this retarded article claiming that Orange Box is region locked everywhere.
Don't give me that shit about "I didn't know it was imported" either. If it seems too good to be true, it PROBABLY IS. The only fault I have with Valve for this is that they should let people unregister so they can register the copies they bought afterwards.
After digging around on the Steam forums a bit, I'd like to clear up some misconceptions that people seem to be getting.
1) Orange Box purchased through Steam (online) is NOT REGION LOCKED IN ANY WAY.
2) Codes from retail boxes in America, the EU and most other places are NOT REGION LOCKED.
3) Codes from Thailand and Russia ARE REGION LOCKED. This is done because Steam games are sold in those countries at a tiny fraction of the US retail cost. The boxes are marked (in the appropriate language) that they keys will not work in other countries.
In other words, people are getting "burned" because they bought keys from companies that buy the Thai/Russian retail boxes, opens them up, and sell you the codes for several times what they paid, which is still cheaper than the rest of the world pays. They companies know that the keys don't work anywhere else, so the people are getting basically scammed by the companies selling them keys, not Valve.
They're not military servicemen living overseas or families on vacation in Europe, they're cheapasses who fall for a scam because they're too eager to get a "great deal".
"Since all 535 of these men and women will have a substantial influence on my life, why again shouldn't I be able to influence the elections of all 535?"
Because at the very most 55 (if you live in California) of those men and women are designated to represent the interests of voters in your state. The others should be more interested in what their own constituents need than what an out-of-state lobbying group pays them to vote for.
Simply put, it's the main way for a website to store any kind of data that remains persistant between pages. Some websites use it to track you for advertising purposes, some use it to provide "comfort" features like automatically logging you in, some use it for very basic functionality like shopping cards on a web store. The most common usage is to store simple preferences, like what language to show the website in, what theme for forums, etc. I'm sorry that that's not a "couple" words, but dumbing down a concept frequently leads to confusion and misunderstanding like your posts display.
Most browsers let you enable/disable cookies on a site-by-site basis, so if you think they AREN'T relevant, just turn them off. If that means you can't access certain sites that claim they require cookies, well, that's too bad.
This article seems very speculative, if not pure fantasy. It assumes Google will somehow turn your search history and ad-clicking history into some kind of predictive model of your brain. The author doesn't really seem to understand any of the technology involved, he repeatedly claims that since Google now owns DoubleClick, they have (legal) access to ALL of your cookies and browsing history. Most of the statistics he quotes are totally useless, for example:
In other words, 3 out of 4 times, he can predict which of the people visiting an automobile price/review site will buy a car in the next three months. Considering that most people wouldn't go to Yahoo Autos unless they had some interest in buying a car, it's not really rocket science to track users and decide which are the "serious" ones and which are just window-shopping. The whole article is filled with speculation that once Google has access to similar data, they'll be able to accurately predict everything we do online, but what the author fails to deliver on is how they'll be able to make the jump from predicting click-through rates on ads to full behavioral models everyone who surfs the web.
Also, the article feels like it's written by a 5th grade English student with a thesaurus. Run-on sentences galore, wild trips of imagination that aren't supported by the article's sources, and a pathetic lack of proper punctuation besides the occasional period. He even uses a smiley face at the end.
You're correct in that it doesn't use HTML, I was mistaken. However, while checking to confirm that, I found out something rather interesting. Apple licensed the famous "1-Click" patent in September of 2000 for use with their web store on Apple.com (source, years before iTMS ever came out. The post that I was replying to claimed that Apple had to license it for iTunes, but that doesn't appear to be true, since it was licensed nearly three years prior to the iTMS being released, for an entirely different service.
iTunes uses an embedded web browser to display the iTunes Music Store. Nice try, though. If you actually read the patent, you'd see that it specifically mentions using a browser that displays HTML as the primary interface for interaction with the online purchasing system.
Again, I'm not saying that I believe the patent is valid, I specifically mentioned that I thought it was too broad. However, to be precise, it's actually "give me that and bill me, I'm customer #XXXXXXXXX". The "novel" part (according to Amazon) is using a cookie with a database ID value so the server knows which customer you are and what your billing/shipping addresses are without having to prompt for information or confirmation of existing information, thus only requiring the user to click once on an item's page to order it, as opposed to sites where you have to add it to your shopping cart, then checkout, then confirm your billing information, then submit the order.
I never said it was particularly innovative, I was simply explaining their patent for the benefit of a few of the previous posters in this thread who obviously hadn't read anything about Amazon's claims except the Slashdot blurbs.
From TFA:
That's who's paying for it, at least in theory.
They aren't patenting the general concept of automatic identification and charging of a customer based on a pre-shared secret, which would include any kind of bar tab system, as well as many other kinds of financial transactions. They're patenting the specific method of using a web browser that supports cookies to provide customer identification information along with the HTTP request representing clicking the "Order now!" button, allowing the server to automatically look up the billing info associated with that customer and fulfill the order without any further customer action.
It's a very broad patent that covers any pretty much any online store that uses cookies to identify customers, but it doesn't cover anything not involving the a web browser, web server and cookies. That's why (according to XLawyer's logic) Amazon included the Norm quotes page, as an example of a system that, while similar in concept, is different enough to not invalidate Amazon's claim to originality. It's a bit of a long shot, but out of all the theories I've read today, I think it's the one that makes the most sense. The purpose of Amazon listing prior art on their paperwork isn't to try to invalidate their own patent, it's to clarify the scope and show that their idea is different enough from previous implementations to merit a patent. It's Amazon saying "These are things that may have influenced our concept, but are different enough to be unique."
That said, I don't think Amazon's patent should be ruled valid, and I hope that the USPTO recognizes that the patent is overly broad and covers many situations that have been happening since browsers started supporting cookies.
I've read the small portion of the application that the submitter linked to, and I'll be damned if I can figure out why that Norm page would ever be relevant to Amazon's patent. However, I also can't figure out how including a bunch of irrelevant items on a patent application is supposed to "bury relevant prior art". I highly doubt the examiner is going to think "Holy shit, 9 pages, I'll just check one or two per page and totally ignore the rest." Even if he just skims over the rest, he's likely to notice that some if it is relevant, and dismiss things like pages on Norm quotes and Wikipedia articles on Object Pascal as having nothing to do with the patent. It's more work than the examiner should probably have to do, but I don't see any reason why it'd result in a radically different end verdict than if those entries were omitted.*
In fact, I can't see how including it would have any kind of beneficial effect on their patent at all. If I was Jeff Bezos right now, I'd be calling my law firm and politely requesting that whoever decided to just dump their bookmarks file into the patent application be thrown out a 10th floor window.
I have about as much faith in the US patent system as most people around here, I rather strongly believe Amazon's patent should be revoked, but I just don't see a point for Amazon in putting "fluff" items in their prior art declarations. If anything, I think it'll be ruled valid simply because the USPTO won't check ANY of the prior art, not because some of it was irrelevant.
I think the variation in files would be more due to the fact that the most common CD ripping programs (iTunes, WMP, etc) don't really care that much about getting bit-identical copies. Different models (and even individual units) of CD/DVD drives can have varying amounts of jitter, and most ripping software doesn't use jitter correction or C2 error correction. It's not really noticeable in the result, but when you run slightly different sources through a heavy compression algorithm like MP3, there's no guarantee that the resulting bitstreams will be similar enough to use a tool like the article talks about.
The different tags issue has been discussed in other comments, but it's pretty trivial to strip the tags when you compare or hash files.