How is this different/better from running an FTP (or SCP or SFTP) server?
You have to log into an FTP server and send/receive files. Basically, it has all sorts of security, access, and automation features you don't get with FTP because FTP is just a file transfer protocol.
If a vending machine identified you, and automatically debited the card it kept on file when you pressed the "Diet Pepsi" button then it certainly would be patentable.
However the non-trivial idea would be a vending machine that identified the user, something that's a very common feature on websites.
I think a more appropriate analogy would be a bar where you run a tab. You sit down, say "beer please", and the bartender, who knows you, brings you a beer of your usual fancy. A patent on this that parallels "one-click" would require all other bars to make you ask for your beer at least twice before you get it. Patently absurd.
Additionally, they want 15 years (instead of 5) of protection for their clinical research data, which will effectively choke off generics until after the 15 years would be up. Clinical research is expensive, but generic meds get around this by using the original research as part of their application to the FDA.
That idea is utterly absurd. The entire purpose of the patent system is to encourage the spread of knowledge and prevent the wasteful duplication of effort caused by protective secrecy. The exclusive term of the patent is already their "carrot" for spending that money to bring a drug to market. Part of the deal is that they have to make the process public. It's no more reasonable to make the generics re-do the trials than it would be to make them re-discover the drug in the first place.
if you invent something that nobody in the universe would have figured out in the next 25 years, would you like to be uncredited for inventing it ?
The patent system is intended "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". "Credit" for inventing somethinghas nothing to do with it. The problem with software patents is that they end up staking claim to large swathes of knowledge, essentially bogging people down in trying to work around them rather than building upon past work. Software patents as currently awarded are about as ludicrous as allowing someone to copyright the use of the future tense in all written works. It totally misses the entire premise of the system-- protecting a specific implementation of a process-- and locks out all possible competition.
The shuttle has no breaks, neither does SpaceShip 1. Extra weight which has no or little use. The former uses parachutes to break and the latter uses a slide instead of a front wheel which doubles up as a friction break. Dunno about Buran, but I would not be surprised if it has no breaks either.
How did you manage to misspell "brake" when the post you were replying to even supplied the correct spelling?
Also, all of those examples you gave actually do have wheel brakes. When you're rolling at 30 knots, you cannot depend on air resistance to stop you. You need mechanical wheel brakes.
this is something that bothers me a lot. How is it that a Mac 512 worked so well with the OS and word processor on the floppy and the data on another flopy, and with 512 kb of memory. Seriously, I want to know. It wasn't all that bad.
It's amazing that even though we could do all that with a 10 MHz proc. and 2.8 Mb of disk space, now a 1 GHz computer is "pokey" with only 128 Mb.
We remember things as being better than they actually were. The original toaster mac had what, a 512x342 grayscale display? Fonts were crude and blocky. Sounds consisted of "eep" and "moof". You can still write a word processor that would run off a 1.44K floppy, but you'd be limited to the relatively narrow feature set as found in original MacWrite. Modern data is simply a lot more information-dense than it used to be. Sure, it seems like a word processor is a word processor, but go back and look at an old mac, or early MS Word. It wasn't so great. I recall I could nearly type faster than MacWrite could keep up with on the WYSIWYG display.
No matter. If I'm wrong, nobody loses anything. If I'm right, you lose for eternity. I can't wait to see the stupid look on your faces then. Maybe you can ask a professor to forgive you or something. Or maybe you can sit at the edge of Darwin's grave and ask him.
Ah, the smug self-satisfaction of someone who thinks they've got it all figured out. I can't wait to see the look on your face when you realize that all the evolutionists, atheists, "baby murderers", and godless commies ended up in the same place you did after death, because [god/life/the universe] isn't some petty game of punishment and reward, but rather something much more complicated and beautiful than a fairy tale concoted by mortal theocracies to scare children.
That button next to the "Submit" button, the one called "Preview", is typicaly used for editing.
Be that as it may, I can always fall back on the more important point of "I am not paid to edit my slashdot posts". Furthermore, one does not have to be a perfect to point out incompetence. People who gripe about editorial quality are irritating jerks, but people who seize upon typos in those jerks' posts as if they are some sort of rebuttal (particularly the ones who rebut by pointing and saying "BLAM"), well, those people are idiots.
Actually if you look at the image of the plaque that the MIT guys made and installed in front of the cannon in its new home, they did not capitalize Brass Rat. So you can't really blame the Slashdot editors (or lack therof), they copied it verbatim.
You obviously don't understand how the Slashdot system works. Note the first three words of the article: "Bob Hearn writes". The article was written by Mr Hearn and submitted to Slashdot. Zonk, the Slashdot "editor", read the article in the submission queue and decided it was worthy of all of our attention. This is not to say that all slashdot editors simply passively approve all articles-- which might be forgiveable-- as others have noted and we all have seen, editors regularly delete critical information, add bizarre editorial rants, or even insert material into articles that makes the actual writer look like a fool (see sister post above).
Now, in the world of information publication, editor competency can range widely. At one end you have the hard-boiled sticklers for fact found in respected publications, who vet every article for factual accuracy and are not satisfied until every spelling and grammatical error is corrected. At the other end you have chimps who have learned to click the [OK] button. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine where in the spectrum Slashdot editors appear to fall.
Oh, but I guess that would be considered "editing",
and they don;t do that around
^^^^^
*BLAM!*
Actually, no, not "blam". I noticed the typo after submission, but since we don't have the capacity to EDIT OUR POSTS, we do not have to measure up to any sort of editorial standard.
To the contrary. I submitted an Ask Slashdot that was accepted and they actually edited some really stupid questions into it that I hadn't asked, which immediately resulted in a number of people questioning the source of my particular genetic line.
I think what you meant is not that they don't edit, but rather that they don't edit properly.
You are indeed correct, sir. I guess it's like my father always says, "if a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right."
Al Gore is a long time environmentalist, and very knowledgeable about scientific matters in general.
Yeah, but consider that Jimmy Carter is a nuclear engineer, but as president signed an executive order banning the construction of breeder reactors in the name of preventing nuclear proliferation. Never mind that he absolutely must have known that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel leaves you with an inseperable mix of plutonium isotopes that are utterly worthless for warheads, being suitable only for use as reactor fuel-- no, the symbolism of the gesture was apparently deemed more important. Subsequently, we're up to our ass in spent reactor fuel, wondering where we can put it, when we ought to be recycling it.
When it comes to politicians, I'm of the opinion that no matter how much you know that they know better, you can never count on them to do the right thing based on their knowledge.
Come on, it's either aluminium or gold plated - there's no brass in there at all.
I think the blurb is misleading in not making it clear the the Brass Rat is a proper noun. Specifically, it is the amusing name given to the MIT class ring, which traditionally pictures a beaver, nature's engineer. Capitalize proper names, you tards! Oh, but I guess that would be considered "editing", and they don;t do that around here...
If you're in a college or you're using broadband (I know my broadband ISP gives me an IP that only changes if I switch network cards or something) then IP addresses tend to point more reliably to a specific person.
"tend to point more reliably" is a far cry from "always point reliably". Without hearing from the network admin at her school, we can't make any statement about the longevity of IP addresses. They may be fixed, assigned to mac addresses, or they might be assigned via DHCP with 1 hour leases. Speculating is utterly pointless.
I think that for most people, "illegally getting something (or the enjoyment of something) without paying for it, when the owner has made it clear that it costs money" is close enough to theft to call it so in informal speech.
True, but debate, online or not, isn't informal speech. He intentionally chose the word "stolen" to cast the OP in an unfavorable light. It wasn't simple colloquialism.
Those numbers would be very accurate if we stopped making airbags today. Instead, all that R&D is paid for and those numbers will drop dramatically over time.
No, the cost/benefit analysis has nothing to do with R&D. $22 million is the cumulative added cost to the consuming population of being forced to pay for an air bag system in every single new car sold.
And how would you explain that the tumors were more likely to be located on the side of the head closest to where the user would put the phone?
Selection bias. You may recall the study they did on this reported earlier on slashdot. When you tell brain cancer patients you're doing a study and ask them what side they used the phone on more, guess which side they tend answer. I'd be more inclined to believe this swedish study if they were also to show that the phones weren't also somehow statistically "preventing" cancer on the reported "non phone" side of the head, as the other study showed.
But Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle puts limits on how accurate your model can be.
As a result you can get truly random bits by measuring the effects of quantum-mechanical events that are below that threshold.
Well yeah, but my point is that every effect has a cause, so nothing is by nature random. Random is simply a measure of our ability to predict the outcome.
Anyway, chain reaction or gaping hole, you would kinda expect safety systems. RL reactors typically won't fail or meltdown without signifigant compromise to their backups, and their backup's backups. If star wars were done as literary sci-fi, the author would probably have made the battle more complex in some way to make the idea of a fighter killing something planet sized beleivable.
Well yeah. Being that Star Wars is cast in the Saturday afternoon serial mold, there was a need to hurry things along and keep the tension high. Subsequently, long, visually unexciting subplots about infiltrators secretly sabotaging failsafe systems, hackers quietly silencing alarms and monkeying safety interlocks, etc. remained unexplored.
Which is where the whole ewok thing falls down. They aren't internally consistant with the other stuff in the movies. They're a great merchandising ploy, but they pretty much kill the whole idea that the empire is even remotely threatening. Both previous movies made it clear that the empire can't be defeated by brute force - ANH has them defeated by subtlety and sabotage, amd ESB has the rebels running away when attacked openly. But apparently the secret to killing stormtroopers, and their mechanized walking tanks, is using rocks and pointy sticks....
The point which the RotJ movie failed to get across (probably due to a shortage of dwarfs to wear teddy bear costumes) was that the ewoks outnumbered the stormtroopers by something like 30 to 1. It was unfortunate that it ended up looking like an even matchup, as the original intent was to show that one person can mount no effective defense against a horde of 30 vicious, furry little monsters, particularly in a non-linear guerilla warfare situation. The little buggers were supposed to be fast, vicious, and numerous; but instead what we got was fifty guys in stormtrooper outfits standing around while ten midgets hobbled by padded bear costumes wobbled around uncertainly throwing styrofoam rocks at them or prodding them ineffectually with sticks.
A young person could get a rather twisted view of what sex is really like from looking at what's available today on the internet.
The obvious counterargument there is "what idiot parent lets their children learn about sex from the internet, and why is it anyone elses problem if they do?"
Sounds like you're in denial. You talk about how outside factors drive you to drugs and drinking. That's the classic "it's not my fault, I can't help it" plea of the addict. You need to get a grip on your life and get your addictions under control before they destroy you. I'd say "before they control you", but that's already happening.
This is coming from the adult child of a recovering alcoholic, who got to watch his younger brother overdose and die in front of him. So I know whereof I speak. Go get some help before it's too late and the people around you have to go through the pain of watching you destroy your life.
Sounds like somebody needs to go back to the book and re-read the part that basically says "Only YOU can know if you have a problem". Diagnosing addiction in someone else at all, much less based on a couple paragraphs on a message board, is complete and utter bullshit and you know it. I am sorry for your loss, but don't twist addiction into some personal crusade. You can't save people. They can only choose to save themselves.
If you're not a 12 stepper and just some preachy nut, then maybe you ought to consider attending a few meetings.
Will the.xxx domain also be numerically segregated? Or will people be able to access such sites by using a numerical address such as 69.69.69.69? In the latter case, how does one filter?
Well, if they're already going to force them at gunpoint into the.xxx ghetto, it's no great leap to also force them to configure the default Apache virtual server (where the 69.69.69.69 points) to serve a non-porn error page or even no page at all, with "www.fuxalot.xxx" served from a domain name based virtual server on that same IP address. I have a dozens different domain names all serving off one IP address from the same Cobalt Raq. Nothing to it.
The big problem with the ".xxx" domain is who decides a site must be restricted to that domain. The classic example is something like a breast cancer awareness site with photographic self-examination instructions. Is that "xxx" material? I bet I could find a bunch of yahoos in Dogpatch who'd lobby to have it put there.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to log into an FTP server and send/receive files. Basically, it has all sorts of security, access, and automation features you don't get with FTP because FTP is just a file transfer protocol.
This is all too confusing. Can't someone just cut to the chase and tell me what the best Linux distro is?
I think a more appropriate analogy would be a bar where you run a tab. You sit down, say "beer please", and the bartender, who knows you, brings you a beer of your usual fancy. A patent on this that parallels "one-click" would require all other bars to make you ask for your beer at least twice before you get it. Patently absurd.
That idea is utterly absurd. The entire purpose of the patent system is to encourage the spread of knowledge and prevent the wasteful duplication of effort caused by protective secrecy. The exclusive term of the patent is already their "carrot" for spending that money to bring a drug to market. Part of the deal is that they have to make the process public. It's no more reasonable to make the generics re-do the trials than it would be to make them re-discover the drug in the first place.
The patent system is intended "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". "Credit" for inventing somethinghas nothing to do with it. The problem with software patents is that they end up staking claim to large swathes of knowledge, essentially bogging people down in trying to work around them rather than building upon past work. Software patents as currently awarded are about as ludicrous as allowing someone to copyright the use of the future tense in all written works. It totally misses the entire premise of the system-- protecting a specific implementation of a process-- and locks out all possible competition.
The shuttle has no breaks, neither does SpaceShip 1. Extra weight which has no or little use. The former uses parachutes to break and the latter uses a slide instead of a front wheel which doubles up as a friction break. Dunno about Buran, but I would not be surprised if it has no breaks either.
How did you manage to misspell "brake" when the post you were replying to even supplied the correct spelling?
Also, all of those examples you gave actually do have wheel brakes. When you're rolling at 30 knots, you cannot depend on air resistance to stop you. You need mechanical wheel brakes.
We remember things as being better than they actually were. The original toaster mac had what, a 512x342 grayscale display? Fonts were crude and blocky. Sounds consisted of "eep" and "moof". You can still write a word processor that would run off a 1.44K floppy, but you'd be limited to the relatively narrow feature set as found in original MacWrite. Modern data is simply a lot more information-dense than it used to be. Sure, it seems like a word processor is a word processor, but go back and look at an old mac, or early MS Word. It wasn't so great. I recall I could nearly type faster than MacWrite could keep up with on the WYSIWYG display.
Ah, the smug self-satisfaction of someone who thinks they've got it all figured out. I can't wait to see the look on your face when you realize that all the evolutionists, atheists, "baby murderers", and godless commies ended up in the same place you did after death, because [god/life/the universe] isn't some petty game of punishment and reward, but rather something much more complicated and beautiful than a fairy tale concoted by mortal theocracies to scare children.
Be that as it may, I can always fall back on the more important point of "I am not paid to edit my slashdot posts". Furthermore, one does not have to be a perfect to point out incompetence. People who gripe about editorial quality are irritating jerks, but people who seize upon typos in those jerks' posts as if they are some sort of rebuttal (particularly the ones who rebut by pointing and saying "BLAM"), well, those people are idiots.
You obviously don't understand how the Slashdot system works. Note the first three words of the article: "Bob Hearn writes". The article was written by Mr Hearn and submitted to Slashdot. Zonk, the Slashdot "editor", read the article in the submission queue and decided it was worthy of all of our attention. This is not to say that all slashdot editors simply passively approve all articles-- which might be forgiveable-- as others have noted and we all have seen, editors regularly delete critical information, add bizarre editorial rants, or even insert material into articles that makes the actual writer look like a fool (see sister post above).
Now, in the world of information publication, editor competency can range widely. At one end you have the hard-boiled sticklers for fact found in respected publications, who vet every article for factual accuracy and are not satisfied until every spelling and grammatical error is corrected. At the other end you have chimps who have learned to click the [OK] button. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine where in the spectrum Slashdot editors appear to fall.
^^^^^
*BLAM!*
Actually, no, not "blam". I noticed the typo after submission, but since we don't have the capacity to EDIT OUR POSTS, we do not have to measure up to any sort of editorial standard.
You are indeed correct, sir. I guess it's like my father always says, "if a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right."
Yeah, but consider that Jimmy Carter is a nuclear engineer, but as president signed an executive order banning the construction of breeder reactors in the name of preventing nuclear proliferation. Never mind that he absolutely must have known that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel leaves you with an inseperable mix of plutonium isotopes that are utterly worthless for warheads, being suitable only for use as reactor fuel-- no, the symbolism of the gesture was apparently deemed more important. Subsequently, we're up to our ass in spent reactor fuel, wondering where we can put it, when we ought to be recycling it.
When it comes to politicians, I'm of the opinion that no matter how much you know that they know better, you can never count on them to do the right thing based on their knowledge.
I think the blurb is misleading in not making it clear the the Brass Rat is a proper noun. Specifically, it is the amusing name given to the MIT class ring, which traditionally pictures a beaver, nature's engineer. Capitalize proper names, you tards! Oh, but I guess that would be considered "editing", and they don;t do that around here...
"tend to point more reliably" is a far cry from "always point reliably". Without hearing from the network admin at her school, we can't make any statement about the longevity of IP addresses. They may be fixed, assigned to mac addresses, or they might be assigned via DHCP with 1 hour leases. Speculating is utterly pointless.
True, but debate, online or not, isn't informal speech. He intentionally chose the word "stolen" to cast the OP in an unfavorable light. It wasn't simple colloquialism.
No, the cost/benefit analysis has nothing to do with R&D. $22 million is the cumulative added cost to the consuming population of being forced to pay for an air bag system in every single new car sold.
Selection bias. You may recall the study they did on this reported earlier on slashdot. When you tell brain cancer patients you're doing a study and ask them what side they used the phone on more, guess which side they tend answer. I'd be more inclined to believe this swedish study if they were also to show that the phones weren't also somehow statistically "preventing" cancer on the reported "non phone" side of the head, as the other study showed.
Well yeah, but my point is that every effect has a cause, so nothing is by nature random. Random is simply a measure of our ability to predict the outcome.
Well yeah. Being that Star Wars is cast in the Saturday afternoon serial mold, there was a need to hurry things along and keep the tension high. Subsequently, long, visually unexciting subplots about infiltrators secretly sabotaging failsafe systems, hackers quietly silencing alarms and monkeying safety interlocks, etc. remained unexplored.
Which is where the whole ewok thing falls down. They aren't internally consistant with the other stuff in the movies. They're a great merchandising ploy, but they pretty much kill the whole idea that the empire is even remotely threatening. Both previous movies made it clear that the empire can't be defeated by brute force - ANH has them defeated by subtlety and sabotage, amd ESB has the rebels running away when attacked openly. But apparently the secret to killing stormtroopers, and their mechanized walking tanks, is using rocks and pointy sticks....
The point which the RotJ movie failed to get across (probably due to a shortage of dwarfs to wear teddy bear costumes) was that the ewoks outnumbered the stormtroopers by something like 30 to 1. It was unfortunate that it ended up looking like an even matchup, as the original intent was to show that one person can mount no effective defense against a horde of 30 vicious, furry little monsters, particularly in a non-linear guerilla warfare situation. The little buggers were supposed to be fast, vicious, and numerous; but instead what we got was fifty guys in stormtrooper outfits standing around while ten midgets hobbled by padded bear costumes wobbled around uncertainly throwing styrofoam rocks at them or prodding them ineffectually with sticks.
The obvious counterargument there is "what idiot parent lets their children learn about sex from the internet, and why is it anyone elses problem if they do?"
Well clearly that leads to the question "how straight are those guys?"
The answer is "not very, particularly if they want to make any money".
Sounds like somebody needs to go back to the book and re-read the part that basically says "Only YOU can know if you have a problem". Diagnosing addiction in someone else at all, much less based on a couple paragraphs on a message board, is complete and utter bullshit and you know it. I am sorry for your loss, but don't twist addiction into some personal crusade. You can't save people. They can only choose to save themselves.
If you're not a 12 stepper and just some preachy nut, then maybe you ought to consider attending a few meetings.
You're not hungry, you just think you're hungry.
Seriously, given an accurate model of how it's generated, nothing is random. Randomness is totally subjective. Nothing is ever truly random.
Well, if they're already going to force them at gunpoint into the .xxx ghetto, it's no great leap to also force them to configure the default Apache virtual server (where the 69.69.69.69 points) to serve a non-porn error page or even no page at all, with "www.fuxalot.xxx" served from a domain name based virtual server on that same IP address. I have a dozens different domain names all serving off one IP address from the same Cobalt Raq. Nothing to it.
The big problem with the ".xxx" domain is who decides a site must be restricted to that domain. The classic example is something like a breast cancer awareness site with photographic self-examination instructions. Is that "xxx" material? I bet I could find a bunch of yahoos in Dogpatch who'd lobby to have it put there.