Is it any surprise that the vast majority of people are uninformed and have a view of reality based on ideology rather than fact?
Nope. But it is surprising and interesting (to me) how the Bush supporters don't perceive Bush's positions accurately. For examples, look at the numbers of people who think Bush supports participation in the Kyoto agreement or the world court. If it were all about ideology, I wouldn't expect these discrepancies.
If we're going to assert, as does this survey by implication, that the opinions of other people matter....
Whether your right or wrong, knowing that other people think your right or wrong may be helpful in your dealings with them. A major point of the survey was find out how aware US adults are about the international situation. This was a perfectly valid line of questioning, and it did not--in my eyes--imply that the perceptions of the world should make a difference in our actions.
There's one thing I really miss about Pascal: nested procedures and functions. Being about to write a little utility function in the scope of the function it helps is just so elegant. You don't have to pass a bunch of parameters to get them in scope. Nobody else can miscall your utility function because it's not out in the global namespace. It's immediately clear to people reading your code that it's just a subordinate helper and to which function it belongs.
Function nesting is a feature sorely lacking from languages like C. It's not to hard to work around this limitation in an OO language, but the solution is still not as elegant or efficient.
And even after 15 years of C and C++, it still makes more sense to me to use = for comparison and to have a special symbol like:= for assignment.
I have a work PC, a home PC, a laptop, and a work PC at another site that I spend half my time at. Why does that mean I have to fork out for 4 X copies of Windows XP to keep the corporate standard so that I can connect into the network?
I honestly don't understand the question. You have to pay for four copies of the OS because you want (or perhaps need) four copies. You're on the demand side of supply and demand.
Doesn't your company buy the OS for the work machines? Do you really need access from both your home desktop and laptop? Could you travel with one laptop for everything?
[I]t[']s impossible to steal immaterial things....
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. --Howard Aiken (1900-1973)
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. --Josh Billings (1818-1885)
They copied all they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
so I left them sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.
--Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research. --Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
The current Scientific American (October 2004) has an article on this changing attitude about what is often called "junk" DNA. I've only had time to skim it.
I get rendering problems with Firefox on Windows XP when ClearType is turned on. Left edges of words in italics are often clipped (mostly better in PR 1.0 than 0.9). Sometimes bullets are drawn without the benefit of ClearType even when all the other text on the page has it. Those look quite blocky (also improved in PR 1.0). Redraws tend to cause distortions. For example, if you have text near a button and then move the cursor over the button, part of the the nearby text is redrawn starting at the wrong pixel, causing distortion, shifting, and tearing (still problematic in PR 1.0).
When scrolling, some scan lines are skipping, making it look like output from a dot matrix printer with a flakey pin. This especially happens on form controls, like radio buttons and checkboxes.
Sorry, I can't post a screenshot to a public server from work.
TFA was slashdotted. I looked at the photos on another site that an earlier poster linked to. Perhaps that site had the before and after shots reversed, because it looks like they added his jacket rather than removing a shadow. On my "definitive collector's edition" laserdiscs, it sure looks like a continuity error between the medium shots and the close-ups. I've kept meaning to check Return of the Jedi to see if Han has the jacket or not when he's thawed, but I've never gotten around to it. My ILM friend, who worked on the special editions, used to joke with me about Han Solo's jacket.
At last, Lucas made a change that makes sense. He fixed a continuity problem. Han Solo's jacket appears and reappears in different shots before they freeze him in carbonite. (Neat trick since he was wearing handcuffs.)
7 cents / kWh? Wow, electricty is cheap where you are. We have a graduated scale here in California. Under my baseline, it's $0.11 / kWh, but it's $0.25 / kWh for incremental units at my typical monthly usage.
The baseline allocations are pretty messed up. They seem to be based purely on climate (by ZIP code) rather than the size of the dwelling, the type of heating/cooling/cooking, and the number of occupants. My 4-bedroom house is allotted a barely than half of what my old 1-bedroom apartment two towns over used to get.
This is actually an advantage if the printer manufacturers intentionally putting distinctive printing characteristics into the cartridge. That's like "upgrading" older, hard-to-trace printers into trackable ones.
Tracking output to a particular toner cartridge might be more useful than tracking to an old, third-hand printer. There is little second-hand market for toner cartridges. Buy a new one or have a professional outfit refill yours, and there's a more timely trail than the old printer you bought.
Using colors for trademarks is more of a European thing, as the US only within the last year began accepting color drawings in trademark applications.
The side of the US Postal service trucks in my area claim (in small print) that the eagle logo and the color scheme are trademarks of the US Postal Service.
To have something that is patentable, you need a physical invention that does something useful, and I don't see how a smell in itself provides this usefulness.
Doesn't the gas companies add something to give normally oderless natural gas that distinctive smell? That's useful, because it helps to inform of leaks.
Has anybody figured out the date formats? I'm seeing a lot like this "02001987". OK, it's either mmddyyyy or ddmmyyyy. But what does 00 mean for month or day? Unknown? It's hard to imagine that they don't have an exact date of death for someone who died as recently as 1987. Or is a zero-based counting system (00 = Jan, 01 = Feb,...)?
It's interesting that the death records include Social Security Numbers. Anybody want to harvest a few thousand inactive SSNs?
Funny, I have problems with 100% of sites I visit with Firefox. Not show stopping problems, but annoyances.
Firefox doesn't play nice with ClearText. Scrolling gets you cruft and missing scanlines. Most, but not all text is rendered with Clear Text, especially bullets. Moving the mouse cursor near a form control causes nearby text to shift by a subpixel. Italic text is often clipped on the left side.
Firefox refuses to remember that I like to view pages with two clicks of View | Text Size | Increase. Not only do I have to make this selection every time start a browser session, I have to do it for every tab. I would use the minimum size settings on the Fonts and Colors dialog, but they are unclickable. If it would respect my OS-set display resolution--at least as a default for its own copy of the setting, then I'd probably only need one click of size increase.
Smooth scroll is anything but smooth when there's animation in progress (especially Flash).
These are all nits, and I don't mean to disparage the Firefox developers. I use Firefox for about half of my browsing. These display annoyances, however, are more noticeable to me, than all of the alleged problems IE has with CSS.
I use IE at home because it works with my ad-blocker/privacy control proxy. I'm sure there are equivalent plug-ins for Firefox, but I'm happy with the interface on what I have. With the proxy and the IE privacy settings cranked up, I've never caught any sort of malware.
Tabs are nice, but, honestly, I don't understand the hype. I don't miss them when I'm on IE. In fact, I wish there were a way to move a tab out to a separate instance of the browser after the fact, in order to do side-by-side comparisons.
NO application should load this image for display. Bounds checking during load should throw an exception (or the equivalent error status for C) for the image and the application should report that the image is corrupt.
Exactly, so even Firefox, which appears to be secure, is still doing the wrong thing. Instead of showing the images and ignoring the overflows, it should complain that these files are corrupted. Software shouldn't be stingy with information.
It's a good question, but I don't like the way it starts with a falsehood. Teenage pregnancies and births have been dropping dramatically and continuously for over a decade. A simple web search finds lots of reliable sources for that. Despite that, the US teenage pregnancy rate is still high compared to other industrialized nations even though US teens are no more sexually active than teens in those countries.
I recently read about a medical study that showed teenage pregnancy can be a good thing. If you adjust for level of prenatal care and economic status, teenaged mothers have the healthiest children and suffer the fewest lasting medical problems from giving birth compared to "adult" women. So biologically, teenage pregnancy is a good thing (if you're into procreation). Socially, however, it's a big problem because we expect people to "grow up" slower. People spend more years in school, enter the work force later, get married older than ever before.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on several points.
[I]t is impossible to set an objective standard which can be consistently applied to determine the "inventiveness height" or so.
I think we do have a reasonable standard here in the US (nonobvious to a skilled practitioner in the field), it's just not being applied. In nearly all cases, patent examiners are not skilled practitioners in the field.
Now, traditionally, it has been assumed that despite its flaws, the patent system had an overall positive effect.
I'm a firm believer that the patent system continues to have an overall positive effect.
Anecdotally, my brother worked for a small medical-device startup company. He is co-inventor on several patents for devices that can non-invasively measure pulserate and oxygen saturation levels in blood. After several years and tens of millions of dollars of research and development, they succeeded in making devices that are more reliable and accurate than the devices then on the market (meaning the difference between life and death for some patients). The invention is a method of extracting data from the sensor waveforms. In practice, it's implemented primarily in software. This company licensed their technology to the big players in this industry, but soon one of the customers simply copied it, canceled the contract, and began selling it as their own. The startup prevailed in the patent lawsuit and is once-again collecting royalties.
Now, without a patent system, I suspect this startup never would have existed (nobody would have funded it), and therefore the state-of-the-art in this field would have stagnated. Or worse--except for regulatory disclosure for medical devices and the potential for reverse engineering--they could have kept their inventions secret and maintained a monopoly on them indefinitely, denying others the inspiration to find even better solutions and preventing the commoditization of the technology at the end of what would have been the patent protection term.
Furthermore, this example illustrates that patents can help protect the small guys when they go up against the big guys. I've never understood why so many people think of patents (and copyrights) solely as weapons of the megacorps. (Maybe because of the cost of securing and defending a patent? That seems to be a general problem with the legal system here, not the patent system.) Sure, patents are often wielded by the big guys, but could little guys go against megacorps without such tools?
Many people think patents prevent innovation because they stop people (for a limited time) from using certain methods. In actuality, it forces inventors to look for new solutions (to get around the known one that has patent protection), and often they come up with better solutions. Would we have PNG today without the LZW patent encumberance of GIF?
We always hear about the silly patents, and the lawerly harrassment related to patents. I don't think we get a balanced picture.
Yes, there are problems. But I think they can be fixed. Raise the bar for inventiveness. Adjust the protection term depending on the field, much shorter for rapidly-changing fields, a tad longer for high-risk and large-investment creations. And eliminate "submarining" with a defend-it-or-lose-it doctrine. Remove the incentive of the patent office to approve everything by basing fees solely on applications. and evaluate examiner performance on something other than the volume applications reviewed.
We've ventured off-topic by discussing the patent system in general. In terms of software patents, I'm still unclear on the definitions. (Given that I'm uncertain after reading and rereading most of the PDF and all of your comments, I suspect that many people are still working with different definitions of software patents.) I still don't know why the term "non-technical" was applied.
I guess I don't understand the EU proposal regarding software patents. Here in the US, there is no specific regulations regarding software in regard to patents. Some inventions are accomplished using software. Patentability (in theory) is based on novelty, originality, etc. Admittedly, we have some problems with trivial things being patented, which in turn set precedent that led us down this spiral.
From your description, it sounds like the EU has a similar set of criteria. So what is the proposal regarding software patents?
In many Slashdot discussions, it seems that people consider any invention which is implemented entirely in software as a "software patent." For example Microsoft's patent on double-clicking a mouse is really a general process for detecting different intent based on the timing of button presses. It's just a process that can be described in English, in software, or even in hardware. Yet many people called this a "software patent." (I'm not defending the patent; it's trivial and has loads of prior art and it should have been dismissed on those grounds.) I think many people in these discussions are working with different definitions of "software patents."
Yes, there are lots of trivial software patents. But that wasn't my point. There are also lots of technical patents that are implemented in software, such as DSP algorithms for processing sensor data in medical devices.
My point was that the original wording implied that the patents are intended to protect non-technical inventions. I found that surprising. I suspect that they are intended to protect inventions (as other patents), but that there's a reporting bias that assumes all software patents are non-technical.
A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate.
Is that a typo? Who says software patents protect "non-technical" inventions? Many software patents here (in the US) are pretty hardcore. Is there something different about the European software patent model that targets them to "non-technical" inventions?
Re:And now, for your delectation and delight...
on
RFID Not Just for Kids
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is actually a brilliant move by the RFID providers. This "how can you object?" application will be the first significant exposure many people will have to RFID. Later, when they hear about objectionable applications, they will already be biased by the good that RFID can do.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. But it is surprising and interesting (to me) how the Bush supporters don't perceive Bush's positions accurately. For examples, look at the numbers of people who think Bush supports participation in the Kyoto agreement or the world court. If it were all about ideology, I wouldn't expect these discrepancies.
Whether your right or wrong, knowing that other people think your right or wrong may be helpful in your dealings with them. A major point of the survey was find out how aware US adults are about the international situation. This was a perfectly valid line of questioning, and it did not--in my eyes--imply that the perceptions of the world should make a difference in our actions.
There's one thing I really miss about Pascal: nested procedures and functions. Being about to write a little utility function in the scope of the function it helps is just so elegant. You don't have to pass a bunch of parameters to get them in scope. Nobody else can miscall your utility function because it's not out in the global namespace. It's immediately clear to people reading your code that it's just a subordinate helper and to which function it belongs.
Function nesting is a feature sorely lacking from languages like C. It's not to hard to work around this limitation in an OO language, but the solution is still not as elegant or efficient.
And even after 15 years of C and C++, it still makes more sense to me to use = for comparison and to have a special symbol like := for assignment.
I honestly don't understand the question. You have to pay for four copies of the OS because you want (or perhaps need) four copies. You're on the demand side of supply and demand.
Doesn't your company buy the OS for the work machines? Do you really need access from both your home desktop and laptop? Could you travel with one laptop for everything?
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. --Howard Aiken (1900-1973)
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. --Josh Billings (1818-1885)
They copied all they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
so I left them sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.
--Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research. --Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. --T.S. Eliot
The current Scientific American (October 2004) has an article on this changing attitude about what is often called "junk" DNA. I've only had time to skim it.
I get rendering problems with Firefox on Windows XP when ClearType is turned on. Left edges of words in italics are often clipped (mostly better in PR 1.0 than 0.9). Sometimes bullets are drawn without the benefit of ClearType even when all the other text on the page has it. Those look quite blocky (also improved in PR 1.0). Redraws tend to cause distortions. For example, if you have text near a button and then move the cursor over the button, part of the the nearby text is redrawn starting at the wrong pixel, causing distortion, shifting, and tearing (still problematic in PR 1.0).
When scrolling, some scan lines are skipping, making it look like output from a dot matrix printer with a flakey pin. This especially happens on form controls, like radio buttons and checkboxes.
Sorry, I can't post a screenshot to a public server from work.
TFA was slashdotted. I looked at the photos on another site that an earlier poster linked to. Perhaps that site had the before and after shots reversed, because it looks like they added his jacket rather than removing a shadow. On my "definitive collector's edition" laserdiscs, it sure looks like a continuity error between the medium shots and the close-ups. I've kept meaning to check Return of the Jedi to see if Han has the jacket or not when he's thawed, but I've never gotten around to it. My ILM friend, who worked on the special editions, used to joke with me about Han Solo's jacket.
At last, Lucas made a change that makes sense. He fixed a continuity problem. Han Solo's jacket appears and reappears in different shots before they freeze him in carbonite. (Neat trick since he was wearing handcuffs.)
7 cents / kWh? Wow, electricty is cheap where you are. We have a graduated scale here in California. Under my baseline, it's $0.11 / kWh, but it's $0.25 / kWh for incremental units at my typical monthly usage.
The baseline allocations are pretty messed up. They seem to be based purely on climate (by ZIP code) rather than the size of the dwelling, the type of heating/cooling/cooking, and the number of occupants. My 4-bedroom house is allotted a barely than half of what my old 1-bedroom apartment two towns over used to get.
This is actually an advantage if the printer manufacturers intentionally putting distinctive printing characteristics into the cartridge. That's like "upgrading" older, hard-to-trace printers into trackable ones.
Tracking output to a particular toner cartridge might be more useful than tracking to an old, third-hand printer. There is little second-hand market for toner cartridges. Buy a new one or have a professional outfit refill yours, and there's a more timely trail than the old printer you bought.
In one very pedantic sense, the people infringing are the people using the patented invention. In other words, the end users are infringing.
This was not a university project. It was a high school project. Even more impressive if you ask me.
A Doom movie already? When's the Zork movie they've been talking about since the 980s coming out?
The side of the US Postal service trucks in my area claim (in small print) that the eagle logo and the color scheme are trademarks of the US Postal Service.
Doesn't the gas companies add something to give normally oderless natural gas that distinctive smell? That's useful, because it helps to inform of leaks.
Has anybody figured out the date formats? I'm seeing a lot like this "02001987". OK, it's either mmddyyyy or ddmmyyyy. But what does 00 mean for month or day? Unknown? It's hard to imagine that they don't have an exact date of death for someone who died as recently as 1987. Or is a zero-based counting system (00 = Jan, 01 = Feb, ...)?
It's interesting that the death records include Social Security Numbers. Anybody want to harvest a few thousand inactive SSNs?
Funny, I have problems with 100% of sites I visit with Firefox. Not show stopping problems, but annoyances.
Firefox doesn't play nice with ClearText. Scrolling gets you cruft and missing scanlines. Most, but not all text is rendered with Clear Text, especially bullets. Moving the mouse cursor near a form control causes nearby text to shift by a subpixel. Italic text is often clipped on the left side.
Firefox refuses to remember that I like to view pages with two clicks of View | Text Size | Increase. Not only do I have to make this selection every time start a browser session, I have to do it for every tab. I would use the minimum size settings on the Fonts and Colors dialog, but they are unclickable. If it would respect my OS-set display resolution--at least as a default for its own copy of the setting, then I'd probably only need one click of size increase.
Smooth scroll is anything but smooth when there's animation in progress (especially Flash).
These are all nits, and I don't mean to disparage the Firefox developers. I use Firefox for about half of my browsing. These display annoyances, however, are more noticeable to me, than all of the alleged problems IE has with CSS.
I use IE at home because it works with my ad-blocker/privacy control proxy. I'm sure there are equivalent plug-ins for Firefox, but I'm happy with the interface on what I have. With the proxy and the IE privacy settings cranked up, I've never caught any sort of malware.
Tabs are nice, but, honestly, I don't understand the hype. I don't miss them when I'm on IE. In fact, I wish there were a way to move a tab out to a separate instance of the browser after the fact, in order to do side-by-side comparisons.
Exactly, so even Firefox, which appears to be secure, is still doing the wrong thing. Instead of showing the images and ignoring the overflows, it should complain that these files are corrupted. Software shouldn't be stingy with information.
It's a good question, but I don't like the way it starts with a falsehood. Teenage pregnancies and births have been dropping dramatically and continuously for over a decade. A simple web search finds lots of reliable sources for that. Despite that, the US teenage pregnancy rate is still high compared to other industrialized nations even though US teens are no more sexually active than teens in those countries.
I recently read about a medical study that showed teenage pregnancy can be a good thing. If you adjust for level of prenatal care and economic status, teenaged mothers have the healthiest children and suffer the fewest lasting medical problems from giving birth compared to "adult" women. So biologically, teenage pregnancy is a good thing (if you're into procreation). Socially, however, it's a big problem because we expect people to "grow up" slower. People spend more years in school, enter the work force later, get married older than ever before.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on several points.
I think we do have a reasonable standard here in the US (nonobvious to a skilled practitioner in the field), it's just not being applied. In nearly all cases, patent examiners are not skilled practitioners in the field.
I'm a firm believer that the patent system continues to have an overall positive effect.
Anecdotally, my brother worked for a small medical-device startup company. He is co-inventor on several patents for devices that can non-invasively measure pulserate and oxygen saturation levels in blood. After several years and tens of millions of dollars of research and development, they succeeded in making devices that are more reliable and accurate than the devices then on the market (meaning the difference between life and death for some patients). The invention is a method of extracting data from the sensor waveforms. In practice, it's implemented primarily in software. This company licensed their technology to the big players in this industry, but soon one of the customers simply copied it, canceled the contract, and began selling it as their own. The startup prevailed in the patent lawsuit and is once-again collecting royalties.
Now, without a patent system, I suspect this startup never would have existed (nobody would have funded it), and therefore the state-of-the-art in this field would have stagnated. Or worse--except for regulatory disclosure for medical devices and the potential for reverse engineering--they could have kept their inventions secret and maintained a monopoly on them indefinitely, denying others the inspiration to find even better solutions and preventing the commoditization of the technology at the end of what would have been the patent protection term.
Furthermore, this example illustrates that patents can help protect the small guys when they go up against the big guys. I've never understood why so many people think of patents (and copyrights) solely as weapons of the megacorps. (Maybe because of the cost of securing and defending a patent? That seems to be a general problem with the legal system here, not the patent system.) Sure, patents are often wielded by the big guys, but could little guys go against megacorps without such tools?
Many people think patents prevent innovation because they stop people (for a limited time) from using certain methods. In actuality, it forces inventors to look for new solutions (to get around the known one that has patent protection), and often they come up with better solutions. Would we have PNG today without the LZW patent encumberance of GIF?
We always hear about the silly patents, and the lawerly harrassment related to patents. I don't think we get a balanced picture.
Yes, there are problems. But I think they can be fixed. Raise the bar for inventiveness. Adjust the protection term depending on the field, much shorter for rapidly-changing fields, a tad longer for high-risk and large-investment creations. And eliminate "submarining" with a defend-it-or-lose-it doctrine. Remove the incentive of the patent office to approve everything by basing fees solely on applications. and evaluate examiner performance on something other than the volume applications reviewed.
We've ventured off-topic by discussing the patent system in general. In terms of software patents, I'm still unclear on the definitions. (Given that I'm uncertain after reading and rereading most of the PDF and all of your comments, I suspect that many people are still working with different definitions of software patents.) I still don't know why the term "non-technical" was applied.
Some consider my brother's
I guess I don't understand the EU proposal regarding software patents. Here in the US, there is no specific regulations regarding software in regard to patents. Some inventions are accomplished using software. Patentability (in theory) is based on novelty, originality, etc. Admittedly, we have some problems with trivial things being patented, which in turn set precedent that led us down this spiral.
From your description, it sounds like the EU has a similar set of criteria. So what is the proposal regarding software patents?
In many Slashdot discussions, it seems that people consider any invention which is implemented entirely in software as a "software patent." For example Microsoft's patent on double-clicking a mouse is really a general process for detecting different intent based on the timing of button presses. It's just a process that can be described in English, in software, or even in hardware. Yet many people called this a "software patent." (I'm not defending the patent; it's trivial and has loads of prior art and it should have been dismissed on those grounds.) I think many people in these discussions are working with different definitions of "software patents."
Yes, there are lots of trivial software patents. But that wasn't my point. There are also lots of technical patents that are implemented in software, such as DSP algorithms for processing sensor data in medical devices.
My point was that the original wording implied that the patents are intended to protect non-technical inventions. I found that surprising. I suspect that they are intended to protect inventions (as other patents), but that there's a reporting bias that assumes all software patents are non-technical.
Is that a typo? Who says software patents protect "non-technical" inventions? Many software patents here (in the US) are pretty hardcore. Is there something different about the European software patent model that targets them to "non-technical" inventions?
This is actually a brilliant move by the RFID providers. This "how can you object?" application will be the first significant exposure many people will have to RFID. Later, when they hear about objectionable applications, they will already be biased by the good that RFID can do.
Certain models were rejected by some counties. I'll be voting on a Diebold touchscreen in Alameda County, California this November.