i think people are missing the point of patents here...
this is not a software patent, where arguable almost everything is obvious. A company put millions of dollars of research into this possible treatment for cancer, and the patent allows them to recoup some of their R&D money for a short amount of time while publishing how they did it.
correct me if i am wrong, but patents only last 17 years, and medical patents are routinely overriden in cases of need in several countries (and i think the us can probably do this as well, but i'm not sure if we do).
I also think that this is something this company can and will license to other companies for other uses. And, in 17 years, this becomes public knowledge.
granted, it is easier to argue that medical advancements serve a higher purpose and should therefore not be patent-able, but i think that misses the point of patents.
patents encourage (and were created to encourage) the inventor to share the information they have learned with the world, and do so by giving them exclusive rights their invention for a period of time.
Image if this kind of research was just closed-source, would that make things better? all research would be internal to several different groups, and there would be no sharing of ideas...
now, if you wanted to argue that health-care and medical research should not be allowed to exist as a profit-driven industry, because of its importance to all of mankind, then you might have a point... but it seems most americans don't want a public health care system...
i use hushmail, and it has a human authenticator system...
any user not on my allow list is sent an email to validate they are a person (it sends them to a link and they have to click on a moving icon in a picture)...
if they do this, their email automatically goes to my inbox, otherwise it gets grouped with the spam...
it actually works pretty well...
a system like this combined with an opt-in system would work pretty well, i think...
it is not a privacy flaw.
there is no standard that says that a browser needs to send the referer information.
it is just a feature supported by most browsers.
i think the general idea is that each ballot has a unique identifier (like a guid or something), but there is not way to link that to a voter; a voter has two states, voted or not voted.
i think what would be better would be to convert the email to text only and strip all of the graphics...
then spammers wouldn't be able to have web images in there HTML email that validate email address, and most users wouldn't care enough to copy and paste a url into the querystring...
better yet, convert all of the HTML into its HTMLEscaped equivalent, so that people see all the html markup and can't read it!
i always thought it meant that they would just hold on to the items for a week, then send them out... (or is that just what amazon does to make people feel the need to pay for next day shipping)
want to pass on any info on the billing error??
i'm a sprint customer, and would love to have 1 year of free phone service...
Re:5 years in the business... WHERE???
on
Effective XML
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· Score: 1, Insightful
i have been in the business for 4 years now, and i use XML on a daily basis.
not only is it a powerful media for representing (and caching) hierarchy/tree-based data, extensions like XSLT providing tremendous advantages in transforming data for a variety of other purposes (you probably hated lisp/scheme based language, too).
While programming language based on XML at first sound a little strange, combining an XML based programming language with XSLT could be super powerful, especially with concepts like code generation...
well, it take time and $$ to count all of the votes.
the promise of electronic voting systems is that counting process is significantly faster & cheaper.
thats why the punch card voting machines were invented.
(b.t.w. i don't know if the costs of the diebold systems are cheaper than just paper ballots, and it definitly sounds like it cost more in terms of election integrity than the time and money saved)
paper ballots are just as easily altered as electronic... who would know if a box of ballots disappeared? or if a box of ballots just showed up... in Chicago people used to vote more than once in the same election, hence the phrase "vote early and often"...
I'm not saying i agree with diebold, reading these memos makes me sick to my stomach... i am a software developer (g, surprise) and i can't believe what i just read. I think that they should be sued out of business for the little bit that i just read that was reposted on slashdot, and i think they should face criminal charges... i am writing my congressmen and senator immediately to try and make sure that they understand the gravity of what these memos reveal.
Its not that a certain amount of money will make them 'forget' someone died. It is that the gaming industry is making money marketing games to younger kids that they have decided are not suitable for younger kids.
It sounds eerily like what the tobacco companies were doing. It is not ethical.
on a side note: I think it is horrible that these kids got off without going to prison (at least the 16 year old), their parents must have been very wealthy and white.
the problem is that everyone wants their phone number listed in the phone book... you can still have your phone number not listed, and then you dont' get many telemarketing calls at all, but the problem is that when your old college roommate you lost touch with is coming to town for the weekend, they can't get your number.
i'm sorry to tell you, but it is a nuisance to recieve commercial calls at home. I don't want to buy anything over the phone, ever. When i want to buy something, i will buy it. I don't want unwarranted solicitations, period.
Slashdot Mirror
i think people are missing the point of patents here...
this is not a software patent, where arguable almost everything is obvious. A company put millions of dollars of research into this possible treatment for cancer, and the patent allows them to recoup some of their R&D money for a short amount of time while publishing how they did it.
correct me if i am wrong, but patents only last 17 years, and medical patents are routinely overriden in cases of need in several countries (and i think the us can probably do this as well, but i'm not sure if we do).
I also think that this is something this company can and will license to other companies for other uses. And, in 17 years, this becomes public knowledge.
granted, it is easier to argue that medical advancements serve a higher purpose and should therefore not be patent-able, but i think that misses the point of patents.
patents encourage (and were created to encourage) the inventor to share the information they have learned with the world, and do so by giving them exclusive rights their invention for a period of time.
Image if this kind of research was just closed-source, would that make things better? all research would be internal to several different groups, and there would be no sharing of ideas...
now, if you wanted to argue that health-care and medical research should not be allowed to exist as a profit-driven industry, because of its importance to all of mankind, then you might have a point... but it seems most americans don't want a public health care system...
i use hushmail, and it has a human authenticator system...
any user not on my allow list is sent an email to validate they are a person (it sends them to a link and they have to click on a moving icon in a picture)...
if they do this, their email automatically goes to my inbox, otherwise it gets grouped with the spam...
it actually works pretty well...
a system like this combined with an opt-in system would work pretty well, i think...
it is not a privacy flaw.
there is no standard that says that a browser needs to send the referer information.
it is just a feature supported by most browsers.
um, i think its a quip...
correct vs. right i think implies factual correctness vs. moral justness...
you're correct though, it is a little ambiguous (but wait, are you right?)
not if you can't link a person to a ballot.
i think the general idea is that each ballot has a unique identifier (like a guid or something), but there is not way to link that to a voter; a voter has two states, voted or not voted.
i think what would be better would be to convert the email to text only and strip all of the graphics...
then spammers wouldn't be able to have web images in there HTML email that validate email address, and most users wouldn't care enough to copy and paste a url into the querystring...
better yet, convert all of the HTML into its HTMLEscaped equivalent, so that people see all the html markup and can't read it!
i always thought it meant that they would just hold on to the items for a week, then send them out... (or is that just what amazon does to make people feel the need to pay for next day shipping)
want to pass on any info on the billing error??
i'm a sprint customer, and would love to have 1 year of free phone service...
i have been in the business for 4 years now, and i use XML on a daily basis.
not only is it a powerful media for representing (and caching) hierarchy/tree-based data, extensions like XSLT providing tremendous advantages in transforming data for a variety of other purposes (you probably hated lisp/scheme based language, too).
While programming language based on XML at first sound a little strange, combining an XML based programming language with XSLT could be super powerful, especially with concepts like code generation...
what about RedCap Linux??
i don't buy the microsoft conspiracy stuff...
from all that i have heard (from credible source), microsoft has recently become heavily vested in FreeBSD research and technology...
(which makes sense, freebsd is great, and the license is perfect for protecting a company's ip)
i'm not saying that m$ wouldn't love to see sco win this case, but i think they are focusing more on competing (for once) than killing the opposition.
anyways, maybe i'm being naive, but thats just my 2 cents.
hey, you said 'Fact remains that our current behaviour is driving this in some degree. It might be the main force or completly negligable.'
ever heard of an oxymoron?
how can 'our current behaviour [be] driving this' and it be 'completly negligable' at the same time????
well, it take time and $$ to count all of the votes.
the promise of electronic voting systems is that counting process is significantly faster & cheaper.
thats why the punch card voting machines were invented.
(b.t.w. i don't know if the costs of the diebold systems are cheaper than just paper ballots, and it definitly sounds like it cost more in terms of election integrity than the time and money saved)
that brings a whole new meaning to the blue screen of death...
you forgot #8.
8. Profit!
why would i do that when i could just 'lose' 100,000 votes from the heavily county?
paper ballots are just as easily altered as electronic... who would know if a box of ballots disappeared? or if a box of ballots just showed up... in Chicago people used to vote more than once in the same election, hence the phrase "vote early and often"...
I'm not saying i agree with diebold, reading these memos makes me sick to my stomach... i am a software developer (g, surprise) and i can't believe what i just read. I think that they should be sued out of business for the little bit that i just read that was reposted on slashdot, and i think they should face criminal charges... i am writing my congressmen and senator immediately to try and make sure that they understand the gravity of what these memos reveal.
yeah, wtf??
anyone know why that is in the licence agreement?
Its not that a certain amount of money will make them 'forget' someone died. It is that the gaming industry is making money marketing games to younger kids that they have decided are not suitable for younger kids.
It sounds eerily like what the tobacco companies were doing. It is not ethical.
on a side note: I think it is horrible that these kids got off without going to prison (at least the 16 year old), their parents must have been very wealthy and white.
hahahahahahaha
oops...
should be "popular != good"
i guess i should have used preview...
i think you are confused...
populate != good
right on. DB-based objects are the best example i can think of where using code generation is very powerful, and is absolutely not lazy...
the problem is that everyone wants their phone number listed in the phone book... you can still have your phone number not listed, and then you dont' get many telemarketing calls at all, but the problem is that when your old college roommate you lost touch with is coming to town for the weekend, they can't get your number.
i'm sorry to tell you, but it is a nuisance to recieve commercial calls at home. I don't want to buy anything over the phone, ever. When i want to buy something, i will buy it. I don't want unwarranted solicitations, period.
i didn't realize that dimensional warp generators were in the spec for the next version... maybe i'll hold off for that version.