Ergo, Obama managed to out-Bush Bush in this area.
Mmm, bush... Now can we get some tits in the picture to round things off? Oh, never mind, the boobs are already in office...
The Federal Government -- Bringing You More T&A Every Year!
(NB: That's probably something more along the lines of "terror and authoritarianism" than that other T&A... You know, in keeping with that jen-yoo-wine American preference for violence over sex [c.f. movie ratings, censoring, etc.].)
I'm not sure how, but for a while I had the fish trapped in one of my VMware sessions, which oddly enough was running WinXP. I'd freed the fish on the host desktop, but when the fish appeared in the VM when it was in full-screen mode, and I then minimized the VM, the fish got trapped in there somehow.
The Broken Window Fallacy just means that we shouldn't break windows for the express purpose of creating more business for the glacier.
I didn't know ice rivers did anything business related. Gee, the things you learn on/. these days!:D
Silliness aside, I think the word you wanted was "glazier", as in, "someone who glazes windows". For that matter, I wonder if "someone who glazes doughnuts" is also a glazier? Mmm, doughnuts...
Cognizant of the failings of rusting rebar, engineers have devised alternatives to the usual unfinished tempered steel rebar, including stainless steel and new polymer fiber possibilities. More here. Though more expensive, using these other options can improve the lifetime of the structure by avoiding the deterioration in the surrounding concrete caused by expanding rust.
Nexuiz runs on top of Lord Havoc's Darkplaces engine, which was (is) a rewrite of the Quake 1 engine.
When I play Quake 1 in his engine, with everything on, it slows to below 10FPS at times. This is on a quad-core with a high end nvidia card.
This is a powerful engine.
Seriously, not trying to slag here, but I really have to ask -- a rendering engine that brings such hardware to its knees might just be inefficient rather than powerful, no?
Please, mods, employ some thought before modding. "Troll" is not a synonym for "Do not like".
In my comment above, I clearly left too much to implication -- *proper* theologians concern themselves with theology, i.e. the study of God/gods and religions. This is orthogonal to any study of science, as no lesser authority than the Vatican itself has pointed out. Dictating science curricula plainly falls outside the bounds of theology, and therefore, anyone trying to make scientific decisions as within the context of this discussion about the Texas board of education is clearly not a theologian. Moreover, forcing one's views on another is rude, all the more so when those views are inappropriate to the context, which brings us to the epithet of "hooligan" -- a more apt description than "theologian", by a long shot.
Cripes, the mods these days are terrible. The "troll" mod used to be reserved for flagging posts that were actually trolling -- i.e., stirring the pot and trying to rile people up with spurious arguments -- as a warning and courtesy to others that the poster was a pot-stirrer and not really serious. My post above is anything but -- at best, I was trying to be mildly amusing and slightly acerbic, but trolling? Certainly not.
Did anyone else see the recent breakthrough announced by gay scientist research group Pink Tiger, with their discover of the Christian gene? Fabulous send-up...
With "intelligent design", you have theologians trying to make scientific decisions.
Somehow when I first read this, it looked like you have hooligans trying to make scientific decisions. But then (in this context, at least) I guess that isn't very different anyway.
I can't say that I enjoy working with assholes, though.
I can certainly see why you didn't go into proctology. Though sometimes it sure seems like a good field to know a bit about, no matter what industry you might work in...
My company recently (against my advice) bought a shitload of Dell OptiPlex 700 series desktops. The damn things are wonky as hell. About 75% of them won't even recognize an inserted thumb drive without a complete reboot.
What are you running on them?
I had a small-shop custom-built job years ago with Win2K on it, and Windows would go belly-up hard-reboot with depressing and increasing frequency, necessitating a complete wipe every couple months, after which the reboot-X-days-later cycle would restart with X as a larger, though shrinking, number. Later I installed Red Hat on it with Windows in a VM (required for certain software, >sigh...<) and it worked like a charm. Turned out the mobo's SMART controller was borked in some subtle way that killed Windows, but Linux was smart enough to find the mobo error and work around it (confirmed in dmesg).
I'm not saying your shitload of Dell OptiPlex 700 series desktops all have borked mobos, but maybe some BIOS setting or Windows driver isn't playing nicely?
(Disclaimer: I own a Dell and have had generally good luck with it, but I'm no apologist. My own machine is a Dimension 5150, and I was bothered to learn that, despite a 64-bit CPU, the chipset is limited to 32-bit memory addressing. How stupid!)
The problem with a lack of clarity in jurisdiction is the potential this raises for forum shopping. With regard to patent issues, the eastern Texas circuit seems to skew towards the plaintiffs; with regard to other issues, there may be other courts that also have pronounced biases, that would thereby attract litigants shopping for forums pertinent to their specific issue. Forum shopping of any sort strikes me as inappropriate -- why should either the plaintiff or defendant be allowed the option of searching for a sympathetic court?
So fix the system in east Texas. Don't change the whole thing because there may be a problem in one location.
While eastern Texas is indeed notably broken, I would posit that its broken-ness is an outgrowth of the underlying problem of forum shopping. Moreover, the change David proposes (i.e., limit possible litigation forums in such cases to the jurisdictions in which either company has a principal presence or headquarters) is both 1) reasonable, and 2) minor.
I'm curious as to your opposition; is there some benefit to forum shopping that I am missing?
This might be stretching things a bit, but might we see a parallel evolutionary pattern at work here? The first malware started out in a purely parasitic mode, using host resources without regard to the health of the host. We are now seeing the emergence of less-virulent malware (at least with regard to computer resources, not necessarily less virulent with regard to impact on victims).
Might we soon discover malware that is even less virulent, and possibly even symbiotic, in terms of providing side *benefits* to those infected? Conceivable circumstances might involve a trojan that is purely for setting up a botnet, with the trojan payload aggressively cleaning the host system and entailing no more negative impact on the victim than the loss of bandwidth and CPU capacity when the botnet is being actively used...
Would you apply a criminal case the same? If someone commits murder in one state but lives in another which do you thing a trial should be held? The state the murder took place in or the state the murderer lives in?
Interesting point, but I would argue that crimes of specificity, such as murder or robbery, are a different beast than infractions of a geographically vaguer nature, such as doing business nationwide in some way that violates copyright or patents. In the former case, the crime clearly occurs in a place, within a specific jurisdiction, and the crime should thus be prosecuted there.
In the latter case, however, the infraction is essentially happening everywhere at once -- and this is where the comparison to murder breaks down. Which legal forum, which jurisdiction, to choose for prosecuting any such legal case is much less clear, and absent any changes such as those David suggests leaves the system open to various abuses, as has been documented with regard to the curiously skewed rulings being handed down in eastern Texas.
I can't really blame politicians for upholding the current copyright regime. From their perspective, copyright protection has enabled the production of a rich and diverse artistic ecosystem in the US. I'd be nervous too about drastically changing anything, for fear of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. It's worked for 200 years, why scrap it now?
We have to show them that we can produce art of the same, or better, quality without the protections of traditional copyright. We need to show them that copyright is unnecessary or harmful.
I wouldn't actually go so far, in part because I am not convinced that copyright per se is harmful. I would simply like to see copyright laws rolled back several iterations to more closely coincide with their initial implementation and original intent. The more recent revisions that extend copyright essentially indefinitely are an absolute perversion of the original compact made with the public -- i.e., that we, the people, would grant authors and other producers with *limited* monopolies, for the express purpose of encouraging them to help enrich the public domain. What we have now, instead, is little more than an egregious power grab by moneyed corporations as they seek to lay claim to every aspect of our modern culture. I propose no killing of the goose (copyright) that lays the golden egg (much of modern culture -- books, movies, music, etc.). The problem is that the goose no longer allows us to make use of that golden egg. Thus, I propose instead that we undo the mutations that have given the goose the enormous size, sharp fangs, and poisonous venom that imperil any of us mere mortals who even think of approaching that golden egg.:)
The thought that worries me, is that maybe we've got the government we deserve. No matter how much money corporations pour into campaign coffers, the people are the ones with the power to vote them out. But, we don't. If the citizens of this country really wanted to change things, they could.
Oofda -- this gets complicated. Yes, while in theory the public has the power to revamp who gets into office, the reality is complex in the extreme. On the one hand, you have moneyed interests who get to decide the very candidates we vote for -- meaning that the elections are rigged before they even happen. Then there are the deeper issues of failing civics education and deliberate disinformation on pretty much all sides of any issue...
Any attempt to change the political system has to begin by changing the mindset of the citizenry. Unfortunately, that's far harder than enacting campaign finance reform or term limits.
I agree with you here, though I might quibble with you about the "has to begin" part:). I think changing the public mindset is vital, but I'm not so sure it's necessarily the first step -- there are probably many ancillary issues that could be taken on before or in parallel to this.
Plus, by way of disclaimer, I grew up in DC, so I am naturally biased towards the cynical when it comes to "da gubmint".:-P
The "Supreme Court loosens patent 'obviousness' test"
Actually, despite the misleading headline, that CNet article describes the SCOTUS decision as *tightening* the test (i.e., making it harder to pass) -- which most of us would regard as a good thing, in reducing the number of no-shit-Sherlock patents and thereby making it harder for patent trolls to sue the modern world into oblivion. What the SCOTUS loosened were the criteria for what constitutes "obvious". From the CNet article:
That standard requires that for an invention to be declared obvious, some "teaching, suggestion or motivation" must exist to show that a person of ordinary skill would have thought to combine certain elements.
Critics have argued that in practice, written evidence is required to pass that test, which has made it harder to overturn allegedly obvious patents and rendered it easier to obtain them from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the first place. Technology companies say that's especially hard for them to prove because of the speedy rate at which they tend to develop new products and ideas.
"It's not written down, it's not published, it's not the subject of scholarly discussion, and that's where the Federal Circuit was basically looking," Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google, Oracle, Red Hat and Verizon, said in an interview with CNET News.com on Monday.
The justices were sympathetic to those criticisms. "The diversity of inventive pursuits and of modern technology counsels against limiting the analysis in this way," they wrote. "In many fields it may be that there is little discussion of obvious techniques or combinations, and it often may be the case that market demand, rather than scientific literature, will drive design trends."
Hardware and software makers have also argued that they're especially threatened by the standard because they would like to be able to rearrange at will the thousands of pre-existing components that compose their products. Some say the lax rules have sparked a stampede of so-called patent "trolls" who make a living off predicting those incremental changes to existing high-tech inventions, landing patents, and then going after companies for infringement.
The CNet article headline is terrible, and suggests the opposite of what actually happened. Basically, the newer looser criteria for what constitutes "obvious" actually *tighten* the test, and should (ideally) make it harder for trolls to game the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we Americans are a gassy people.
(ducks)
Mmm, bush... Now can we get some tits in the picture to round things off? Oh, never mind, the boobs are already in office...
The Federal Government -- Bringing You More T&A Every Year!
(NB: That's probably something more along the lines of "terror and authoritarianism" than that other T&A... You know, in keeping with that jen-yoo-wine American preference for violence over sex [c.f. movie ratings, censoring, etc.].)
Cheers,
No thanks, I don't smoke.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Szervusz,
Warum nicht?
Tschüß,
Thank you, Gizmonic, for introducing me to yet another word I expect never to use in polite company. :)
Cheers,
I'm not sure how, but for a while I had the fish trapped in one of my VMware sessions, which oddly enough was running WinXP. I'd freed the fish on the host desktop, but when the fish appeared in the VM when it was in full-screen mode, and I then minimized the VM, the fish got trapped in there somehow.
Cheers,
I didn't know ice rivers did anything business related. Gee, the things you learn on /. these days! :D
Silliness aside, I think the word you wanted was "glazier", as in, "someone who glazes windows". For that matter, I wonder if "someone who glazes doughnuts" is also a glazier? Mmm, doughnuts...
Cheers,
Cognizant of the failings of rusting rebar, engineers have devised alternatives to the usual unfinished tempered steel rebar, including stainless steel and new polymer fiber possibilities. More here. Though more expensive, using these other options can improve the lifetime of the structure by avoiding the deterioration in the surrounding concrete caused by expanding rust.
Cheers,
Seriously, not trying to slag here, but I really have to ask -- a rendering engine that brings such hardware to its knees might just be inefficient rather than powerful, no?
Cheers,
Please, mods, employ some thought before modding. "Troll" is not a synonym for "Do not like".
In my comment above, I clearly left too much to implication -- *proper* theologians concern themselves with theology, i.e. the study of God/gods and religions. This is orthogonal to any study of science, as no lesser authority than the Vatican itself has pointed out. Dictating science curricula plainly falls outside the bounds of theology, and therefore, anyone trying to make scientific decisions as within the context of this discussion about the Texas board of education is clearly not a theologian. Moreover, forcing one's views on another is rude, all the more so when those views are inappropriate to the context, which brings us to the epithet of "hooligan" -- a more apt description than "theologian", by a long shot.
Cripes, the mods these days are terrible. The "troll" mod used to be reserved for flagging posts that were actually trolling -- i.e., stirring the pot and trying to rile people up with spurious arguments -- as a warning and courtesy to others that the poster was a pot-stirrer and not really serious. My post above is anything but -- at best, I was trying to be mildly amusing and slightly acerbic, but trolling? Certainly not.
Cheers,
Did anyone else see the recent breakthrough announced by gay scientist research group Pink Tiger, with their discover of the Christian gene? Fabulous send-up...
Gay Scientists Isolate Christianity Gene
Cheers,
Somehow when I first read this, it looked like you have hooligans trying to make scientific decisions. But then (in this context, at least) I guess that isn't very different anyway.
Cheers,
This message brought to you by Citizens Against Penguin Evolution...
Cheers,
I can certainly see why you didn't go into proctology. Though sometimes it sure seems like a good field to know a bit about, no matter what industry you might work in...
Cheers,
What are you running on them?
I had a small-shop custom-built job years ago with Win2K on it, and Windows would go belly-up hard-reboot with depressing and increasing frequency, necessitating a complete wipe every couple months, after which the reboot-X-days-later cycle would restart with X as a larger, though shrinking, number. Later I installed Red Hat on it with Windows in a VM (required for certain software, >sigh...<) and it worked like a charm. Turned out the mobo's SMART controller was borked in some subtle way that killed Windows, but Linux was smart enough to find the mobo error and work around it (confirmed in dmesg).
I'm not saying your shitload of Dell OptiPlex 700 series desktops all have borked mobos, but maybe some BIOS setting or Windows driver isn't playing nicely?
(Disclaimer: I own a Dell and have had generally good luck with it, but I'm no apologist. My own machine is a Dimension 5150, and I was bothered to learn that, despite a 64-bit CPU, the chipset is limited to 32-bit memory addressing. How stupid!)
Cheers,
is all I needed to say.
Yah, and most of that seems to happen in June, with the rest happening when the typhoons blow through. Whee!
Cheers,
I'm not sure how that got marked as AC -- the previous posting is mine.
Cheers,
The problem with a lack of clarity in jurisdiction is the potential this raises for forum shopping. With regard to patent issues, the eastern Texas circuit seems to skew towards the plaintiffs; with regard to other issues, there may be other courts that also have pronounced biases, that would thereby attract litigants shopping for forums pertinent to their specific issue. Forum shopping of any sort strikes me as inappropriate -- why should either the plaintiff or defendant be allowed the option of searching for a sympathetic court?
While eastern Texas is indeed notably broken, I would posit that its broken-ness is an outgrowth of the underlying problem of forum shopping. Moreover, the change David proposes (i.e., limit possible litigation forums in such cases to the jurisdictions in which either company has a principal presence or headquarters) is both 1) reasonable, and 2) minor.
I'm curious as to your opposition; is there some benefit to forum shopping that I am missing?
Cheers,
This might be stretching things a bit, but might we see a parallel evolutionary pattern at work here? The first malware started out in a purely parasitic mode, using host resources without regard to the health of the host. We are now seeing the emergence of less-virulent malware (at least with regard to computer resources, not necessarily less virulent with regard to impact on victims).
Might we soon discover malware that is even less virulent, and possibly even symbiotic, in terms of providing side *benefits* to those infected? Conceivable circumstances might involve a trojan that is purely for setting up a botnet, with the trojan payload aggressively cleaning the host system and entailing no more negative impact on the victim than the loss of bandwidth and CPU capacity when the botnet is being actively used...
Just curious where this might all lead.
Cheers,
Aha! Thank you for that, I was seriously scratching my head about the headline, but what you say here shines a light on that.
Cheers,
Interesting point, but I would argue that crimes of specificity, such as murder or robbery, are a different beast than infractions of a geographically vaguer nature, such as doing business nationwide in some way that violates copyright or patents. In the former case, the crime clearly occurs in a place, within a specific jurisdiction, and the crime should thus be prosecuted there.
In the latter case, however, the infraction is essentially happening everywhere at once -- and this is where the comparison to murder breaks down. Which legal forum, which jurisdiction, to choose for prosecuting any such legal case is much less clear, and absent any changes such as those David suggests leaves the system open to various abuses, as has been documented with regard to the curiously skewed rulings being handed down in eastern Texas.
Cheers,
I wouldn't actually go so far, in part because I am not convinced that copyright per se is harmful. I would simply like to see copyright laws rolled back several iterations to more closely coincide with their initial implementation and original intent. The more recent revisions that extend copyright essentially indefinitely are an absolute perversion of the original compact made with the public -- i.e., that we, the people, would grant authors and other producers with *limited* monopolies, for the express purpose of encouraging them to help enrich the public domain. What we have now, instead, is little more than an egregious power grab by moneyed corporations as they seek to lay claim to every aspect of our modern culture. I propose no killing of the goose (copyright) that lays the golden egg (much of modern culture -- books, movies, music, etc.). The problem is that the goose no longer allows us to make use of that golden egg. Thus, I propose instead that we undo the mutations that have given the goose the enormous size, sharp fangs, and poisonous venom that imperil any of us mere mortals who even think of approaching that golden egg. :)
Oofda -- this gets complicated. Yes, while in theory the public has the power to revamp who gets into office, the reality is complex in the extreme. On the one hand, you have moneyed interests who get to decide the very candidates we vote for -- meaning that the elections are rigged before they even happen. Then there are the deeper issues of failing civics education and deliberate disinformation on pretty much all sides of any issue...
I agree with you here, though I might quibble with you about the "has to begin" part :). I think changing the public mindset is vital, but I'm not so sure it's necessarily the first step -- there are probably many ancillary issues that could be taken on before or in parallel to this.
Plus, by way of disclaimer, I grew up in DC, so I am naturally biased towards the cynical when it comes to "da gubmint". :-P
Cheers,
Actually, despite the misleading headline, that CNet article describes the SCOTUS decision as *tightening* the test (i.e., making it harder to pass) -- which most of us would regard as a good thing, in reducing the number of no-shit-Sherlock patents and thereby making it harder for patent trolls to sue the modern world into oblivion. What the SCOTUS loosened were the criteria for what constitutes "obvious". From the CNet article:
The CNet article headline is terrible, and suggests the opposite of what actually happened. Basically, the newer looser criteria for what constitutes "obvious" actually *tighten* the test, and should (ideally) make it harder for trolls to game the system.
Cheers,