Stupid Lion update killed my/. cookie. Posting as non-anon.
I went hiking this weekend with my wife and (2 year old) kid, and as we went along, we came across a completely normal-looking woman who had her eyes open, was standing to the side of the path, a semi-smile on her face staring out at the scenery. However, she didn't move, didn't acknowledge us in the slightest as we approached. My thought (and later, I found out, my wife's, too) was that she was doing a walking meditation or some such and was just lost in her own world.
Our kid, on the other hand, did not know what to do with it. He got up to about 4 feet shy of the woman's place on the path, and would not follow us past her. He just kept staring, unwilling to move forward. I picked him up and carried him past her, and as soon as she was out of site, he relaxed and went along his way. I asked him if that was a little uncanny, and he responded, "widdo uhcangy".
You're slashdotting wrong! You should be slinging ad hominem attacks, defending your choice like a religion, and basically proving the point opposite to your intended point. Your reasoned answer will get you banned, pronto!
...from the roles of their customers who suddenly stopped coming in as Netflix' client base skyrocketed. I haven't gotten the email, but I know Blockbuster has it, and wouldn't be surprised if they figured out that my rental dollars were going to Netflix, not some little corner video shop. Especially considering most of those corner shops are out of business because of the likes of Blockbuster....
For some reason, I can't get the image of the Simpsons "Monorail" episode out of my mind. "Tramway!" "What's that you say?" "Tramway!" "Will it need trees to provide shade?" "Tramway! Tramway! TRAMWAY!!"
I'm in Portland, where public trans is a huge deal. 1.5 Bn sounds like a lot, but if it's done right, it can pay off in spades.
500,000$ may be a lot for an individual, but a city? Not so much. Especially one of 150,000 people. They're going to live through it.
Good point; however, imagine if the project had been properly scoped and managed, and had been able to turn out a product with a little more time and money invested. What if they could have produced their own fleet of EVs for city use? Would that have justified the cost? Does the city own the electric power generation or distribution, allowing them to effectively give away the razors to local residents so they could then sell the blades for a bit more profit? Were they going to sell the cars on the open market?
Like I said above, $500,000 not only isn't that much for a city, it's a paltry amount for an automotive startup. When companies making a simple piece of photo sharing software get investments of multiple millions of dollars, you'd think that something like this would get a bit more in terms of resources. The number is right in that range where it actually probably is criminal. Way too much for a simple exploration, but way too little to think you could actually turn something out.
Who exactly expected to have a fully functional prototype of a sale-able electric vehicle with a $500,000 investment? Cities, counties, states and the Federal Government get into all sorts of businesses that take time and money to set up. Medicare, BART, the TVA... it's not always a good idea, nor always a bad idea. But if you're going to do it, do it. $500,000 gets you two engineers, some materials and a fab plant for a year, and not much else. That may be a nice way to do a lean start-up, but it's entirely possible that the only reason that the half-mil was a waste was because that was the limit, so it was doomed to fail.
It may not be an impossible task, but if inventing the next generation of EV were easy and cheap--and in this context, I'd suggest that a $500,000 investment is cheap--then everyone would be doing it.
And I guess what I tried to imply here but probably didn't is that if kids are released from various grades without certain facts well set in their minds and verified by people who are responsible for their education, they are likely to go forward in the world with greater and greater belief that they are responsible for making up their own facts.
Facts are indeed helpful; they provide a framework with which to better understand the concepts that drive what we do from day to day. While I have never felt that rote memorization was the most important thing in learning a process, it's my strong feeling that without some concrete facts to act as cornerstones to more abstract concepts, those concepts could go greatly awry. And as is evidenced by the likes of Palin and Bachman, people who don't memorize facts tend to make up new ones to justify their actions ("Paul Revere's mission was to warn the British!" and "There is not one single study that indicates that CO2 is dangerous!", respectively) rather than look them up.
Yup. I fly as little as possible, partially because of privacy issues, partially because of the new scope-and-grope process, and partially because the overall experience has just become so very unpleasant. Long lines, cramped flights, last-minute cancellations; who wants to deal with this.
So I don't go to some of the places that I used to have on my destination list, and where I do go, I try to drive. In the last two years, I've flown only for business, and once for a funeral for which we couldn't plan ahead long enough to make the drive.
Of course, when driving, I still use my credit card, so my privacy is not necessarily complete. I'm sure someone can tell where I fuel up, eat and stay. Hell, they could probably even guess what kind of car I drive based on fuel utilization signatures combined with dealer maintenance histories.
You make a good point, although I'd suggest that deceptive marketing does apply here, considering "4g wireless" is a marketing term that covers a wide variety of technologies, some of which are slower than what is possible under "3g" speeds.
Actually, holding your breath would probably be a good thing. Not only are most people full of hot air, but the amount of CO2 released with each breath contributes to some small fraction of the human-generated portion of our current greenhouse emergency!
The only Blockbuster left in a 10 mile radius of my house is an unmanned kiosk which is broken half the time. If I can't get everything via streaming, then Netflix has become far less useful to me. I was under the impression this was a semi-sustainable business; if I had known that they were just doing it long enough to kill the competition then jack up prices, I probably would have stuck with old faithful.
Seems like a lot of people would try to play games with the date of first awareness. Perhaps by terming it "suspicion" in 2004 but requiring a lengthy (and expensive, of course) legal review before the infringement could be confirmed. Thus they don't become "aware" of the infringement until, say, 2009 in your example, for an extra five years of damages.
How could they justify that? "Your honor, we were simply doing all necessary due diligence to ensure that we were not bringing a frivolous lawsuit before you. In the court's best interests, we took on the expense and risk of fully validating our complaint prior to taking any legal action."
Well, if a mobile phone can be your boarding pass for a plane, there's no real reason it couldn't be a driver's license, too. Instead of a magnetic strip it could have a bar code which would reflect a real-time, signed stamp of authenticity from the DMV's servers, which code could be read by a cop's mobile device and verified. Between that and doing a visual validation of the embedded picture, you've got something that's every bit as good as a printed license.
Maybe better; someone might loan their younger brother an ID to allow them to go to a bar one night, but they're not going to give them their mobile phone for any amount of time. And they'll notice it's stolen much, much faster.
Ah, that does sound like it has some advantages. I hadn't understand the "struck off, never to be repeated" aspect of it.
Now if only something could be done to reduce the benefits to trolls who buy up discarded patents just to file suits, never producing new knowledge nor any products...
One method I've seen is for people to make copies of important documents, seal them and ship them via certified mail. It's not foolproof, but I've been told (no official citation) that it is defensible in court.
The thing that kills patents is prior art. So if you're releasing something to the public domain, make sure to document every step of the way, everything that is potentially patentable. If you invented it first, then with proper documentation, nobody else can patent it...
...at least until the new "whoever files first" rules go into effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Stupid Lion update killed my /. cookie. Posting as non-anon.
I went hiking this weekend with my wife and (2 year old) kid, and as we went along, we came across a completely normal-looking woman who had her eyes open, was standing to the side of the path, a semi-smile on her face staring out at the scenery. However, she didn't move, didn't acknowledge us in the slightest as we approached. My thought (and later, I found out, my wife's, too) was that she was doing a walking meditation or some such and was just lost in her own world.
Our kid, on the other hand, did not know what to do with it. He got up to about 4 feet shy of the woman's place on the path, and would not follow us past her. He just kept staring, unwilling to move forward. I picked him up and carried him past her, and as soon as she was out of site, he relaxed and went along his way. I asked him if that was a little uncanny, and he responded, "widdo uhcangy".
I'm waiting for the iPhone 6!
You're slashdotting wrong! You should be slinging ad hominem attacks, defending your choice like a religion, and basically proving the point opposite to your intended point. Your reasoned answer will get you banned, pronto!
...from the roles of their customers who suddenly stopped coming in as Netflix' client base skyrocketed. I haven't gotten the email, but I know Blockbuster has it, and wouldn't be surprised if they figured out that my rental dollars were going to Netflix, not some little corner video shop. Especially considering most of those corner shops are out of business because of the likes of Blockbuster....
For some reason, I can't get the image of the Simpsons "Monorail" episode out of my mind. "Tramway!" "What's that you say?" "Tramway!" "Will it need trees to provide shade?" "Tramway! Tramway! TRAMWAY!!"
I'm in Portland, where public trans is a huge deal. 1.5 Bn sounds like a lot, but if it's done right, it can pay off in spades.
What is this "MB" you speak of? My 1541 drive stores 170KB per floppy. That should surely be enough for anyone.
Maybe they're trying to irradiate babies to make them the next green energy source for electric vehicles.
D'oh. Well, there we go.
This wasn't a kit car project. It takes more than $75k of R&D to build a $75k car.
500,000$ may be a lot for an individual, but a city? Not so much. Especially one of 150,000 people. They're going to live through it.
Good point; however, imagine if the project had been properly scoped and managed, and had been able to turn out a product with a little more time and money invested. What if they could have produced their own fleet of EVs for city use? Would that have justified the cost? Does the city own the electric power generation or distribution, allowing them to effectively give away the razors to local residents so they could then sell the blades for a bit more profit? Were they going to sell the cars on the open market?
Like I said above, $500,000 not only isn't that much for a city, it's a paltry amount for an automotive startup. When companies making a simple piece of photo sharing software get investments of multiple millions of dollars, you'd think that something like this would get a bit more in terms of resources. The number is right in that range where it actually probably is criminal. Way too much for a simple exploration, but way too little to think you could actually turn something out.
Who exactly expected to have a fully functional prototype of a sale-able electric vehicle with a $500,000 investment? Cities, counties, states and the Federal Government get into all sorts of businesses that take time and money to set up. Medicare, BART, the TVA... it's not always a good idea, nor always a bad idea. But if you're going to do it, do it. $500,000 gets you two engineers, some materials and a fab plant for a year, and not much else. That may be a nice way to do a lean start-up, but it's entirely possible that the only reason that the half-mil was a waste was because that was the limit, so it was doomed to fail.
It may not be an impossible task, but if inventing the next generation of EV were easy and cheap--and in this context, I'd suggest that a $500,000 investment is cheap--then everyone would be doing it.
And I guess what I tried to imply here but probably didn't is that if kids are released from various grades without certain facts well set in their minds and verified by people who are responsible for their education, they are likely to go forward in the world with greater and greater belief that they are responsible for making up their own facts.
Facts are indeed helpful; they provide a framework with which to better understand the concepts that drive what we do from day to day. While I have never felt that rote memorization was the most important thing in learning a process, it's my strong feeling that without some concrete facts to act as cornerstones to more abstract concepts, those concepts could go greatly awry. And as is evidenced by the likes of Palin and Bachman, people who don't memorize facts tend to make up new ones to justify their actions ("Paul Revere's mission was to warn the British!" and "There is not one single study that indicates that CO2 is dangerous!", respectively) rather than look them up.
Yup. I fly as little as possible, partially because of privacy issues, partially because of the new scope-and-grope process, and partially because the overall experience has just become so very unpleasant. Long lines, cramped flights, last-minute cancellations; who wants to deal with this.
So I don't go to some of the places that I used to have on my destination list, and where I do go, I try to drive. In the last two years, I've flown only for business, and once for a funeral for which we couldn't plan ahead long enough to make the drive.
Of course, when driving, I still use my credit card, so my privacy is not necessarily complete. I'm sure someone can tell where I fuel up, eat and stay. Hell, they could probably even guess what kind of car I drive based on fuel utilization signatures combined with dealer maintenance histories.
Don't even get me started on Java numbering. Half my clients refuse to leave 1.43 anyway.
You make a good point, although I'd suggest that deceptive marketing does apply here, considering "4g wireless" is a marketing term that covers a wide variety of technologies, some of which are slower than what is possible under "3g" speeds.
How much is that in Bitcoins?
I'm not holding my breath.
Actually, holding your breath would probably be a good thing. Not only are most people full of hot air, but the amount of CO2 released with each breath contributes to some small fraction of the human-generated portion of our current greenhouse emergency!
The only Blockbuster left in a 10 mile radius of my house is an unmanned kiosk which is broken half the time. If I can't get everything via streaming, then Netflix has become far less useful to me. I was under the impression this was a semi-sustainable business; if I had known that they were just doing it long enough to kill the competition then jack up prices, I probably would have stuck with old faithful.
Seems like a lot of people would try to play games with the date of first awareness. Perhaps by terming it "suspicion" in 2004 but requiring a lengthy (and expensive, of course) legal review before the infringement could be confirmed. Thus they don't become "aware" of the infringement until, say, 2009 in your example, for an extra five years of damages.
How could they justify that? "Your honor, we were simply doing all necessary due diligence to ensure that we were not bringing a frivolous lawsuit before you. In the court's best interests, we took on the expense and risk of fully validating our complaint prior to taking any legal action."
Bitcoins!
Well, if a mobile phone can be your boarding pass for a plane, there's no real reason it couldn't be a driver's license, too. Instead of a magnetic strip it could have a bar code which would reflect a real-time, signed stamp of authenticity from the DMV's servers, which code could be read by a cop's mobile device and verified. Between that and doing a visual validation of the embedded picture, you've got something that's every bit as good as a printed license.
Maybe better; someone might loan their younger brother an ID to allow them to go to a bar one night, but they're not going to give them their mobile phone for any amount of time. And they'll notice it's stolen much, much faster.
Ah, that does sound like it has some advantages. I hadn't understand the "struck off, never to be repeated" aspect of it.
Now if only something could be done to reduce the benefits to trolls who buy up discarded patents just to file suits, never producing new knowledge nor any products...
One method I've seen is for people to make copies of important documents, seal them and ship them via certified mail. It's not foolproof, but I've been told (no official citation) that it is defensible in court.
The thing that kills patents is prior art. So if you're releasing something to the public domain, make sure to document every step of the way, everything that is potentially patentable. If you invented it first, then with proper documentation, nobody else can patent it...
...at least until the new "whoever files first" rules go into effect.