They don't piss me off at all; I removed Flash from Firefox. If there's a site (porn) with flash-only (porn) content (porn) that I'm interested in (porn), I send the URL (porn) to a different web (porn) browser that still (porn) has Flash (porn) installed. Of course, it helps (porn) that there are a few (porn) stand-alone (porn) FLV video (porn) software viewers (porn) out there. As far as I can tell, Flash is only for (Porn, porn, porn) major time wasters.
For some of the more obnoxious JavaScript-based ones, I add 'em (like someone else suggested) to the/etc/hosts file. So far, only one has been IP based; some work with ROUTE was needed for that one.
Have you recently tried to start a company? Especially after the dot.com burst and Enron?
Myself? Hell, no; I was once promoted to management by mistake, because they couldn't find anyone with people skills, a work ethic, and at least half a brain. Both I and those higher up learned my limitations; although neither ended up regretting the decision (the other options were bad), we both dearly regretted the necessity. If you can't handle both management and Real Work, you've absolutely no business heading a start-up.
I've friends who've done it. Four failed miserably within 18 months, including one badly enough to go Chapter 7 Personal; one has ended up more or less as you suggest, after about five years of the company floundering; and two are plodding along making a moderately prosperous living. This may be indicative of the high talent level of my friends; I've been told that about nine out of ten start-ups go bust in under two years. Batting around 0.300 won't get you to major league baseball, but it's damn good for entrepreneurs. (OTOH, it's within noise level of norm for the sample size.)
When my younger sister's turn came around, she listed; "Nuclear Physicist, Circus Clown and Phrenologist"
She should have used retrophrenologist instead; much more fun, and a practical use of one's sibling experience. Of course, that might have resulted in her going to a different sort of counseling. "Temponaut" is another fun one.
Every day, students come in and simply wander to whatever area they want.
Sorry, no. There are a certain number of things you need to learn, whether you are inclined to or not, and very few high school aged kids are mature enough to fully prosper in that kind of environment.
Mind you, it's a great format for a elementary/middle school age summer day camp; I attended one like that for a few years. It helped that the guy for chemistry was a local science teacher who had state and federal licenses for manufacture, transport, and use of explosives.
Today's kids are not being properly prepared for the work environment.
While this is a legitimate criticism of schools, there are two things you appear to have underconsidered.
First, this is only one of the intended functions of schools.
Second, this "declaring a major" nonsense may not solve the stated problem.
As the causes of the underlying ineffectiveness in education are with both the system AND the students, the mandatory "major" idea may even make the problem worse. Furthermore, it may impede some of the other useful functions, such as instilling some ability to understand how to come up with solutions to problems, not merely re-apply previous solutions. I want American schools to turn out students as Citizens whose reflex is to question, not Subjects whose reflex to obey.
I'd certainly support having such "majors" as an option... but making them mandatory is arsinine.
As for your comparison to Asia, I hear about their "best and brightest" students routinely at the university where I work. Their failure to grasp the idea of "individual original work", and the frequency (NB: not universality) of plagiarism and cheating due to the instilled "success by any means" morality rapidly turns new faculty deeply cynical. What it does to the old cynics is downright frightening.
(Yes, the American-born cheat too; however, the fraction is lower in that sub-population.)
The only question is who directly controls the armies. Aside from that, yes, soviet-style communism resembles nothing more than a nation-state that is also a single corporation with a nation-wide monopoly on everything.
As the peon, the working grunt, you're fucked in either system.
Well, it's one bright side to being "terminated" by your employer over here: you at least have the slim chance to try and start a competing company. Soviet "termination" tended to insure non-competes in a manner that the Final Court hasn't overturned in at least the last two thousand years or so....
What I got from that was; never take career advice from someone who's job is solely to tell kids what they want to be when they grow up. If they were so good at picking a life out for themselves they probably wouldn't be guidance councillors.
A friend of mine spent a couple years working as a high school "career advisor" (which was what the local gang of idiots school board called the position). When applying for the job, she argued that the six totally different careers she had tried herself proved she would be good at the job, since she had so much experience picking careers herself.
She admits she privately thought this was utter bullpucky; the HR person seemed to think it was great. She got the job. On the bright side, during her two years she did at least help one kid, who she recognized as having a bipolar condition; she was familiar with the symptoms, being bipolar herself.
My experience with guidance councilors was also less than idea. The usual aptitude were singularly unhelpful, since the computer's response to "What career should I consider" was "YES!" Doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, pointy-haired MBA... and the "guidance" person couldn't help me figure out which would actually interest me. I ended up pursuing Nuclear Engineering for a while, as that was a close to "Mad Scientist" as I could find. (I've since switched into working in IT.)
The dangers of trying to educate someone is that they may not learn what you intend or expect. College students are still capable of learning from experience; is the RIAA?
The Red Cross is *clearly* in the wrong on this one. Their charter is very clear, and J&J has them dead to rights.
So, the ARC has also been using the symbol for a bit over a century. As far as I(amNotALawyer) know, US trademark case law has held for the bulk of that time that trademarks not actively protected are lost. From where I sit, both have a claim to use of the trademark Crux Couped Gules, similar to the use of "Superhero" as a jointly (albeit stupidly) held trademark of DC and Marvel.
"A pox on both their houses"... no, wait, that might help their businesses. Never mind then.
Your average song isn't just about melody. It's about rhythm, lyrics, arrangements, vocals, instruments... to think that, somehow, today there's just less music to find, is flat out ridiculous in the face of all the variables one can alter.
True, changing the lyrics of the song can change its interpretation; "Greensleeves", "What Child is This", or "The Resurrection of the Rump" cause deeply different reactions... but, as far as copyright goes, do not change that royalties must be paid to the melody's composer if the work has not fallen to the public domain yet. Ditto playing it on different instruments, with "vocals" being a special case of instrumental (combined with lyrics). Changing the rhythm can do more (I vaguely remember learning a particularly obscene drinking song to the rough tune of another well-known hymn, but I can't recall it; alas, I was drinking at the time...), but is certainly enough for a "derived works" lawsuit unless within the Parody exception.
You need to re-read the story from the beginning, and remember: "Large" is not "Infinite". I'll also note that John Barnes anticipates the same phenomenon (albeit further down the road) in the Interstellar Metaculture of his series about Giraut Leones.
While this little clip attempts to prove a point, actually watching it is akin to being tied to the back of a bulldozer as it drives 50 miles down an unpaved road.
Which I suppose is one way to learn geography... and learn to hate it appropriately.
"In the early Seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic. [...] Now you're lucky to find ten albums a year of that quality."
"I do not know the figure for the maximum number of discretely appreciable melodies, and again I'm certain it is quite high, and again I am certain that it is not infinity. There are sixteen billion of us alive, Senator, more than all the people that have ever lived. Thanks to our technology, better than half of us have no meaningful work to do; fifty-four percent of our population is entered on the tax rolls as artists. Because the synthesizer is so cheap and versatile, a majority of those artists are musicians, and a great many are composers. Do you know what it is like to be a composer these days, Senator?"
"I know a few composers."
"Who are still working?"
"Well . . . three of 'em."
"How often do they bring out a new piece?"
Pause. "I would say once every five years on the average. Hmmm. Never thought of it before, but--"
" Did you know that at present two out of every five copyright submissions to the Music Division are rejected on the first computer search?"
The old man's face had stopped registering surprise, other than for histrionic purposes, more than a century before; nonetheless, she knew she had rocked him. "No, I did not."
"Why would you know? Who would talk about it? But it is a fact nonetheless. Another fact is that, when the increase in number of working composers is taken into account, the rate of submissions to the Copyright Office is decreasing significantly. There are more composers than ever, but their individual productivity is declining. Who is the most popular composer alive?"
"Uh . . . I suppose that Vachandra fellow."
"Correct. He has been working for a little over fifty years. If you began now to play every note he ever wrote, in succession, you would be done in twelve hours. Wagner wrote well over sixty hours of music--the Ring alone runs twenty-one hours. The Beatles--essentially two composers--produced over twelve hours of original music in less than ten years. Why were the greats of yesteryear so much more prolific?
"There were more enjoyable permutations of eighty-eight notes for them to find."
Sir Elton John's musical talent may be argued either way, but it doesn't change that he still is an Ignorant Idiot.
Yeah, if only there was some way for girls to keep from getting pregnant.
Aside from celibacy, of course. =)
Well, a hysterectomy and castration both tend to affect the sex drive, and are a bit permanent to boot. Both condoms and the pill have significant failure rates (rhythm is laughable); while they do reduce the risk, there's still a marked risk. IUDs have a bad rep due to Dalkon, and higher side effects than the pill. And, due to the cost of pregnancy tests, the increasing ethical problems as pregnancy progresses, social restrictions and financial costs on the mechanisms, and side effects of the different methods, early termination is not considered a satisfactory backup.
And of course, getting access to these is a bit trickier for teens....
Do the most normal people have the most sex, by benefit of having the widest selection of potential partners that are similar to them?
As far as I can see, the study isn't about the most sex, but about the earliest. Marriage would be a dual problem for your study, due to both the "artificial" diminishing of the number of partners, and the sometimes failure to do so — Mrs. Robinson may not want to discuss her IQ for the study. That said, I'd suspect it's a factor. A major IQ difference often means different recreational interests, and thus reduced social opportunities, plus it can add challenge to communications, which makes relationships harder to establish as well as to maintain.
While my experience at summer "gifties" camps is dated, the hookup frequency there seemed to be comparable to normal summer campers, as long as parity in the gender ratio facilitated it. (IE: Computer camp = not so much frolicking.)
the base level of co-ordination, often affected by the teen "growth spurt"
lack of theoretical and practical knowledge about it, exacerbated if mutual, reduced if one partner is more experienced. Yes, no-one these days is utterly ignorant, but there's a big difference between knowing that oral sex can be fun, and knowing exactly how to make someone (or how to yourself be induced to) go squeee!
Difficulty in obtaining sufficient privacy
The excessive fear of looking ridiculous that teenagers seem to have, but lose later on.
With decent physical co-ordination, some solid background theory, an enthusiastic but patient and slightly more experienced initial partner, an environment unlikely to interruption, and a willingness to look silly while experimenting are key to sex being good from the start.
P.S. Watch the "abstinence only" crowd use this as ammunition: "See! Smart teenagers choose abstinence!"
Since this is usually the theocratic zealot community, I look forward to it, so I (and the juveniles I act as a bad influence for) can point out that studies also usually show the highly intelligent are more likely to be agnostic or atheist, and never suggest the opposite.
If groups with different IQs have different sex habits, and I learn about your sex habits, then by using Bayes' theorem I can also make inferences about your IQ. Obviously just statistical inferences ("he has less sex, therefore, he is more likely to be smart"), but still.
Except that the change happens in both directions away from the average, so the most you can make is a statistical inference about how far from the norm they probably are, rather than in which direction.
But that's a huge deal. Basically then, if you're an inventor, you're screwed. Let's say you come up with a way to increase the efficiency of jet engines. According to this, unless you actually plan on selling jet engines, you've got no way to enforce your patent. You can offer to sell the patent to a jet manufacturing company, but why should they buy it from you, since you've got no leverage over them? They can just go ahead and use your invention, and since you don't actually manufacture jet engines yourself, you can't stop them.
Somewhat true. True, your leverage is reduced, since you may not be able to outright prohibit the development of the product when no-one is willing to pay your extortionate fees. Not true, in that violators don't quite get a free ride. EBay still isn't going to get away with this clean and clear; the judge hasn't said (as far as I've seen) anything to preclude EBay having to pay for their use of the process, both in the past and in the future, nor rule out punitive damages for EBay's blatant disregard of the patent-holders' rights. Furthermore, Ebay is not going to have any hope of obtaining an exclusive deal; the best they can hope for is to limit the non-punitive parts of the license cost to something vaguely resembling fair market value (IE, not much more than every cent in revenue Ebay ever takes in from the feature)... and nothing will prevent MercExcange from afterwards providing licenses to Ebay's (struggling) competitors at much cheaper prices.
Or, to continue the Jet analogy: so you try and license your turboencabulator tech to General Dynamics, and they start pirating the idea. You can still sue, collect court costs, punitive damages, and a license fee for every jet engine they ever put it into (although probably not exceeding the extra they can charge for it) — say, ten grand. You can still go afterwards to Boeing and offer them a license for five grand, to add insult to injury. Furthermore, suppose you DO have a license issued to a developer — possibly even a "small" one such as Scaled Composites — and the license includes any sort of exclusivity provisions; I see nothing in the ruling that says that license would not remain a valid basis for the granting of an injunction (such as requested against Ebay) excluding any infringing competitors from this kind of business. For the moment, money (albeit perhaps a very large mountain thereof) ought to be sufficient to correct the damage done to MercExchange.
This ruling thus seems to fulfill the underlying purpose of Patents, "to further the progress of Science and the Useful Arts". It insures that the inventor (or patent holder) can still make money off of the discovery, but precludes them holding back Progress via extortion. It's not a perfect balance, but it's not a perfect world. I still think it's overall an improvement.
Why dilute the brand for the enterprise stuff with consumer-grade equipment being associated with the name?
Because they're tired of small-business owners deciding consumer-grade equipment made by a corporate-grade company is good enough; they want them to look at real (expensive) business-grade hardware.
Just curious - I'm not seeing the connection here. Why would universities be big on this?
Because they don't want the volume of peer-to-peer videos of the topless chicks at last weekend's frat party/orgy — over any protocol — to take up so much of the bandwidth capacity on the school's network backbone that a professor down the hall spends three hours having his connecton time out while trying to submit an application for a twenty megabuck grant to Big Government Agency on the last day before the deadline. This, by the way, is not a random example. For bonus points, the responsible party was finally tracked down nine minutes after the deadline closed... and was one of the professor's graduate student minions. Who, was of course informed, that if said BGA did not provide aforementioned grant (low chance, given the missed deadline), the professor would doubtless be short of funds for minion positions the next year, so the student should probably make efforts to finish his graduate degree by the end of the current semester. Which, once word got around, reduced the number of such incidents.
Locally, the IT staffers generally don't care much about students sharing their homemade pr0n with the available bandwidth, and if it wasn't for the legal issues (and threats by the MafIAA, and so on), they wouldn't give a fsck about the music and movie sharing per se either. They do, however, want to make sure these uses don't interfere with the serious educational and research operations of the school. Ergo, the Central Powers traffic shape some of the nastier bandwidth sucking protocols. IIR, top priorities are DNS, https, and ssh, which get a minimum reserved of 15%, plus up to 75% more of the bandwith capacity if needed; FTP, http of non-hog files (IE, not recognized as video nor audio), rsync, Email, and one or two others I forget have a 10% reserved load, plus as much as they can hog of what's not used by or reserved for the top tier; after that, everything else (from torrent to irc to IM and so on) gets whatever bandwidth is left. That can be as much as 95% of the OC3 uplink... or sometimes nothing at all.
Packet inspection facilitates moving stupid bandwidth hogs into the lower-priority traffic zone, so mission-critical protocols go through. For a university, "mission critical" is usually defined in a sensible manner. The problem occurs when a for-profit ISP does it; "mission critical" becomes "whatever we can get paid the most for", by the legally required nature of corporate entities. I'd have no problem with AT&T and the like reserving a few percent to insure that internal network management traffic (BGP, DNS, SNMP, etc.) go through no matter what. However, when "Corporate Customer's VOIP" gets a priority, what's left for everyone else is no longer "Internet Service" in my book; that's selling "Surplus Capacity Available Margin" (or perhaps "Surplus Hardline Internet Transmission"), and ought to be distinctly labeled as such, and sold as a suitably discount product.
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Fletcher: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Why?
Fletcher: Because it's devastating to my case!
Judge: Overruled.
I find his movies generally annoying, but this one tolerable enough that I sat through it without walking out.
I'd just be happy to have a click in my name
What, like N!xau in The Gods Must Be Crazy?
(Admittedly, I'm now wondering how many DMV programmers thought of this case....)
No, that would have been more useful, and might have conceivably deserved stars.
What pisses me off are badly designed Flash ads.
They don't piss me off at all; I removed Flash from Firefox. If there's a site (porn) with flash-only (porn) content (porn) that I'm interested in (porn), I send the URL (porn) to a different web (porn) browser that still (porn) has Flash (porn) installed. Of course, it helps (porn) that there are a few (porn) stand-alone (porn) FLV video (porn) software viewers (porn) out there. As far as I can tell, Flash is only for ( Porn, porn, porn ) major time wasters.
For some of the more obnoxious JavaScript-based ones, I add 'em (like someone else suggested) to the /etc/hosts file. So far, only one has been IP based; some work with ROUTE was needed for that one.
Have you recently tried to start a company? Especially after the dot.com burst and Enron?
Myself? Hell, no; I was once promoted to management by mistake, because they couldn't find anyone with people skills, a work ethic, and at least half a brain. Both I and those higher up learned my limitations; although neither ended up regretting the decision (the other options were bad), we both dearly regretted the necessity. If you can't handle both management and Real Work, you've absolutely no business heading a start-up.
I've friends who've done it. Four failed miserably within 18 months, including one badly enough to go Chapter 7 Personal; one has ended up more or less as you suggest, after about five years of the company floundering; and two are plodding along making a moderately prosperous living. This may be indicative of the high talent level of my friends; I've been told that about nine out of ten start-ups go bust in under two years. Batting around 0.300 won't get you to major league baseball, but it's damn good for entrepreneurs. (OTOH, it's within noise level of norm for the sample size.)
When my younger sister's turn came around, she listed; "Nuclear Physicist, Circus Clown and Phrenologist"
She should have used retrophrenologist instead; much more fun, and a practical use of one's sibling experience. Of course, that might have resulted in her going to a different sort of counseling. "Temponaut" is another fun one.
Every day, students come in and simply wander to whatever area they want.
Sorry, no. There are a certain number of things you need to learn, whether you are inclined to or not, and very few high school aged kids are mature enough to fully prosper in that kind of environment.
Mind you, it's a great format for a elementary/middle school age summer day camp; I attended one like that for a few years. It helped that the guy for chemistry was a local science teacher who had state and federal licenses for manufacture, transport, and use of explosives.
Today's kids are not being properly prepared for the work environment.
While this is a legitimate criticism of schools, there are two things you appear to have underconsidered.
First, this is only one of the intended functions of schools.
Second, this "declaring a major" nonsense may not solve the stated problem.
As the causes of the underlying ineffectiveness in education are with both the system AND the students, the mandatory "major" idea may even make the problem worse. Furthermore, it may impede some of the other useful functions, such as instilling some ability to understand how to come up with solutions to problems, not merely re-apply previous solutions. I want American schools to turn out students as Citizens whose reflex is to question, not Subjects whose reflex to obey.
I'd certainly support having such "majors" as an option... but making them mandatory is arsinine.
As for your comparison to Asia, I hear about their "best and brightest" students routinely at the university where I work. Their failure to grasp the idea of "individual original work", and the frequency (NB: not universality) of plagiarism and cheating due to the instilled "success by any means" morality rapidly turns new faculty deeply cynical. What it does to the old cynics is downright frightening.
(Yes, the American-born cheat too; however, the fraction is lower in that sub-population.)
The rest is pretty much the same.
The only question is who directly controls the armies. Aside from that, yes, soviet-style communism resembles nothing more than a nation-state that is also a single corporation with a nation-wide monopoly on everything.
As the peon, the working grunt, you're fucked in either system.
Well, it's one bright side to being "terminated" by your employer over here: you at least have the slim chance to try and start a competing company. Soviet "termination" tended to insure non-competes in a manner that the Final Court hasn't overturned in at least the last two thousand years or so....
What I got from that was; never take career advice from someone who's job is solely to tell kids what they want to be when they grow up. If they were so good at picking a life out for themselves they probably wouldn't be guidance councillors.
A friend of mine spent a couple years working as a high school "career advisor" (which was what the local gang of idiots school board called the position). When applying for the job, she argued that the six totally different careers she had tried herself proved she would be good at the job, since she had so much experience picking careers herself.
She admits she privately thought this was utter bullpucky; the HR person seemed to think it was great. She got the job. On the bright side, during her two years she did at least help one kid, who she recognized as having a bipolar condition; she was familiar with the symptoms, being bipolar herself.
My experience with guidance councilors was also less than idea. The usual aptitude were singularly unhelpful, since the computer's response to "What career should I consider" was "YES!" Doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, pointy-haired MBA... and the "guidance" person couldn't help me figure out which would actually interest me. I ended up pursuing Nuclear Engineering for a while, as that was a close to "Mad Scientist" as I could find. (I've since switched into working in IT.)
The dangers of trying to educate someone is that they may not learn what you intend or expect. College students are still capable of learning from experience; is the RIAA?
The Red Cross is *clearly* in the wrong on this one. Their charter is very clear, and J&J has them dead to rights.
So, the ARC has also been using the symbol for a bit over a century. As far as I(amNotALawyer) know, US trademark case law has held for the bulk of that time that trademarks not actively protected are lost. From where I sit, both have a claim to use of the trademark Crux Couped Gules, similar to the use of "Superhero" as a jointly (albeit stupidly) held trademark of DC and Marvel.
"A pox on both their houses"... no, wait, that might help their businesses. Never mind then.
A GPL violator can be forced to compensate, just like with any other copyright infringement.
There's also the chance for a judgment awarding legal expenses, which is probably the main reason for the donation.
Your average song isn't just about melody. It's about rhythm, lyrics, arrangements, vocals, instruments... to think that, somehow, today there's just less music to find, is flat out ridiculous in the face of all the variables one can alter.
True, changing the lyrics of the song can change its interpretation; "Greensleeves", "What Child is This", or "The Resurrection of the Rump" cause deeply different reactions... but, as far as copyright goes, do not change that royalties must be paid to the melody's composer if the work has not fallen to the public domain yet. Ditto playing it on different instruments, with "vocals" being a special case of instrumental (combined with lyrics). Changing the rhythm can do more (I vaguely remember learning a particularly obscene drinking song to the rough tune of another well-known hymn, but I can't recall it; alas, I was drinking at the time...), but is certainly enough for a "derived works" lawsuit unless within the Parody exception.
You need to re-read the story from the beginning, and remember: "Large" is not "Infinite". I'll also note that John Barnes anticipates the same phenomenon (albeit further down the road) in the Interstellar Metaculture of his series about Giraut Leones.
While this little clip attempts to prove a point, actually watching it is akin to being tied to the back of a bulldozer as it drives 50 miles down an unpaved road.
Which I suppose is one way to learn geography... and learn to hate it appropriately.
Check the Sun article
Now, where did I hear something like that before? Oh, yes: Spider Robinson's 1983 Hugo Winning Short Story, "The Melancholy Elephants"—
Sir Elton John's musical talent may be argued either way, but it doesn't change that he still is an Ignorant Idiot.
Yeah, if only there was some way for girls to keep from getting pregnant.
Aside from celibacy, of course. =)
Well, a hysterectomy and castration both tend to affect the sex drive, and are a bit permanent to boot. Both condoms and the pill have significant failure rates (rhythm is laughable); while they do reduce the risk, there's still a marked risk. IUDs have a bad rep due to Dalkon, and higher side effects than the pill. And, due to the cost of pregnancy tests, the increasing ethical problems as pregnancy progresses, social restrictions and financial costs on the mechanisms, and side effects of the different methods, early termination is not considered a satisfactory backup.
And of course, getting access to these is a bit trickier for teens....
Do the most normal people have the most sex, by benefit of having the widest selection of potential partners that are similar to them?
As far as I can see, the study isn't about the most sex, but about the earliest. Marriage would be a dual problem for your study, due to both the "artificial" diminishing of the number of partners, and the sometimes failure to do so — Mrs. Robinson may not want to discuss her IQ for the study. That said, I'd suspect it's a factor. A major IQ difference often means different recreational interests, and thus reduced social opportunities, plus it can add challenge to communications, which makes relationships harder to establish as well as to maintain.
While my experience at summer "gifties" camps is dated, the hookup frequency there seemed to be comparable to normal summer campers, as long as parity in the gender ratio facilitated it. (IE: Computer camp = not so much frolicking.)None. A teenager who turns down sex is not smart by definition.
That's definitely not true for girls, given the added risk of pregnancy, and the number of cads about these days.
Sex when I was 18 was awkward and boring
Contributing factors to which can be:
With decent physical co-ordination, some solid background theory, an enthusiastic but patient and slightly more experienced initial partner, an environment unlikely to interruption, and a willingness to look silly while experimenting are key to sex being good from the start.
P.S. Watch the "abstinence only" crowd use this as ammunition: "See! Smart teenagers choose abstinence!"
Since this is usually the theocratic zealot community, I look forward to it, so I (and the juveniles I act as a bad influence for) can point out that studies also usually show the highly intelligent are more likely to be agnostic or atheist, and never suggest the opposite.
If groups with different IQs have different sex habits, and I learn about your sex habits, then by using Bayes' theorem I can also make inferences about your IQ. Obviously just statistical inferences ("he has less sex, therefore, he is more likely to be smart"), but still.
Except that the change happens in both directions away from the average, so the most you can make is a statistical inference about how far from the norm they probably are, rather than in which direction.
But that's a huge deal. Basically then, if you're an inventor, you're screwed. Let's say you come up with a way to increase the efficiency of jet engines. According to this, unless you actually plan on selling jet engines, you've got no way to enforce your patent. You can offer to sell the patent to a jet manufacturing company, but why should they buy it from you, since you've got no leverage over them? They can just go ahead and use your invention, and since you don't actually manufacture jet engines yourself, you can't stop them.
Somewhat true. True, your leverage is reduced, since you may not be able to outright prohibit the development of the product when no-one is willing to pay your extortionate fees. Not true, in that violators don't quite get a free ride. EBay still isn't going to get away with this clean and clear; the judge hasn't said (as far as I've seen) anything to preclude EBay having to pay for their use of the process, both in the past and in the future, nor rule out punitive damages for EBay's blatant disregard of the patent-holders' rights. Furthermore, Ebay is not going to have any hope of obtaining an exclusive deal; the best they can hope for is to limit the non-punitive parts of the license cost to something vaguely resembling fair market value (IE, not much more than every cent in revenue Ebay ever takes in from the feature)... and nothing will prevent MercExcange from afterwards providing licenses to Ebay's (struggling) competitors at much cheaper prices.
Or, to continue the Jet analogy: so you try and license your turboencabulator tech to General Dynamics, and they start pirating the idea. You can still sue, collect court costs, punitive damages, and a license fee for every jet engine they ever put it into (although probably not exceeding the extra they can charge for it) — say, ten grand. You can still go afterwards to Boeing and offer them a license for five grand, to add insult to injury. Furthermore, suppose you DO have a license issued to a developer — possibly even a "small" one such as Scaled Composites — and the license includes any sort of exclusivity provisions; I see nothing in the ruling that says that license would not remain a valid basis for the granting of an injunction (such as requested against Ebay) excluding any infringing competitors from this kind of business. For the moment, money (albeit perhaps a very large mountain thereof) ought to be sufficient to correct the damage done to MercExchange.
This ruling thus seems to fulfill the underlying purpose of Patents, "to further the progress of Science and the Useful Arts". It insures that the inventor (or patent holder) can still make money off of the discovery, but precludes them holding back Progress via extortion. It's not a perfect balance, but it's not a perfect world. I still think it's overall an improvement.
Why dilute the brand for the enterprise stuff with consumer-grade equipment being associated with the name?
Because they're tired of small-business owners deciding consumer-grade equipment made by a corporate-grade company is good enough; they want them to look at real (expensive) business-grade hardware.
Just curious - I'm not seeing the connection here. Why would universities be big on this?
Because they don't want the volume of peer-to-peer videos of the topless chicks at last weekend's frat party/orgy — over any protocol — to take up so much of the bandwidth capacity on the school's network backbone that a professor down the hall spends three hours having his connecton time out while trying to submit an application for a twenty megabuck grant to Big Government Agency on the last day before the deadline. This, by the way, is not a random example. For bonus points, the responsible party was finally tracked down nine minutes after the deadline closed... and was one of the professor's graduate student minions. Who, was of course informed, that if said BGA did not provide aforementioned grant (low chance, given the missed deadline), the professor would doubtless be short of funds for minion positions the next year, so the student should probably make efforts to finish his graduate degree by the end of the current semester. Which, once word got around, reduced the number of such incidents.
Locally, the IT staffers generally don't care much about students sharing their homemade pr0n with the available bandwidth, and if it wasn't for the legal issues (and threats by the MafIAA, and so on), they wouldn't give a fsck about the music and movie sharing per se either. They do, however, want to make sure these uses don't interfere with the serious educational and research operations of the school. Ergo, the Central Powers traffic shape some of the nastier bandwidth sucking protocols. IIR, top priorities are DNS, https, and ssh, which get a minimum reserved of 15%, plus up to 75% more of the bandwith capacity if needed; FTP, http of non-hog files (IE, not recognized as video nor audio), rsync, Email, and one or two others I forget have a 10% reserved load, plus as much as they can hog of what's not used by or reserved for the top tier; after that, everything else (from torrent to irc to IM and so on) gets whatever bandwidth is left. That can be as much as 95% of the OC3 uplink... or sometimes nothing at all.
Packet inspection facilitates moving stupid bandwidth hogs into the lower-priority traffic zone, so mission-critical protocols go through. For a university, "mission critical" is usually defined in a sensible manner. The problem occurs when a for-profit ISP does it; "mission critical" becomes "whatever we can get paid the most for", by the legally required nature of corporate entities. I'd have no problem with AT&T and the like reserving a few percent to insure that internal network management traffic (BGP, DNS, SNMP, etc.) go through no matter what. However, when "Corporate Customer's VOIP" gets a priority, what's left for everyone else is no longer "Internet Service" in my book; that's selling "Surplus Capacity Available Margin" (or perhaps "Surplus Hardline Internet Transmission"), and ought to be distinctly labeled as such, and sold as a suitably discount product.
I can believe in kids whipping up spells, but dumping a hot asian girl, now that is just the realm of fantasy!
Gentlemen prefer blondes; I prefer brunettes — but dude, everyone smiles for a redhead!
"NEXT!"