Richard Stallman is such a baby. Doors that have to be opened with keycards are everywhere, and usually you can't leave them open for more than 30 or 60 seconds, or an alarm will go off.
Stallman is simply using the RFID angle to rehash his pet peeves. The big fuss being made over this issue overlooks the fact that MIT already has card reader access virtually everywhere, from the dorms to the labs to even some of the public buildings such as the medical center. The only difference here is that Stata, being newer, has chosen to install RFID readers instead of the standard swipe.
If the RFID chips they used could be easily read from a distance, then this might be more of a problem -- we joked about professors having real-time blips representing their students walking around, a la Harry Potter's Maurader's map:) However, the chips they installed are pretty short-range, so I don't see this as a viable problem: they won't even read from your pocket when you're standing in front of the reader; you have to wave it in front of the scanner.
Near as I can tell, there's nothing "magical" about using the new readers as opposed to the old ones; any privacy issues you might perceive are exactly the same as they've been on campus for years now.
What difference does that make? They're still spamming. I don't care if they do have a valid return address: 'unsolicited' is still 'unsolicited'.
It actually could make a difference, if it makes spam economically unprofitable for spammers. Spammers make their money from the fact that they can send out a bazillion emails and survive on very tiny response rates. By increasing the cost of sending spam, in the form of seized bond funds, Microsoft can make it infeasible for spammers who post bonds to profitably send unsolicited spam. This is also the idea behind those "internet postage" and other proposed spam-defeating measures.
The beef I have with this scheme is that since it's the user that's inconvenienced by the spam, the bond money should be sent to them in the event of a violation. The fact that Microsoft is the one getting the funds is what makes it seem like a money grab.
Sorry to give you one less reason to hate MS, but they are taking the money as a BOND, not as payment. MS only gets the money if the spammers don't follow their rules. Probably something like "must use real return address and have a unsubscribe link that doesn't add you to more lists."
What, you mean that a Slashdot submitter would put in something that wasn't meticulously researched and accurately summarized?:p
My bit of I-hate-early-mornings sarcasm aside, I fail to see how this being a bond makes any difference to the end user. Most people probably won't find much consolation in knowing that the annoying spam in their Inbox that escaped their filters is resulting in more income for Microsoft.
A bond is typically posted so that the injured party receives the money held if an agreement is broken. It seems pretty clear that the "injured party" is the spamee here, not Microsoft. What're the odds that MS will share the money if the terms are violated?
There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
There's no need to register such patents. Just publish the information. If there's a dispute having a patent isn't better than having prior art.
Parent AC has a good point. Publication is a straightforward way of establishing that something is "in the public domain". For precisely that reason, the first thing researchers learn is that if you think something you came up with has marketability, be sure to get that patent submission in first before you publish; otherwise the patent cannot be granted.
Publication has most of the properties the grandparent wanted: turnaround time is typically 6 months to a year (depending on whether you go conference or journal), costs are minimal (usually a few hundred dollars for a conference, less for journal), and it gets disseminated to a wide audience.
The downside is that the bar for patents appears lower than for publication; it seems like I'm always reading on Slashdot about patents that are successfully granted for ideas that do nothing to advance the state of the art, which leads me to suspect that there may be a "gray area" of ideas that are patentable (at least under our current system) but would have difficulty being accepted for publication. This is probably where "defensive patenting" would be useful.
In fact, Microsoft is now building up its patent arsenal, applying for a rather amazing 10 patents a day. The idea isn't to ensure that Microsoft makes a fair profit from its patents; it's to make sure that no one else can write fully compatible software.
And the plot thickens... They are doing this (as the article states) to keep Linux and other OSs from being compatible.
Or, rather than profit motive or monopoly propagation, it could be option #3: Microsoft may just not want a repeat of the Eolas debacle where they get sued for something seemingly public domain 5 years down the road. Many companies (IBM comes to mind) maintain huge patent stables for precisely this purpose.
There are many reasons companies patent things, ranging from the defensive to the offensive. Unfortunately it's hard to tell a priori what the actual reasons are.
I suspect a big reason people use the current IPO process is not because they feel it's the best process for raising the maximum revenue, but because it raises acceptable amounts of revenue while letting people connected to the IPO profit by purchasing underpriced shares at launch. For this reason IPO shares are usually handed out as perks to people connected with either the company itself or their financial firm.
Are you kidding me? I live in Canada and all I see is American content -- radio stations are full of American music, television is all American shows, and the products we buy are all American. Where's the censorship? It's obviously not working.
Why aren't patents exposed to peer review, like academic articles are? The invention (if it is) will be protected by the patent pending laws while it's reviewed.
Having had some experience with the academic peer review process, from both the reviewer and reviewee perspective, I feel obligated to point out that the peer review process is far from perfect as well. Off the top of my head, a couple of points to consider:
1. Finding qualified reviewers. Many academics in my field (network theory) have been complaining about "reviewer burnout". Simply put, any popular field will have lots of people submitting papers [patents, in your analogy] in an effort to boost their publications. Oftentimes, many of these people will submit stuff that's obviously not publication-quality material, but reviewers still have to spend their time first to evaluate it and then to produce a good writeup justifying rejecting it. To be sure, there are still good papers, but the general experience seems to be that the signal-to-noise ratio of submissions is directly inverse to the popularity of the field. Imagine how much worse this would be for patents, where the payoff is not just CV bragging rights but actual profit dollars.
The end result is that it's difficult to get quality reviews, because the reviewers (who, by definition of peer review, tend to be very busy professionals who already have a lot to do) get burned out and are tempted to just breeze through reviews. Since the patent office gets many more patent applications than your typical journal, I'd imagine this would be an even bigger problem for patents.
2. Finding honest reviewers. By making patents peer-reviewed, you're forcing applicants to disclose the details of their technology to their peers before their patent is accepted. A similar situation exists in academia where often multiple research groups are working on the same research project. Sadly, it's not unheard of for particular reviewers to stonewall acceptance of papers because they have similar results which they are submitting / hope to submit soon to another journal. Imagine how, in the case of patent review where people are competing not just for notoriety but for profits, an even bigger incentive would exist for this sort of thing to go on.
I understand that your point is that it would be nice to have highly qualified individuals doing patent reviews, which would hopefully inject more common sense into the proceedings. I'm just saying that setting up such a system may hhave its own problems to iron out.
The good thing about Gator going public is that their Financial Statements will tell us what advertisers are funding them. Makes for a nice boycott list.
Actually the financials will only tell you how much they're making off the advertisers; they're not required to disclose customer identities. If the numbers turn out to be big, all it's going to do is encourage others to follow in their footteps by starting up more spyware companies.
Depends on where you live. In the U.S. and U.K., the answer is yes. There have even been cases in the U.K. of people using jammers that have been charged. Doesn't seem to stop people from continuing to sell them quietly though.
But in Texas, all of the major highways have a specific kind of etching on each side of the road in the pavement. When you go over this with your tire, it creates a really loud noise that vibrates the entire car. It would wake up just about anybody, and I think it's been around for a good number of years.
You mean like rumble strips? That's actually one of the "sounds" that the computerized system they tested uses as a warning (presumably because people are already familiar with that noise):
Ford spokesman Mike Vaughn said they tested computerized optical scanning and a variety of warnings: a vibrating steering wheel, the sound of a car driving over rumble strips and a visual warning projected on the windshield.
Using technology to try to improve driving is not new; as a Boston Globe article "Honk If You're Driving" noted, similar devices are already deployed today:
Many trucks on US highways already have systems in place to gauge a driver's roadworthiness by analyzing steering and pedalwork patterns or by detecting frequent blinking and heavy eyelids. But because of drivers' fears that this data might be used against them in court, such technology has not caught on in American passenger cars, according to Tsuda [of Nissan's Technical Center North America], who designed a short-lived fatigue-monitoring car for Nissan Japan in the 1980's.
There are systems to try to detect other problems like following too closely and other driver "no-no's", but so far privacy concerns have been a major impediment. The technology also has to overcome the problem that at best they can just issue warnings (since no one's ready to accept a car that usurps control from its driver yet), and drivers can still choose to ignore the warnings. The lesson is that technology is only half of the picture; human behavior and social concerns need to be addressed also before ideas like this will really take off.
What the hell does this mean? Sounds like a bunch of buzzwords thrown together about a project nobody wants that solves a problem that doesn't exist.
Heh, I thought the same thing when I read this but couldn't think up a polite way to mention it.
The phrase "island Internet" is already a bit of an oxymoron because most of my use of the internet relies on its sheer size and ubiquity. I use Google to look up things I don't know about, which works because someone somewhere around the world is likely to have an informative page on just about any topic. I use email and IM to connect with people because they don't rely on physical proximity. Google News (and Slashdot!) keep me up to date on news wherever I go. I'm sure others could come up with more examples, but the common theme is that each of these applications relies on the connectedness and size of the net today (Metcalfe's Law, anyone?). The internet, to me, boils down to content and reach -- who'll provide that on your "island"?
That's not to say that there won't be new applications for this sort of device -- I can envision something akin to the iPod jacking phenomenon -- but comparing it to the internet is a misleading metaphor.
This is a tad off-topic, but I couldn't resist tossing in another calculus goodie I saw on a LiveJournal post a while back. For those not familiar with it, MIT hosts an Integration Bee every January -- kinda like a spelling bee, but with (obviously) integrating.
evelio (evelio) wrote,
@ 2004-01-23 15:24:00
I love MIT
>Geek thing #1 A friend of mine won the Integration Bee at MIT. He got $50 of Certificates to Toscis (Ice cream place) and a baseball cap.
>Geek thing #2:
Another friend wrote him this poem:
I love you;
You are my hero.
My love for you is 1/x
as x approaches 0.
>Geek thing #3: To which another friend of mine replied:
Wait Wait! As x approaches zero from which direction?
> fund managers make zillions based on return. they don't care.
Fund managers don't own the funds they manage.
This whole thread is a bit off-topic, but for the less financially-savvy I couldn't resist pointing out that actually the grandparent is kind of correct, fund managers' compensation is loosely tied to return. Mutual fund managers, for example, typically receive a percentage of the fund value every year. Therefore, the larger and more successful the fund, the more money they make. Presumably, popularity and size are tied to returns. Peter Lynch reportedly made 0.75% off his funds, which doesn't sound like much until you realize that 0.75% of his $12 billion Magellan fund is a cool $90 million every year.
More sophisticated investment vehicles such as hedge funds usually have their money tied even more closely to the fund. The managers of LTCM, for example, used to be heavy investors in their own fund. Additionally, their fees were usually a percentage of the return -- if they made no money, then they (virtually) didn't get paid, whereas if they showed positive returns, they took a (large) cut of the returns.
The 90% of the shares owned by US investors aren't owned by your next door neighbours, they're owned by multimillionaire investment traders. They don't give a shit about the people making them the money, they're just cogs in their money-machine.
Not true. For example, Coke (KO) has a market cap of over $121 billion. Even Bill Gates, currently the world's richest man at $46.6 billion net worth, can barely afford a third of Coke even if he liquidated all his holdings in everything else.
You're right in that major shareholders are institutions - Coke's float is 67% held by them. However, that's because "institutions" are usually just investing the public's money. Coke in particular happens to be one of the S&P 500 companies -- know all those people invested in mutual and S&P index funds? Chances are most of them, including a few of your "next-door neighbors", own at least a few shares, and what profits Coke profits them too.
Ultimately, if you think that big multinationals are the ones that are going to be making the money, there's nothing that's stopping you from hitching your money to their wagon. There's nothing stopping you from being one of those investors that's profiting from their returns. Especially in this day with low-cost online brokerages, it's a fallacy to think that only rich people can afford to be investors.
So whereas there are similarities, I think there are differences too, and I think the two input mechanisms reflect that. There is the other point that not all of us are maestro's with a musical instrument... the user-interface of the ivories might be slightly less user-friendly than the traditional QWERTY
The primary difference is that keys on a keyboard are binary input while piano keys are analog. How hard you strike them, your angle of approach, and other factors all combine to let you vary the sound you get. People have tried to model pianos (most notably via "digital pianos", which have been around for a long time now), but among musicians they're still considered to be tonally inferior.
I disagreed with the article quote that "For [Hawley], there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard'."I think the key will be to recognize that electronic music and the more classical type both have their own qualities and complement, rather than replace, each other. Sort of like how electric, acoustic, and classical guitars are all similar instruments but each have their own sound -- none is meant to replicate any other one.
Yeah, that was my first thought too. What's stopping them from adding that? One word: cost.
Your typical motion sensor lock runs for $50 list, probably less on the street. Add an entry-level GPS receiver, retailing for around $120. Toss in extra money to support a transceiver that broadcasts the notebook's position (remember, the GPS unit by itself just lets the notebook know where it is; you have to have some way for it to send that location to you), tamper-proofing/camoflage (how good's your GPS receiver if the thief just snaps off your antenna?), monthly charges for monitoring and a call center, and you're probably looking at $400 or more plus subscription. That might be peanuts for a car of $20,000+, but on your $1000 laptop, that's a significant chunk of change.
The beauty of the electronic beast, according to Mitchell, is it allows the laptop owner to be mobile, which is, after all, the whole idea of laptops. There are few false alarms because of the deactivating device and the distance required between the laptop and its owner (about 15 feet) before the gizmo works.
"There are lots of systems out there that have just a thing that detects motion, so it blasts a siren just like the car alarms that no one listens to these days," said Mitchell.
What they don't say is how their device solves the problem. As far as I can tell, when it goes off, it still makes the same annoying sounds.
I disagree that loud laptop alarms won't be effective because they're unnoticed -- after all, the places they'd be used would most likely be study areas or libraries, which are typically very quiet. A 105 decibel alarm in such an area would certainly get people's attention. The problem is that it'd be terribly obnoxious as well. Personally, I think if someone did use one of these somewhere like a library, it'd work great scaring off the would-be thief but not so great against the subsequent mob coming to bash it into silence with textbooks and binders...
Um, I know citing "freedom of expression" is a knee-jerk reflex here at Slashdot, but it applies only when you're not breaking any laws while doing so. The cliche'd example would be yelling "Fire" in a crowded movie theater.
From what I could gather from a quick Google, both necrophilia and cannibalism are illegal in the U.K. (someone correct me if I'm wrong), in which case posting web sites advertising that you're doing it would be pretty dumb. The parallel for Americans would be something like hosting child pornography on your server for public consumption -- not only would you be doing something illegal, but you'd be publicizing about it at the same time.
There's some discussion about the welcome or lack thereof women get in the gaming community, and arguments over whether it's a good idea to have separate women's matches.
It's a question that's been rehashed a lot, but here are a few thoughts.
Some sports separate out men and women because physical differences make it hard for them to compete. Obvious examples that come to mind are contact sports like football and basketball, or even non-contacts like tennis (mentioned in one of the article comments) where physicality still plays a strong role. It's the same reasoning that makes sports like boxing have weight classes (a gender-neutral issue): to produce interesting matchups that let the competitors focus on how well they compare with others with a similar physical starting point.
Having said that, it doesn't strike me that there are significant differences in physiology that would prevent co-ed competitions from being fair, any more than you would expect one gender or another to have an advantage in competitions of bridge or snooker. The fact that they still compete in separate brackets more likely has more to do with advertising dollars (sponsors probably figure that the female market for Counterstrike is pretty small) or inertia (hey, let's do our tournaments like every other sports competition!) than any argument based on merit.
I wasn't aware that "
parking off the road" was probable cause to "investigate an investigation".
I think the "probable cause" would be the call from the witness claiming they saw some domestic violence going on. Both the story and the cop in the video mention it. So it's not a case of where the police cruiser just pulled over because they thought the guy's face looked funny.
Deputy Lee Dove of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department came on the scene - siren a-wailing - in response to a domestic violence report. Someone saw Mimi arguing with her dad and thought it had come to blows. The witness said that he saw "a man with a black cowboy hat" who "slugged the female". Dove was there to investigate the report.
Not being an expert on legal matters, I can't really say anything from a rights standpoint, but I do feel obliged to point out that from a pragmatic standpoint a little bit of calm and courtesy probably would have prevented things from escalating the way they did. On the video it looks like the man started getting visibly agitated and shouting pretty easily, when he could have just calmly stated his case. Unfortunately when you get right down to things, if you start by being hostile and loud it usually doesn't help things. This is true regardless of whether you're talking to a cop, a secretary, airport security, or whatever. (On a side note, I've seen what I'd consider much more aggressive tactics given much less provocation every time I pass through the airport.)
You did read the article, didn't you? That "prior art" is from the same people who are suing.
I did happen to RTFA. I think the problem is you're mistaking the patent info I quoted as a Case patent when it's actually the Goldberg one.
I put up the quote from the Goldberg Patents to show that their patent is dated December 1996, which was after Case had already implemented some prior art. I don't know if Case tried to patent his system (I suspect not; trying to patent a ladder system as "new" just because it's implemented on a computer instead of pen-and-paper should strike any reasonable person as silly).
Unless Mr. Goldberg works for IGN and hence owns rights to Case's Ladder, the prior art example should be valid. I also happen to think that implementing a ladder for computer games should be a blindingly obvious extension of sports ladders which have been around since before I was in diapers, but I guess the whole point of this news post was how lax patent examiners have become in allowing these things.
Wouldn't Case's Ladder be considered prior art? From the patent info:
Inventors: Goldberg; Sheldon F. (3360 E. Serene, Henderson, NV 89014); Antwerp; John Van (Springdale, MD)
Assignee: Goldberg; Sheldon F. (Henderson, NV)
Appl. No.: 759895
Filed: December 3, 1996
I remember playing Red Alert using Case's Ladder back in mid-1996, which seems like a pretty clear case of a ranking system for a multiplayer game. Of course, if you leave the online-game context and move into the wider arena of general games/sports, ladders have been around long before that.
call me old fashioned but shouldn't any
revenue be EARNED ???:))
For those not familiar with the accounting-speak, unearned revenue is basically money which has been paid to Microsoft for products which they have not yet delivered. Consider it kind of like pre-ordering your favorite new DVD or video game. Companies are required to account for it separately from regular revenue because if for some reason they're unable to deliver the product later, that revenue might have to be returned; therefore it's considered slightly risky.
In this particular context, it would include people who have signed up for Microsoft "software subscription" program. Declining unearned revenues mean that there aren't as many people signing up for their subscriptions as they'd hoped.
Slashdot Mirror
If the RFID chips they used could be easily read from a distance, then this might be more of a problem -- we joked about professors having real-time blips representing their students walking around, a la Harry Potter's Maurader's map :) However, the chips they installed are pretty short-range, so I don't see this as a viable problem: they won't even read from your pocket when you're standing in front of the reader; you have to wave it in front of the scanner.
Near as I can tell, there's nothing "magical" about using the new readers as opposed to the old ones; any privacy issues you might perceive are exactly the same as they've been on campus for years now.
The beef I have with this scheme is that since it's the user that's inconvenienced by the spam, the bond money should be sent to them in the event of a violation. The fact that Microsoft is the one getting the funds is what makes it seem like a money grab.
My bit of I-hate-early-mornings sarcasm aside, I fail to see how this being a bond makes any difference to the end user. Most people probably won't find much consolation in knowing that the annoying spam in their Inbox that escaped their filters is resulting in more income for Microsoft.
A bond is typically posted so that the injured party receives the money held if an agreement is broken. It seems pretty clear that the "injured party" is the spamee here, not Microsoft. What're the odds that MS will share the money if the terms are violated?
Publication has most of the properties the grandparent wanted: turnaround time is typically 6 months to a year (depending on whether you go conference or journal), costs are minimal (usually a few hundred dollars for a conference, less for journal), and it gets disseminated to a wide audience.
The downside is that the bar for patents appears lower than for publication; it seems like I'm always reading on Slashdot about patents that are successfully granted for ideas that do nothing to advance the state of the art, which leads me to suspect that there may be a "gray area" of ideas that are patentable (at least under our current system) but would have difficulty being accepted for publication. This is probably where "defensive patenting" would be useful.
There are many reasons companies patent things, ranging from the defensive to the offensive. Unfortunately it's hard to tell a priori what the actual reasons are.
I suspect a big reason people use the current IPO process is not because they feel it's the best process for raising the maximum revenue, but because it raises acceptable amounts of revenue while letting people connected to the IPO profit by purchasing underpriced shares at launch. For this reason IPO shares are usually handed out as perks to people connected with either the company itself or their financial firm.
1. Finding qualified reviewers. Many academics in my field (network theory) have been complaining about "reviewer burnout". Simply put, any popular field will have lots of people submitting papers [patents, in your analogy] in an effort to boost their publications. Oftentimes, many of these people will submit stuff that's obviously not publication-quality material, but reviewers still have to spend their time first to evaluate it and then to produce a good writeup justifying rejecting it. To be sure, there are still good papers, but the general experience seems to be that the signal-to-noise ratio of submissions is directly inverse to the popularity of the field. Imagine how much worse this would be for patents, where the payoff is not just CV bragging rights but actual profit dollars.
The end result is that it's difficult to get quality reviews, because the reviewers (who, by definition of peer review, tend to be very busy professionals who already have a lot to do) get burned out and are tempted to just breeze through reviews. Since the patent office gets many more patent applications than your typical journal, I'd imagine this would be an even bigger problem for patents.
2. Finding honest reviewers. By making patents peer-reviewed, you're forcing applicants to disclose the details of their technology to their peers before their patent is accepted. A similar situation exists in academia where often multiple research groups are working on the same research project. Sadly, it's not unheard of for particular reviewers to stonewall acceptance of papers because they have similar results which they are submitting / hope to submit soon to another journal. Imagine how, in the case of patent review where people are competing not just for notoriety but for profits, an even bigger incentive would exist for this sort of thing to go on.
I understand that your point is that it would be nice to have highly qualified individuals doing patent reviews, which would hopefully inject more common sense into the proceedings. I'm just saying that setting up such a system may hhave its own problems to iron out.
Depends on where you live. In the U.S. and U.K., the answer is yes. There have even been cases in the U.K. of people using jammers that have been charged. Doesn't seem to stop people from continuing to sell them quietly though.
The phrase "island Internet" is already a bit of an oxymoron because most of my use of the internet relies on its sheer size and ubiquity. I use Google to look up things I don't know about, which works because someone somewhere around the world is likely to have an informative page on just about any topic. I use email and IM to connect with people because they don't rely on physical proximity. Google News (and Slashdot!) keep me up to date on news wherever I go. I'm sure others could come up with more examples, but the common theme is that each of these applications relies on the connectedness and size of the net today (Metcalfe's Law, anyone?). The internet, to me, boils down to content and reach -- who'll provide that on your "island"?
That's not to say that there won't be new applications for this sort of device -- I can envision something akin to the iPod jacking phenomenon -- but comparing it to the internet is a misleading metaphor.
More sophisticated investment vehicles such as hedge funds usually have their money tied even more closely to the fund. The managers of LTCM, for example, used to be heavy investors in their own fund. Additionally, their fees were usually a percentage of the return -- if they made no money, then they (virtually) didn't get paid, whereas if they showed positive returns, they took a (large) cut of the returns.
You're right in that major shareholders are institutions - Coke's float is 67% held by them. However, that's because "institutions" are usually just investing the public's money. Coke in particular happens to be one of the S&P 500 companies -- know all those people invested in mutual and S&P index funds? Chances are most of them, including a few of your "next-door neighbors", own at least a few shares, and what profits Coke profits them too.
Ultimately, if you think that big multinationals are the ones that are going to be making the money, there's nothing that's stopping you from hitching your money to their wagon. There's nothing stopping you from being one of those investors that's profiting from their returns. Especially in this day with low-cost online brokerages, it's a fallacy to think that only rich people can afford to be investors.
I disagreed with the article quote that "For [Hawley], there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard'."I think the key will be to recognize that electronic music and the more classical type both have their own qualities and complement, rather than replace, each other. Sort of like how electric, acoustic, and classical guitars are all similar instruments but each have their own sound -- none is meant to replicate any other one.
Your typical motion sensor lock runs for $50 list, probably less on the street. Add an entry-level GPS receiver, retailing for around $120. Toss in extra money to support a transceiver that broadcasts the notebook's position (remember, the GPS unit by itself just lets the notebook know where it is; you have to have some way for it to send that location to you), tamper-proofing/camoflage (how good's your GPS receiver if the thief just snaps off your antenna?), monthly charges for monitoring and a call center, and you're probably looking at $400 or more plus subscription. That might be peanuts for a car of $20,000+, but on your $1000 laptop, that's a significant chunk of change.
I disagree that loud laptop alarms won't be effective because they're unnoticed -- after all, the places they'd be used would most likely be study areas or libraries, which are typically very quiet. A 105 decibel alarm in such an area would certainly get people's attention. The problem is that it'd be terribly obnoxious as well. Personally, I think if someone did use one of these somewhere like a library, it'd work great scaring off the would-be thief but not so great against the subsequent mob coming to bash it into silence with textbooks and binders ...
What happened to the good old days when we had RIAA and SCO jokes to space out the Microsoft ones?
From what I could gather from a quick Google, both necrophilia and cannibalism are illegal in the U.K. (someone correct me if I'm wrong), in which case posting web sites advertising that you're doing it would be pretty dumb. The parallel for Americans would be something like hosting child pornography on your server for public consumption -- not only would you be doing something illegal, but you'd be publicizing about it at the same time.
Some sports separate out men and women because physical differences make it hard for them to compete. Obvious examples that come to mind are contact sports like football and basketball, or even non-contacts like tennis (mentioned in one of the article comments) where physicality still plays a strong role. It's the same reasoning that makes sports like boxing have weight classes (a gender-neutral issue): to produce interesting matchups that let the competitors focus on how well they compare with others with a similar physical starting point.
Having said that, it doesn't strike me that there are significant differences in physiology that would prevent co-ed competitions from being fair, any more than you would expect one gender or another to have an advantage in competitions of bridge or snooker. The fact that they still compete in separate brackets more likely has more to do with advertising dollars (sponsors probably figure that the female market for Counterstrike is pretty small) or inertia (hey, let's do our tournaments like every other sports competition!) than any argument based on merit.
I put up the quote from the Goldberg Patents to show that their patent is dated December 1996, which was after Case had already implemented some prior art. I don't know if Case tried to patent his system (I suspect not; trying to patent a ladder system as "new" just because it's implemented on a computer instead of pen-and-paper should strike any reasonable person as silly).
Unless Mr. Goldberg works for IGN and hence owns rights to Case's Ladder, the prior art example should be valid. I also happen to think that implementing a ladder for computer games should be a blindingly obvious extension of sports ladders which have been around since before I was in diapers, but I guess the whole point of this news post was how lax patent examiners have become in allowing these things.
In this particular context, it would include people who have signed up for Microsoft "software subscription" program. Declining unearned revenues mean that there aren't as many people signing up for their subscriptions as they'd hoped.