The problem is if B&N wins, then everyone else who has had these bandied at them has a countersuit to recover the costs already paid under false pretenses. If MS brings NEW patents, then people will be inclined to look for prior art because fuck, it worked for B&N.
I can't imagine why people don't contract lawyers and insist on the lawyers recovering their legal fees. Shall you win I will pay you up to $X and then beyond that 10% of your legal fees only up to $Y, and you shall independently pursue the plaintiff for recovery of your legal expenses; shall you lose, you shall receive at most $a (less than $X, or maybe a very low rate). We shall provide documentation of agreed upon legal rates and all agreements related to said legal case; you shall supply justification of your rates, such as but not limited to comparison to your normal rate spread.
Reality becomes: Legal battles are back-breaking, legal bullshit raises hell, and shareholders dislike watching you try to dirty the game by lawroom bullshit. Eventually, lawyers don't want to work your cases--or when your lawyer sees this is going nowhere, he strongly recommends retracting the case parts way to inform you that you will need to bid up a new lawyer.
It's a matter of leverage, really. I could kick your ass right now, that could get messy. How about we don't go down that way? Oh ok you want to be slightly less annoying... bah, it's too much work to beat the shit out of you, and then the cops show up, and then I have to explain shit to make them go away. Fine whatever, here's a dollar now fuck off.
Plus, after Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 and we ended up with that idiot George W. Bush as President a lot of people started really voting for the lesser of two evils in earnest. What other choice do the people have? Support a fringe candidate that is just not going to win, period? Or throw your hat in with the guy you disagree with the least that may actually win the election?
You're funny. You think the president has power. He is the most powerless man on the planet. Shake 70% of Congress and they will do whatever it is you want, and the President will give speeches about how he wishes to be Emperor and how we need to bypass Congress and get out of the hell of Bureaucracy that's holding back his jobs bill...
Ubuntu (with Gnome Shell), then Debian (when you're ready). Give it a spin. Personally I stick on Ubuntu, but people have said many nice things about Debian... also Linux Mint, but when I used it in late 2010 it was horribly broken and dysfunctional.
You seem to believe there isn't a scale of adjustment here. America is not a capitalist society; it is a Free Enterprise System, which is slightly away from capitalism by means of regulation. Unfortunately, the tone of that regulation has been polluted by the capitalist entities with the largest amount of power, such that it represents their interests in many cases rather than the interests of the people. With a more socialist system, the tone of regulation is polluted such that only the explicit rulers have power, and they use it to keep up the guise of doing "what's best for everyone" (which they fail at, usually; and when they don't, the system still has little to no incentive to supply more than very base conditions in its optimal state).
Full communism sucks. Strong communism sucks less. Full capitalism sucks as much as full communism--it's the same system with different rules. Strong capitalism sucks less. The only viable system is still leaving power in the hands of a few, who are intended to keep the system in balance as it changes over time. These rulers have little power, but can quickly usurp it if they go rogue and start to poison the system--hence why it is so difficult to build a working, durable social system.
I play Go because it teaches me balance, along with a number of other important skills. Today we are taught to want everything now and to not accept anything we can get away with--sue everyone, ban everything, to hell with the consequences. There must be balance in all things...
it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.
They will listen to fifty million phone calls and angry lynch mobs. The only thing that frightens a congressman more than getting beheaded is losing a substantial number of votes. Floods of phone calls and e-mails and hand-written letters from private citizens that are pissed off at you are a strong indication that voters may seek to replace you in the next election.
My point is that claiming a business is auto-fail because it's not a big multi-megacorp is like giving the guy who came up with FedEx a fail for having a ridiculous and impossible business plan that involves shit that hasn't been done before; except in this case, we've already seen no-name distributors carry big-name titles.
A company that shipped Tribes 2, UT, Quake 3, Railroad Tycoon, SC3000, Civilization, Soldier of Fortune... yes, a no-name company that went out of business, which no big game companies like ID Software or Activision are going to pay attention to, right? Or did you mean only EA counts as a big game company--the Microsoft of Video Games, while these people are just small Apples?
I don't use Audigy tools, but the Audigy card sounds far better than a current-gen VIA or RealTek AC97 onboard. I bought an Audigy2 for $10 and use it in Linux.
Yes but the point is I don't feel it's well and proper to kill an animal for its fur, or hide, or the content of a gland, or for its meat. Rabbit fur is good, but rabbit meat is food! If you're taking the fur, why are you discarding the incredibly useful carcass instead of eating it? Similarly, why would you kill a musk deer to extract perfume, and not make both deer leather and deer meat? Something is wrong with this. Even Merino sheep are bred to produce slightly less wool, for the advantage of being useful as a slaughter animal for meat--because otherwise the animal would be bred and sheered, and then kill and discard the carcass wastefully.
I find that libraries carry a lot of common information and not so much uncommon information. This sort of muckery seems to encourage concentration of information into a smaller and smaller realm, constantly sorting out first the never-used, then the minimally-used, to maximize volume of return but minimize the use of the library as a haven for obscure and long-forgotten knowledge. Effectively, like burning some books while not burning other books--removes knowledge.
As with all things, there must be balance. A library where you don't increase holding of more useful texts is less immediately useful; although if you removed all the most used texts, you would have an interesting outcome... the obscure and oft-overlooked need retention, too.
If you eat animal meat without making use of the perfectly good leather or fur stock, you deserve to be murdered. So wasteful! Even silk is made by boiling thousands of silk larvae to death--the larvae is then reclaimed and put into food in China!
No no no. You buy the CD, you rip copies to your hard drive, then sell the CD to Record and Tape Traders for $5. You have the music, they have the CD. It's the same with i.e. Amazon MP3s, you upload your copy for resale but you KEEP the original you have downloaded, now there are TWO copies. A thing that cannot be stopped, so we just plead with you to not do it.
Fiction does weird things. If I read an epic that spans several months, in fifteen minutes' time I'm snapping out of an altered state of consciousness where several months have passed. My memory is an interpret-and-rewrite model, where the consequences of an instruction are the permanent storage--so if I read something, my memory is of what the thing is rather than of reading it. I don't recall ever reading several of the Thomas Covenant books, but I recall being there...
Things like The Gap Cycle more stand out because of how they're told: you're immersed in character thought rather than third person perspective. Rather than a rather challenging linguistic rendition of events, each chapter is told from the perspective of a certain character--often overlapping events, or backtracking to fill details of what just happened (because something happened over there, and it ended in what just ended the last chapter, but let's find out why this guy is suddenly in control of this weapon and using it against us!). Things like Morn Hyland, "Jesus, was he [...]?... Yes. Angus was capable of that." It's not presented as character thought, but rather just written as part of the text--but the text is from the character's POV, it carries the character's sentiment, and sometimes odd character thoughts are written in without bothering to note that this is a thought the character is having.
Of course, even that kind of sentiment belies a reason for textual memorization: you're being steeped in the character's thoughts and feelings; these happen to be thoughts that you had, you remember thinking that. I have no idea what happened before that passage--there was [...] and [...] and some stuff got [...] and then [...] but Angus [...], sure, but I don't recall how much text was devoted to any of that, much less what it may have consisted of. I just remember shit got real.
I have to recommend The Gap Cycle, by the way. Don't ask on genre, or subject. It is an amazing book, period; it fails to please in its genre if that's what you care about, because it's too busy delivering a competently-written story. Also the first book-and-a-half (book one is short, because it inflicts mental damage--it has to or your suspension of disbelief wouldn't suffice to accept the main character's thoughts and actions as realistic) is a challenge in patience, as the stage must be set before the actors can play. A lot of banal actions, meeting the cast, boring day to day activities.
Still, after the setup, the story continues to grow more and more interesting. This never ends; the final pages leading out are conclusive, yet they continue to be epic right into the final moments, with tension hanging on every word of every sentence right to the end. The situations get immensely complex, and Donaldson makes no move to allow small but crucial mistakes--every breath is important, every fraction of a second spent thinking, every delay, every reaction. We will not accept that a rational person in such situation may decide to question or to not accept these slight missteps; these slight missteps have an impact, and saving throws are very, very lucky and leave those who have been irritated still unimpressed and now more impatient. This is not a plot element; it is reality, it is a lasting result of cause and effect, and not forgotten the moment we move into another scene.
Backup copies, you're just trading files with moneys attached. Like reselling a physical CD after ripping it or copying it to tape or whatnot, same as we've done for years really, just quicker and easier. This kind of resale relies heavily on the honor system.
There is the issue that there may be 263 patents, one being a silver bullet and the rest trash. Personally I think if you raise hell with bogus patents to try to avoid using your silver bullet (i.e. it's easy to get around, whereas avoiding 263 patents is like walking through a minefield...), you deserve to have your claims DENIED. FOREVER. Too much bullshit in the pile you submitted, so we are going to just assume the whole lot is invalid and invalidate it; if you can show that some are valid, good for you, but we no longer care because you played dirty and YOU LOST.
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The problem is if B&N wins, then everyone else who has had these bandied at them has a countersuit to recover the costs already paid under false pretenses. If MS brings NEW patents, then people will be inclined to look for prior art because fuck, it worked for B&N.
I can't imagine why people don't contract lawyers and insist on the lawyers recovering their legal fees. Shall you win I will pay you up to $X and then beyond that 10% of your legal fees only up to $Y, and you shall independently pursue the plaintiff for recovery of your legal expenses; shall you lose, you shall receive at most $a (less than $X, or maybe a very low rate). We shall provide documentation of agreed upon legal rates and all agreements related to said legal case; you shall supply justification of your rates, such as but not limited to comparison to your normal rate spread.
Reality becomes: Legal battles are back-breaking, legal bullshit raises hell, and shareholders dislike watching you try to dirty the game by lawroom bullshit. Eventually, lawyers don't want to work your cases--or when your lawyer sees this is going nowhere, he strongly recommends retracting the case parts way to inform you that you will need to bid up a new lawyer.
It's a matter of leverage, really. I could kick your ass right now, that could get messy. How about we don't go down that way? Oh ok you want to be slightly less annoying ... bah, it's too much work to beat the shit out of you, and then the cops show up, and then I have to explain shit to make them go away. Fine whatever, here's a dollar now fuck off.
Plus, after Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 and we ended up with that idiot George W. Bush as President a lot of people started really voting for the lesser of two evils in earnest. What other choice do the people have? Support a fringe candidate that is just not going to win, period? Or throw your hat in with the guy you disagree with the least that may actually win the election?
You're funny. You think the president has power. He is the most powerless man on the planet. Shake 70% of Congress and they will do whatever it is you want, and the President will give speeches about how he wishes to be Emperor and how we need to bypass Congress and get out of the hell of Bureaucracy that's holding back his jobs bill...
... but Google isn't an ISP and ins't blocking or regulating through-traffic...
Ubuntu (with Gnome Shell), then Debian (when you're ready). Give it a spin. Personally I stick on Ubuntu, but people have said many nice things about Debian ... also Linux Mint, but when I used it in late 2010 it was horribly broken and dysfunctional.
You seem to believe there isn't a scale of adjustment here. America is not a capitalist society; it is a Free Enterprise System, which is slightly away from capitalism by means of regulation. Unfortunately, the tone of that regulation has been polluted by the capitalist entities with the largest amount of power, such that it represents their interests in many cases rather than the interests of the people. With a more socialist system, the tone of regulation is polluted such that only the explicit rulers have power, and they use it to keep up the guise of doing "what's best for everyone" (which they fail at, usually; and when they don't, the system still has little to no incentive to supply more than very base conditions in its optimal state).
Full communism sucks. Strong communism sucks less. Full capitalism sucks as much as full communism--it's the same system with different rules. Strong capitalism sucks less. The only viable system is still leaving power in the hands of a few, who are intended to keep the system in balance as it changes over time. These rulers have little power, but can quickly usurp it if they go rogue and start to poison the system--hence why it is so difficult to build a working, durable social system.
Spoken like a man who plays Diplomacy a lot.
I play Go because it teaches me balance, along with a number of other important skills. Today we are taught to want everything now and to not accept anything we can get away with--sue everyone, ban everything, to hell with the consequences. There must be balance in all things...
You're funny. What exactly do you get from the US? We don't export anything except 70% of the world's grain.
it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.
They will listen to fifty million phone calls and angry lynch mobs. The only thing that frightens a congressman more than getting beheaded is losing a substantial number of votes. Floods of phone calls and e-mails and hand-written letters from private citizens that are pissed off at you are a strong indication that voters may seek to replace you in the next election.
My point is that claiming a business is auto-fail because it's not a big multi-megacorp is like giving the guy who came up with FedEx a fail for having a ridiculous and impossible business plan that involves shit that hasn't been done before; except in this case, we've already seen no-name distributors carry big-name titles.
A company that shipped Tribes 2, UT, Quake 3, Railroad Tycoon, SC3000, Civilization, Soldier of Fortune... yes, a no-name company that went out of business, which no big game companies like ID Software or Activision are going to pay attention to, right? Or did you mean only EA counts as a big game company--the Microsoft of Video Games, while these people are just small Apples?
Loki Games....
I don't use Audigy tools, but the Audigy card sounds far better than a current-gen VIA or RealTek AC97 onboard. I bought an Audigy2 for $10 and use it in Linux.
Yes but the point is I don't feel it's well and proper to kill an animal for its fur, or hide, or the content of a gland, or for its meat. Rabbit fur is good, but rabbit meat is food! If you're taking the fur, why are you discarding the incredibly useful carcass instead of eating it? Similarly, why would you kill a musk deer to extract perfume, and not make both deer leather and deer meat? Something is wrong with this. Even Merino sheep are bred to produce slightly less wool, for the advantage of being useful as a slaughter animal for meat--because otherwise the animal would be bred and sheered, and then kill and discard the carcass wastefully.
I find that libraries carry a lot of common information and not so much uncommon information. This sort of muckery seems to encourage concentration of information into a smaller and smaller realm, constantly sorting out first the never-used, then the minimally-used, to maximize volume of return but minimize the use of the library as a haven for obscure and long-forgotten knowledge. Effectively, like burning some books while not burning other books--removes knowledge.
As with all things, there must be balance. A library where you don't increase holding of more useful texts is less immediately useful; although if you removed all the most used texts, you would have an interesting outcome... the obscure and oft-overlooked need retention, too.
In all honesty, even wild seals are rather friendly. You could just huddle in a pile with them.
If you eat animal meat without making use of the perfectly good leather or fur stock, you deserve to be murdered. So wasteful! Even silk is made by boiling thousands of silk larvae to death--the larvae is then reclaimed and put into food in China!
No no no. You buy the CD, you rip copies to your hard drive, then sell the CD to Record and Tape Traders for $5. You have the music, they have the CD. It's the same with i.e. Amazon MP3s, you upload your copy for resale but you KEEP the original you have downloaded, now there are TWO copies. A thing that cannot be stopped, so we just plead with you to not do it.
How the fuck can you not read in second grade? I could read before kindergarten.
Kanji is pieces, parts and overlays. There are rules for how to interpret it. It's effectively reading multiple shapes at once.
Fiction does weird things. If I read an epic that spans several months, in fifteen minutes' time I'm snapping out of an altered state of consciousness where several months have passed. My memory is an interpret-and-rewrite model, where the consequences of an instruction are the permanent storage--so if I read something, my memory is of what the thing is rather than of reading it. I don't recall ever reading several of the Thomas Covenant books, but I recall being there...
Things like The Gap Cycle more stand out because of how they're told: you're immersed in character thought rather than third person perspective. Rather than a rather challenging linguistic rendition of events, each chapter is told from the perspective of a certain character--often overlapping events, or backtracking to fill details of what just happened (because something happened over there, and it ended in what just ended the last chapter, but let's find out why this guy is suddenly in control of this weapon and using it against us!). Things like Morn Hyland, "Jesus, was he [...]? ... Yes. Angus was capable of that." It's not presented as character thought, but rather just written as part of the text--but the text is from the character's POV, it carries the character's sentiment, and sometimes odd character thoughts are written in without bothering to note that this is a thought the character is having.
Of course, even that kind of sentiment belies a reason for textual memorization: you're being steeped in the character's thoughts and feelings; these happen to be thoughts that you had, you remember thinking that. I have no idea what happened before that passage--there was [...] and [...] and some stuff got [...] and then [...] but Angus [...], sure, but I don't recall how much text was devoted to any of that, much less what it may have consisted of. I just remember shit got real.
I have to recommend The Gap Cycle, by the way. Don't ask on genre, or subject. It is an amazing book, period; it fails to please in its genre if that's what you care about, because it's too busy delivering a competently-written story. Also the first book-and-a-half (book one is short, because it inflicts mental damage--it has to or your suspension of disbelief wouldn't suffice to accept the main character's thoughts and actions as realistic) is a challenge in patience, as the stage must be set before the actors can play. A lot of banal actions, meeting the cast, boring day to day activities.
Still, after the setup, the story continues to grow more and more interesting. This never ends; the final pages leading out are conclusive, yet they continue to be epic right into the final moments, with tension hanging on every word of every sentence right to the end. The situations get immensely complex, and Donaldson makes no move to allow small but crucial mistakes--every breath is important, every fraction of a second spent thinking, every delay, every reaction. We will not accept that a rational person in such situation may decide to question or to not accept these slight missteps; these slight missteps have an impact, and saving throws are very, very lucky and leave those who have been irritated still unimpressed and now more impatient. This is not a plot element; it is reality, it is a lasting result of cause and effect, and not forgotten the moment we move into another scene.
Backup copies, you're just trading files with moneys attached. Like reselling a physical CD after ripping it or copying it to tape or whatnot, same as we've done for years really, just quicker and easier. This kind of resale relies heavily on the honor system.
There is the issue that there may be 263 patents, one being a silver bullet and the rest trash. Personally I think if you raise hell with bogus patents to try to avoid using your silver bullet (i.e. it's easy to get around, whereas avoiding 263 patents is like walking through a minefield...), you deserve to have your claims DENIED. FOREVER. Too much bullshit in the pile you submitted, so we are going to just assume the whole lot is invalid and invalidate it; if you can show that some are valid, good for you, but we no longer care because you played dirty and YOU LOST.