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User: Cajun+Hell

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  1. There may be prior art, if anyone kept it on Google Awarded Broad Patent For Location-Based Advertising · · Score: 1

    Patent was filed in 2003. But in 2002 (I think it was June but maybe if I check some old records I can narrow this down) I was watching TV and noticed an advertisement for a local business. I didn't think much about it at the time, but a few months later I travelled to another state, and exhausted after the drive, I watched some TV inside my far-from-home hotel room. I didn't see any advertisements for my home town businesses! I'll have to check my old VHS tapes to confirm this.

    In fact, I think I saw an issue of the local newspaper in 2001, where the classified ads section happened to advertise several apartments for rent in my town, and no apartments from apartment advertisers on the other side of the continent. I wonder if I can still find that paper.

    No wait.. in 1999 there was a rock band who had hired a national ad agency to place concert ads in the cities through which they were touring, only targeting the local media but not paying extra to show the ads to the whole national audience. Shit, what was the name of that flash-in-the-pan rock band? Does anyone remember?

    Now that I think of it, in 1998 David Attenborough documented a male bird in Indonesia, where it was showing off its colors and song only to females within a few miles of itself. Birds in Louisiana were totally ignored for its advertising purposes, as the resource cost of transmitting ad to them, was judged by its marketing department as being not worth the expense. (Not to mention that the Louisiana birds may have been genetically incompatible.) Attenborough did a good job of explaining how that bird really wanted to fuck the local females. Maybe I can find a torrent of this show, because it sounds like birds have been doing this at least 5 years before Google.

    Maybe I'm mis-remembering this stuff, but I think industries may have been using location based advertising prior to 2003. Finding the proof won't be easy, though.

  2. Re:No always has been on ARM Designer Steve Furber On Energy-Efficient Computing · · Score: 2, Informative

    And quite honestly, its about the only sector that needs work on energy-efficiency to gain any benefit.

    Google disagrees with you, in a really big way.

    Also, anyone who has hooked up a Kill-A-Watt to their computer, and then calculated how much money per year they're spending on it, disagrees with you.

    This one asshole spent an estimated half a million dollars (of someone else's money) on electricity (which is probably the main reason he really got in trouble), not counting the harder-to-measure increased electric bill for the air conditioning (he was doing this in Arizona).

    Energy costs money. People care about money.

  3. What do you mean they cut the power?! on Space Exploration Needs Extraterrestrial Ethics · · Score: 1

    When dealing with aliens, "terror" and "weakness" will be sufficient. With the occasional "being dissolved by acid blood" for the truly tricky situations...

    Actually, the movies(s) you reference does include a key phrase that pretty much sums up the whole ethical situation.

    "They're just animals."

    Whatever your attitude toward bears, ferns, amoebas, etc is going to be about the same as your attitude toward aliens of similar behavior. Aliens might be new, but our thoughts about them will be nothing new at all.

  4. Re:yeah. its much better to be p0wned on Independent Programmers' No-Win Scenario · · Score: 1

    As far as I can tell that party is made up of nutbags

    I agree, but those nutbags may be the sanest of the bunch.

  5. It really IS magic on iPad Will Beat Netbooks With "Magic" · · Score: 1

    Apple has a lot of convincing-sounding rationalizations for why the iPad/iPod/iPhone should be appliance-like rather than computer-like.

    Some of them, maybe you even agree with.

    But go ahead and look at them, and ask, "Why shouldn't this rationalization just as easily apply to the Macintosh?" Find one that doesn't apply. You can't.

    The consequences to this line of thinking are obviously abhorrent. You know it's wrong. And yet, if you don't follow the logic all the way to desktop PCs, then it doesn't seem so bad, huh? BUT IT'S THE SAME LOGIC.

    What makes it ok for a handheld? Magic, that's what. Nothing you can measure, talk about objectively, or get people to agree on. It's pure religion in its ultimate dogmatic form: Steve said so.

  6. Re:A partial solution: on Beliefs Conform To Cultural Identities · · Score: 1

    What's the church's stance on God's inaction there, anyway? They had it coming?

    In all seriousness, Judeo-Christianity's answer to that is: "shut up and stop asking."

    The "problem" of evil existing in the face of a supposedly omnipotent and benevolent god, was recognized long, long ago as a threat to faith.

    The attempted solution was the book of Job. Read it some time, because it has a comical end. Basically, the devil totally fucks with Job as some sort of a wager with God. Job holds out and stays loyal to God. But at the end, Job gets impatient and says, "Yo God, this is totally unfair. C'mon, why are you allowing this?"

    God's answer: "Who the fuck are you to question anything, pea-brain?!" I'm serious. That's God's answer. So if you want to know why there's evil and how it could possibly be compatible with God's plan, the answer is shut the fuck up with your arrogantly presumptuous questions.

    And that's the best Judeo-Christianity could do. Pretty impressive, huh?

  7. Re:Just ask the teens... on Considering Cheaper Pico-Projectors As Standard Equipment On Cell Phones · · Score: 1

    It's time for the mobile fufme.

  8. Re:Programming has Changed on "Logan's Run" Syndrome In Programming · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When 40+ year olds were going to college or studying, OOP was in its infancy

    Sure, but what do you think 40+ year old programmers have been doing for the last 20 years? We might not have been taught OOP but we've been using it since the guys who were taught it, were in diapers.

  9. Re:The minute this becomes law... on FBI Pushing For 2-Year Retention of Web Traffic Logs · · Score: 1

    So call it the Overseas Server Farm Stimulus bill

  10. Re:Imagine books instead of video on UCLA Profs Banned From Posting Course Videos · · Score: 1

    If the copy machine were, in fact, free, you couldn't stop people from doing this.

    You usually wouldn't be able to stop 'em because you'd never know when it's happening. But whenever you catch 'em, eat their brain and they'll stop. (They caught UCLA and UCLA stopped, didn't they?)

  11. Imagine books instead of video on UCLA Profs Banned From Posting Course Videos · · Score: 3, Informative

    Teacher: "Good morning, lit class. Next we'll be reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It's for sale at the bookstore. Go buy a copy and read the first 100 pages and we'll talk about it on Monday."

    Student: "Buy?! I can't afford that."

    Teacher: "Ok, well the library also has--"

    Student: "Only one copy and Ralph here next to me already checked it out."

    Teacher: "Ok, well, then, I'll just take my copy here over to the photocopy machine. Who all of you need a free copy?"

    Student: "Me!"

    Student: "Mee!"

    Student: "Me too!"

    Heller: "Brains!" [Kills teacher and eats brain.]

    Student: "Why did you kill teacher?"

    Heller: "Copyright infringement."

    Student: "You're dead. Why do you care?"

    Heller: "Need money buy brains."

    That's a totally believable scenario. But change the book to a movie and suddenly people are surprised that someone's brain got eaten.

  12. Of course you should have choices! on iPad Is a "Huge Step Backward" · · Score: 1

    FSF is saying, "this one is a bad choice, and here's why."

  13. David Attenborough is my god on Dinosaur Feather Color Discovered · · Score: 1

    I didn't see any dinosaurs in "Life of Birds." Ergo, you are correct.

  14. Re:Extra things you'll need on Apple's "iPad" Out In the Open · · Score: 1

    If one of my computers already has an ethernet port, why would any of the others need one? Just get a digiboard and run RS232 cables to the other computers.

  15. Re:Is it just D&D ? on Prison Bans D&D For Mimicking Gang Structure · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If I were imprisoned, I'd consider it a significant investment in an opportunity to work hard on improving myself, so as to no longer be a detriment to society.

    With an attitude like that, good luck ever getting into prison.

  16. corporations aren't just a group on Supreme Court Rolls Back Corporate Campaign Spending Limits · · Score: 1

    You might as well argue that racists, communists, libertarians, etc, shouldn't be given free speech for other arbitrary reasons about qualities of those groups.

    There's a huge difference between those groups and corporations.

    The government didn't give you, me, and groups of racists the right to free speech. The government merely protects that right. The government did give corporations the right to free speech. Without government, racists still exist but corporations do not.

    I love the GP's "endowed by their creator" reference. What created the corporations? The law did.

  17. Re:Wait, what? on Three Lawmakers Ask For Enforcement Against Leak Sites · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I really am interested in why would they be called liberals

    Ok, let's look at gay marriage, drug legalization, prostitution.

    A conservative would channel ***PRE***-president Reagan, and say government is the problem and freedom is the solution. They would say that people have to do things for themselves, let the market decide, etc. A liberal, on the other hand, will have a (well-meaning) vision for how a Great Society should be, and think about what actions government policy should take in order to cause that vision to become reality.

    Marriage. The conservative will say, "whatever people wanna do, let 'em do it and face the consequences." Some of them will add, "I hope those homos some day figure out that no matter how much they buttfuck, they're not going to create a baby. Too bad, their loss when they grow old and don't have a family to support them." Other conservatives will say, "What consequences? Spending your life with someone you love? Ha!"

    A liberal will say, "I think we all share a vision of what marriage should be, and the polls even in 2009 bear that out. Government should enact policies enforce the will of the people. That's democracy and the way forward to the world that we want to live in." But then they split on what the will of the people is (damn polls keep changing), so some try to allow gay marriage and some try to outlaw it.

    And so on, the same sort of thing with drugs and prostitution (and healthcare!), The Rs are liberal on some of these, and conservative on others. Same with the Ds. Neither of those parties adopts a consistently liberal or conservative platform. (See the Libertarians or the Communists for consistent ideology.)

    Abortion is a little different. A conservative is going to uphold the woman's right (just like they would for marriage and prostitution) but some of them believe that a fetus is a person and therefore needs its rights upheld too. And really, a liberal can also have that same position too. So abortion isn't really a liberal/conservative conflict. It's a conflict between people who think fetus' rights are in dire jeopardy (babies are being murdered, the most egregious civil rights violation imaginable), versus people who think "fetus' rights" is just as much as a nonsense oxymoron as "rock's rights," so the woman's rights aren't in conflict with anyone else's rights at all. Neither side is really taking the position that a progressive vision-of-society should trump rights, although each side thinks the other side does, since they disagree about whether or not a fetus can have rights.

  18. Copy, delete, new, paste on Best Way To Clear Your Name Online? · · Score: 2, Funny

    Copy yourself to the clipboard and then delete yourself. Create a new record and then paste yourself from the clipboard and save. You'll then have a new primary key, and references to the old you will be orphaned, or maybe even delete themselves depending on how serious the engine is when it comes to referential integrity constraints.

  19. Promoting the progress of science and useful arts on Fast Wi-Fi's Slow Road To Standardization · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    One quote from the article:

    Before the IEEE will approve any given standard, everyone with a patent that touches that standard must sign a LoA (Letter of Agreement). The LoA states that the patent holder won't sue anyone using his or her patent in a standard-compatible device. In this case, the holdout was CISRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), an Australian government research group that held a patent that concerned the development of a wirless LAN. CISRO refused to sign the 802.11n-related LOA.

    and one from the US Constitution:

    Congress shall have the right to .. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

    Try again, Congress.

  20. Re:Blu-Ray: not ready yet on D-Link's New Boxee Box Runs Linux, Eyes Netflix · · Score: 1

    I use the Sony DBP-360 and it's great. I'm just curious how it could be made better because DRM becomes more defeated.

    Select some content that shows off the beautiful capabilities of the player in question, in whatever medium is most convenient for the player (e.g. a Blu-Ray disc). Hook up the player to a high resolution monitor without HDCP (e.g. use your SVGA or DVI input, or put some middle man on an HDMI cable), and play the aforementioned medium.

    Under these circumstances, mplayer will display a high definition movie file in high definition. What does a Sony DBP-360 do with a Blu-Ray disc under such circumstances?

  21. Re:Open source on The Science Credibility Bubble · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So until a realistic Sun/Earth computer model exists, a true "global warming experiment" can't be run.

    The purpose of science is to create and confirm/falsify that model; it can't use that model as a basis for experiments. Nobody is ever going to confirm or falsify a global warming hypothesis using this approach, because if their simulation doesn't get the result they want, they'll just say the model wasn't realistic enough.

    With weather science, we're at a point somewhere in between Copernicus and Kepler. We have a basic idea that appears consistent with the observations, so we're likely (but maybe not) on the right track, but we have lots of nagging details that keep us from having an accurate enough model to really propose a theory. I think it might end up being so complex that we never (even a thousand years from now) quite nail it down with enough precision that we can say, "The temperature will be n.i degrees at this time next month."

    What we do have, though, are parts of the model. We can do an experiment in a flask and see how the gasses in the flask can influence its ability to absorb/reflect/etc energy. If someone thinks this isn't going to a factor in the ultimate (possibly unattainable) model for weather, I'd love to hear why.

    Was Copernicus a scientist? I can't give a satisfying answer to that one, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say he was doing good work. ;)

  22. Blu-Ray: not ready yet on D-Link's New Boxee Box Runs Linux, Eyes Netflix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't buy Blu-Ray until the DRM gets more fully defeated. When Blu-Ray becomes ready, there will be some BD library that developers will be able to use to read the discs, and people will be able to implement players without getting licenses that specify that the product is required to suck (which is why there currently aren't any good players), and then good players (all-in-one boxes, MythTV, etc) will finally appear on the market.

    Until then, if you want high-definition movies, just let pirates deal with the hassles of Blu-Ray's flakiness, and you can download them with bittorrent. You'll end up with movies that just work, including with your own all-in-one box.

    Save your money until Blu-Ray becomes a serious consumer-friendly product. Right now, it's a problem-plagued scam for suckers only.

  23. Re:Fucking moronic on New York State Testing Emergency Alerts Over Gaming Networks · · Score: 1

    BTW, what I forgot to mention in the game example, is that if you're using the game chat capability, I'm not going to get the message anyway, because that's just chat noise. The bots I use to play for me don't know how to make any sense of chats, so they just ignore it. They just tell me when I've gone up a level, so that I know that my game is going well and that I'm having fun. Send your emergency message to me over the emergency feed, where it's properly categorized, and then I will be able to duck and cover and you can all continue to enjoy playing your games with me.

  24. Re:Fucking moronic on New York State Testing Emergency Alerts Over Gaming Networks · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is the same thing as them running the emergency broadcast during your favorite show.

    That's what's moronic. Emergency Broadcast made sense because TVs were incredibly stupid and didn't have the ability to tell users anything other than what someone happened to be broadcasting.

    Our machines have gotten a lot smarter since then. You don't need to interrupt a broadcast anymore, because a computer is capable of interrupting a user directly.

    Let me give you an example of how dumb this is. Let's say it's 8 at night, and right now, there is an incoming ICBM. You're watching an episode of Hogan's Heroes that was broadcast at 3 in the morning, and your PVR is recording the 2009 remake of V.

    Dumb tech: The V broadcast is interrupted by the government saying, "Hey, everyone, you might want to duck and cover." Your PVR dutifully records this so that on The Day After, when you watch V, you get to see the warning that was broadcast last night. Meanwhile, as the ICBM comes in, Hogans' Heroes plays uninterrupted. You don't duck and cover, and oops, you're not ever going to get to watch the warning in the middle of V explaining that you were supposed to duck and cover, because you got shredded by flying glass while you were obliviously watching TV. When they find your corpse, you're still wearing the monocle that you always wear when you watch Hogan's Heroes. You lose.

    Smart tech: V is uninterrupted, since by the time you get around to watching it, there won't be any reason to duck and cover. There's just no reason to fuck with your recording. Your PVR is playing Hogan's Heroes, but also knows that there's this one government feed that you subscribed to, that you've said you want to see with great priority. Hogan climbs out of the tunnel and Sergeant Schultz sees him -- and even though this was broadcast many hours ago before anyone knew about the ICBM -- you don't get to find out if Hogan finally gets shot, because your TV says, "Hey, everyone, you might want to duck and cover." You duck and cover. After the explosion when things calm down, you get to watch what happens to Hogan and (this is the important part) your recording of V is intact without an obsolete warning, although there's this one spot in the recording where there's suddenly a lot of static and people said that shit wasn't going to happen with digital TV, so you feel ripped off. But at least your PVR did the right thing as well as it could. You (relatively, considering what all is happening, with the nuclear war raging and all that) win.

    An internet-connected game system is like a PVR, in that it can be smarter. It's capable of listening for more than one thing, so that even the game server doesn't say anything about the ICBM, your game machine can still tell you about the ICBM. And people who aren't getting nuked don't have to worry about all this irrelevant-to-them server load interfering with their important game.

  25. Re:Ugh. on Cooling Bags Could Cut Server Cooling Costs By 93% · · Score: 1

    Weird that your filters are malfunctioning. But anyway, these cool new bags are only currently available through barter, in exchange for 2 kiddie porn magazines plus one copy of michaelangelo virus.