Someone should do a page just of hilarious "citation needed" edits on Wikipedia. I've seen some pretty funny/bizarre ones, especially lately. Someone could post "The Earth has a moon" on there and some prick would have a [citation needed] slapped on it five seconds later.
Even better, someone should publish a *book* of them, and then *it* could be the citation.:)
I don't know anything about how RDRand works so this may be a stupid question, but would it be possible for someone to write a drop-in replacement for it?
If we're talking about a lending library, then they take away your books after 3 weeks, even IF you continue to be a member.
Our public library has something very similar running already: there are a number of ebooks and audiobooks available for 7 or 21-day loans, for free. It was kind of neat this summer when I was on vacation in another country, and still able to check out a book from the library.:)
The tighter the filter, the more people will be annoyed by it and turn it off. And if it really were strictly a porn filter, people might be too embarrassed to opt-out. Now everyone has plausible deniability: "I need to run a VPN for work" or whatever.
This idea that blocking ads is "stealing content"...very interesting. Suppose instead of blocking ads, I made a list of every company that advertised to me on the web and personally boycotted each one. Where would that fall on the ethical scale?
Mod parent up. It will be a lot easier, psychologically speaking, for people to opt-out of the filter if it's not just about porn. Also more people will be inconvenienced by it, and more people will get pissed off over it. So this is actually good news, in a perverse sort of way.
What would happen if the Bitcoin Foundation just shut down, ceased to exist? What effect would that have on the use of Bitcoins as currency? And would that satisfy the "cease and desist" order?
First, I take exception to this remark. I'm a 38-year-old straight guy (I find women WAY more attractive than men), but this sort of transparent ploy just seems pathetic to me. It is not a turn-on to see women desperately flirting with me when I know all they want is for me to buy their product. People like to talk about sexism towards men: THAT Is sexism towards men. "Oh, put a sexy lady in front of him and he'll do anything we tell him to." Ugh.
Second, did you see the numbers above? "45 percent of the entire gaming population is now women, and women make up 46 percent of the most frequent game buyers." It is *not* a male-dominated industry any more.
(I'm not even going to get into the use of women as decorative objects because someone who complains about "political correctness" isn't going to see anything wrong with that anyway, I figure.)
gtbritshskull is correct; s/he merely said that if there were a common factor (3 in my example), then you could simplify the expression, which is true: 3^3+6^3=3^5 CAN be simplified by dividing both sides by 3^3.
In general, you can divide both sides by [gcd(A,B,C)]^min(x,y,z) I believe.
Only if x=y=z. For instance, somebody above suggested 3^3 + 6^3 = 3^5 (27+216=243). If we factor out the common 3, we get 3^2 + 2*(6^2) = 3^4 (9+72=81), which no longer has the right form because 72 is not a power of any number.
If x=y=z, and if A^x+B^x=C^x where A,B,C had the same greatest common factor n, then you could divide all three numbers by n^x and get a new formula (A/n)^x+(B/n)^y=(C/n)^z where A/n, B/n, and C/n had no common factor, and if Beal's conjecture is true then these numbers cannot exist if x>2. Therefore A^x+B^x=C^x has no nontrivial solution for x>2, which is Fermat's last theorem.
Meh, you're exaggerating my analogy; Alice was able to call a friend on her phone and she got down from the roof just fine. And Bob could have said "No sorry, I can't hold the ladder for you," or he could have said, "I'm so sorry, but I forgot I left my oven on," or he could have shouted up the ladder, "Hey Alice, sorry but I really have to go!"
But I won't try to convince you further unless you want me to.
ALICE: "Hey Bob, will you come hold this ladder for me while I climb up on the roof, make sure it doesn't fall over." BOB: "OK" Bob holds the ladder, Alice climbs up on the roof. Bob gets bored and leaves, and the ladder falls over. ALICE (on cellphone to Bob): "Hey you jerk! You left me up here on the roof! Why didn't you stay?" BOB: "It's not like you were paying me or anything. You should be grateful that I stayed for as long as I did."
Now, how should Alice react? There probably isn't any sort of legal remedy she can take against him (just as there's no legal remedy that people have against Google for taking away their free services). But you can bet she's angry, and she's going to think twice about turning to Bob again, and she's going to warn all her friends that Bob is not to be trusted.
That's the "issue", and that's what's going on here. All free services have the potential to become an important part of somebody's life, so that taking them away can leave them up on the roof without a ladder.
I check Facebook because my extended family posts there; some of them I wouldn't be comfortable talking with one-on-one because we don't have a lot in common (and I've tried!), but I still want to know how they're doing because I love them and care about their well-being. Facebook isn't my main hangout and I rarely post there myself, but to quit FB entirely I would either have to cut myself off from my extended family a little bit, or else convince all of them (most of whom are not particularly computer-savvy) to move to another service.
It's all about where your group is at. Personally I think it's weird that people have personal conversations over Twitter: it's just a news/joke aggregator for me. And I do most of my social-media socializing on an odd little website called Plurk, because that's where my closest circle of friends have ended up.
I have a Firefox extension called Social Fixer which does great at fixing the major Facebook annoyances, but there's no such option on iOS and the in-feed ads are already pretty annoying; with videos I'll probably limit my FB viewing to the laptop.
You could put a second battery in the dock for portability, maybe a second graphics card or more RAM as well? It's kind of like having a separate computer and tablet, except their states and their hard drives stay synced.
When we give women more time off than men to take care of an infant (and that's what parental leave is mostly for), we are strengthening the notion that the mother is the better person to take care of a baby. And what about women who don't *want* to take so much time off from work? My wife is a researcher running her own lab, and needed to get back to work as soon as she could after our son was born. Fortunately, I was working part-time and I could be a stay-at-home dad (with some babysitting assistance). But suppose I had a similar job to hers, and the University said "OK, she can have 12 weeks off but you can only have 6", isn't that putting added pressure on her to take the leave, regardless of the relative importance of our positions? Isn't it telling her "We can spare you a lot more easily than we can spare your husband, because he's a man"?
So I see no reason for women to cheer this disparity.
.... some a$$hat took a photo of me, posted it on the web and didn't ask for my permission. Now it's potentially orphaned, and Wham I'm the face on the ads for selling selling A$$ cream for Joe Schmoe over in the UK and I can't stop it?/facepalm
Instead, Joe Schmoe can send a photographer out and take your picture as you walk down the street, and use your face to sell A$$ cream. It's not this law that's the problem (in this case).
Isaac Asimov wrote about this in many essays on robotics and computers, and saw this as a plus: we may get to the point where we don't NEED everybody to be working 40 hours a week, so people would be free to pursue their own activities. And if by saying that these people are no longer "necessary" than you're buying into the mindset that a person's essential worth is tied up with their work and how they contribute to the economy. Asimov, unfortunately, underestimated how powerful that mindset is. The thought of paying everybody a living wage whether they work or not is abhorrent to so many people (in America, at least), even if there isn't any work that needs doing.
Yes, for the reasons you mention the ruling does seem bizarre to me. However, I suspect that the descriptiveness of "mini" is still enough to reject the application, even if the other reasoning is fallacious, so I didn't want to focus on arguing those points.
- The fact that there are no trademarks for "Mac mini" or "iPod mini" is strong evidence that "iPad mini" cannot be trademarked...
- The fact that there is a trademark for "iPad" is strong evidence that, well, you know, "iPad" can be trademarked;-)
Well, it IS possible for a trademark to slip into the public domain and be lost, maybe even in the time between the iPad trademark and this application. I'm wondering if that's what the patent reviewer had in mind?
I'm not even sure about the problem with mini, since I wouldn't say "I have a tablet mini!" but "I have a mini tablet!" But ok I guess.:)
This just seems bizarre to me. I've never heard anyone refer to a tablet as a "pad", outside of Star Trek's PADDs, have you? That sounds like a bizarre ruling. Nor have I seen anyone attach i- to anything and not have it be a reference to Apple; there's e-commerce but not i-commerce, no one says "do you have an i-connection?", etc.
First, Google isn't making any money from Reader but it must have been getting something out of it or else they never would have put it online in the first place. Part of what they're getting is goodwill, so that people will further equate "Google" with "useful product". Now that they're closing Reader, they lose that goodwill. And if we the users make a big enough stink about it, if we make it very expensive for them to shut down Reader, than next time they will have to factor that into their calculation when they consider shutting down a service, and maybe we get to keep something we like. Thus, the whining about Reader online does in fact make sound business sense on the users' part. There's more to the economy than just money.
Second, Reader is a special case because it has become the de facto standard for RSS reader synchronization; almost all RSS readers in the past few years let you (or force you to) synchronize with Google Reader, so that you can move back and forth from one app to another without forgetting which articles you've already read. By offering Reader for free they were distorting the market (discouraging others from setting up their own synchronization services), and while four months is plenty of time for an individual to find a new RSS reader, it's not a lot of time for a software maker to rewrite their software. I've seen this compared to Microsoft's Embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy. I don't think it was intentional on Google's part in this case—if I understand it correctly they weren't encouraging the use of their API for synchronization purposes—but still, "a giant has to watch where he steps".
Slashdot Mirror
Someone should do a page just of hilarious "citation needed" edits on Wikipedia. I've seen some pretty funny/bizarre ones, especially lately. Someone could post "The Earth has a moon" on there and some prick would have a [citation needed] slapped on it five seconds later.
Even better, someone should publish a *book* of them, and then *it* could be the citation. :)
why not just use an older version?
You can be sure I'm never updating my copy of Social Fixer again!
I don't know anything about how RDRand works so this may be a stupid question, but would it be possible for someone to write a drop-in replacement for it?
If we're talking about a lending library, then they take away your books after 3 weeks, even IF you continue to be a member.
Our public library has something very similar running already: there are a number of ebooks and audiobooks available for 7 or 21-day loans, for free. It was kind of neat this summer when I was on vacation in another country, and still able to check out a book from the library. :)
The tighter the filter, the more people will be annoyed by it and turn it off. And if it really were strictly a porn filter, people might be too embarrassed to opt-out. Now everyone has plausible deniability: "I need to run a VPN for work" or whatever.
This idea that blocking ads is "stealing content"...very interesting. Suppose instead of blocking ads, I made a list of every company that advertised to me on the web and personally boycotted each one. Where would that fall on the ethical scale?
Mod parent up. It will be a lot easier, psychologically speaking, for people to opt-out of the filter if it's not just about porn. Also more people will be inconvenienced by it, and more people will get pissed off over it. So this is actually good news, in a perverse sort of way.
What would happen if the Bitcoin Foundation just shut down, ceased to exist? What effect would that have on the use of Bitcoins as currency? And would that satisfy the "cease and desist" order?
First, I take exception to this remark. I'm a 38-year-old straight guy (I find women WAY more attractive than men), but this sort of transparent ploy just seems pathetic to me. It is not a turn-on to see women desperately flirting with me when I know all they want is for me to buy their product. People like to talk about sexism towards men: THAT Is sexism towards men. "Oh, put a sexy lady in front of him and he'll do anything we tell him to." Ugh.
Second, did you see the numbers above? "45 percent of the entire gaming population is now women, and women make up 46 percent of the most frequent game buyers." It is *not* a male-dominated industry any more.
(I'm not even going to get into the use of women as decorative objects because someone who complains about "political correctness" isn't going to see anything wrong with that anyway, I figure.)
gtbritshskull is correct; s/he merely said that if there were a common factor (3 in my example), then you could simplify the expression, which is true: 3^3+6^3=3^5 CAN be simplified by dividing both sides by 3^3.
In general, you can divide both sides by [gcd(A,B,C)]^min(x,y,z) I believe.
D'oh, good catch. But then z=2 and the conjecture specifies that all the exponents be greater than 2.
Only if x=y=z. For instance, somebody above suggested 3^3 + 6^3 = 3^5 (27+216=243). If we factor out the common 3, we get 3^2 + 2*(6^2) = 3^4 (9+72=81), which no longer has the right form because 72 is not a power of any number.
If x=y=z, and if A^x+B^x=C^x where A,B,C had the same greatest common factor n, then you could divide all three numbers by n^x and get a new formula (A/n)^x+(B/n)^y=(C/n)^z where A/n, B/n, and C/n had no common factor, and if Beal's conjecture is true then these numbers cannot exist if x>2. Therefore A^x+B^x=C^x has no nontrivial solution for x>2, which is Fermat's last theorem.
Meh, you're exaggerating my analogy; Alice was able to call a friend on her phone and she got down from the roof just fine. And Bob could have said "No sorry, I can't hold the ladder for you," or he could have said, "I'm so sorry, but I forgot I left my oven on," or he could have shouted up the ladder, "Hey Alice, sorry but I really have to go!"
But I won't try to convince you further unless you want me to.
ALICE: "Hey Bob, will you come hold this ladder for me while I climb up on the roof, make sure it doesn't fall over."
BOB: "OK"
Bob holds the ladder, Alice climbs up on the roof. Bob gets bored and leaves, and the ladder falls over.
ALICE (on cellphone to Bob): "Hey you jerk! You left me up here on the roof! Why didn't you stay?"
BOB: "It's not like you were paying me or anything. You should be grateful that I stayed for as long as I did."
Now, how should Alice react? There probably isn't any sort of legal remedy she can take against him (just as there's no legal remedy that people have against Google for taking away their free services). But you can bet she's angry, and she's going to think twice about turning to Bob again, and she's going to warn all her friends that Bob is not to be trusted.
That's the "issue", and that's what's going on here. All free services have the potential to become an important part of somebody's life, so that taking them away can leave them up on the roof without a ladder.
I check Facebook because my extended family posts there; some of them I wouldn't be comfortable talking with one-on-one because we don't have a lot in common (and I've tried!), but I still want to know how they're doing because I love them and care about their well-being. Facebook isn't my main hangout and I rarely post there myself, but to quit FB entirely I would either have to cut myself off from my extended family a little bit, or else convince all of them (most of whom are not particularly computer-savvy) to move to another service.
It's all about where your group is at. Personally I think it's weird that people have personal conversations over Twitter: it's just a news/joke aggregator for me. And I do most of my social-media socializing on an odd little website called Plurk, because that's where my closest circle of friends have ended up.
I have a Firefox extension called Social Fixer which does great at fixing the major Facebook annoyances, but there's no such option on iOS and the in-feed ads are already pretty annoying; with videos I'll probably limit my FB viewing to the laptop.
You could put a second battery in the dock for portability, maybe a second graphics card or more RAM as well? It's kind of like having a separate computer and tablet, except their states and their hard drives stay synced.
We tried it their way once. It was called "feudalism".
When we give women more time off than men to take care of an infant (and that's what parental leave is mostly for), we are strengthening the notion that the mother is the better person to take care of a baby. And what about women who don't *want* to take so much time off from work? My wife is a researcher running her own lab, and needed to get back to work as soon as she could after our son was born. Fortunately, I was working part-time and I could be a stay-at-home dad (with some babysitting assistance). But suppose I had a similar job to hers, and the University said "OK, she can have 12 weeks off but you can only have 6", isn't that putting added pressure on her to take the leave, regardless of the relative importance of our positions? Isn't it telling her "We can spare you a lot more easily than we can spare your husband, because he's a man"?
So I see no reason for women to cheer this disparity.
.... some a$$hat took a photo of me, posted it on the web and didn't ask for my permission. Now it's potentially orphaned, and Wham I'm the face on the ads for selling selling A$$ cream for Joe Schmoe over in the UK and I can't stop it? /facepalm
Instead, Joe Schmoe can send a photographer out and take your picture as you walk down the street, and use your face to sell A$$ cream. It's not this law that's the problem (in this case).
Add Kathy Dunderdale and her allies to as many unseemly Facebook groups as possible.
Isaac Asimov wrote about this in many essays on robotics and computers, and saw this as a plus: we may get to the point where we don't NEED everybody to be working 40 hours a week, so people would be free to pursue their own activities. And if by saying that these people are no longer "necessary" than you're buying into the mindset that a person's essential worth is tied up with their work and how they contribute to the economy. Asimov, unfortunately, underestimated how powerful that mindset is. The thought of paying everybody a living wage whether they work or not is abhorrent to so many people (in America, at least), even if there isn't any work that needs doing.
Yes, for the reasons you mention the ruling does seem bizarre to me. However, I suspect that the descriptiveness of "mini" is still enough to reject the application, even if the other reasoning is fallacious, so I didn't want to focus on arguing those points.
- The fact that there are no trademarks for "Mac mini" or "iPod mini" is strong evidence that "iPad mini" cannot be trademarked...
- The fact that there is a trademark for "iPad" is strong evidence that, well, you know, "iPad" can be trademarked ;-)
Well, it IS possible for a trademark to slip into the public domain and be lost, maybe even in the time between the iPad trademark and this application. I'm wondering if that's what the patent reviewer had in mind?
I'm not even sure about the problem with mini, since I wouldn't say "I have a tablet mini!" but "I have a mini tablet!" But ok I guess. :)
This just seems bizarre to me. I've never heard anyone refer to a tablet as a "pad", outside of Star Trek's PADDs, have you? That sounds like a bizarre ruling. Nor have I seen anyone attach i- to anything and not have it be a reference to Apple; there's e-commerce but not i-commerce, no one says "do you have an i-connection?", etc.
Am I missing something?
Just delete some goddamn email.. hoarder!
...and this is why we can't watch half of the first six seasons of Doctor Who.
First, Google isn't making any money from Reader but it must have been getting something out of it or else they never would have put it online in the first place. Part of what they're getting is goodwill, so that people will further equate "Google" with "useful product". Now that they're closing Reader, they lose that goodwill. And if we the users make a big enough stink about it, if we make it very expensive for them to shut down Reader, than next time they will have to factor that into their calculation when they consider shutting down a service, and maybe we get to keep something we like. Thus, the whining about Reader online does in fact make sound business sense on the users' part. There's more to the economy than just money.
Second, Reader is a special case because it has become the de facto standard for RSS reader synchronization; almost all RSS readers in the past few years let you (or force you to) synchronize with Google Reader, so that you can move back and forth from one app to another without forgetting which articles you've already read. By offering Reader for free they were distorting the market (discouraging others from setting up their own synchronization services), and while four months is plenty of time for an individual to find a new RSS reader, it's not a lot of time for a software maker to rewrite their software. I've seen this compared to Microsoft's Embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy. I don't think it was intentional on Google's part in this case—if I understand it correctly they weren't encouraging the use of their API for synchronization purposes—but still, "a giant has to watch where he steps".