Particularly small patent holders that present ideas to big companies, hoping to be bought out, but instead get the shaft.
But this isn't really the business model in software though. I only know of software companies that make actual software products. I don't know of any software companies that do software R&D, patent their idea, then sell it to a bigger company. The reason for this is that the barriers to creating a finished software product are really low compared to other industries like hardware and biotech. So if you have a phenomenal idea, you are usually capable of implementing it. Not so true in biotech, where you may only be able to afford to prototype the idea, then you need a big company to make it into an actual product.
I am interpreting your first question as "Is the expense of electrolysis the main inhibitor of a hydrogen-fuel economy?" I believe the answer is "sorta, but not really." The cheapest way to get hydrogen is from natural gas. The problem is that the whole reason to move to a hydrogen economy is to become carbon-neutral. If you use natural gas mines, you defeated the purpose. So to that point, a cheaper form of electrolysis might help.
Your second question is really a chicken-vs-egg question. There's low demand, because there aren't hydrogen-powered vehicles. But that is because it is difficult to store the hydrogen with sufficient density to make a car that can travel a long-enough distance. Compressing it takes time, wastes energy, and makes the tanks heavy and expensive. The next generation of attempts stores the hydrogen chemically. But bear in mind that there is already a really really good way to store hydrogen chemically. In the US, we call it "gasoline" and it is great because all you have to do is burn it, and it releases the energy from the hydrogen-carbon bond! Awesome! Perfect! Right? Ooops, that darned carbon-neutral thing again...
because it calls for equal treatment of *lawful* content.
No internally consistent definition of metwork nuetrality would call for any distinction between "lawful" and "unlawful." Attempting to do so would almost completely defeat the purpose of neutrality in the first place!
This article makes no sense. It talks about "crystallizing" light but never says what it means. Then it goes into quantum computers. In the middle, it links to a journals.aps.org article that doesn't even contain the word "crystal" in it. All the quotes are vague things like "It’s something that we have never seen before" which doesn't help either.
I thought the Slashdot comments might help, but they are all just jokes. So I take it no one else understands what this article is about either.
In an e-mail to colleagues at the DMV, Breslow wrote, “We can’t fail an applicant for not being able to navigate a traffic circle if they say that there [sic] vehicle can’t yet do it.”
So if an autonomous car is not able to navigate entirely autonomously, it still passes. So what is the fail criteria? Perhaps it only fails if the car does not hand control back to the driver? I'm curious how that works. I imagine that 2 seconds before hitting a roundabout, the car switches control to the driver. This seems unsafe because the driver then has to hang up his/her phone, set down their taco, climb back into the front seat, and then figure out what the heck is going on around the car that forced this situation to happen.:-O
Okay, so I jest. But seriously, if the car drives itself 99% of the time it will take a moment for the driver to take control. If you have ever paused a driving video game, then come back, it is actually tough to coordinate unpausing and picking-up right where you left off. I imagine in a real car you need to make sure your foot is at the right position on the accelerator pedal to smoothly transition control.
Knowing who to blame is important for the end user. Don't call Apple when your cell phone reception is bad. Don't blame ZFS because the vendor you chose for your distro pre-configured it in stupid way. The end-user needs to understand who to blame so they know which vendor to avoid next time. In my reception example, the end-user must decide if they want to switch from Apple to Samsung, or if they want to switch from AT&T to Verizon. This is one of the reasons non-techies tend to make the same technology mistake over-and-over again. I have heard people say things like: "I can never get my email to work in this damn Dell! But it works fine on my HP at work!" I try to explain to them that the problem is their email client software is configured wrong at home, not that Dell can't make PCs that support email.
AC: Can you state what distro you were using when this happened? Brambus: Can you recommend a distro that does not do this?
This is not bad for Microsoft, it is bad for Apple. If people start calling all tablets "iPads" then Apple may lose their trademark on the term iPad. That article was from 2012, so clearly this isn't a new issue. It already happened to aspirin, elevator, and zipper.
Okay, phew! I must have misinterpreted the meaning of "already weak genetic influence." Also, each of those articles do go on to explain that nutrition, including fetal nutrition, have a significant impact as well.
Why do we need to do anything to the phone system if it's "just another protocol to run on top of IP"
I misspoke. I meant "voice could be just another protocol that can run on top of IP." Currently it is not implemented as such. One reason to replace the existing phone infrastructure is because it is expensive. You pay more for a voice call than you would pay for the equivalent amount of data. Another is that it has a different, more complex, regulatory framework. It isn't end-to-end encrypted. You can't make phone calls from WiFi when you don't have cellular service.
Many Slashdotters have been saying for years that voice is just another protocol that can run on top of IP. The schism between "phone service" and "data service" is artificial at this point. The only feature it brings right now is that it is standardized. I wonder how long before nobody uses it anymore? I fear a world where I have to install 10 different apps to talk to people. But at the same time, if we can choose some standard protocol then we can get rid of the telephone system entirely.
The statement "it’s extremely difficult to ‘improve’ on the lethality of nature" dodges the fact that one does not need to 'improve' it, one needs only 'combine' existing forms of lethality:
A scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published an article in June revealing that he had taken genes from the deadly human 1918 Spanish Flu and inserted them into the H5N1 avian flu to make a new virus—one which was both far deadlier and far more capable of spreading
Overall, this article really is quite inspiring. I'm glad to know that creating deadly viruses is not yet available on the average home lab. It makes it sounds like home-hackers can make some really cool bacteria. It's like we are working toward a bio-arduino.
Agreed. I think it is safe to say that decompiling an EXE produces something that is a derived work of that EXE. Otherwise, you could run Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word through a decompiler, then distribute them for free under the GPL. Similarly, you could decompile Apache and distribute it under a commercial license.
If the person sees video of the event, THEN gives their testimony, it largely defeated the purpose of the testimony. You want to know what they remember, tainted by their emotions and perceptions at the time. If the testimony is merely a narration of of the video it told you nothing new. And if one of the people is lying, you won't catch them if you give them a chance to see what the camera caught.
Perhaps they need to give testimony, then watch the video, then have the opportunity to revise it. But both should be admissible as evidence.
http://www.vievu.com/vievu-sto... The $1,000 price is totally reasonable. Start with a ruggedized HD camera: a few hundred dollars to start. Now add a battery that can last all day in any weather - that's pricey. Now add that it can record video all day - that's quite a bit of flash in a small space. Put a wearable mount on it. Now add a lot of security features. Lastly, get it certified. I think they did okay.
DSL can operate that way, but in my experience that was rare. To make that work, the ISP must place their equipment in the nearby "central office" and lease the phone line from the telephone company. I am the only person I ever knew who had residential DSL provided by someone other than the phone company. Everyone else who had DSL used Verizon DSL. I live in Maryland, and I am not aware of any DSL providers any longer. I used CavTel, who no longer does residential. The options I know of are Verizon and Comcast.
This is yet another example of why your local telecom (or cable) company should not be an ISP. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc. should provide you with wires that connect you to your ISP of choice. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc. should not even offer public email accounts.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects online service providers from liability and lawsuits over user-generated content, except in very narrow circumstances where the providers created or developed content themselves.
Should that protection apply if Yelp charges to remove negative reviews? At that point, it the site still user-generated content? Suppose there were 1000 anonymous monkeys adding negative reviews of Slashdot, and positive reviews of Slashdot. Then Yelp charges Slashdot to remove the negative reviews. Can Yelp still claim that the site is nothing but user generated content? That's a slippery slope...
Imagine that Yelp merely took the sentences from people's reviews, and charged to remove the negative sentences. Can they claim protection then? What if they selectively removed letters and rearranged the words to form different reviews? Is that user generated content? It seems to me that they crossed the line by charging to remove reviews, and they should not be protected.
Yelp would still have won today, since the basis was that there was no evidence against them, only suspicion.
The plaintiffs lacked the factual evidence to support their claims of extortion, the appeals court said.
So there was no extortion par, which is why Yelp won the case. Yelp was not doing what the business owners claimed Yelp was doing.
Slashdot refusing to censor comments on my request is a bit different from Slashdot asking me to pay or they will make sure they will be lot of defamatory comments.
I assume by "make sure there will be a lot of defamatory comments" you are implying that they (Yelp, or Slashdot in the hypothetical) is either making the defamatory comments themselves or paying someone to do so. But there was no evidence of that.
What is different is that the Mafia was charging for protection, but they were also the ones perpetrating the crime. Yelp is not writing the negative reviews. The real issue here is that Yelp offers the ability to remove the negative reviews at all. Not that they charge for them.
Fair enough. Or perhaps his worst writings are forgotten? Perhaps if Voltaire could see his legacy know he would be thinking "Thank God I didn't become famous for that awful book about the school massacre!"
Slashdot Mirror
Particularly small patent holders that present ideas to big companies, hoping to be bought out, but instead get the shaft.
But this isn't really the business model in software though. I only know of software companies that make actual software products. I don't know of any software companies that do software R&D, patent their idea, then sell it to a bigger company. The reason for this is that the barriers to creating a finished software product are really low compared to other industries like hardware and biotech. So if you have a phenomenal idea, you are usually capable of implementing it. Not so true in biotech, where you may only be able to afford to prototype the idea, then you need a big company to make it into an actual product.
I am interpreting your first question as "Is the expense of electrolysis the main inhibitor of a hydrogen-fuel economy?" I believe the answer is "sorta, but not really." The cheapest way to get hydrogen is from natural gas. The problem is that the whole reason to move to a hydrogen economy is to become carbon-neutral. If you use natural gas mines, you defeated the purpose. So to that point, a cheaper form of electrolysis might help.
Your second question is really a chicken-vs-egg question. There's low demand, because there aren't hydrogen-powered vehicles. But that is because it is difficult to store the hydrogen with sufficient density to make a car that can travel a long-enough distance. Compressing it takes time, wastes energy, and makes the tanks heavy and expensive. The next generation of attempts stores the hydrogen chemically. But bear in mind that there is already a really really good way to store hydrogen chemically. In the US, we call it "gasoline" and it is great because all you have to do is burn it, and it releases the energy from the hydrogen-carbon bond! Awesome! Perfect! Right? Ooops, that darned carbon-neutral thing again...
because it calls for equal treatment of *lawful* content.
No internally consistent definition of metwork nuetrality would call for any distinction between "lawful" and "unlawful." Attempting to do so would almost completely defeat the purpose of neutrality in the first place!
I guess so.
Car: "Warning: 500-foot cliff detected. Switching to manual mode in 3...2...1..."
Human: "AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa......"
TEST PASSED!
This article makes no sense. It talks about "crystallizing" light but never says what it means. Then it goes into quantum computers. In the middle, it links to a journals.aps.org article that doesn't even contain the word "crystal" in it. All the quotes are vague things like "It’s something that we have never seen before" which doesn't help either.
I thought the Slashdot comments might help, but they are all just jokes. So I take it no one else understands what this article is about either.
The link is bad. American shakedown: Police won't charge you, but they'll grab your money
In an e-mail to colleagues at the DMV, Breslow wrote, “We can’t fail an applicant for not being able to navigate a traffic circle if they say that there [sic] vehicle can’t yet do it.”
So if an autonomous car is not able to navigate entirely autonomously, it still passes. So what is the fail criteria? Perhaps it only fails if the car does not hand control back to the driver? I'm curious how that works. I imagine that 2 seconds before hitting a roundabout, the car switches control to the driver. This seems unsafe because the driver then has to hang up his/her phone, set down their taco, climb back into the front seat, and then figure out what the heck is going on around the car that forced this situation to happen. :-O
Okay, so I jest. But seriously, if the car drives itself 99% of the time it will take a moment for the driver to take control. If you have ever paused a driving video game, then come back, it is actually tough to coordinate unpausing and picking-up right where you left off. I imagine in a real car you need to make sure your foot is at the right position on the accelerator pedal to smoothly transition control.
And what is the difference to the end user?
Knowing who to blame is important for the end user. Don't call Apple when your cell phone reception is bad. Don't blame ZFS because the vendor you chose for your distro pre-configured it in stupid way. The end-user needs to understand who to blame so they know which vendor to avoid next time. In my reception example, the end-user must decide if they want to switch from Apple to Samsung, or if they want to switch from AT&T to Verizon. This is one of the reasons non-techies tend to make the same technology mistake over-and-over again. I have heard people say things like: "I can never get my email to work in this damn Dell! But it works fine on my HP at work!" I try to explain to them that the problem is their email client software is configured wrong at home, not that Dell can't make PCs that support email.
AC: Can you state what distro you were using when this happened?
Brambus: Can you recommend a distro that does not do this?
This is not bad for Microsoft, it is bad for Apple. If people start calling all tablets "iPads" then Apple may lose their trademark on the term iPad. That article was from 2012, so clearly this isn't a new issue. It already happened to aspirin, elevator, and zipper.
the (already weak) genetic influence of genes on height has an effect 20 times greater
Wait... did I just read that genes only have a weak influence on height?????
Googling "genes for height"
Height clearly has a lot to do with genetics - shorter parents tend to have shorter children, and taller parents tend to have taller children...
Okay, phew! I must have misinterpreted the meaning of "already weak genetic influence." Also, each of those articles do go on to explain that nutrition, including fetal nutrition, have a significant impact as well.
We can hope! Although a better option would be for EULAs to simply be unenforcable entirely.
Why do we need to do anything to the phone system if it's "just another protocol to run on top of IP"
I misspoke. I meant "voice could be just another protocol that can run on top of IP." Currently it is not implemented as such. One reason to replace the existing phone infrastructure is because it is expensive. You pay more for a voice call than you would pay for the equivalent amount of data. Another is that it has a different, more complex, regulatory framework. It isn't end-to-end encrypted. You can't make phone calls from WiFi when you don't have cellular service.
Many Slashdotters have been saying for years that voice is just another protocol that can run on top of IP. The schism between "phone service" and "data service" is artificial at this point. The only feature it brings right now is that it is standardized. I wonder how long before nobody uses it anymore? I fear a world where I have to install 10 different apps to talk to people. But at the same time, if we can choose some standard protocol then we can get rid of the telephone system entirely.
The statement "it’s extremely difficult to ‘improve’ on the lethality of nature" dodges the fact that one does not need to 'improve' it, one needs only 'combine' existing forms of lethality:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
A scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published an article in June revealing that he had taken genes from the deadly human 1918 Spanish Flu and inserted them into the H5N1 avian flu to make a new virus—one which was both far deadlier and far more capable of spreading
Overall, this article really is quite inspiring. I'm glad to know that creating deadly viruses is not yet available on the average home lab. It makes it sounds like home-hackers can make some really cool bacteria. It's like we are working toward a bio-arduino.
Agreed. I think it is safe to say that decompiling an EXE produces something that is a derived work of that EXE. Otherwise, you could run Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word through a decompiler, then distribute them for free under the GPL. Similarly, you could decompile Apache and distribute it under a commercial license.
Personally, I want a shoe phone. :-)
If the person sees video of the event, THEN gives their testimony, it largely defeated the purpose of the testimony. You want to know what they remember, tainted by their emotions and perceptions at the time. If the testimony is merely a narration of of the video it told you nothing new. And if one of the people is lying, you won't catch them if you give them a chance to see what the camera caught.
Perhaps they need to give testimony, then watch the video, then have the opportunity to revise it. But both should be admissible as evidence.
http://www.vievu.com/vievu-sto...
The $1,000 price is totally reasonable. Start with a ruggedized HD camera: a few hundred dollars to start. Now add a battery that can last all day in any weather - that's pricey. Now add that it can record video all day - that's quite a bit of flash in a small space. Put a wearable mount on it. Now add a lot of security features. Lastly, get it certified. I think they did okay.
DSL can operate that way, but in my experience that was rare. To make that work, the ISP must place their equipment in the nearby "central office" and lease the phone line from the telephone company. I am the only person I ever knew who had residential DSL provided by someone other than the phone company. Everyone else who had DSL used Verizon DSL. I live in Maryland, and I am not aware of any DSL providers any longer. I used CavTel, who no longer does residential. The options I know of are Verizon and Comcast.
This is yet another example of why your local telecom (or cable) company should not be an ISP. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc. should provide you with wires that connect you to your ISP of choice. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc. should not even offer public email accounts.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects online service providers from liability and lawsuits over user-generated content, except in very narrow circumstances where the providers created or developed content themselves.
Should that protection apply if Yelp charges to remove negative reviews? At that point, it the site still user-generated content? Suppose there were 1000 anonymous monkeys adding negative reviews of Slashdot, and positive reviews of Slashdot. Then Yelp charges Slashdot to remove the negative reviews. Can Yelp still claim that the site is nothing but user generated content? That's a slippery slope...
Imagine that Yelp merely took the sentences from people's reviews, and charged to remove the negative sentences. Can they claim protection then? What if they selectively removed letters and rearranged the words to form different reviews? Is that user generated content? It seems to me that they crossed the line by charging to remove reviews, and they should not be protected.
Yelp would still have won today, since the basis was that there was no evidence against them, only suspicion.
Have you missed the extortion part?
Nope. It's in the article right here:
The plaintiffs lacked the factual evidence to support their claims of extortion, the appeals court said.
So there was no extortion par, which is why Yelp won the case. Yelp was not doing what the business owners claimed Yelp was doing.
Slashdot refusing to censor comments on my request is a bit different from Slashdot asking me to pay or they will make sure they will be lot of defamatory comments.
I assume by "make sure there will be a lot of defamatory comments" you are implying that they (Yelp, or Slashdot in the hypothetical) is either making the defamatory comments themselves or paying someone to do so. But there was no evidence of that.
So apparently nobody has pre-existing right to be free of smear campaign on Yelp.
True. Just like on Slashdot. I could post that qbast provided terrible service, and Slashdot cannot be compelled to remove it. I'm thankful for that.
What is different is that the Mafia was charging for protection, but they were also the ones perpetrating the crime. Yelp is not writing the negative reviews. The real issue here is that Yelp offers the ability to remove the negative reviews at all. Not that they charge for them.
Fair enough. Or perhaps his worst writings are forgotten? Perhaps if Voltaire could see his legacy know he would be thinking "Thank God I didn't become famous for that awful book about the school massacre!"