The likelihood that your information will be used increases drastically when the size a the theft is small. So size does not matter
So if the likelihood of my information being used increases drastically when the theft is small, doesn't size matter? It might be inversely proportional to the size of the theft, but it still matters.
Working at a big corporation is being forced to use poor quality crap tools because some snake-oil salesman is buddy-buddy with a senior VP 10,000 miles away.
Or in Microsoft's case because they created the poor quality crap tools themselves.
Best Buy is horrible at doing these things and is part of the reason I basically refuse to buy anything there except for a few random DVDs every now and then. I was once in need of a few power cables for my extra PCs. I went to Best Buy and noted these cables, normal pieces of copper covered in proper insulation for indoor usage, were $15 a piece!! A 15-minute trip to MicroCenter later, I had three of the power cables for less than $5. I once saw them charge twice as much for a crossover cable and nearly died laughing right there in the middle of the store, as if the cable was somehow different enough to result in that sort of price change.
As for Black Friday, the deals this year were not that great and you probably got hosed on both the items because I have seen equally priced items online for about the same prices and you don't have to deal with BB's wonderful customer service.
is to insult the USPTO at every possible junction, especially around here. There are several problems with searching for the most prolific inventor and the reason largely lies in the complexity of the search. First off, the database was built a long time ago and at that time a great many inventions (probably in the millions or at least hundreds of thousands) had already come through the US Patent Office. Now, in order to figure out if each person was a separate individual from the other people sharing that name you would have to research each patent and attempt to contact as many people as possible to find out if they were the same. This is just to get the unique IDs for the first database.
Let us assume that you started from that point on creating unique IDs for every individual, instead of the aforementioned problem a new one that previously existed is still there. A person can have a multitude of possible names. Say my name was James Robert Smith. What if I filed for patents using different forms of my name over time? James Robert, Jim Robert, Jim Bob (hey I had to pick a name with a funny variant), maybe just James or just Jim, or just Robert or Rob or Bob, how about J.R. or J.B., or Jim Rob, James Rob...I think you get my point. Not to mention my name might be VERY common. I doubt many people in the US could argue that Smith is an uncommon last name, the same goes for the name James or Robert. Now you have to determine if it is the same person.
On a printed patent your next means of division would be by city and state. Of course this does not take into account if our James Robert Smith moved around or if multiple James Robert Smith's exist in the same city and state. This is a rather complex search that is not as easy to perform as some individuals might have you believe. After all, it wasn't just the PTO who said we cannot do it, of course I shouldn't expect people to RTFA.
In defense of prior art search, these relatively simpler to perform. You would search for a general concept or a component of an item claimed in the patent. The primary database would include prior patents, patent publications, and patents from other countries. A vast majority of individuals around slashdot will often point out prior art that is outside these realms, and while individuals within the patent office will search outside as well, the ability to find prior art is much more limited without databases properly setup for accurate searching. Even if examiner X finds a reference to application Z through a Google search, they still have to then show that reference A was published or known before the filing date of application Z.
I could quite possibly spend all day trying to defend the PTO; however, it would most likely be a waste of my time. Instead of complaining the PTO does not do its job and constantly making what sound like personal attacks at the individuals who work there (without ever knowing who they are), file for a patent, work at the office, or litigate a patent as an attorney or agent (if you can get past that pesky exam) before you judge the job the individuals are doing. I think you will all find that the people working at the patent office work hard to ensure that the best quality they can produce goes into every patent application they work on and that these people deserve better then to have their intelligence or integrity questioned by people who do not fully understand how the system works (afterall the office quite possibly collects much more in fees for a longer prosecution then for a quick allowance).
Look at every video game movie ever made and make sure to not hire any of those directors. If you do this you can move on to step 2, hiring good actors.
Honestly, with the exception of the Halo screenshot, the before/after shots look identical.
The clarity improvement seems quite clear to me. Details are better, edges are better defined, and text is often clearer. It isn't that hard to see a difference, but seriously I hope you weren't expecting world altering changes; it is what it is.
The reason prices rice and fall on the stock market is because people buy and sell certain stocks causing the prices to either rise or fall respectively. If a stock is not bought or sold it could maintain its price point (though this doesn't happen too often since people are almost always buying and selling listed stocks). Without a "sell" model, how would you lower the price on music? You would have to implement a sort of timed decline in pricing, which would have to lower prices not on some hard constant but at a good variable rate to maintain interest before the one hit wonder becomes worthless, again.
There are also cases of insider trading which occur on Wall Street. In order to regulate this the SEC monitors the trades and activities of stocks. This means that someone at Apple would have to do a similar job on a model based like this. If no one was monitoring the purchases properly then I am sure you would see big labels paying individuals to purchase songs in order to raise the price. If a song were popular enough they could quickly drive up the price forcing people to pay $1.59 a song instead of getting the lucky starting price of $0.99 a song, or whatever it might be.
Let us not forget that the industry is already fairly well dependent on a supply and demand style. Obviously some people are willing to pay $0.99 for less popular songs, while others might be willing to pay more. The true magic here is that Apple found the perfect price point to appeal to both side, which keeps the pricing and market simple for the users to follow.
Tiered pricing schemes make a bit more sense because they would not be affected by spikes in song purchases or by the temporary decline of a song or by the aforementioned conspiracy. However, they also have their own set of problems. You would quite effectively remove some purchases by raising the songs price. Fewer people would be willing to pay $1.49 or more for the song they were willing to pay $0.99 for. At the same time you might find a few people who are more willing to pay $0.79 or $0.49 for a song then they were to pay $0.99, but I highly doubt the $1.49 songs could outpace the $0.79 or $0.49 songs.
Let us trust Steve's decision for now. I am sure the folks at Apple had enough sense to ask some economists to look at the system and analyze the effects that a tiered system would have. Going on this assumption, it would be safe to say that $0.99 songs are here to stay (so long as the RIAA continues to play nice).
ACLU Supported Issues from Wikipedia:
Supports the separation of church and state; under this mandate, the ACLU:
Opposes the government-sponsored display of religious symbols on public property;
Opposes official prayers, religious ceremonies, or "moments of silence" in public schools or schools funded with public money;
Supports full first amendment rights of citizens, organizations and the press, including school newspapers;
Supports reproductive rights, including the right to choose an abortion, on the basis of an implied right to privacy in the fourth amendment;
Supports full civil rights for homosexuals, including government benefits for homosexual couples equal to those provided for heterosexual ones;
Supports affirmative action as a means of redressing past discrimination and achieving a racially diverse student body;
Supports the rights of defendants and suspects against unconstitutional police practices;
Supports the decriminalization of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and marijuana;
Opposes demonstration permits and other requirements for protests in public places.
The only one which I have a huge issue with is their support of affirmative action. Simply because affirmative action is not the equal footing or diversity minorities want, it is a gimme. It is sort of like saying, "Oh you are so you aren't expected to do as well, so your qualifications are good enough." The use of affirmative action has been abused where individuals who were white were denied college admissions or jobs because despite their better qualifications, the school had to allow some minority students in to school. It is that policy and the ACLU's support thereof that most unnerves me; however, I cannot speak for the others.
I am pretty sure though that the separation of church and state items and the rights for homosexuals are one of the biggests things that draw the ire of many people since those are topics that many conservative christians disagree with the most.
due to his gross misrepresentation of the facts. Bonhomie cited six losses by the EFF...visit the EFF's legal victories page, and you'll see several wins that Bonhomie conveniently failed to mention.
Read the EFF's victories page. They list MGM v. Grokster. Ummm, I think SCOTUS overturning the 9th Circuit's ruling qualifies as a DEFEAT! So without wasting half my day to chase down their other "victories", I believe I will trust the EFF's objectivity about as much as anyone else (not much as all).
Even if the article is meant as satire, it still raises a good point. Has the EFF outlived its usefullness? When first created it could stand up as a group defending the little guys from the law and big corporations using said law. However, it is quite clear nowadays the EFF is a political group, after all they have tried to effect changes in the law more widespread then their individual cases.
Isn't the EFF sort of turning into a modern day ACLU. I still know a good many people who cringe when they hear the ACLU is getting involved in a case because their political agenda often effect the way they defend a person and brings with it an image that may affect the decisions of a judge or jury.
Look, The issue here is that linux isn't able to get the content. Regardless of whether YOU can get it, I can't.
iTunes supposedly works in CrossOver office. If not then dual boot or run more then one machine. Seriously I know very few Linux users who have absolutely no Windows or Mac machines sitting around somewhere.
As for the video being small? THAT *SUCKS* -- If they wanted to overcome the bittorrent downloads they needed quality that rivals that. Why would pirates *PAY* for something that isn't the quality they are getting for *FREE*
Check out the resolutions of most of these shows. They are not always as great as they can be, and much of the HD content ones are not at the natives resolutions in which they were broadcast. I know this much because I have to use the 'fit to screen' function on my media player to get them to stretch to an appropriate size for display at 1080i. The resolution is actually not too uncommon either, and if the video compression is handled well might not make a huge visual difference on most TVs.
I dont' expect the actors to act for free, but I do expect decent quality video when I pay for something. Why would I work to get money, just to waste it, by buying a tv show that I have to squint to see?
Squint to see? Are you blind? The display on the 5G ipods is suppose to be rather good for viewing, and if you are viewing on a PC no one said you HAVE to watch it in 320x240. You ever heard of resizing your player window.
This is inevitable.
Actually no it isn't. You will probably find that a lot of people will purchase shows that are available to them. Most the content that my friends or I ever keep is shows which are presently not on DVD or which we are waiting for the money to afford the DVDs. If it were available online in a similar format as what I presently have, then I would also probably consider purchasing in that method and so would a great many people. You know why? Because on a few rare occassions the sales of DVDs and media like this will help drive the show and produce revenue. For cancelled shows, it could help bring them back to life. I am sure we are pretty much all aware of what show got brought back to life thanks to DVD sales and it's syndication on another network.
The real goal should always be to minimalize piracy. By offering services like iTunes you work towards that end by providing users a means for purchasing music or shows they want without having to get physical media and in digital formats they like. While other people will continue to pirate things and be the first people to say if they weren't making crap we would buy it. Well it was obviously worth your time to DL, and you obviously watched/listened to it, so it must not be THAT bad.
The end of all piracy will occur when usenet workgroups and IRC servers begin getting taken down by the RIAA/MPAA. Which is not real likely because as far as I have seen they have never even attempted to try.
Too many patents are issued for "innovations" that are obvious, vague or already in wide use.
There is a gross lack of statistics to back this statement up. Do some inventions get overturned by courts? Yes. Is this a result of poor examination? Not always. There are many reasons a patent may be overturned by the courts and to attribute everyone to the poor patent system is not a good reason. In some cases they get overturned by "prior art" that is not readily available to the patent office or to the general public.
Too many patent holders try to extend their claims to devices and services that weren't even contemplated when the patents were granted.
Examples? If they are trying to extend their claims then this is a problem more at the level of the courts. The job on the patent office is to ensure they get a patent for their invention. If their invention is relatively broad reaching, it is possible that they truly are the first to invent something. Wouldn't it be reasonable to think the first patents on LCDs and computer mice would be pretty broad?
And it's a difficult, costly exercise to overturn a questionable patent after it has been awarded.
This statement is not completely true. As quoted from the MPEP: Any person may, at any time during the period of enforceability of a patent, file a
request for an ex parte reexamination by the Office of any claim of the patent on
the basis of prior art patents or printed publications cited under 1.501. The
request must be accompanied by the fee for requesting reexamination set in
1.20(c)(1).
The fee is $2520 which is outside the range many normal individuals might be willing to pay, but any corporation of some size who had an interest in the patent in question could easily fight a single claim outside of court relatively cheap.
The appeals court in Washington takes the position that, except in exceptional circumstances, courts must issue permanent injunctions to stop infringers from using the inventions in dispute.
Something currently being disputed before SCOTUS so get back to this one after that is over.
The article itself manages to complain primarily about the ruling that injunctions be permanent. The piece will probably not be read or even fully understood by the vast majority of its readers. If memory serves me, the most recent attempt to reform patent law did include limitations on these sort of material. Hardly a scathing review of the patent system, it is much more a little complaining from someone who doesn't understand much about the system itself.
Let's not forget that smaller circuits mean more cache on-die.
Let's not forget that smaller circuits also mean more errors per wafer. The key here is to make sure your processes are still good enough that when you shrink the die size the extra dies per wafer outpaces the errors per wafer. To be honest, Intel can be confident that their processes will work fine, but they will not really know for sure until they actually begin mass producing at 45 nm.
Seriously, avoiding anything related to the show and/or its "competition", do scripts really sell enough or have enough appeal to warrant the paper on which the books will be printed? Not to mention that its not even the scripts for the whole series.
There were a set of companion CDs for some (if not all) the Star Trek series a few years back. Each CD contained complete scripts for the series, synopsis, the original 'next time on...' videos, and pictures. It retailed for $15-20, which is half as much as this for 7 seasons worth of scripts.
Now for the admission, I am a Star Trek fan. I watched B5 sparingly and never was able to get much into it. I am not one of those Star Trek or nothing fans either. I do enjoy other science fictions show, I just never enjoyed B5. While I can see this item appealing to maybe some of the B5 fans, I highly doubt many of them will be too enthusiastic about getting it. I say this because, I have seen Star Trek books on sell for years that I would probably never consider purchasing because they are just too much and are not something with which I would be that intrigued.
One word: costs. If you can make something for less money and subsequently sell it for less money it is feasible to drive a competitor out of business by forcing them to lose money because their costs are too high. In the case of the small inventor, the patent system ensures them some sort of protection under this method. If person Y creates a new product, they can begin to make and sell that product. If it becomes successful, without a patent system, company Z could recreate the new product and because of their resources they would be able to sell the product for less and use their marketing to encourage people to purchase their product.
Under this example, the company would profit from the invention of another individual without any compensation to the inventor. Patents are meant to protect these ideas so the person is basically guaranteed some protection to earn the compensation they deserve. The idea behind this is not too far removed from the idea of protecting an individuals music or literature with copyrights in order to ensure they have the opportunity to make money from their own works.
While there are fundamental differences in the way the two systems works, in the end the ideas behind them are founded on the same principal. Both systems arguably need improvement, but they do serve a purpose.
If person X writes a commentary or opinion piece for a newspaper that is taken to be libel, does the paper really wind up getting sued? Especially in the case where person X is working free lance? Or is it person X who gets sued, and probably fired?
Provided they print the truth, they've got no issues.
I can think of at least one instance in recent history (and there are surely more) of papers printing stories which the author had written false material, including making up people. Printing false news is surely harmful to the general public since many people rely on news outlets to inform them of the goings on in their area and the world. I know in the one case I am thinking of (at the NYT I think) the individual was fired.
There is one big difference between people posting anonymously to blogs or other websites and a newspaper. In many cases the newspaper is paying the individual to write a story, whereas the website is typically not. I would be interested if something has ever occurred where a person wrote a Letter to the Editor or the like that was printed and considered libel, and what outcome there was. I say this because blogs are much closer to this than to actual news reporting.
Do I really need to bring up the trade secret vs. patent protection again? The key to patent protection is the idea of full disclosure (at least here in the US). The idea is, you are guaranteed protection of your invention for a period to not exceed 20 yrs from the filing date of the invention, and in return you must disclose your invention to the public. It is this disclosure that is meant to foster innovation.
There are ways around trade secrets; however, in some fields the time required to successfully reverse engineer a trade secret in order to create an exact copy of a product may be too long. How many people throughout the years have claimed to have correctly figured out the formula for Coca-Cola. It is one of the most closely guarded secrets, and Coca-Cola has stated that the supposed formulas people have come up with are not the correct ones.
By requiring disclosure you force the inventor or company to tell the world what his invention is and provide everyone else a chance to improve upon said product by modifying it and then working to get a patent on an the improved idea. Without this disclosure the small inventor might possibly vanish, because they do not always have the time or resources to reverse engineer the trade secret protected item.
You claim that cases like this stifle innovation, but let us say for a second that NTP's patent was upheld by the USPTO, are you tell me that they should have no recourse to protect their invention? If there were no patent system their idea would only exist on paper somewhere and they would have no protection for their idea against a larger company like RIM. Without the patent system, the legal battle would turn into an argument over who invented it first, decided by the courts who we know are so knowledgeable about technology. At least the patent office employs engineers who have an understanding of the technologies and the ideas that are going into inventions.
I will admit the system could probably use a few corrections, but many of the problems people talk about have come about because of rulings made at the judicial level and not necessarily with laws. This includes the adoptions of business method and software patents which the PTO did attempt to resist for some time. It also includes rulings by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) who instituted rulings making it hard to impossible to reject obvious patents in some cases.
I would say that some things can be fixed, but the system should remain in order to afford some protection to inventors in order to allow them the opportunity to protect their inventions and the chance to profit from them. At least the duration is not as viciously long as the extended copyright protections.
is a failure to communicate. Seriously, we have a many pushing 80 who has been in the media for 56 years. I know many people who are scared to death of the internet that are his age and he obviously has some issue with the new media that is the latest thing to come along and challenge the supremacy that newspapers had in reporting news for decades.
The fact is, his attack is aimed at the entire internet, from blogs to Wikipedia. It is sort of ironic when you read his wikipedia entry and then see what he has said today. From his wikipedia entry:
In 1986, Middle Tennessee State University established the "John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies," honoring Seigenthaler's "lifelong commitment to free expression values". He founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in 1991.
Such a wonderful free speech advocate that he screams foul to a degree where he calls for the head of the internet. The greatest thing about news and blogs on the internet is the anonymity it affords people to express themselves without the fear for any retaliation. You would think that an advocate of free speech would realize this and embrace such a wonderful technology.
As for the posts on wikipedia about his ties to the assassination, if they were written in a truly speculative fashion then he really cannot say much since someone would be expressing an opinion in the form of one of those crazy conspiracy theories. I have to break it to him, but Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin still have to deal with crap from the conspiracy nuts over their moon landing. I mean Aldrin decked a man over it.
As for holding providers liable, does that mean I should hold the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, or any other major media outlet responsible wholly responsible for the content of their writers? I doubt he would make a resounding yes to that statement considering the problems the media has had lately with its image. The Gallup Poll on Honest and Ethics by Profession actually lower in 2004 for the journalists to below 40% and a 2005 survey in Australia has journalists at 11%. (If anyone has survey results for a US survey in '05 please let me know.)
I hate to break it to the man, but the world is changing and the protection afforded us on the internet might turn out to be the only way to avoid repercusions for what we say, especially at the pace the great US of A is going. Not to mention how great it already is for people who don't have the luxury of free speech that we are suppose to enjoy.
NIMF is just downright stupid. They are calling for more and more AO games, but similar material gets into R-rated movies (remember by the ratings that is 16 and older, M is 17+, AO is 18+) and you do not see them attacking the ratings issued out for them. Like most any organization, NIMF has an agenda and it just so happens their agenda is to "protect the children". While this might be valorous in the eyes of some, it is downright attrocious the odds to which they will go to meet their goals.
Here is a group, with some degree of political clout, who enjoys screaming foul and overacting to what they consider indecency. To remedy the problems with the media, they have decided to enlist the politicians of the US to pass laws making these foul games illegal to sell to minors and to make as many games AO as possible. As a matter of fact, the only good thing NIMF has done lately is put space between themselves and Jack 'The Hack' Thompson.
In the end, NIMF (and many parents) forget that it is not the responsibility of the government, or for that matter the game industry or retailers, to control the content of games that make their way into the hands of children. The responsibility for that falls squarely on the shoulders of parents, and it is tiring to see people who would rather hand off that responsibility to someone else, because they do not think they should be responsible for what their child watches, plays, or hears.
Our society is in a downward spiral. Within my own relatively short lifetime (born circa 1982), we have seen the PG-13 Rating (1984, not too big a deal I think), Parental Advisory sticker (1985), NC-17 Rating (1990, Though really a replacement for the X-Rating), Birth of the ESRB (1994), the TV Parental Guidelines (1997), and the V-Chip (required on 13+ inch TV post-2000).
I am sure I might have missed some things, but really it does paint a bad picture that slowly parents have begun to throw away responsibility to a computer chip and ratings boards, instead of actually watching to see what it is their children are doing with their time. I am just glad my parents looked past ratings and as such I got to enjoy a good many R-rated movies years ahead of time.
FTFA: Martin said he doesn't plan to push the industry to adopt a new business model, but he suggested that more restrictions on basic cable programming be added if the industry doesn't offer consumers more choice.
Does anyone else read this to say the FCC will begin overstepping their bounds and begin to regulate cable television?
economically feasible and in the best interest of consumers
Yeah, but not for the cable companies. Many companies pack channels the way they do in order to get people to sign up for larger packages so they can get the 2 or 3 channels they want. Besides, I doubt the big cable companies will make the rates of a la carte TV reasonable.
If they do, you can bet I will only have like 30-40 channels and 12 of those will be my HD channels I get now (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB, PBS, ESPN, Comcast Sports HD, Discovery HD, TNT HD, inHD, inHD2) . This would leave the standard def of 10 of those 12 channels plus Sci Fi, Cartoon Network, TBS, Comedy Central, ESPN2, OLN, ABC Family, Spike, USA, AMC, TCM, History Channel, and maybe some others I am missing.
Trust me, the will make sure that costs me as much or more then the approximately $60 or so that my cable costs me now. Add about another $40 on that for the internet and I pay Comcast more money then I do for my three "essential utilities" (Electricity, Gas, Water).
I love how the two problems so far have been from California, where nothing seems to work right. Well at least that is the view the rest of the country seems to hold.
Well that is because VOIP is getting to use the infrastructure established and created by the big telecoms and cable companies. In reality neither group like the idea, because VOIP has created a replacement service for the telecoms that in many cases uses their own infrastructure to transmit the data for phone service.
Since the big telecoms are not getting money from the VOIP services, except for the ones they are offering, they are receiving no money to maintain the infrastructure that is allowing people to make their VOIP calls. The situation is not quite as dire in the minds of the cable companies, but many of them are offering their own VOIP services now as well, and many people are convinced to just get theirs because it is one bill for phone, tv and internet instead of two or three.
The most interesting this is that the big telecoms (at least Verizon) are trying to establish a market in the television industry now by getting permission to use the high bandwidth of fiber solutions (FIOS in Verizon's case) to transmit television along with their data and voice services.
To be honest I do not mind paying the higher prices for the telecoms because I know who to bitch at when my service is interrupted and know that 9 times out of 10 the service will be quickly restored. In the case of VOIP, the possible problems and people to blame our boundless. It could be a trouble with the VOIP carriers service, it could be poor data connection from your ISP, and let us not get into the issues that would arise in a power failure.
I do not see much benefit for VOIP either. The cost difference is not that big of a deal in my opinion, and I have a phone that can go anywhere with me, it is called a cell phone. I have no reception problems, and it has far more usefulness as a travelling phone then VOIP ever would, not to mention E911 service is working.
Slashdot Mirror
The likelihood that your information will be used increases drastically when the size a the theft is small. So size does not matter
So if the likelihood of my information being used increases drastically when the theft is small, doesn't size matter? It might be inversely proportional to the size of the theft, but it still matters.
Working at a big corporation is being forced to use poor quality crap tools because some snake-oil salesman is buddy-buddy with a senior VP 10,000 miles away.
Or in Microsoft's case because they created the poor quality crap tools themselves.
Best Buy is horrible at doing these things and is part of the reason I basically refuse to buy anything there except for a few random DVDs every now and then. I was once in need of a few power cables for my extra PCs. I went to Best Buy and noted these cables, normal pieces of copper covered in proper insulation for indoor usage, were $15 a piece!! A 15-minute trip to MicroCenter later, I had three of the power cables for less than $5. I once saw them charge twice as much for a crossover cable and nearly died laughing right there in the middle of the store, as if the cable was somehow different enough to result in that sort of price change.
As for Black Friday, the deals this year were not that great and you probably got hosed on both the items because I have seen equally priced items online for about the same prices and you don't have to deal with BB's wonderful customer service.
is to insult the USPTO at every possible junction, especially around here. There are several problems with searching for the most prolific inventor and the reason largely lies in the complexity of the search. First off, the database was built a long time ago and at that time a great many inventions (probably in the millions or at least hundreds of thousands) had already come through the US Patent Office. Now, in order to figure out if each person was a separate individual from the other people sharing that name you would have to research each patent and attempt to contact as many people as possible to find out if they were the same. This is just to get the unique IDs for the first database.
Let us assume that you started from that point on creating unique IDs for every individual, instead of the aforementioned problem a new one that previously existed is still there. A person can have a multitude of possible names. Say my name was James Robert Smith. What if I filed for patents using different forms of my name over time? James Robert, Jim Robert, Jim Bob (hey I had to pick a name with a funny variant), maybe just James or just Jim, or just Robert or Rob or Bob, how about J.R. or J.B., or Jim Rob, James Rob...I think you get my point. Not to mention my name might be VERY common. I doubt many people in the US could argue that Smith is an uncommon last name, the same goes for the name James or Robert. Now you have to determine if it is the same person.
On a printed patent your next means of division would be by city and state. Of course this does not take into account if our James Robert Smith moved around or if multiple James Robert Smith's exist in the same city and state. This is a rather complex search that is not as easy to perform as some individuals might have you believe. After all, it wasn't just the PTO who said we cannot do it, of course I shouldn't expect people to RTFA.
In defense of prior art search, these relatively simpler to perform. You would search for a general concept or a component of an item claimed in the patent. The primary database would include prior patents, patent publications, and patents from other countries. A vast majority of individuals around slashdot will often point out prior art that is outside these realms, and while individuals within the patent office will search outside as well, the ability to find prior art is much more limited without databases properly setup for accurate searching. Even if examiner X finds a reference to application Z through a Google search, they still have to then show that reference A was published or known before the filing date of application Z.
I could quite possibly spend all day trying to defend the PTO; however, it would most likely be a waste of my time. Instead of complaining the PTO does not do its job and constantly making what sound like personal attacks at the individuals who work there (without ever knowing who they are), file for a patent, work at the office, or litigate a patent as an attorney or agent (if you can get past that pesky exam) before you judge the job the individuals are doing. I think you will all find that the people working at the patent office work hard to ensure that the best quality they can produce goes into every patent application they work on and that these people deserve better then to have their intelligence or integrity questioned by people who do not fully understand how the system works (afterall the office quite possibly collects much more in fees for a longer prosecution then for a quick allowance).
Look at every video game movie ever made and make sure to not hire any of those directors. If you do this you can move on to step 2, hiring good actors.
Honestly, with the exception of the Halo screenshot, the before/after shots look identical.
The clarity improvement seems quite clear to me. Details are better, edges are better defined, and text is often clearer. It isn't that hard to see a difference, but seriously I hope you weren't expecting world altering changes; it is what it is.
It'll be interesting to see who cracks first and when.
Umm, I think that will be the company who hardly has any money, aka SCO.
The reason prices rice and fall on the stock market is because people buy and sell certain stocks causing the prices to either rise or fall respectively. If a stock is not bought or sold it could maintain its price point (though this doesn't happen too often since people are almost always buying and selling listed stocks). Without a "sell" model, how would you lower the price on music? You would have to implement a sort of timed decline in pricing, which would have to lower prices not on some hard constant but at a good variable rate to maintain interest before the one hit wonder becomes worthless, again.
There are also cases of insider trading which occur on Wall Street. In order to regulate this the SEC monitors the trades and activities of stocks. This means that someone at Apple would have to do a similar job on a model based like this. If no one was monitoring the purchases properly then I am sure you would see big labels paying individuals to purchase songs in order to raise the price. If a song were popular enough they could quickly drive up the price forcing people to pay $1.59 a song instead of getting the lucky starting price of $0.99 a song, or whatever it might be.
Let us not forget that the industry is already fairly well dependent on a supply and demand style. Obviously some people are willing to pay $0.99 for less popular songs, while others might be willing to pay more. The true magic here is that Apple found the perfect price point to appeal to both side, which keeps the pricing and market simple for the users to follow.
Tiered pricing schemes make a bit more sense because they would not be affected by spikes in song purchases or by the temporary decline of a song or by the aforementioned conspiracy. However, they also have their own set of problems. You would quite effectively remove some purchases by raising the songs price. Fewer people would be willing to pay $1.49 or more for the song they were willing to pay $0.99 for. At the same time you might find a few people who are more willing to pay $0.79 or $0.49 for a song then they were to pay $0.99, but I highly doubt the $1.49 songs could outpace the $0.79 or $0.49 songs.
Let us trust Steve's decision for now. I am sure the folks at Apple had enough sense to ask some economists to look at the system and analyze the effects that a tiered system would have. Going on this assumption, it would be safe to say that $0.99 songs are here to stay (so long as the RIAA continues to play nice).
ACLU Supported Issues from Wikipedia:
Supports the separation of church and state; under this mandate, the ACLU:
Opposes the government-sponsored display of religious symbols on public property;
Opposes official prayers, religious ceremonies, or "moments of silence" in public schools or schools funded with public money;
Supports full first amendment rights of citizens, organizations and the press, including school newspapers;
Supports reproductive rights, including the right to choose an abortion, on the basis of an implied right to privacy in the fourth amendment;
Supports full civil rights for homosexuals, including government benefits for homosexual couples equal to those provided for heterosexual ones;
Supports affirmative action as a means of redressing past discrimination and achieving a racially diverse student body;
Supports the rights of defendants and suspects against unconstitutional police practices;
Supports the decriminalization of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and marijuana;
Opposes demonstration permits and other requirements for protests in public places.
The only one which I have a huge issue with is their support of affirmative action. Simply because affirmative action is not the equal footing or diversity minorities want, it is a gimme. It is sort of like saying, "Oh you are so you aren't expected to do as well, so your qualifications are good enough." The use of affirmative action has been abused where individuals who were white were denied college admissions or jobs because despite their better qualifications, the school had to allow some minority students in to school. It is that policy and the ACLU's support thereof that most unnerves me; however, I cannot speak for the others.
I am pretty sure though that the separation of church and state items and the rights for homosexuals are one of the biggests things that draw the ire of many people since those are topics that many conservative christians disagree with the most.
due to his gross misrepresentation of the facts. Bonhomie cited six losses by the EFF...visit the EFF's legal victories page, and you'll see several wins that Bonhomie conveniently failed to mention.
Read the EFF's victories page. They list MGM v. Grokster. Ummm, I think SCOTUS overturning the 9th Circuit's ruling qualifies as a DEFEAT! So without wasting half my day to chase down their other "victories", I believe I will trust the EFF's objectivity about as much as anyone else (not much as all).
Even if the article is meant as satire, it still raises a good point. Has the EFF outlived its usefullness? When first created it could stand up as a group defending the little guys from the law and big corporations using said law. However, it is quite clear nowadays the EFF is a political group, after all they have tried to effect changes in the law more widespread then their individual cases.
Isn't the EFF sort of turning into a modern day ACLU. I still know a good many people who cringe when they hear the ACLU is getting involved in a case because their political agenda often effect the way they defend a person and brings with it an image that may affect the decisions of a judge or jury.
Look, The issue here is that linux isn't able to get the content. Regardless of whether YOU can get it, I can't.
iTunes supposedly works in CrossOver office. If not then dual boot or run more then one machine. Seriously I know very few Linux users who have absolutely no Windows or Mac machines sitting around somewhere.
As for the video being small? THAT *SUCKS* -- If they wanted to overcome the bittorrent downloads they needed quality that rivals that. Why would pirates *PAY* for something that isn't the quality they are getting for *FREE*
Check out the resolutions of most of these shows. They are not always as great as they can be, and much of the HD content ones are not at the natives resolutions in which they were broadcast. I know this much because I have to use the 'fit to screen' function on my media player to get them to stretch to an appropriate size for display at 1080i. The resolution is actually not too uncommon either, and if the video compression is handled well might not make a huge visual difference on most TVs.
I dont' expect the actors to act for free, but I do expect decent quality video when I pay for something. Why would I work to get money, just to waste it, by buying a tv show that I have to squint to see?
Squint to see? Are you blind? The display on the 5G ipods is suppose to be rather good for viewing, and if you are viewing on a PC no one said you HAVE to watch it in 320x240. You ever heard of resizing your player window.
This is inevitable.
Actually no it isn't. You will probably find that a lot of people will purchase shows that are available to them. Most the content that my friends or I ever keep is shows which are presently not on DVD or which we are waiting for the money to afford the DVDs. If it were available online in a similar format as what I presently have, then I would also probably consider purchasing in that method and so would a great many people. You know why? Because on a few rare occassions the sales of DVDs and media like this will help drive the show and produce revenue. For cancelled shows, it could help bring them back to life. I am sure we are pretty much all aware of what show got brought back to life thanks to DVD sales and it's syndication on another network.
The real goal should always be to minimalize piracy. By offering services like iTunes you work towards that end by providing users a means for purchasing music or shows they want without having to get physical media and in digital formats they like. While other people will continue to pirate things and be the first people to say if they weren't making crap we would buy it. Well it was obviously worth your time to DL, and you obviously watched/listened to it, so it must not be THAT bad.
The end of all piracy will occur when usenet workgroups and IRC servers begin getting taken down by the RIAA/MPAA. Which is not real likely because as far as I have seen they have never even attempted to try.
Too many patents are issued for "innovations" that are obvious, vague or already in wide use.
There is a gross lack of statistics to back this statement up. Do some inventions get overturned by courts? Yes. Is this a result of poor examination? Not always. There are many reasons a patent may be overturned by the courts and to attribute everyone to the poor patent system is not a good reason. In some cases they get overturned by "prior art" that is not readily available to the patent office or to the general public.
Too many patent holders try to extend their claims to devices and services that weren't even contemplated when the patents were granted.
Examples? If they are trying to extend their claims then this is a problem more at the level of the courts. The job on the patent office is to ensure they get a patent for their invention. If their invention is relatively broad reaching, it is possible that they truly are the first to invent something. Wouldn't it be reasonable to think the first patents on LCDs and computer mice would be pretty broad?
And it's a difficult, costly exercise to overturn a questionable patent after it has been awarded.
This statement is not completely true. As quoted from the MPEP:
Any person may, at any time during the period of enforceability of a patent, file a request for an ex parte reexamination by the Office of any claim of the patent on the basis of prior art patents or printed publications cited under 1.501. The request must be accompanied by the fee for requesting reexamination set in 1.20(c)(1).
The fee is $2520 which is outside the range many normal individuals might be willing to pay, but any corporation of some size who had an interest in the patent in question could easily fight a single claim outside of court relatively cheap.
The appeals court in Washington takes the position that, except in exceptional circumstances, courts must issue permanent injunctions to stop infringers from using the inventions in dispute.
Something currently being disputed before SCOTUS so get back to this one after that is over.
The article itself manages to complain primarily about the ruling that injunctions be permanent. The piece will probably not be read or even fully understood by the vast majority of its readers. If memory serves me, the most recent attempt to reform patent law did include limitations on these sort of material. Hardly a scathing review of the patent system, it is much more a little complaining from someone who doesn't understand much about the system itself.
Let's not forget that smaller circuits mean more cache on-die.
Let's not forget that smaller circuits also mean more errors per wafer. The key here is to make sure your processes are still good enough that when you shrink the die size the extra dies per wafer outpaces the errors per wafer. To be honest, Intel can be confident that their processes will work fine, but they will not really know for sure until they actually begin mass producing at 45 nm.
"Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in." -Michael Corleone
Seriously, avoiding anything related to the show and/or its "competition", do scripts really sell enough or have enough appeal to warrant the paper on which the books will be printed? Not to mention that its not even the scripts for the whole series.
There were a set of companion CDs for some (if not all) the Star Trek series a few years back. Each CD contained complete scripts for the series, synopsis, the original 'next time on...' videos, and pictures. It retailed for $15-20, which is half as much as this for 7 seasons worth of scripts.
Now for the admission, I am a Star Trek fan. I watched B5 sparingly and never was able to get much into it. I am not one of those Star Trek or nothing fans either. I do enjoy other science fictions show, I just never enjoyed B5. While I can see this item appealing to maybe some of the B5 fans, I highly doubt many of them will be too enthusiastic about getting it. I say this because, I have seen Star Trek books on sell for years that I would probably never consider purchasing because they are just too much and are not something with which I would be that intrigued.
One word: costs. If you can make something for less money and subsequently sell it for less money it is feasible to drive a competitor out of business by forcing them to lose money because their costs are too high. In the case of the small inventor, the patent system ensures them some sort of protection under this method. If person Y creates a new product, they can begin to make and sell that product. If it becomes successful, without a patent system, company Z could recreate the new product and because of their resources they would be able to sell the product for less and use their marketing to encourage people to purchase their product.
Under this example, the company would profit from the invention of another individual without any compensation to the inventor. Patents are meant to protect these ideas so the person is basically guaranteed some protection to earn the compensation they deserve. The idea behind this is not too far removed from the idea of protecting an individuals music or literature with copyrights in order to ensure they have the opportunity to make money from their own works.
While there are fundamental differences in the way the two systems works, in the end the ideas behind them are founded on the same principal. Both systems arguably need improvement, but they do serve a purpose.
If person X writes a commentary or opinion piece for a newspaper that is taken to be libel, does the paper really wind up getting sued? Especially in the case where person X is working free lance? Or is it person X who gets sued, and probably fired?
Provided they print the truth, they've got no issues.
I can think of at least one instance in recent history (and there are surely more) of papers printing stories which the author had written false material, including making up people. Printing false news is surely harmful to the general public since many people rely on news outlets to inform them of the goings on in their area and the world. I know in the one case I am thinking of (at the NYT I think) the individual was fired.
There is one big difference between people posting anonymously to blogs or other websites and a newspaper. In many cases the newspaper is paying the individual to write a story, whereas the website is typically not. I would be interested if something has ever occurred where a person wrote a Letter to the Editor or the like that was printed and considered libel, and what outcome there was. I say this because blogs are much closer to this than to actual news reporting.
Do I really need to bring up the trade secret vs. patent protection again? The key to patent protection is the idea of full disclosure (at least here in the US). The idea is, you are guaranteed protection of your invention for a period to not exceed 20 yrs from the filing date of the invention, and in return you must disclose your invention to the public. It is this disclosure that is meant to foster innovation.
There are ways around trade secrets; however, in some fields the time required to successfully reverse engineer a trade secret in order to create an exact copy of a product may be too long. How many people throughout the years have claimed to have correctly figured out the formula for Coca-Cola. It is one of the most closely guarded secrets, and Coca-Cola has stated that the supposed formulas people have come up with are not the correct ones.
By requiring disclosure you force the inventor or company to tell the world what his invention is and provide everyone else a chance to improve upon said product by modifying it and then working to get a patent on an the improved idea. Without this disclosure the small inventor might possibly vanish, because they do not always have the time or resources to reverse engineer the trade secret protected item.
You claim that cases like this stifle innovation, but let us say for a second that NTP's patent was upheld by the USPTO, are you tell me that they should have no recourse to protect their invention? If there were no patent system their idea would only exist on paper somewhere and they would have no protection for their idea against a larger company like RIM. Without the patent system, the legal battle would turn into an argument over who invented it first, decided by the courts who we know are so knowledgeable about technology. At least the patent office employs engineers who have an understanding of the technologies and the ideas that are going into inventions.
I will admit the system could probably use a few corrections, but many of the problems people talk about have come about because of rulings made at the judicial level and not necessarily with laws. This includes the adoptions of business method and software patents which the PTO did attempt to resist for some time. It also includes rulings by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) who instituted rulings making it hard to impossible to reject obvious patents in some cases.
I would say that some things can be fixed, but the system should remain in order to afford some protection to inventors in order to allow them the opportunity to protect their inventions and the chance to profit from them. At least the duration is not as viciously long as the extended copyright protections.
is a failure to communicate. Seriously, we have a many pushing 80 who has been in the media for 56 years. I know many people who are scared to death of the internet that are his age and he obviously has some issue with the new media that is the latest thing to come along and challenge the supremacy that newspapers had in reporting news for decades.
The fact is, his attack is aimed at the entire internet, from blogs to Wikipedia. It is sort of ironic when you read his wikipedia entry and then see what he has said today. From his wikipedia entry:
In 1986, Middle Tennessee State University established the "John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies," honoring Seigenthaler's "lifelong commitment to free expression values". He founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in 1991.
Such a wonderful free speech advocate that he screams foul to a degree where he calls for the head of the internet. The greatest thing about news and blogs on the internet is the anonymity it affords people to express themselves without the fear for any retaliation. You would think that an advocate of free speech would realize this and embrace such a wonderful technology.
As for the posts on wikipedia about his ties to the assassination, if they were written in a truly speculative fashion then he really cannot say much since someone would be expressing an opinion in the form of one of those crazy conspiracy theories. I have to break it to him, but Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin still have to deal with crap from the conspiracy nuts over their moon landing. I mean Aldrin decked a man over it.
As for holding providers liable, does that mean I should hold the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, or any other major media outlet responsible wholly responsible for the content of their writers? I doubt he would make a resounding yes to that statement considering the problems the media has had lately with its image. The Gallup Poll on Honest and Ethics by Profession actually lower in 2004 for the journalists to below 40% and a 2005 survey in Australia has journalists at 11%. (If anyone has survey results for a US survey in '05 please let me know.)
I hate to break it to the man, but the world is changing and the protection afforded us on the internet might turn out to be the only way to avoid repercusions for what we say, especially at the pace the great US of A is going. Not to mention how great it already is for people who don't have the luxury of free speech that we are suppose to enjoy.
NIMF is just downright stupid. They are calling for more and more AO games, but similar material gets into R-rated movies (remember by the ratings that is 16 and older, M is 17+, AO is 18+) and you do not see them attacking the ratings issued out for them. Like most any organization, NIMF has an agenda and it just so happens their agenda is to "protect the children". While this might be valorous in the eyes of some, it is downright attrocious the odds to which they will go to meet their goals.
Here is a group, with some degree of political clout, who enjoys screaming foul and overacting to what they consider indecency. To remedy the problems with the media, they have decided to enlist the politicians of the US to pass laws making these foul games illegal to sell to minors and to make as many games AO as possible. As a matter of fact, the only good thing NIMF has done lately is put space between themselves and Jack 'The Hack' Thompson.
In the end, NIMF (and many parents) forget that it is not the responsibility of the government, or for that matter the game industry or retailers, to control the content of games that make their way into the hands of children. The responsibility for that falls squarely on the shoulders of parents, and it is tiring to see people who would rather hand off that responsibility to someone else, because they do not think they should be responsible for what their child watches, plays, or hears.
Our society is in a downward spiral. Within my own relatively short lifetime (born circa 1982), we have seen the PG-13 Rating (1984, not too big a deal I think), Parental Advisory sticker (1985), NC-17 Rating (1990, Though really a replacement for the X-Rating), Birth of the ESRB (1994), the TV Parental Guidelines (1997), and the V-Chip (required on 13+ inch TV post-2000).
I am sure I might have missed some things, but really it does paint a bad picture that slowly parents have begun to throw away responsibility to a computer chip and ratings boards, instead of actually watching to see what it is their children are doing with their time. I am just glad my parents looked past ratings and as such I got to enjoy a good many R-rated movies years ahead of time.
FTFA:
Martin said he doesn't plan to push the industry to adopt a new business model, but he suggested that more restrictions on basic cable programming be added if the industry doesn't offer consumers more choice.
Does anyone else read this to say the FCC will begin overstepping their bounds and begin to regulate cable television?
economically feasible and in the best interest of consumers
Yeah, but not for the cable companies. Many companies pack channels the way they do in order to get people to sign up for larger packages so they can get the 2 or 3 channels they want. Besides, I doubt the big cable companies will make the rates of a la carte TV reasonable.
If they do, you can bet I will only have like 30-40 channels and 12 of those will be my HD channels I get now (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB, PBS, ESPN, Comcast Sports HD, Discovery HD, TNT HD, inHD, inHD2) . This would leave the standard def of 10 of those 12 channels plus Sci Fi, Cartoon Network, TBS, Comedy Central, ESPN2, OLN, ABC Family, Spike, USA, AMC, TCM, History Channel, and maybe some others I am missing.
Trust me, the will make sure that costs me as much or more then the approximately $60 or so that my cable costs me now. Add about another $40 on that for the internet and I pay Comcast more money then I do for my three "essential utilities" (Electricity, Gas, Water).
I love how the two problems so far have been from California, where nothing seems to work right. Well at least that is the view the rest of the country seems to hold.
Well that is because VOIP is getting to use the infrastructure established and created by the big telecoms and cable companies. In reality neither group like the idea, because VOIP has created a replacement service for the telecoms that in many cases uses their own infrastructure to transmit the data for phone service.
Since the big telecoms are not getting money from the VOIP services, except for the ones they are offering, they are receiving no money to maintain the infrastructure that is allowing people to make their VOIP calls. The situation is not quite as dire in the minds of the cable companies, but many of them are offering their own VOIP services now as well, and many people are convinced to just get theirs because it is one bill for phone, tv and internet instead of two or three.
The most interesting this is that the big telecoms (at least Verizon) are trying to establish a market in the television industry now by getting permission to use the high bandwidth of fiber solutions (FIOS in Verizon's case) to transmit television along with their data and voice services.
To be honest I do not mind paying the higher prices for the telecoms because I know who to bitch at when my service is interrupted and know that 9 times out of 10 the service will be quickly restored. In the case of VOIP, the possible problems and people to blame our boundless. It could be a trouble with the VOIP carriers service, it could be poor data connection from your ISP, and let us not get into the issues that would arise in a power failure.
I do not see much benefit for VOIP either. The cost difference is not that big of a deal in my opinion, and I have a phone that can go anywhere with me, it is called a cell phone. I have no reception problems, and it has far more usefulness as a travelling phone then VOIP ever would, not to mention E911 service is working.
'Scuse me, Ma Bell Jr., aka SBC
SBC kindly asks you refer to them as Ma Bell, now that they have purchased AT&T and are taking AT&T for their own name.