Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Alice
Babylon 5
Beetlejuice
Chico and the Man
Dark Justice
Eight is Enough
F Troop
The F.B.I.
Falcon Crest
Freakazoid
Freddy's Nightmares
The Fugitive
Growing Pains
Hangin' with Mr. Cooper
Head of the Class
Histeria!
Kung Fu
La Femme Nikita
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Maverick
The New Adventures of Batman
Perfect Strangers
Pinky and the Brain
Scarecrow and Mrs. King
Sisters
Spenser: For Hire
V
Welcome Back, Kotter
Wonder Woman
This is what I was able to find for a full list with more content to be added over the course of a year. There are a few shows I am glad to see, can you guess one from my sig?
By and large patent law is not the problem with the system. There are actually two glaring problem to which I will point you.
Problem 1: Congress takes a good chunk of the Patent Office's money to distribute to other government agencies. Unlike many of your government offices the USPTO actually makes money, not just spends it. I do not have the exact numbers available but for some reason it seems like there are quite possibly hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that the USPTO never sees of its own money. So we can all think of how this would help I am sure.
Problem 2: The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) created the requirement for a "motivation" when makinng a rejection on 35 USC 103(a). What does this mean? It simply means that if you had reference A that teaches a set number of elements in an invention and reference B which teaches another set of elements, you would then need a reason for combining the two references and preferably one from one of the two references. This requirement was not part of the SCOTUS ruling in Graham v. Deere which established the guidlines for making an obvious-type rejection, and it ignores the one of ordinary skill in the art (in my, and many other people's, opinion) as discussed in the SCOTUS ruling.
Here are a few reminders to people arguing that something is obvious: 1) Was it obvious when the application was filed and not just today? 2) Things, more often then not, always seem obvious in hindsight. 3) If it is obvious, where is the prior art teaching the references and what does it teach. 4) Remember the invention is in the claims, and the claims are actually narrower then many of you give them credit for. 5) Most patents never make anyone money, they are solely meant for protection of products, and nowadays protection from "trolls."
Is the system broken? Yes. Does the law need to be re-written? Not so much, only in the sense that it would bring a few things in line with the rest of the world.
Not just its employees, but its military. I can honestly say that I believe most the Blackberry's I see in use on the commuter trains here in DC are being used by military personnel.
Ok, so let's say there are only 5,000 lost sales then. Or even just 2,000. The fact is that some people will download it, read the whole thing and never even consider purchasing it. There are plenty of methods available for people to take gambles on different media types. In the case of movies, there is Blockbuster or Netflix which minimize the cost of the gamble. People have HBO and SHO for similar reasons and on-demand programming through cable companies.
For the books there are plenty of methods as well. You can always go to your local library or a bookstore to browse through the book selection. I see plenty of people in B&N looking through the books and heck I think some of them read whole books there and still never purchase them. So the problem would still exist even without a downloading means available and with or without copyright laws.
Games have Blockbuster or Gamefly or downloadable demos. The one with the hardest alternative test systems are music. Sometimes you can find musical samples online to try out, but there are not really many established preview methods, since we can argue how horrible radio selection and music television stations are for trying out music.
The fact is the copyright system doesn't need to be completely abolished, it only needs to be modified to make it more suitable and appropriate. The time limit should be lowered to something like 40-50 yrs (so I can maybe see some public domain movies in my lifetime). The definition of fair use should be spelled out in the law and made very clear to avoid the legal issues and such that come out of what is a largely undefinite term. The idea of backing-up media would need to be protected, as well as the idea of having media portability, so you can make old VHS -> DVD, CDs -> MP3, etc. There should also be laws that specifically make DRM ideas illegal with a few very rare exceptions. It should be made clear that anything interfering with a persons right to fair use will not be allowed. Unfortunately, this is probably all a pipe dream.
actually it is true...RTFA and you'll see in the second or third paragraph those five companies putting money into the group...IBM and Sony have reason to join in on the fun because big companies are the target of trolls, and that is the real goal of this group is to protect corporations from patent trolls.
Hmmm...$50-$60 a game + $25-$40 for an extra controller + $25-$35 for memory card if you don't get the HDD = $100 - $135. Of course you can multiply that game number by two or three at least since it is coming out in time for X-Mas (oh dear me, I can see the bad X related promos now) so many people will be getting games at launch and for the holidays. Seriously, if you plan on playing this thing pretty hard you are going to want more then one game at launch anyway.
I think you underestimate what people are going to be willing to spend. I would imagine many people will pick up the cheaper one thinking they will buy an extra game instead. This is especially true of people who do not mind extra consoles and can keep around their X-Box for their old games and saves and whatever else...
So much better and easier control usually on the PC. Not to mention better frame rates and presently better resolutions then your TV. Now if you got yourself a nice HDTV I do recommend game play through a PC on there...played WoW, HL2, and CS: Source on an HDTV before like that....oh so sweet....
Yes, but do you have to pay for live to update games? If not, you realize that many games have ignored this function since they had 0 online capability there was no point in adding a patching system. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind comes to mind, as I recall it had many problems on X-Box that were PC patched. The same for KotoR I.
It is speculation on a Blog. It is a post going to a blog from a person who writes on said blog. The blog has loads of ads. Lets do some math. Write inflammatory Story + Submit to Slashdot + Get a few people to click ads while reading said story = Profit.
Nothing to see here, just another example of/. posting peoples blogs so they can get some more money.
I think the only thing anyone has ever said against tray loading designs is they can break, which a top load isn't going to do unless you go about ripping the top off or the spring dies. Also, the top loading giving you access to the lens area and some of the mechanics. While this may not seem good because it allows in dust, it is better for cleaning around the area with the canned air and the like. It should be noted that there have been problems with the PS2 and skipping because of dust/dirt.
While tray loading is good for stackability, the X-Box really didn't have a design that was good for sitting stuff on top of it. I do have my PS2 stacked, on top of the surround receiver, below the real DVD player and cable box. I really need to find a nice rack to hold all the stuff so it looks nicer next to all speakers and TV.
While many, if not all, of the cases to date involve private schools, there is more to these cases then the rights of the private school to do such. We all can agree if this was a public school no one would question that the groups were in the wrong, since the schools are public institutions. It is reasons like this why a public school cannot ban certain groups from using the facilities just because of their racial, sexual, or other such makeup. (This has actually been tested by courts in many cases, if you make the school available for some you must make it available for all.)
Now, we have a private school. Normally, I would agree with the school preventing students from access to these websites while on school property and using school computers and the like. The fact is though, this is not the case. These schools are have been enforcing these rules even when students are away from the school and not using anything school related. Pope John XIII didn't even say it was limited to school related material, but all material available. Of course, they attempted to use the spin that it was for the children's protection. However, anyone who has been online (or saw Datelines recent "scare story") know that most online predators use chat room and instant messaging to prowl on the young ones, not blogs and community sites.
In the case of the Fisher College student, if he was stating factual information concerning the individuals in question, then he was doing nothing more then amateur reporting. Had the story been printed in a newspaper or had he been a source (even non-anonymous) to a news story we probably would not be talking about this. This is a bit more twisted in they are not even trying to hide the fact that they suspened a student for writing things that might be shining a light on dark truths at the school.
In the end, I believe that the question of private schools (and corporations) censoring information might come down to a court ruling; however, I believe it might be some time before SCOTUS hears such a case. When they do I expect the following, the schools in question being private organizations, have the right to their own means for controlling services and information distributed through their own computer resource; however, without some pre-acknowledge contract that clearly outlines the limitations of the students in a way as to let them know that such activity is not allowed away from these situations the organizations no longer have this control. Of course they could surprise me and say the organizations have no control outside of their own computer resources.
To expand on this, I believe SCOTUS will use Boy Scouts as an example stating that as a private organization they have the right to deny certain individuals the ability to serve as scout masters (and quite possibly as scouts themselves). The debate becomes a bit more of a problem when you consider private schools and the voucher possibility. At this point, private schools are to some degree being provided with their money from government and the question becomes a lot more important. I believe in the ultimate ruling that most people will like SCOTUS might say: We believe the freedom of speech is an ultimate right of the people of this country as demonstrated by it being a part of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. This Right should not be violated by an institution public or private in a way that prevents individuals from free expression while not violating other laws (i.e. the "fire in a crowded theater" idea or trade secret laws) and non-disclosure agreements.
In the end, of the three most likely responses, I believe we will probably get the half-way one, where SCOTUS would say, you can control speech at your institution and distributed through your network or using your own equipment (computers given to students for home use), but outside of that the individuals have an expectation of the Right to Free Speech. I believe it is also important for the court to make this case in the rights for minors, because it seems to be the general few of adults in power positions (i.e. principals, managers, teachers, etc.) that minors are not entitled to the same rights and protections of adults (which is quite untrue).
Ummm...KotoR I and II are both available for your PC. Guess what else, the PC version can be patched to fix the bugs that cannot be fixed in the Console version.
Actually looking around both sites I see about an equal amount of ads for their individual merchandise. Actually, I see more ads per page for not site related materials on VGCats then on PA. I mean seriously, from what I can tell the nice people bringing us both strips seem to like each other, and better yet VGCats even has a link on their main page to PA's Charity.
Everyone seems to be complaining that your argument against PA is that they sold out. Not only do you use an ill-defined term that will get you about 20 different definitions from 20 people, but you also do not address anything relevant to the people, the site or the comic.
People would be a bit less harsh to you if you actually stated a point instead of simply saying, the suck because they sold out. Do you dislike their drawing style? Do you find the comics un-funny? Did they bull you in high school? Seriously, provide logical argument and then when people start replying back with lines like, no you suck, then you can say that you have pulled the fanboys from their holes.
As it looks, it seems we found us the VGCats fanboy, because he has done nothing to rationalize his attack on PA.
We had an issue where I once worked because we had so many servers the general server room that many different groups used was no longer adequate for our needs, since we were outgrowing our alotted space. Now instead of building us a new server room with the appropriate cooling (which presumably would have included raised flooring) we got a closet in a new building. This is obviously not much fun for the poor people who worked outside the closet, because the servers made a good deal of noise and even with the door closed were quite distracting.
Now, we had to get building systems to maximize the air flow from the AC vent in the room to ensure maximum cooling and the temperature on the thermostat was set to the minimum (about 65 F I believe). One day, while trying to do some routine upgrades to the server, I noticed things not going so well. So I logged off the remote connection and made my way to the server room.
What do I find when I get there? The room temperature is approximately 95 F (the outside room was a normal 72) and the servers are burning up. I check the system logs and guess what, it has been like this four nearly 12 hrs (since sometime in the middle of the night). To make this worse our system administrator was at home for vacation around X-Mas, so of course all sorts of hell was busting loose.
We wound up getting the room down after the people from building systems managed to get us more AC cooling in the room; however, the point is it was never really enough. Even on a good day it was anywhere from 75 F to 80 F in the room and with nearly a full rack and another one to be moved in there is was never going to be enough. This is what happens though when administrations have apathy when it comes to IT and the needs of the computer systems, particularly servers. Maybe we should bolt servers down and stick them in giant wind tunnels or something...
If you reverse-engineered Coke's formula (which has already been done)
Actually if you believe the people over at Coca-Cola, none of the published recipes are correct. If you do not believe them, well no one has exactly started selling an exact duplicate of Coke en masse so who knows. Part of the problem is even if you figure out exactly what is in Coke, well you still need to find the correct order and process for turning the raw materials into Coke.
So I might be off on the reverse engineering of a trade secret...but you are arguably off on the Coca Cola formula being successfully reverse engineered. But anyway, this is now starting to get off on a tangent...
No, see if you did make the coke rip off you do not necessarily have to be admitting coke is better, simply trying to sell the same product. People who like Pepsi will still buy Pepsi because they like the taste, because trust me there is a difference (I have one friend who still swears he cannot tell the difference).
The thing is if your crack team of scientists "reverse engineer" the coke formula Coca Cola is going to throw a fit and quite likely you'll get sued back to the stone age and that is not exactly something people want to deal with. The idea is the Coke formula is a trade secret and violating that would cost you.
Like one of the sibling to my (what is it GGGP) post said there does not only need to be a benefit to society but to the inventor. Trust me you would think differently if company X was a drug company making a life saving drug who kept their idea a "trade secret" and subsequently charged high prices for their product. Ignore the inter-cola competition, because there are plenty of coke zealots who would probably buy it if it was twice the price of pepsi and the same goes the other way.
Like another sibling says, if they implemented some great process in making coke that is kept secret as well, then yes we could be harming society in some way because it would be a means for stifling innovation. Trade secrets = bad, patents = better. Like one of my other posts the benefits of a patent are DISCLOSURE. A patent for the coke recipe would not necessarily have prevented pepsi or anyone else from make a soda product, but it would have allowed people to make the exact same cola product that Coke is after the patent term was up...
You mean to say that there Pepsi Cola, Herschi Cola, 7UP, Spa Green/Red, Tonic, Cassis, etc. could all be bought before Coca Cola existed? Or you mean to say that these other soda drinks are there because of the stiffling effect of not having a patent on Coca Cola?
Take the big 4 soda makers. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, RC, and DPSU (Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up in case you are dense). Now none of these companies use the same formula. This is why they all have very different tasting soda products and why many people either love or hate one or the other when it comes to Coke and Pepsi in particular.
Now let us say for a minute that no one else was quick enough to have figured out the wonderful process and ingredients that Coca-Cola uses. By having a patent you force disclosure meaning everyone would then be in the know about Coca-Cola's recipe. This means that anyone could clone Coca-Cola perfectly after the patent age was up (see the post that is a sibling to the GP).
As it stands Coca-Cola's recipe is a trade secret and the same is probably quite true for Pepsi, RC and Dr. Pepper. This means that a "perfect" copy of these drinks is never going to be possible because so long as they protect their trade secret, anyone making a exact clone would be breaking the law in "stealing a trade secret." This means knock-off soda made by the people who provide grocery chains and Wal-Mart with their generic soda will never be perfect replicas and only close approximations.
What this boils down to is this: no patent means competition is only driven between brands of what are technically varying products. There is no generic substitute so people who want the "real thing" have to buy it from Coke, Pepsi, etc. This means that they usually do not have to worry so much about competing with the prices of generic sodas which are often sold for as much as half the cost of the name brand. The reason they do not have to compete with these is because they are smaller in number, but also because they can never successfully replicate a brands taste without copying the recipe, which as discussed above is illegal.
Your example of the RIM v. NTP case is not a good example. First off, you misuse the idea because it goes beyond e-mail and wireless link. Go read the claims of the patent and get back to me on that one, because unlike what the masses of patent haters on/. would like you to believe the case isn't as dumbed down as it looks.
Now back to my original example. The reason a Big Mac has no patent is because burgers are much older then the Big Mac. The idea of adding lettuce, tomato, etc. is no big deal since it would be "well known" in the art. There was nothing new and innovative about the Big Mac, I mean even the lame sauce isn't that secret.
I will now point you to a particular patent for a food product. In this case 4,871,554 which is a patent for fortified food products. The first claim basically covers your fortified orange juice. The patent as you will see is held by Coca-Cola, for their Minute Maid division no doubt. I once again invite you to look at class 426 and check out subclass 7 for fermentation processes. There are patents for Anheuser-Busch which covered a cholesterol free egg product (3,987,212) which is now expired.
There is a difference between patenting a mass produced product and a simple cooking recipe. The fact is it would not be economical to get patents on simple food recipes and quite possibly impossible since there is such a wide variety in cooking. On a side note, recipes have the potential to be copyrighted if provided with the proper context. We all know how much longer a copyright lasts over a patent.
Seriously, this is not a really contested issue among patents and you are in an obvious minority here. Why do I say that? The patent application is a WIPO/PCT patent application being sent to a wide variety of states, therefore it must be something that holds patentable weight in many countries and not just in the USA.
To go with my other patent, check out class 426 over at the USPTO. So this isn't that odd of an occurence to patent food and beverages if there is a whole class for it. Also another note from my sibling post, a trade secret provides nearly the same legal protection as a patent in many cases, so long as the company takes great effort to maintain said secret. In this case Coca-Cola would be able to sue just about anyone selling a cola product with the exact (and possibly very similar) recipe as their own since they can claim they stole a trade secret. With a patent, it would have run out by now (Coca-cola has been around more then 20 years) and there would be the possibility of hundreds of generic Coca-Cola products which could have the exact same recipe...disclosure is key to why patents are good.
Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that?
Because patents require disclosure, the whole idea is to offer a certain time of protection for a product while at the same time forcing disclosure of it to the public. It is this disclosure that makes it possible for people to advance technologies and improve on them. Actually the Coca-Cola as a trade secret is a great example of how keeping a secret and not disclosing could technically stifle innovation in the soda industry if other companies were already so prolific in the area anyway.
The Big Mac is a BAD example. It is a burger which would be easily rejected as a sum of its parts. Nothing holding patentable weight, but a drink like Coca-Cola is a chemical mixture and one that is actually useful. What you fail to realize is that by patenting this idea Nestle has made is possible for every company in the world to improve on their process and to improve the overall item. Without this it would be a trade secret for all eternity and no one would ever know how it was made. Since this is something that people have not done before, it is important that disclosure is made in order to allow people to actually learn the process.
Really, you are WAY off base on this one. Go crawl back into your hole of paranoia, and moderators mod down the Parent because he is not insightful at all, just terribly misinformed.
Wait, are you telling me I am not the only Computer Engineer (well actually, Electrical and Computer Engineer, complain to Ohio State) on here? But I am glad to see that some people around here know what an FPGA and ASIC are and that I am not alone. Btw, you know anybody hiring someone to do some ASIC design work or anything else that might take advantage of my VLSI and digital design course work from college...
I mean did anyone seriously think that these memory latencies were going to have a great impact on anything that the most common users care about? I mean game performance is barely touched at all, which is another Duh! I think their conclusion is probably right, the people buying these things are the idiots who want to post how they have the ultimate system with great RAM and everything, where they probably only could afford 1 GB of their stuff, my performance and load times are better because I could afford the 2 GB of my 'slower' RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Alice
Babylon 5
Beetlejuice
Chico and the Man
Dark Justice
Eight is Enough
F Troop
The F.B.I.
Falcon Crest
Freakazoid
Freddy's Nightmares
The Fugitive
Growing Pains
Hangin' with Mr. Cooper
Head of the Class
Histeria!
Kung Fu
La Femme Nikita
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Maverick
The New Adventures of Batman
Perfect Strangers
Pinky and the Brain
Scarecrow and Mrs. King
Sisters
Spenser: For Hire
V
Welcome Back, Kotter
Wonder Woman
This is what I was able to find for a full list with more content to be added over the course of a year. There are a few shows I am glad to see, can you guess one from my sig?
By and large patent law is not the problem with the system. There are actually two glaring problem to which I will point you.
Problem 1: Congress takes a good chunk of the Patent Office's money to distribute to other government agencies. Unlike many of your government offices the USPTO actually makes money, not just spends it. I do not have the exact numbers available but for some reason it seems like there are quite possibly hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that the USPTO never sees of its own money. So we can all think of how this would help I am sure.
Problem 2: The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) created the requirement for a "motivation" when makinng a rejection on 35 USC 103(a). What does this mean? It simply means that if you had reference A that teaches a set number of elements in an invention and reference B which teaches another set of elements, you would then need a reason for combining the two references and preferably one from one of the two references. This requirement was not part of the SCOTUS ruling in Graham v. Deere which established the guidlines for making an obvious-type rejection, and it ignores the one of ordinary skill in the art (in my, and many other people's, opinion) as discussed in the SCOTUS ruling.
Here are a few reminders to people arguing that something is obvious:
1) Was it obvious when the application was filed and not just today?
2) Things, more often then not, always seem obvious in hindsight.
3) If it is obvious, where is the prior art teaching the references and what does it teach.
4) Remember the invention is in the claims, and the claims are actually narrower then many of you give them credit for.
5) Most patents never make anyone money, they are solely meant for protection of products, and nowadays protection from "trolls."
Is the system broken? Yes. Does the law need to be re-written? Not so much, only in the sense that it would bring a few things in line with the rest of the world.
Not just its employees, but its military. I can honestly say that I believe most the Blackberry's I see in use on the commuter trains here in DC are being used by military personnel.
Ok, so let's say there are only 5,000 lost sales then. Or even just 2,000. The fact is that some people will download it, read the whole thing and never even consider purchasing it. There are plenty of methods available for people to take gambles on different media types. In the case of movies, there is Blockbuster or Netflix which minimize the cost of the gamble. People have HBO and SHO for similar reasons and on-demand programming through cable companies.
For the books there are plenty of methods as well. You can always go to your local library or a bookstore to browse through the book selection. I see plenty of people in B&N looking through the books and heck I think some of them read whole books there and still never purchase them. So the problem would still exist even without a downloading means available and with or without copyright laws.
Games have Blockbuster or Gamefly or downloadable demos. The one with the hardest alternative test systems are music. Sometimes you can find musical samples online to try out, but there are not really many established preview methods, since we can argue how horrible radio selection and music television stations are for trying out music.
The fact is the copyright system doesn't need to be completely abolished, it only needs to be modified to make it more suitable and appropriate. The time limit should be lowered to something like 40-50 yrs (so I can maybe see some public domain movies in my lifetime). The definition of fair use should be spelled out in the law and made very clear to avoid the legal issues and such that come out of what is a largely undefinite term. The idea of backing-up media would need to be protected, as well as the idea of having media portability, so you can make old VHS -> DVD, CDs -> MP3, etc. There should also be laws that specifically make DRM ideas illegal with a few very rare exceptions. It should be made clear that anything interfering with a persons right to fair use will not be allowed. Unfortunately, this is probably all a pipe dream.
actually it is true...RTFA and you'll see in the second or third paragraph those five companies putting money into the group...IBM and Sony have reason to join in on the fun because big companies are the target of trolls, and that is the real goal of this group is to protect corporations from patent trolls.
Hmmm...$50-$60 a game + $25-$40 for an extra controller + $25-$35 for memory card if you don't get the HDD = $100 - $135. Of course you can multiply that game number by two or three at least since it is coming out in time for X-Mas (oh dear me, I can see the bad X related promos now) so many people will be getting games at launch and for the holidays. Seriously, if you plan on playing this thing pretty hard you are going to want more then one game at launch anyway.
I think you underestimate what people are going to be willing to spend. I would imagine many people will pick up the cheaper one thinking they will buy an extra game instead. This is especially true of people who do not mind extra consoles and can keep around their X-Box for their old games and saves and whatever else...
So much better and easier control usually on the PC. Not to mention better frame rates and presently better resolutions then your TV. Now if you got yourself a nice HDTV I do recommend game play through a PC on there...played WoW, HL2, and CS: Source on an HDTV before like that....oh so sweet....
Yes, but do you have to pay for live to update games? If not, you realize that many games have ignored this function since they had 0 online capability there was no point in adding a patching system. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind comes to mind, as I recall it had many problems on X-Box that were PC patched. The same for KotoR I.
It is speculation on a Blog. It is a post going to a blog from a person who writes on said blog. The blog has loads of ads. Lets do some math. Write inflammatory Story + Submit to Slashdot + Get a few people to click ads while reading said story = Profit.
/. posting peoples blogs so they can get some more money.
Nothing to see here, just another example of
I think the only thing anyone has ever said against tray loading designs is they can break, which a top load isn't going to do unless you go about ripping the top off or the spring dies. Also, the top loading giving you access to the lens area and some of the mechanics. While this may not seem good because it allows in dust, it is better for cleaning around the area with the canned air and the like. It should be noted that there have been problems with the PS2 and skipping because of dust/dirt.
While tray loading is good for stackability, the X-Box really didn't have a design that was good for sitting stuff on top of it. I do have my PS2 stacked, on top of the surround receiver, below the real DVD player and cable box. I really need to find a nice rack to hold all the stuff so it looks nicer next to all speakers and TV.
While many, if not all, of the cases to date involve private schools, there is more to these cases then the rights of the private school to do such. We all can agree if this was a public school no one would question that the groups were in the wrong, since the schools are public institutions. It is reasons like this why a public school cannot ban certain groups from using the facilities just because of their racial, sexual, or other such makeup. (This has actually been tested by courts in many cases, if you make the school available for some you must make it available for all.)
Now, we have a private school. Normally, I would agree with the school preventing students from access to these websites while on school property and using school computers and the like. The fact is though, this is not the case. These schools are have been enforcing these rules even when students are away from the school and not using anything school related. Pope John XIII didn't even say it was limited to school related material, but all material available. Of course, they attempted to use the spin that it was for the children's protection. However, anyone who has been online (or saw Datelines recent "scare story") know that most online predators use chat room and instant messaging to prowl on the young ones, not blogs and community sites.
In the case of the Fisher College student, if he was stating factual information concerning the individuals in question, then he was doing nothing more then amateur reporting. Had the story been printed in a newspaper or had he been a source (even non-anonymous) to a news story we probably would not be talking about this. This is a bit more twisted in they are not even trying to hide the fact that they suspened a student for writing things that might be shining a light on dark truths at the school.
In the end, I believe that the question of private schools (and corporations) censoring information might come down to a court ruling; however, I believe it might be some time before SCOTUS hears such a case. When they do I expect the following, the schools in question being private organizations, have the right to their own means for controlling services and information distributed through their own computer resource; however, without some pre-acknowledge contract that clearly outlines the limitations of the students in a way as to let them know that such activity is not allowed away from these situations the organizations no longer have this control. Of course they could surprise me and say the organizations have no control outside of their own computer resources.
To expand on this, I believe SCOTUS will use Boy Scouts as an example stating that as a private organization they have the right to deny certain individuals the ability to serve as scout masters (and quite possibly as scouts themselves). The debate becomes a bit more of a problem when you consider private schools and the voucher possibility. At this point, private schools are to some degree being provided with their money from government and the question becomes a lot more important. I believe in the ultimate ruling that most people will like SCOTUS might say: We believe the freedom of speech is an ultimate right of the people of this country as demonstrated by it being a part of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. This Right should not be violated by an institution public or private in a way that prevents individuals from free expression while not violating other laws (i.e. the "fire in a crowded theater" idea or trade secret laws) and non-disclosure agreements.
In the end, of the three most likely responses, I believe we will probably get the half-way one, where SCOTUS would say, you can control speech at your institution and distributed through your network or using your own equipment (computers given to students for home use), but outside of that the individuals have an expectation of the Right to Free Speech. I believe it is also important for the court to make this case in the rights for minors, because it seems to be the general few of adults in power positions (i.e. principals, managers, teachers, etc.) that minors are not entitled to the same rights and protections of adults (which is quite untrue).
Ummm...KotoR I and II are both available for your PC. Guess what else, the PC version can be patched to fix the bugs that cannot be fixed in the Console version.
Actually looking around both sites I see about an equal amount of ads for their individual merchandise. Actually, I see more ads per page for not site related materials on VGCats then on PA. I mean seriously, from what I can tell the nice people bringing us both strips seem to like each other, and better yet VGCats even has a link on their main page to PA's Charity.
Everyone seems to be complaining that your argument against PA is that they sold out. Not only do you use an ill-defined term that will get you about 20 different definitions from 20 people, but you also do not address anything relevant to the people, the site or the comic.
People would be a bit less harsh to you if you actually stated a point instead of simply saying, the suck because they sold out. Do you dislike their drawing style? Do you find the comics un-funny? Did they bull you in high school? Seriously, provide logical argument and then when people start replying back with lines like, no you suck, then you can say that you have pulled the fanboys from their holes.
As it looks, it seems we found us the VGCats fanboy, because he has done nothing to rationalize his attack on PA.
*Inignot giving the finger to Dennis Hope*
Inignot: "I hope he can see this because I'm doing it as hard as I can"
We had an issue where I once worked because we had so many servers the general server room that many different groups used was no longer adequate for our needs, since we were outgrowing our alotted space. Now instead of building us a new server room with the appropriate cooling (which presumably would have included raised flooring) we got a closet in a new building. This is obviously not much fun for the poor people who worked outside the closet, because the servers made a good deal of noise and even with the door closed were quite distracting.
Now, we had to get building systems to maximize the air flow from the AC vent in the room to ensure maximum cooling and the temperature on the thermostat was set to the minimum (about 65 F I believe). One day, while trying to do some routine upgrades to the server, I noticed things not going so well. So I logged off the remote connection and made my way to the server room.
What do I find when I get there? The room temperature is approximately 95 F (the outside room was a normal 72) and the servers are burning up. I check the system logs and guess what, it has been like this four nearly 12 hrs (since sometime in the middle of the night). To make this worse our system administrator was at home for vacation around X-Mas, so of course all sorts of hell was busting loose.
We wound up getting the room down after the people from building systems managed to get us more AC cooling in the room; however, the point is it was never really enough. Even on a good day it was anywhere from 75 F to 80 F in the room and with nearly a full rack and another one to be moved in there is was never going to be enough. This is what happens though when administrations have apathy when it comes to IT and the needs of the computer systems, particularly servers. Maybe we should bolt servers down and stick them in giant wind tunnels or something...
If you reverse-engineered Coke's formula (which has already been done)
Actually if you believe the people over at Coca-Cola, none of the published recipes are correct. If you do not believe them, well no one has exactly started selling an exact duplicate of Coke en masse so who knows. Part of the problem is even if you figure out exactly what is in Coke, well you still need to find the correct order and process for turning the raw materials into Coke.
So I might be off on the reverse engineering of a trade secret...but you are arguably off on the Coca Cola formula being successfully reverse engineered. But anyway, this is now starting to get off on a tangent...
No, see if you did make the coke rip off you do not necessarily have to be admitting coke is better, simply trying to sell the same product. People who like Pepsi will still buy Pepsi because they like the taste, because trust me there is a difference (I have one friend who still swears he cannot tell the difference).
The thing is if your crack team of scientists "reverse engineer" the coke formula Coca Cola is going to throw a fit and quite likely you'll get sued back to the stone age and that is not exactly something people want to deal with. The idea is the Coke formula is a trade secret and violating that would cost you.
Like one of the sibling to my (what is it GGGP) post said there does not only need to be a benefit to society but to the inventor. Trust me you would think differently if company X was a drug company making a life saving drug who kept their idea a "trade secret" and subsequently charged high prices for their product. Ignore the inter-cola competition, because there are plenty of coke zealots who would probably buy it if it was twice the price of pepsi and the same goes the other way.
Like another sibling says, if they implemented some great process in making coke that is kept secret as well, then yes we could be harming society in some way because it would be a means for stifling innovation. Trade secrets = bad, patents = better. Like one of my other posts the benefits of a patent are DISCLOSURE. A patent for the coke recipe would not necessarily have prevented pepsi or anyone else from make a soda product, but it would have allowed people to make the exact same cola product that Coke is after the patent term was up...
You mean to say that there Pepsi Cola, Herschi Cola, 7UP, Spa Green/Red, Tonic, Cassis, etc. could all be bought before Coca Cola existed? Or you mean to say that these other soda drinks are there because of the stiffling effect of not having a patent on Coca Cola?
/. would like you to believe the case isn't as dumbed down as it looks.
Take the big 4 soda makers. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, RC, and DPSU (Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up in case you are dense). Now none of these companies use the same formula. This is why they all have very different tasting soda products and why many people either love or hate one or the other when it comes to Coke and Pepsi in particular.
Now let us say for a minute that no one else was quick enough to have figured out the wonderful process and ingredients that Coca-Cola uses. By having a patent you force disclosure meaning everyone would then be in the know about Coca-Cola's recipe. This means that anyone could clone Coca-Cola perfectly after the patent age was up (see the post that is a sibling to the GP).
As it stands Coca-Cola's recipe is a trade secret and the same is probably quite true for Pepsi, RC and Dr. Pepper. This means that a "perfect" copy of these drinks is never going to be possible because so long as they protect their trade secret, anyone making a exact clone would be breaking the law in "stealing a trade secret." This means knock-off soda made by the people who provide grocery chains and Wal-Mart with their generic soda will never be perfect replicas and only close approximations.
What this boils down to is this: no patent means competition is only driven between brands of what are technically varying products. There is no generic substitute so people who want the "real thing" have to buy it from Coke, Pepsi, etc. This means that they usually do not have to worry so much about competing with the prices of generic sodas which are often sold for as much as half the cost of the name brand. The reason they do not have to compete with these is because they are smaller in number, but also because they can never successfully replicate a brands taste without copying the recipe, which as discussed above is illegal.
Your example of the RIM v. NTP case is not a good example. First off, you misuse the idea because it goes beyond e-mail and wireless link. Go read the claims of the patent and get back to me on that one, because unlike what the masses of patent haters on
Now back to my original example. The reason a Big Mac has no patent is because burgers are much older then the Big Mac. The idea of adding lettuce, tomato, etc. is no big deal since it would be "well known" in the art. There was nothing new and innovative about the Big Mac, I mean even the lame sauce isn't that secret.
I will now point you to a particular patent for a food product. In this case 4,871,554 which is a patent for fortified food products. The first claim basically covers your fortified orange juice. The patent as you will see is held by Coca-Cola, for their Minute Maid division no doubt. I once again invite you to look at class 426 and check out subclass 7 for fermentation processes. There are patents for Anheuser-Busch which covered a cholesterol free egg product (3,987,212) which is now expired.
There is a difference between patenting a mass produced product and a simple cooking recipe. The fact is it would not be economical to get patents on simple food recipes and quite possibly impossible since there is such a wide variety in cooking. On a side note, recipes have the potential to be copyrighted if provided with the proper context. We all know how much longer a copyright lasts over a patent.
Seriously, this is not a really contested issue among patents and you are in an obvious minority here. Why do I say that? The patent application is a WIPO/PCT patent application being sent to a wide variety of states, therefore it must be something that holds patentable weight in many countries and not just in the USA.
To go with my other patent, check out class 426 over at the USPTO. So this isn't that odd of an occurence to patent food and beverages if there is a whole class for it. Also another note from my sibling post, a trade secret provides nearly the same legal protection as a patent in many cases, so long as the company takes great effort to maintain said secret. In this case Coca-Cola would be able to sue just about anyone selling a cola product with the exact (and possibly very similar) recipe as their own since they can claim they stole a trade secret. With a patent, it would have run out by now (Coca-cola has been around more then 20 years) and there would be the possibility of hundreds of generic Coca-Cola products which could have the exact same recipe...disclosure is key to why patents are good.
Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that?
Because patents require disclosure, the whole idea is to offer a certain time of protection for a product while at the same time forcing disclosure of it to the public. It is this disclosure that makes it possible for people to advance technologies and improve on them. Actually the Coca-Cola as a trade secret is a great example of how keeping a secret and not disclosing could technically stifle innovation in the soda industry if other companies were already so prolific in the area anyway.
The Big Mac is a BAD example. It is a burger which would be easily rejected as a sum of its parts. Nothing holding patentable weight, but a drink like Coca-Cola is a chemical mixture and one that is actually useful. What you fail to realize is that by patenting this idea Nestle has made is possible for every company in the world to improve on their process and to improve the overall item. Without this it would be a trade secret for all eternity and no one would ever know how it was made. Since this is something that people have not done before, it is important that disclosure is made in order to allow people to actually learn the process.
Really, you are WAY off base on this one. Go crawl back into your hole of paranoia, and moderators mod down the Parent because he is not insightful at all, just terribly misinformed.
I wanna do them!!
Seriously, if there are some female D&D geek girls out there...please oh please tell me where to find you!
Wait, are you telling me I am not the only Computer Engineer (well actually, Electrical and Computer Engineer, complain to Ohio State) on here? But I am glad to see that some people around here know what an FPGA and ASIC are and that I am not alone. Btw, you know anybody hiring someone to do some ASIC design work or anything else that might take advantage of my VLSI and digital design course work from college...
Actually I think that is the premise behind meta-moderating...
I mean did anyone seriously think that these memory latencies were going to have a great impact on anything that the most common users care about? I mean game performance is barely touched at all, which is another Duh! I think their conclusion is probably right, the people buying these things are the idiots who want to post how they have the ultimate system with great RAM and everything, where they probably only could afford 1 GB of their stuff, my performance and load times are better because I could afford the 2 GB of my 'slower' RAM.
Geeze, must be a slow week for hardware...