the solution is simple. Throw whoever runs the patent office in jail. by now they've clearly let enough bad patents through to consistute an sustained and deliberate assault on the american economy. It's subterfuge and sabotage if ever I saw it. Lengthy sentences are in order all round!
Amazon, for instance, obtained US Patent 6,963,848. This was granted on November 8, 2005. It was *filed* March 2, 2000. PriceGrabber only started grabbing reviews in May of that year, and that by partnering with ConsumerReview.COM -- which may or may not have used methods specified in the patent.
Yeah, but I think sometime back in like, 1890, advertisers had customers reviews of products in their advertisements. Things along the lines of ""This product was great" or "Really worth the money".
That wasn't on a computer you say? Well, lemme take a look. Yup! Just such a customer review for for viagra was sent to be by email spammers in 1999. I guess they turned out to be useful after all.
That the gods I'm living in a fair and honest legal system where spurious patents like these can be fought by the little guys without fear of being crushed by corperate countersuits.
Sure it cuts price, but who wants something that won't sparkle and shine in a couple years as HDTVs become more commonplace?
That's true. but it's also true that HDTV's aren't likely to become commonplace till well after 2010, by which time the next generation of console will be approaching it end of life.
Point of note here. What type of television is little Johhny or Mary more likely to have in their bedrooms with the console. A cheap and robust CRT, or a $2000 HDTV set?
Having started playing FPS's at 1920x1200 and 1600x1200 on my 6800, I don't think it would be possible for me to go back to NTSC resolution for modern games.
Well I'm still using an old 15' CRT television to play my games and I'm more that satisfied with it. I've tried HD TV, and I don't see that benefits in the increase in resolution offset the enormous costs of
a) Purchascing such a device and b) The loss of CPU and GPU cycles to increasing resolution that could be put to better uses eleswhere, like gameplay or AI.
You may have enjoyed the 1600x1200 resolution, but I seriously doubt you enjoyed it at the same framerate or lighting quality or perhaps even texture and model quality as someone who was using good old 1024x768 resolution. There's a payoff here, and in terms of what makes a game look better, increasing resolution beyond 1024x768 ranks pretty low on the list of options.
Of course the number one way of making a game look better is better art design. This fact slips past most developers.
So, are they against open source? Why is socialism bad all of a sudden? I thought helping people was good. Are people still obsessing over the whole socalism==communism thing.
Were these guys paying attention when New Orleans flooded?
XUL is powerful. Go here for a taste of how easy it's markup can be.
However, XUL's logic is based on Javascript, and this needs a serious overhaul. Javascript is powerful in some respects, but has serious failings as anything other than a supplementary language.
If XUL can improve javascript or use a different language altogether, I think we'll begin to see more high quality web applications written in it.
Behold France which is currently in upheaval because unsatisfied Muslims are striking out at the national culture which has been keeping them down, nevermind the fact that the Muslims themselves segregate themselves from the rest of society by refusing to conform to the culture into which they immigrated.
Actually, the riots in France are not motivated on religious grounds. The riots are as a result of huge economic disadvantage, exploitation and unemployment in those communities which are rioting. This has come about because of racism and bigotry in France, not because of religion. The majority of the rioters are not even religious.
The Muslims are not rioting. The poor are rioting. Quite a lot of people will try and distract you from this fact, especially in France, where the poor rioting has a long and well documented history of toppling governments.
I've played hundreds of games, from the Atari 2600 days through to today, and it'd depressing for me to notice that my opinion of video games is largely the same as his.
I've reached just about the same conclusion. The industry is stagnating. Good games are hetting harder and harder to find amid all the crud. Maybe a new breed of independant companies will usher in a new era and sweep it all away. Maybe new technology will enable more innovative games. Maybe open source is lead the way to better games.
But probably not. It's most likely that, like holloywood, the game industry will continuously churn out absolute rubbish, with the occassional diamond in the rough appearing every 18 months or so. We most likely will never see the equivalent of Super Mario World hitting the shelves any time soon.
I reject your assumption that God is cannot exist in M.
M is defined to be the set of scientifically explainable elements. You have maintained that God cannot be explained by science. Thus God is not an element of M, and is instead an element of E, the set of objects that cannot be explained by science.
We could argue this up and down forever, but there is a distinct possibilty that no matter what reasonable and logical argument I present, no matter how compelling, some will forever maintain that God still exists because I cannot prove it does not.
Human beings do not naturally reach this state. It must be indoctrinated into them, usually from a very young age. It becomes so ingrained that eventually, the religiously inclined are completely unable to imagine or accept that their views may in fact be fantasy, which they are indistinguishable from.
All religions were simply made up my village elders, or their cultural equivalants. They were not divinely inspired. No Gods or Godesses have ever spoken or communicated in any way, with anyone, by any means. We are all adults. We know this.
Yet there are those who, though they know this as well, hold otherwise. There are also those who do not know this, and hold otherwise. Both these groups are a result of systematic, ongoing campaigns of indoctrination by clergy and by leity. I firmly believe this indoctrination process to be wrong. It enslaves peoples minds. It is an anethema to the core values of democracy. Yet to ban it outright would also be an anethema to democracy.
In my view, the solution to this problem is to educate people of the dangers of religion and proselytism, so that slowly but surely, people stop being religious. This had already been accomplished to some degree in industrialised societies, with the advent of universal secondary education. The education board of Kansas knows this, and so is seeking to handicap the ability of the secondary education system to free people's minds, in any way it can.
Please show me how religion is illogical. Just because it isn't science doesn't make it invalid. I challenge you try to explain how something not described by science can't exist.
Let existence be divided into two distinct non overlapping sets M and E. Let M be the material/(scientifically explainable) realm set. Let E be the ethereal(scientifically unexplainable) realm set. By definition the intersection of M and E is a null set.
Everything in out universe lies within set M. God, if such a being exists, does not by definition lie within M. Therefore God must be an element, or elements, of E.
If elements in M are to be influenced by elements in E then some physical particle, force or other effect must in some way originate or be connected with an element in E. This implies that at some time or place, there exists an element which is both a member of M and E.
But by definition, the intersection of M and E is the null set. Thus, elements in E cannot effect elements in M directly.
One can postulate the set E', whose intersection with M and E is not a null set. Then element in E can influence elements in M, via influence of elements in E'.
It falls then to define the set E', which contains elements both in the material set and the ethereal set. Also, this set must contain at least one element wich does not lie with in either M or E, otherwise it is simply a subset of M union E.
So we have at least one element in existence with is neither explainable or unexplainable by science. This is a clear contridiction. We have reached a logical contridiction, thus one of our assumptions was false.
The only unjustified assumption we made was the existence of this one element. Thus E' less (E union M) is a null set. Therefore E' is a subset of E union M and so elements in E cannot influence elements in M.
Therefore, the existence of God in set E is the equivalent to the existence of any element in set M, as neither element can affect the other. We may inverse the sets M and E and any set of elements in M with the God set in E and the argument still holds. Religion holds that the existence of God is greater than the existence of any element in set M. Clearly this is not the case, therefore religion is illogical.
I think you will find the argument is really quite solid.
1. If people ever did believe in dragons and fairies they believed in them as physical entities. Anything physical is governed by natural law. God does not exist in the physical world as described by science, so there is your biggest distinction.
If God does not exist in the physical world, then what is the basis for worshipping it? Where do scriptures and religious teachings stem from if this is the case?
By your arguments, every religious teaching in the world that makes reference to divine figures, whether it is a monothesistic religion or nature worship or whatever, is indistuinguishable from something that is simply a product of human fantasy. Yet simultaniously, believers in any such teachings hold them to be absolute truth over and above any other, including verifyable scientific facts.
So we have something which is indistuinguishable from fantasy, yet is held above all other truths.
This is quintessential doublethink, and children across the world each and every day are having it drilled into them. Is this right? Is it wrong to expose the logical fallacy inherent in almost every religion?
Should I be allowed to say that any paticular religious teaching is nonsense? What if the state attempts to stop me? Should peoples religious freedoms be protected under the law, even when those freedoms themselves are often illogical, and sometimes contrary to the constitution of the state?
These are questions which I feel will more and more impact upon the post enlightenment world. The cases of cults such as Scientology and the past and perhaps even present activities the Catholic Church have shown us that there are flaws in the state allowing unconditional religious freedoms. The state has a duty to protect the rights of its citizens, but what about when religious teachings take away the rights of citizens? What must the state do then?
Class action suit? Why not just have Sony face criminal charges? The company broke the law, so why not send an executive or two to jail for a few weeks. At least a suspended sentence?
The U.S. Patent Office is underfunded, understaffed, and underqualified.
Stop making excuses. The office is corrupt. There can be no doubt that substantial bribes are floating a great many patents coming out of the USPTO. What other reasonable explanation could there be for such a gross level of blatantly illegal activity?
The press were pals of the government at the time, so Railtrack always came out as the cold hearted evil corporation.
The press being pals had nothing to do with it. Railtrack was the cold hearted corporation. People died as a direct result of their negligence in a effort to cut costs.
And not just any old people! They were middle class victims! The horror...
Claiming that religion is like dragons and fiaries is a strawman, and you ought to know that.
In what sense? What distinguishes religious stories and teachings from these tales? How is believing in angels or heaven and hell or an afterlife any more or less justifyable in believing in dragons or fairies?
I'm not against casual used sales (Selling to friends, ebay, lending), but I am against stores like BestBuy ripping off customers by paying out next to nothing and reselling for almost retail, while promoting these before new sales.
Just to et you know, because of fixed price console games, retailers make a bare minimum of margin on selling brand new games and consoles. A friend of mine who worked in a game store claimed the margin for the store on selling a new console was ~$2, whereas for a new console the margin must have been at least ~$50.
Retails push used game so much because nowadays, that is the only place they make money. If Sony pull this off, a lot of retailers will simply go out of business, and you can expect to see an increase in both console and game prices.
Be careful what you wish for. Enjoy your decreased market sales.
How can you honestly speak of freedom, and than sugest eliminating peoples ability to think for themselves?
In these days of freedom, people no longer believe that dragons, fairies and demons are real. People no longer think that the earth is flat, or lies at the center of the universe. Such thinking has stopped by means of education and freedom of thought. It was not repression, but rather the opposite, liberation that prevented such things.
I don't propose making religion illegal. What I would propose is more openness and education so that people stop believing in religion. There can be no doubt that religion is a source of much hate and trouble in the world, so why shouldn't people try prevent others falling into its trap?
What I absolutely would not propose is forcing children to be exposed to religious thinking in school, as is being done in Kansas. It must be realised that education leads people away from religion, and that the aim of the religious in Kansas is to limit educations ability to do so, so that it becomes harder for generations of young people to escape ignorance.
Do you really think that eliminating religion is a good thing?
Actually yes I do.
To my way of thinking, religion is best off going the way of believing in dragons and that the sun revolved around the earth. You may be offended by that, but I am daily offended by much of the vitriol and hate speach that is preached by religious clerics and believers everyday.
the problem is that religious parents are unlikely to see it that way in many cases.
Exactly. Because they themselves have been indoctrinated. It's a vicious cycle, which has proven near impossible to break, even in these days of the elightenment.
At this point, I've been having so many dependency issues with apt and yum, that 70% of the time, I end up compiling from source anyway. So I'm in fact moving to Gentoo. I'm sure it won't be a paneaca of all my dependency ills, but the way things stand I'm practically running a custom compiled system anyway.
And many people forgets that non-gpl drivers may be very well impossible to write at all (at least some lawyers think this), drivers are not at all like an app is WRT to gtk, drivers are more like "plugins".
What? What kind of logic or legal interpretation leads to this conclusion. By that logic, the kernel itself is an illegal app as it interfaces with all kinds of proprietry hardware.
A driver is just a specific program that enables the kernel, and hence programs, to interface with some esoteric piece of hardware. I think that case involving DMCA "copyright circumvention" on printer cartridges put any doubts people may have had on this matter to rest.
Slashdot Mirror
the solution is simple. Throw whoever runs the patent office in jail. by now they've clearly let enough bad patents through to consistute an sustained and deliberate assault on the american economy. It's subterfuge and sabotage if ever I saw it. Lengthy sentences are in order all round!
Amazon, for instance, obtained US Patent 6,963,848. This was granted on November 8, 2005. It was *filed* March 2, 2000. PriceGrabber only started grabbing reviews in May of that year, and that by partnering with ConsumerReview.COM -- which may or may not have used methods specified in the patent.
Yeah, but I think sometime back in like, 1890, advertisers had customers reviews of products in their advertisements. Things along the lines of ""This product was great" or "Really worth the money".
That wasn't on a computer you say? Well, lemme take a look. Yup! Just such a customer review for for viagra was sent to be by email spammers in 1999. I guess they turned out to be useful after all.
That the gods I'm living in a fair and honest legal system where spurious patents like these can be fought by the little guys without fear of being crushed by corperate countersuits.
Oh wait.
You put the projector at the foot of the bed and have it send the image to the far wall.
You assume sir, that the walls of my room are clean.
but have you seen 1600x1200 thrown up on an 8' diagonal projection screen?
That sounds nice but I seriously doubt this setup will fit on the table at the foot of my bed for the foreseeable future.
Sure it cuts price, but who wants something that won't sparkle and shine in a couple years as HDTVs become more commonplace?
That's true. but it's also true that HDTV's aren't likely to become commonplace till well after 2010, by which time the next generation of console will be approaching it end of life.
Point of note here. What type of television is little Johhny or Mary more likely to have in their bedrooms with the console. A cheap and robust CRT, or a $2000 HDTV set?
Having started playing FPS's at 1920x1200 and 1600x1200 on my 6800, I don't think it would be possible for me to go back to NTSC resolution for modern games.
Well I'm still using an old 15' CRT television to play my games and I'm more that satisfied with it. I've tried HD TV, and I don't see that benefits in the increase in resolution offset the enormous costs of
a) Purchascing such a device
and
b) The loss of CPU and GPU cycles to increasing resolution that could be put to better uses eleswhere, like gameplay or AI.
You may have enjoyed the 1600x1200 resolution, but I seriously doubt you enjoyed it at the same framerate or lighting quality or perhaps even texture and model quality as someone who was using good old 1024x768 resolution. There's a payoff here, and in terms of what makes a game look better, increasing resolution beyond 1024x768 ranks pretty low on the list of options.
Of course the number one way of making a game look better is better art design. This fact slips past most developers.
So, are they against open source? Why is socialism bad all of a sudden? I thought helping people was good. Are people still obsessing over the whole socalism==communism thing.
Were these guys paying attention when New Orleans flooded?
XUL is powerful. Go here for a taste of how easy it's markup can be.
However, XUL's logic is based on Javascript, and this needs a serious overhaul. Javascript is powerful in some respects, but has serious failings as anything other than a supplementary language.
If XUL can improve javascript or use a different language altogether, I think we'll begin to see more high quality web applications written in it.
Behold France which is currently in upheaval because unsatisfied Muslims are striking out at the national culture which has been keeping them down, nevermind the fact that the Muslims themselves segregate themselves from the rest of society by refusing to conform to the culture into which they immigrated.
Actually, the riots in France are not motivated on religious grounds. The riots are as a result of huge economic disadvantage, exploitation and unemployment in those communities which are rioting. This has come about because of racism and bigotry in France, not because of religion. The majority of the rioters are not even religious.
The Muslims are not rioting. The poor are rioting. Quite a lot of people will try and distract you from this fact, especially in France, where the poor rioting has a long and well documented history of toppling governments.
I've played hundreds of games, from the Atari 2600 days through to today, and it'd depressing for me to notice that my opinion of video games is largely the same as his.
I've reached just about the same conclusion. The industry is stagnating. Good games are hetting harder and harder to find amid all the crud. Maybe a new breed of independant companies will usher in a new era and sweep it all away. Maybe new technology will enable more innovative games. Maybe open source is lead the way to better games.
But probably not. It's most likely that, like holloywood, the game industry will continuously churn out absolute rubbish, with the occassional diamond in the rough appearing every 18 months or so. We most likely will never see the equivalent of Super Mario World hitting the shelves any time soon.
I reject your assumption that God is cannot exist in M.
M is defined to be the set of scientifically explainable elements. You have maintained that God cannot be explained by science. Thus God is not an element of M, and is instead an element of E, the set of objects that cannot be explained by science.
We could argue this up and down forever, but there is a distinct possibilty that no matter what reasonable and logical argument I present, no matter how compelling, some will forever maintain that God still exists because I cannot prove it does not.
Human beings do not naturally reach this state. It must be indoctrinated into them, usually from a very young age. It becomes so ingrained that eventually, the religiously inclined are completely unable to imagine or accept that their views may in fact be fantasy, which they are indistinguishable from.
All religions were simply made up my village elders, or their cultural equivalants. They were not divinely inspired. No Gods or Godesses have ever spoken or communicated in any way, with anyone, by any means. We are all adults. We know this.
Yet there are those who, though they know this as well, hold otherwise. There are also those who do not know this, and hold otherwise. Both these groups are a result of systematic, ongoing campaigns of indoctrination by clergy and by leity. I firmly believe this indoctrination process to be wrong. It enslaves peoples minds. It is an anethema to the core values of democracy. Yet to ban it outright would also be an anethema to democracy.
In my view, the solution to this problem is to educate people of the dangers of religion and proselytism, so that slowly but surely, people stop being religious. This had already been accomplished to some degree in industrialised societies, with the advent of universal secondary education. The education board of Kansas knows this, and so is seeking to handicap the ability of the secondary education system to free people's minds, in any way it can.
Please show me how religion is illogical. Just because it isn't science doesn't make it invalid. I challenge you try to explain how something not described by science can't exist.
Let existence be divided into two distinct non overlapping sets M and E. Let M be the material/(scientifically explainable) realm set. Let E be the ethereal(scientifically unexplainable) realm set. By definition the intersection of M and E is a null set.
Everything in out universe lies within set M. God, if such a being exists, does not by definition lie within M. Therefore God must be an element, or elements, of E.
If elements in M are to be influenced by elements in E then some physical particle, force or other effect must in some way originate or be connected with an element in E. This implies that at some time or place, there exists an element which is both a member of M and E.
But by definition, the intersection of M and E is the null set. Thus, elements in E cannot effect elements in M directly.
One can postulate the set E', whose intersection with M and E is not a null set. Then element in E can influence elements in M, via influence of elements in E'.
It falls then to define the set E', which contains elements both in the material set and the ethereal set. Also, this set must contain at least one element wich does not lie with in either M or E, otherwise it is simply a subset of M union E.
So we have at least one element in existence with is neither explainable or unexplainable by science. This is a clear contridiction. We have reached a logical contridiction, thus one of our assumptions was false.
The only unjustified assumption we made was the existence of this one element. Thus E' less (E union M) is a null set. Therefore E' is a subset of E union M and so elements in E cannot influence elements in M.
Therefore, the existence of God in set E is the equivalent to the existence of any element in set M, as neither element can affect the other. We may inverse the sets M and E and any set of elements in M with the God set in E and the argument still holds. Religion holds that the existence of God is greater than the existence of any element in set M. Clearly this is not the case, therefore religion is illogical.
I think you will find the argument is really quite solid.
I would refer you to http://www.venganza.org/ and http://www.invisiblepinkunicorn.com/ for further insight into this topic.
1. If people ever did believe in dragons and fairies they believed in them as physical entities. Anything physical is governed by natural law. God does not exist in the physical world as described by science, so there is your biggest distinction.
If God does not exist in the physical world, then what is the basis for worshipping it? Where do scriptures and religious teachings stem from if this is the case?
By your arguments, every religious teaching in the world that makes reference to divine figures, whether it is a monothesistic religion or nature worship or whatever, is indistuinguishable from something that is simply a product of human fantasy. Yet simultaniously, believers in any such teachings hold them to be absolute truth over and above any other, including verifyable scientific facts.
So we have something which is indistuinguishable from fantasy, yet is held above all other truths.
This is quintessential doublethink, and children across the world each and every day are having it drilled into them. Is this right? Is it wrong to expose the logical fallacy inherent in almost every religion?
Should I be allowed to say that any paticular religious teaching is nonsense? What if the state attempts to stop me? Should peoples religious freedoms be protected under the law, even when those freedoms themselves are often illogical, and sometimes contrary to the constitution of the state?
These are questions which I feel will more and more impact upon the post enlightenment world. The cases of cults such as Scientology and the past and perhaps even present activities the Catholic Church have shown us that there are flaws in the state allowing unconditional religious freedoms. The state has a duty to protect the rights of its citizens, but what about when religious teachings take away the rights of citizens? What must the state do then?
Class action suit? Why not just have Sony face criminal charges? The company broke the law, so why not send an executive or two to jail for a few weeks. At least a suspended sentence?
The U.S. Patent Office is underfunded, understaffed, and underqualified.
Stop making excuses. The office is corrupt. There can be no doubt that substantial bribes are floating a great many patents coming out of the USPTO. What other reasonable explanation could there be for such a gross level of blatantly illegal activity?
The press were pals of the government at the time, so Railtrack always came out as the cold hearted evil corporation.
The press being pals had nothing to do with it. Railtrack was the cold hearted corporation. People died as a direct result of their negligence in a effort to cut costs.
And not just any old people! They were middle class victims! The horror...
Claiming that religion is like dragons and fiaries is a strawman, and you ought to know that.
In what sense? What distinguishes religious stories and teachings from these tales? How is believing in angels or heaven and hell or an afterlife any more or less justifyable in believing in dragons or fairies?
I'm not against casual used sales (Selling to friends, ebay, lending), but I am against stores like BestBuy ripping off customers by paying out next to nothing and reselling for almost retail, while promoting these before new sales.
Just to et you know, because of fixed price console games, retailers make a bare minimum of margin on selling brand new games and consoles. A friend of mine who worked in a game store claimed the margin for the store on selling a new console was ~$2, whereas for a new console the margin must have been at least ~$50.
Retails push used game so much because nowadays, that is the only place they make money. If Sony pull this off, a lot of retailers will simply go out of business, and you can expect to see an increase in both console and game prices.
Be careful what you wish for. Enjoy your decreased market sales.
I'm writing a FOSS app to help with an online fan project at the moment.
I chose XUL, because essentially the only user requirement for installation is that they have Firefox or another Mozilla suite program.
XUL will run on any box Firefox will run on. And that means about 99% of the boxen out there.
1) Performance is now basically the same as C/C++/Objective-C apps.
I guess that's why the majority of bleeding edge games, telephone server software and mainstream applications are written in Java nowadays.
Oh Wait.
How can you honestly speak of freedom, and than sugest eliminating peoples ability to think for themselves?
In these days of freedom, people no longer believe that dragons, fairies and demons are real. People no longer think that the earth is flat, or lies at the center of the universe. Such thinking has stopped by means of education and freedom of thought. It was not repression, but rather the opposite, liberation that prevented such things.
I don't propose making religion illegal. What I would propose is more openness and education so that people stop believing in religion. There can be no doubt that religion is a source of much hate and trouble in the world, so why shouldn't people try prevent others falling into its trap?
What I absolutely would not propose is forcing children to be exposed to religious thinking in school, as is being done in Kansas. It must be realised that education leads people away from religion, and that the aim of the religious in Kansas is to limit educations ability to do so, so that it becomes harder for generations of young people to escape ignorance.
Do you really think that eliminating religion is a good thing?
Actually yes I do.
To my way of thinking, religion is best off going the way of believing in dragons and that the sun revolved around the earth. You may be offended by that, but I am daily offended by much of the vitriol and hate speach that is preached by religious clerics and believers everyday.
the problem is that religious parents are unlikely to see it that way in many cases.
Exactly. Because they themselves have been indoctrinated. It's a vicious cycle, which has proven near impossible to break, even in these days of the elightenment.
At this point, I've been having so many dependency issues with apt and yum, that 70% of the time, I end up compiling from source anyway. So I'm in fact moving to Gentoo. I'm sure it won't be a paneaca of all my dependency ills, but the way things stand I'm practically running a custom compiled system anyway.
And many people forgets that non-gpl drivers may be very well impossible to write at all (at least some lawyers think this), drivers are not at all like an app is WRT to gtk, drivers are more like "plugins".
What? What kind of logic or legal interpretation leads to this conclusion. By that logic, the kernel itself is an illegal app as it interfaces with all kinds of proprietry hardware.
A driver is just a specific program that enables the kernel, and hence programs, to interface with some esoteric piece of hardware. I think that case involving DMCA "copyright circumvention" on printer cartridges put any doubts people may have had on this matter to rest.