Well if it wasn't for the US (and Soviet) governments there wouldn't be the spacecraft whose missions so often make it to the front page of this site. Not satelite TV. Nor thousands of medicines. And without universities, who duck the corporate need for the quick profit grab, there'd be no BSD, no Turing, and no Newton.
I would defy the poster to name a single world changing product in science, technology and medicine that has not come about as a result of massive, detailed and prolonged research.
Fine, some arise from the back-garden boffins like the monk and his runner beans, dyson and his hoovers, and the bloke who invented the cats-eye and is now one of the richest self-made men in the world, and others arise through the corporate route (a la Jobs and Gates), but common to these cases, as well as the thousands of advances that come through the government and university sectors, is the absolute necessity for the product or idea to go through rigourous testing and research before it is capable of use in the outside world.
There is some role for inspiration but the fact remains: without a detailed grounding in your field your flash of inspiration is likely to have been thought of before; if it has not been applied it is probably because it requires you to do a hefty chunk of research to prove the theory.
There are no, or few, free rides left. If anyone finds one, send it my way!
This AC is basically correct. Losing party pays used to be the rule until the new Civil Procedure Rules came into force in England and Wales in 2001(Scotland and Northern Ireland having separate legal systems).
Now, generally, the losing party pays BUT if you've been unreasonable (e.g. by refusing to settle a case, then winning, but by less than the amount you were offered to make a deal), the winner can now get stumped with the loser's legal costs (from the date the offer was made).
AFAIK and IANAL but I thought most Commonwealth countries had a system of losing party pays. US is somewhat different, I think.
This case is going to be different again though as it is brought by the European Commission, in the European Courts where national laws and court procedure are irrelevant.
The original decision was a determination of the European Commission. This is part of the executive branch of the European Union, and you could see its rulings as equivalent to rulings of the Office of Fair Trading/ Competition Commission here in the UK, or the Department of Justice in the US. There is an automatic right of appeal from such decisions to the judicial branch (the European Court): this is seen as an essential part of the system of checks and balances in the EU. Strictly, the case is currently being appealed to the European Court of First Instance: there is a further layer of appeal to the European Court itself.
The three year gap between government making its mind up on the case it wishes to pursue and final determination of that case in the courts is not that different from what might be expected in the US I think, in a case involving this much money and complexity. The further appeal may stretch things out a little further but not necessarily as (a) the European Court tends to follow the decisions of the CFI and (b) the Court has the power to call the case before it immediately, leapfrogging the intermediate stage (I believe again this is a similarity with the US Supreme Court- Federal Courts relationship, on which the European judicial institutions are modelled).
"Accidental" crimes? Perhaps. I'm sceptical of most such claims, I don't think the police would prsecute if a weblog on a hard disk showed only a single, accidental, access.
On the other hand, people who are looking up this kind of stuff will now be able to look at any sites that BT miss and claim that they thought it must have been legal because it wasn't being blocked by BT.
However distateful it may seem, the most effective way to reduce harm in these situations would probably be a combination of using supergrasses/pleabargains (who would perhaps be granted immunity and even anonymity in exchange for going through counselling, handing over unwiped hard drives/usb keys and testifying against distributers of images) and old fashioned detective work. The proliferation of pornography on the internet is primarily a policing problem; it is a failure of policing, not only in the UK but around the world, that has left the private sector to find inadequate technical patches for this problem. I say inadequate as there is nothing in the article suggesting that BT can block other forms of internet transmission than web sites, and because presumably there will be a time lag even for those, if new sites come on line.
There is one inescapable fact behind this problem: for every image of child abuse on the net, a child was abused. By looking, and paying to look, viewers are condeming more innocents to suffer.
And as we now know the path of the transit and the distance of the earth from the sun, you could also presumably use the angle, timing and duration of the transit to work out where on Earth you are.
This all reminds me of the old saying that at its most advanced, mathmatics is indistinguishable from magic.
All those lovely Escher pictures similarly show the ways in which selective use of mathmatics & physics can create imaginary worlds that, while they could not necessaily occur in reality, "feel" realistic.
The logo must be a visual comment on the typical patent discussions on Slashdot, that is discussions of people trying to patent really obvious things, or things that are in use already.
By the way, both prior use and obviousness are grounds for opposing a patent, at least here in the UK.
I find using an integrated file management system (such as Hummingbird's Docs Open) at work simplifies searching for documents immensly. (Our database scans c.200,000 files so Windows find would be a joke!) Like any filing system however, it does require the users to think a little about where they store their files, by matter number and client number, and how they are named. After a couple of anguished searches for labouriously produced documents, most colleagues get the knack, but there's always the odd one or two who don't.
The drawback of this system is that it is not effective for searches of content however (just too slow). Perhaps Google could provide a plug-in, now that would be neat.
Intel found this out to their cost when clone 486 chips came out. On attempting to sue Cyrix et al, they were unable to prevent them from using the number names. Hence the move to the (trademarked) brand name "Pentium".
"You can have president, senator, congressman, governor, state senator, state representative, mayor, sheriff, district attorney, judge, and other people to vote for."
Yes, but not in the same election! They may be on the same day, and even (if you have a paper-ballot) on the same voting sheet, but fundamentally what you are doing in most parts of the US is voting for one candidate over others for one office. Then another one candidate over others for another office...n
Plus in many parts of India there were more than one election held. For instance the sacking by the locals of the tech-savvy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, which may impact that state's ability to invest in infrastructure for the IT industry (or to put it another way, will probably help poor local farmers with free electricity).
They still use the term Milliard for "thousand million" in France and Germany. It is probably the unwieldy nature of the English-language term that caused the common (though not universal) transition to the American Billion.
The most populous country with English as an official language, India, uses a different counting system again. As they grow in economic and scientific strength, will lakhs (hundreds of thousands) and crores (tens of millions) become part of everyday speech in the West? They are easier to say!
Lakh=a Hundred Thousand Million Crore=Ten million Milliard=Billion=Thousand Million English Billion=Trillion
"it is the rare Chinese... who is interested in anything other than money."
If anything further were needed to point to the total failure of communist states, by their own criteria, to achieve equality and prosperity and through that the contentment of their citizens, then this statement says it all.
The mini may hit the sweet spot in the trade off between size and weight on the one hand and storage capacity on the other. When it needs recharging, I can put new songs on it.
It is way off the sweet spot in another area: price. Even the US price of $200 plus tax seems pretty steep, and I'm sure when it is available over the counter here in the UK it will be steeper still.
ID cards are highly unlikely of themselves to violate the Convention, seeing as they are used in most other Convention States.
If the biometric element were compulsory, it might I suppose be a violation of the so called "right to privacy", but this provision is notoriously wooly and contains the usual carve-outs for public protection etc.
It is interesting that this company's management was apparently involved in previous dud tech floats.
This is the latest in a long series of floatations by companies that have not gone from the stage of having a good idea to the stage of making money from it. There is an unfortunate precedent for this company: just as users of mp3 sites wanted (at that stage) something for nothing, so linux users are generally still looking at the system as a cheaper, or free, alternative to those on the market. For Lindows to make a decent profit, it will either have to change the culture of its user base, or make serious inroads into the entrenched Windows market. Either will be a formidable task.
Slashdot Mirror
The wheel is in the "garden shed" category to be sure, but it went through its own prduct cycle: initially as a Potters' Wheel then attached to two wheeled-carts before being used for sturdier four-wheeled vehicles.
Well if it wasn't for the US (and Soviet) governments there wouldn't be the spacecraft whose missions so often make it to the front page of this site. Not satelite TV. Nor thousands of medicines. And without universities, who duck the corporate need for the quick profit grab, there'd be no BSD, no Turing, and no Newton.
I would defy the poster to name a single world changing product in science, technology and medicine that has not come about as a result of massive, detailed and prolonged research.
Fine, some arise from the back-garden boffins like the monk and his runner beans, dyson and his hoovers, and the bloke who invented the cats-eye and is now one of the richest self-made men in the world, and others arise through the corporate route (a la Jobs and Gates), but common to these cases, as well as the thousands of advances that come through the government and university sectors, is the absolute necessity for the product or idea to go through rigourous testing and research before it is capable of use in the outside world.
There is some role for inspiration but the fact remains: without a detailed grounding in your field your flash of inspiration is likely to have been thought of before; if it has not been applied it is probably because it requires you to do a hefty chunk of research to prove the theory.
There are no, or few, free rides left. If anyone finds one, send it my way!
96
This AC is basically correct. Losing party pays used to be the rule until the new Civil Procedure Rules came into force in England and Wales in 2001(Scotland and Northern Ireland having separate legal systems).
Now, generally, the losing party pays BUT if you've been unreasonable (e.g. by refusing to settle a case, then winning, but by less than the amount you were offered to make a deal), the winner can now get stumped with the loser's legal costs (from the date the offer was made).
AFAIK and IANAL but I thought most Commonwealth countries had a system of losing party pays. US is somewhat different, I think.
This case is going to be different again though as it is brought by the European Commission, in the European Courts where national laws and court procedure are irrelevant.
The original decision was a determination of the European Commission. This is part of the executive branch of the European Union, and you could see its rulings as equivalent to rulings of the Office of Fair Trading/ Competition Commission here in the UK, or the Department of Justice in the US. There is an automatic right of appeal from such decisions to the judicial branch (the European Court): this is seen as an essential part of the system of checks and balances in the EU. Strictly, the case is currently being appealed to the European Court of First Instance: there is a further layer of appeal to the European Court itself.
The three year gap between government making its mind up on the case it wishes to pursue and final determination of that case in the courts is not that different from what might be expected in the US I think, in a case involving this much money and complexity. The further appeal may stretch things out a little further but not necessarily as (a) the European Court tends to follow the decisions of the CFI and (b) the Court has the power to call the case before it immediately, leapfrogging the intermediate stage (I believe again this is a similarity with the US Supreme Court- Federal Courts relationship, on which the European judicial institutions are modelled).
"Accidental" crimes? Perhaps. I'm sceptical of most such claims, I don't think the police would prsecute if a weblog on a hard disk showed only a single, accidental, access.
On the other hand, people who are looking up this kind of stuff will now be able to look at any sites that BT miss and claim that they thought it must have been legal because it wasn't being blocked by BT.
However distateful it may seem, the most effective way to reduce harm in these situations would probably be a combination of using supergrasses/pleabargains (who would perhaps be granted immunity and even anonymity in exchange for going through counselling, handing over unwiped hard drives/usb keys and testifying against distributers of images) and old fashioned detective work. The proliferation of pornography on the internet is primarily a policing problem; it is a failure of policing, not only in the UK but around the world, that has left the private sector to find inadequate technical patches for this problem. I say inadequate as there is nothing in the article suggesting that BT can block other forms of internet transmission than web sites, and because presumably there will be a time lag even for those, if new sites come on line.
There is one inescapable fact behind this problem: for every image of child abuse on the net, a child was abused. By looking, and paying to look, viewers are condeming more innocents to suffer.
And as we now know the path of the transit and the distance of the earth from the sun, you could also presumably use the angle, timing and duration of the transit to work out where on Earth you are.
This all reminds me of the old saying that at its most advanced, mathmatics is indistinguishable from magic.
All those lovely Escher pictures similarly show the ways in which selective use of mathmatics & physics can create imaginary worlds that, while they could not necessaily occur in reality, "feel" realistic.
Another magical view of the future was the original Futurama Exhibit at the World's Fair .
The logo must be a visual comment on the typical patent discussions on Slashdot, that is discussions of people trying to patent really obvious things, or things that are in use already.
By the way, both prior use and obviousness are grounds for opposing a patent, at least here in the UK.
My 0.02's worth...
I find using an integrated file management system (such as Hummingbird's Docs Open) at work simplifies searching for documents immensly. (Our database scans c.200,000 files so Windows find would be a joke!) Like any filing system however, it does require the users to think a little about where they store their files, by matter number and client number, and how they are named. After a couple of anguished searches for labouriously produced documents, most colleagues get the knack, but there's always the odd one or two who don't.
The drawback of this system is that it is not effective for searches of content however (just too slow). Perhaps Google could provide a plug-in, now that would be neat.
The quote is accurate in the United Kingdom, Canada and other common-law countries.
Intel found this out to their cost when clone 486 chips came out. On attempting to sue Cyrix et al, they were unable to prevent them from using the number names. Hence the move to the (trademarked) brand name "Pentium".
Braille Paper Ballots. High tech solution - vote by txt msg!
"You can have president, senator, congressman, governor, state senator, state representative, mayor, sheriff, district attorney, judge, and other people to vote for."
Yes, but not in the same election! They may be on the same day, and even (if you have a paper-ballot) on the same voting sheet, but fundamentally what you are doing in most parts of the US is voting for one candidate over others for one office. Then another one candidate over others for another office...n
Plus in many parts of India there were more than one election held. For instance the sacking by the locals of the tech-savvy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, which may impact that state's ability to invest in infrastructure for the IT industry (or to put it another way, will probably help poor local farmers with free electricity).
They still use the term Milliard for "thousand million" in France and Germany. It is probably the unwieldy nature of the English-language term that caused the common (though not universal) transition to the American Billion.
The most populous country with English as an official language, India, uses a different counting system again. As they grow in economic and scientific strength, will lakhs (hundreds of thousands) and crores (tens of millions) become part of everyday speech in the West? They are easier to say!
Lakh=a Hundred Thousand
Million
Crore=Ten million
Milliard=Billion=Thousand Million
English Billion=Trillion
Yes, but some still survive deep beneath the Earth to act as your slaves: chickens
"it is the rare Chinese... who is interested in anything other than money." If anything further were needed to point to the total failure of communist states, by their own criteria, to achieve equality and prosperity and through that the contentment of their citizens, then this statement says it all.
At what point did Canada cease to be part of the Americas?
The mini may hit the sweet spot in the trade off between size and weight on the one hand and storage capacity on the other. When it needs recharging, I can put new songs on it. It is way off the sweet spot in another area: price. Even the US price of $200 plus tax seems pretty steep, and I'm sure when it is available over the counter here in the UK it will be steeper still.
ID cards are highly unlikely of themselves to violate the Convention, seeing as they are used in most other Convention States. If the biometric element were compulsory, it might I suppose be a violation of the so called "right to privacy", but this provision is notoriously wooly and contains the usual carve-outs for public protection etc.
It is interesting that this company's management was apparently involved in previous dud tech floats. This is the latest in a long series of floatations by companies that have not gone from the stage of having a good idea to the stage of making money from it. There is an unfortunate precedent for this company: just as users of mp3 sites wanted (at that stage) something for nothing, so linux users are generally still looking at the system as a cheaper, or free, alternative to those on the market. For Lindows to make a decent profit, it will either have to change the culture of its user base, or make serious inroads into the entrenched Windows market. Either will be a formidable task.