If you read the posting that asserted that "GSM is superior", the author started out by saying "regardless of the technical merits", which makes it very clear that he's not saying that the standard itself is superior. He's saying that because GSM is much much more widely adopted than CDMA, it makes it better for the user, because you can actually use it almost everywhere (and in general, you get more choice of carriers in places that have choices.)
CDMA's radio technology may have been better than GSM's, for the 2G/2.5G/3G versions, though everybody's now heading to LTE for 4G, but GSM's technically hokey authentication system was at least designed so that you could use SIM cards from different carriers in different phones.
There was one well-known study that found that the more detailed data on birth dates, times, and locations the astrologer collected, the more accurate the subject thought their horoscope was. Of course, the catch was that the "astrologer" was giving everybody the same ambiguously written horoscope, not using any of the actual data from the subject. Suckers.
Actually it's why we're better off without a "loser pays" system - if you're trying to sue a company the size of Microsoft or IBM, or they're trying to sue you, and they've got much better lawyers than you can afford, then you can't risk losing, because paying their legal costs will bankrupt you. So you can't risk suing them if they've ripped you off, and if they sue you, you're better off settling right away instead of fighting, even though you're right and they're wrong.
The Phelps gang aren't like patent trolls or crazed birthers suing the Federal government to release the evidence that Obama was an illegal immigrant space alien. When they sue, it's because they've got reasonably legitimate cases against people or governments who have enough money that there's a good chance of collecting it. They do their trolling outside of court, loudly and persistently enough that people attack them or governments illegally restrict their speech, and then they sue and usually win, because they usually only sue when they've got a solid case.
From a legal perspective, the technical term for what they are is assholes, and it's not the government's business to stop people from being assholes, and it is the government's business to keep people from punching them out.
From a religious perspective, the technical term for them is sinners, and they refuse to repent, and in many religious traditions the proper response to that is to shun them. If the news media would follow that advice, maybe they'd go away.
Nah, he showed up today:-) It seemed likely that it was some kind of gamer reference, but normally Yetis aren't portrayed as something that would have horns - they're usually humanoid or ape-like. So maybe a yeti pelt would protect you against frost damage, or maybe eating a yeti corpse would get the gods angry at you for being a cannibal (if you're playing Nethack as some kind of human.)
We did snipe hunts in college. It really surprised me that some of my fellow students might not have known that snipe hunts were fake, though it was less surprising that some of them didn't know that snipe throw water balloons. (It may be that the "hunters" did know that the whole process was a game, and assumed that everybody knew that and thought it was an excuse to run around the woods at night and drink beer, which it mostly was, and that playing the "hunters" might get them first crack at the beer.)
Grand Juries don't find people guilty - they find that there's credible enough evidence to hold a trial. Trial courts (either jury or judge-only) can find people guilty, but they can only do that legally if the defendant has the opportunity to defend himself in court - people really do care a lot about in-absentia kangaroo courts, while very few people would care if they kidnapped him and held a kangaroo court.
Violating another nation's sovereignty only matters if their government complains, which doesn't seem to be an issue here; Awlaki's not close to the first person the US has assassinated in Yemen, but he probably is the first American citizen they've done it to.
Enough of these patents are recent that we can't just ignore them and hope they'll go away (as we probably could if they were from, say, 1995.) And yes, if you're trying to bust the patent in court by showing prior art, you've got to find art that's prior to the filing date and the invention date.
But that's part of the reason a patent troll would file $5000 infringement suits against users like coffee shops, who are big enough to pay it (unlike suing a home user) but small enough they're not going to risk $1m on lawyers trying to bust a patent (unlike suing Cisco), and probably aren't even going to risk $10k on lawyers to argue a "we're the wrong target, go sue Linksys" response to their suit.
The standard earthquake warning is animals acting weird - "Wow, my cat started acting really weird before that earthquake!" "Your cat also acts weird when there isn't an earthquake."
Now we've got to worry every time our electrons start acting weird?
Business method patents pretty much do that - they're not patenting the technology itself (connect wire A to CPU B at 3.3v, etc.), they're patenting uses of the technology, and there were a lot of patents about "Do [some common business practice] on the Internetz!" that got approved in spite of ridiculousity. But even in more direct technology patents, way too many of them didn't add anything novel or non-obvious, they just used the computer technology of the time to implement some previously known process.
On the other hand, "non-obvious" may be easy to argue about at the time of the patent, if the patent examiners are diligent enough to locate experts in the field during the examination process (which they almost never are), but it can be surprisingly hard to decide whether something was obvious 5-10 years ago after the process has been out in the field. When did we really learn to do x?
Thanks for posting something not only actually informative, but also insightful. Also, unless the Trolls have done careful review of their targets, they'd have to assert that the targets were using equipment whose manufacturers did not license use of the patented technologies. (Perhaps they've done that, or perhaps they know that _nobody_ has a license for their patents.)
TFA gives a URL for the lawsuit, and the lawsuit lists the patents (they're supposedly attached, but you have to play games to make that work - easier to get them from Google.) I converted them to text - here's the list. It's interesting to look at the dates - most of them were issued in the late 2000s, though of course you'd have to read the actual patents to find out when they were filed, but coffeeshops offering Wifi had become routine long before that.
# On March 30, 2004, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 6,714,559 (“the ‘559 Patent”) titled “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
#On June 10, 2008, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 7,386,002 (“the ‘002 Patent”) titled “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
# On May 19, 2009, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 7,535,921 (“the ‘921 Patent”) titled “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
# On June 16, 2009, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 7,548,553 (“the ‘553 Patent”) titled “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
# On April 14, 1998, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 5,740,366 (“the ‘366 Patent”) titled “Communication Network Having Plurality Of Bridging Nodes Which Transmit A Beacon To Terminal Nodes In Power Saving State That It Has Messages Awaiting Delivery.”
# On August 17, 1999, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 5,940,771 (“the ‘771 Patent”) titled “Network Supporting Roaming, Sleeping Terminals.”
#On April 16, 2002, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 6,374,311 (“the ‘311 Patent”) titled “Communication Network Having A Plurality Of Bridging Nodes Which Transmit A Beacon To Terminal Nodes In Power Saving State That It Has Messages Awaiting Delivery.”
# On November 25, 2008, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 7,457,646 (“the ‘646 Patent”) titled “Radio Frequency Local Area Network.”
# On August 13, 1996, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 5,546,397 (“the ‘397 Patent”) titled “High Reliability Access Point For Wireless Local Area Network.”
# On December 1, 1998, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 5,844,893 (“the ‘893 Patent”) titled “System For Coupling Host Computer Means With Base Transceiver Units On A Local Area Network.”
# On December 16, 2003, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 6,665,536 (“the ‘536 Patent”) titled “Local Area Network Having Multiple Channel Wireless Access.”
#On February 24, 2004, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 6,697,415 (“the ‘415 Patent”) titled “Spread Spectrum Transceiver Module Utilizing Multiple Mode Transmission.”
# On March 14, 2006, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 7,013,138 (“the ‘138 Patent”) titled “Local Area Network Having Multiple Channel Wireless Access.”
# On May 4, 2010, the USPTO duly and legally issued U.S. Patent No. 7,710,907 (“the ‘907 Patent”) titled “Local Area Network Having Multiple Channel Wireless Access.”
#The fourteen patents identified in paragraphs 15-28 are hereinafter referred to collectively as the “WLAN Patents.”
# Innovatio owns all rights, title, and interest in and to, and has standing to sue for infringement of, the WLAN Patents, including the right to sue for and collect past damages.
During the period of time that these patents were filed (i.e. until about last week, or whenever the recent patent law change takes effect), the US was a First-to-Invent country. But even besides that, if there's published prior art, you don't get to claim patent protection on that part, only on the work you've done that was novel and non-obvious. First-to-file means you've got an incentive to keep your stuff secret until you're ready to file a patent, and an incentive to file your patent as soon as possible to prevent somebody else from patenting something similar first, and if we're lucky the new patent law will make submarine patents harder rather than easier. And of course the Patent Office is much better about "prior art" that's part of a filed patent that's referenced by the new patent's applicant than they are about prior art that was well-known in the public literature.
It's not that the anti-science political machine doesn't believe in science - the problem is that they believe that winning is more important, and supporting their big corporate donors' agendas is a big part of winning.
The opposition to evolution is primarily to get religious conservatives to identify themselves as political conservatives (as opposed to feeding the hungry, healing the sick, freeing the prisoners, building peace instead of war, etc. and similar liberal values.) But it's also to get people to believe what their leaders tell them instead of thinking about the consequences of what they're doing, and to keep them anti-science - believe the authorities, not the experts!.
The opposition to climate change science is much more fundamental, because it's a corporate-sponsor thing. If the public believes that pollution and carbon emission are leading to devastating climate changes, then they'll pressure politicians to make laws like cap&trade that are bad for oil and coal companies, or laws about farm practices that affect big agribusinesses, or laws restricting clear-cutting forests, or laws about managing government-owned natural resources. Well, "Drill, Baby, Drill!", and if it means lying to another generation of schoolkids about how biology works to keep them anti-science, no problem.
If I were using Linux as my primary desktop I'd set up a chroot jail and run a Firefox copy in it just for Facebook, keeping it separate from the rest of my browsing. Since I'm not, and since I'm running VMWare Player for other purposes, I'll probably end up setting up a Linux VM just to run Firefox in. (I've already got one, but I'm not that happy with it - it's one of those custom small distro things, doesn't run apt-get, and updates to Firefox haven't worked well.)
Any suggestions for a reasonably small Debianish VM?
Facebook is a social network that wants to also suck up all kinds of information about you. Google-Plus is an identity management service (according to Eric Schmidt), and has some social-networking features to suck in users.
I'm interested in social networks, though I'd prefer one that was less obnoxious. I have entirely no interest in an identity management service, especially one where I'm the product, not the customer. Schmidt clarified things in a way that made it real easy to decide whether to join G+. (And I'd long since given up on Orkut, which was fun for a few months when all my friends were joining, but gradually turned into a system for cute Brazilian guys or occasionally girls to ask to be my friend, even though my profile said I was already married and my picture was obviously way too old for them.)
We have a group of people who've been getting together IRL for dinner for decades. We use email/web to coordinate where we're going to dinner - once upon a time that was effectively a social filter.
My mom still has one of those plaster castings of a handprint one of us did in kindergarten sitting in one of her cabinets. I'm not sure we know who, unless the teacher wrote our name on the back:-)
Meanwhile, if you ever get another chance to see the movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3D, absolutely go see it. Werner Herzog took a camera crew into the oldest known painted cave in France for a couple of days, and it really did need to be filmed in 3D.
You missed the beginning of the sentence, which is that "no person shall be held to answer for" - that means brought in to a court process. You can't have a court case for capital or infamous crimes simply on the accusation of a prosecutor or police, unlike for petty crimes. Obama's gang didn't have a court case here, they declared him to be guilty and assassinated him.
If we were talking about whether the prisoners in Gitmo had to be indicted by a grand jury before being given a fair trial, your quote would apply here.
Some time back in the mid-80s we had a session at a symposium at Bell Labs on "The Question that Just Won't Die - Where to put the Q and the Z". TouchTone(tm) was pretty much universal by then, and phone-type number pads were showing up on cash machines, and there were starting to be all sorts of input systems for text on the pads. The problem is that it's really arbitrary and none of the answers are perfect, and also it's a simple enough question that everybody knows enough to comment on it.
The two most common answers were "PQRS on 7, WXYZ on 9" and "QZ on 1". Phone people didn't like "QZ on 1", because 0 and 1 were still significant to phone switches, plus lots of people didn't like it because it's ugly and out-of-order and less mnemonic. But there were also lots of systems that did variations on "hit the number with the three letters you want, then hit 1 if it's the first letter, 2 if it's the second, 3 if it's the third" or "hit the number with the letters you want N times", and all of those systems would break badly if some people had PQRS and others had PRS (and some of them would also break on Z on WXYZ because they only expected three choices.)
Oh, the new model keypunch! I used one of those in college in the mid-70s, but I learned keypunching on a Model 026, running a Boy Scout mailing list in ~1971. So no, you're not close to old...
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If you read the posting that asserted that "GSM is superior", the author started out by saying "regardless of the technical merits", which makes it very clear that he's not saying that the standard itself is superior. He's saying that because GSM is much much more widely adopted than CDMA, it makes it better for the user, because you can actually use it almost everywhere (and in general, you get more choice of carriers in places that have choices.)
CDMA's radio technology may have been better than GSM's, for the 2G/2.5G/3G versions, though everybody's now heading to LTE for 4G, but GSM's technically hokey authentication system was at least designed so that you could use SIM cards from different carriers in different phones.
There was one well-known study that found that the more detailed data on birth dates, times, and locations the astrologer collected, the more accurate the subject thought their horoscope was. Of course, the catch was that the "astrologer" was giving everybody the same ambiguously written horoscope, not using any of the actual data from the subject. Suckers.
Actually it's why we're better off without a "loser pays" system - if you're trying to sue a company the size of Microsoft or IBM, or they're trying to sue you, and they've got much better lawyers than you can afford, then you can't risk losing, because paying their legal costs will bankrupt you. So you can't risk suing them if they've ripped you off, and if they sue you, you're better off settling right away instead of fighting, even though you're right and they're wrong.
There's a much simpler way around the problem.
The Phelps gang aren't like patent trolls or crazed birthers suing the Federal government to release the evidence that Obama was an illegal immigrant space alien. When they sue, it's because they've got reasonably legitimate cases against people or governments who have enough money that there's a good chance of collecting it. They do their trolling outside of court, loudly and persistently enough that people attack them or governments illegally restrict their speech, and then they sue and usually win, because they usually only sue when they've got a solid case.
From a legal perspective, the technical term for what they are is assholes, and it's not the government's business to stop people from being assholes, and it is the government's business to keep people from punching them out.
From a religious perspective, the technical term for them is sinners, and they refuse to repent, and in many religious traditions the proper response to that is to shun them. If the news media would follow that advice, maybe they'd go away.
Nah, he showed up today :-) It seemed likely that it was some kind of gamer reference, but normally Yetis aren't portrayed as something that would have horns - they're usually humanoid or ape-like. So maybe a yeti pelt would protect you against frost damage, or maybe eating a yeti corpse would get the gods angry at you for being a cannibal (if you're playing Nethack as some kind of human.)
Pseudoscientific tripe is what you use when you're trying to find the perfect recipe for menudo.
We did snipe hunts in college. It really surprised me that some of my fellow students might not have known that snipe hunts were fake, though it was less surprising that some of them didn't know that snipe throw water balloons. (It may be that the "hunters" did know that the whole process was a game, and assumed that everybody knew that and thought it was an excuse to run around the woods at night and drink beer, which it mostly was, and that playing the "hunters" might get them first crack at the beer.)
Are you violent in the Klein bottle, or only outside of it?
Now, in Germany you can get booze in klein bottles, and it's no problem.
Grand Juries don't find people guilty - they find that there's credible enough evidence to hold a trial. Trial courts (either jury or judge-only) can find people guilty, but they can only do that legally if the defendant has the opportunity to defend himself in court - people really do care a lot about in-absentia kangaroo courts, while very few people would care if they kidnapped him and held a kangaroo court.
Violating another nation's sovereignty only matters if their government complains, which doesn't seem to be an issue here; Awlaki's not close to the first person the US has assassinated in Yemen, but he probably is the first American citizen they've done it to.
Enough of these patents are recent that we can't just ignore them and hope they'll go away (as we probably could if they were from, say, 1995.) And yes, if you're trying to bust the patent in court by showing prior art, you've got to find art that's prior to the filing date and the invention date.
But that's part of the reason a patent troll would file $5000 infringement suits against users like coffee shops, who are big enough to pay it (unlike suing a home user) but small enough they're not going to risk $1m on lawyers trying to bust a patent (unlike suing Cisco), and probably aren't even going to risk $10k on lawyers to argue a "we're the wrong target, go sue Linksys" response to their suit.
The standard earthquake warning is animals acting weird - "Wow, my cat started acting really weird before that earthquake!" "Your cat also acts weird when there isn't an earthquake."
Now we've got to worry every time our electrons start acting weird?
Business method patents pretty much do that - they're not patenting the technology itself (connect wire A to CPU B at 3.3v, etc.), they're patenting uses of the technology, and there were a lot of patents about "Do [some common business practice] on the Internetz!" that got approved in spite of ridiculousity. But even in more direct technology patents, way too many of them didn't add anything novel or non-obvious, they just used the computer technology of the time to implement some previously known process.
On the other hand, "non-obvious" may be easy to argue about at the time of the patent, if the patent examiners are diligent enough to locate experts in the field during the examination process (which they almost never are), but it can be surprisingly hard to decide whether something was obvious 5-10 years ago after the process has been out in the field. When did we really learn to do x?
Thanks for posting something not only actually informative, but also insightful. Also, unless the Trolls have done careful review of their targets, they'd have to assert that the targets were using equipment whose manufacturers did not license use of the patented technologies. (Perhaps they've done that, or perhaps they know that _nobody_ has a license for their patents.)
TFA gives a URL for the lawsuit, and the lawsuit lists the patents (they're supposedly attached, but you have to play games to make that work - easier to get them from Google.) I converted them to text - here's the list. It's interesting to look at the dates - most of them were issued in the late 2000s, though of course you'd have to read the actual patents to find out when they were filed, but coffeeshops offering Wifi had become routine long before that.
During the period of time that these patents were filed (i.e. until about last week, or whenever the recent patent law change takes effect), the US was a First-to-Invent country. But even besides that, if there's published prior art, you don't get to claim patent protection on that part, only on the work you've done that was novel and non-obvious. First-to-file means you've got an incentive to keep your stuff secret until you're ready to file a patent, and an incentive to file your patent as soon as possible to prevent somebody else from patenting something similar first, and if we're lucky the new patent law will make submarine patents harder rather than easier. And of course the Patent Office is much better about "prior art" that's part of a filed patent that's referenced by the new patent's applicant than they are about prior art that was well-known in the public literature.
It's not that the anti-science political machine doesn't believe in science - the problem is that they believe that winning is more important, and supporting their big corporate donors' agendas is a big part of winning.
The opposition to evolution is primarily to get religious conservatives to identify themselves as political conservatives (as opposed to feeding the hungry, healing the sick, freeing the prisoners, building peace instead of war, etc. and similar liberal values.) But it's also to get people to believe what their leaders tell them instead of thinking about the consequences of what they're doing, and to keep them anti-science - believe the authorities, not the experts!.
The opposition to climate change science is much more fundamental, because it's a corporate-sponsor thing. If the public believes that pollution and carbon emission are leading to devastating climate changes, then they'll pressure politicians to make laws like cap&trade that are bad for oil and coal companies, or laws about farm practices that affect big agribusinesses, or laws restricting clear-cutting forests, or laws about managing government-owned natural resources. Well, "Drill, Baby, Drill!", and if it means lying to another generation of schoolkids about how biology works to keep them anti-science, no problem.
If I were using Linux as my primary desktop I'd set up a chroot jail and run a Firefox copy in it just for Facebook, keeping it separate from the rest of my browsing. Since I'm not, and since I'm running VMWare Player for other purposes, I'll probably end up setting up a Linux VM just to run Firefox in. (I've already got one, but I'm not that happy with it - it's one of those custom small distro things, doesn't run apt-get, and updates to Firefox haven't worked well.)
Any suggestions for a reasonably small Debianish VM?
Facebook is a social network that wants to also suck up all kinds of information about you. Google-Plus is an identity management service (according to Eric Schmidt), and has some social-networking features to suck in users.
I'm interested in social networks, though I'd prefer one that was less obnoxious. I have entirely no interest in an identity management service, especially one where I'm the product, not the customer. Schmidt clarified things in a way that made it real easy to decide whether to join G+. (And I'd long since given up on Orkut, which was fun for a few months when all my friends were joining, but gradually turned into a system for cute Brazilian guys or occasionally girls to ask to be my friend, even though my profile said I was already married and my picture was obviously way too old for them.)
We have a group of people who've been getting together IRL for dinner for decades. We use email/web to coordinate where we're going to dinner - once upon a time that was effectively a social filter.
My mom still has one of those plaster castings of a handprint one of us did in kindergarten sitting in one of her cabinets. I'm not sure we know who, unless the teacher wrote our name on the back :-)
Meanwhile, if you ever get another chance to see the movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3D, absolutely go see it. Werner Herzog took a camera crew into the oldest known painted cave in France for a couple of days, and it really did need to be filmed in 3D.
You missed the beginning of the sentence, which is that "no person shall be held to answer for" - that means brought in to a court process. You can't have a court case for capital or infamous crimes simply on the accusation of a prosecutor or police, unlike for petty crimes. Obama's gang didn't have a court case here, they declared him to be guilty and assassinated him.
If we were talking about whether the prisoners in Gitmo had to be indicted by a grand jury before being given a fair trial, your quote would apply here.
Sure, they should probably also dump the board, but paying Carly whatever she'd negotiated so that she'd go away was pretty obviously a good deal.
Yup. It almost didn't matter what they had to pay Carly to make her go away - it was worthwhile.
Some time back in the mid-80s we had a session at a symposium at Bell Labs on "The Question that Just Won't Die - Where to put the Q and the Z". TouchTone(tm) was pretty much universal by then, and phone-type number pads were showing up on cash machines, and there were starting to be all sorts of input systems for text on the pads. The problem is that it's really arbitrary and none of the answers are perfect, and also it's a simple enough question that everybody knows enough to comment on it.
The two most common answers were "PQRS on 7, WXYZ on 9" and "QZ on 1". Phone people didn't like "QZ on 1", because 0 and 1 were still significant to phone switches, plus lots of people didn't like it because it's ugly and out-of-order and less mnemonic. But there were also lots of systems that did variations on "hit the number with the three letters you want, then hit 1 if it's the first letter, 2 if it's the second, 3 if it's the third" or "hit the number with the letters you want N times", and all of those systems would break badly if some people had PQRS and others had PRS (and some of them would also break on Z on WXYZ because they only expected three choices.)
Oh, the new model keypunch! I used one of those in college in the mid-70s, but I learned keypunching on a Model 026, running a Boy Scout mailing list in ~1971. So no, you're not close to old...