"It's the 'what-if' that worries me," said David Castiaux, an instructor for Mid-Del Technology Center in Del City, Oklahoma, who teaches rescue workers about hybrids.
Yeah. Right.... 'Cause ya know, regular, traditional cars are like so totally safe. They've got a combustible source and potentially sprakable metal everywhere. Let's not forget the battery acid, and various other noxious chemicals that could be in the engine. Man, sounds super safe to me.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the hybrids don't pose a new and different danger--I suspect they do. But I sense a lot of fearmongering in the article that I find annoying.
NPR allows you to listen to them online via realplayer stream. They ask for *donations*. Perhaps BBC Online should do the same. I'd donate.
Yes, it's true lots of people would leech, but this is always the dilemma of public domain vs. proprietary/corporate. Personally, I think, as long as the public entity is able to remain solvent, having leechers is better than having evil, smelly, corporate types. Leeches are the lesser of two evils.:-)
About the word "steal": Yeah, you're right, but while we're lookin' stuff up, let's look up connotation (sense 2b). IMHO, while you're right about the definition of "steal", that crime-y little word has many very negative connotations. And, in its most common usages, once something is stolen, it's previous posessor no longer has it.
But, of course, there's a fundamental difference between the electric world and the physical in this instance. In the physical world, it's much easier to move an object than it is to copy it. But it's the reverse in the electronic world. (at least most of the time;-) ) In fact, to move things electronically, it's often necessary to copy, then delete the previous instance.
Websites that tell me to make no copies of their page annoy me since, most times, their page is already cached by my browser by the time I even see the notice.
A few years back there were anti-piracy radio commercials that said something close to: "When your kid installs pirated software, it's the same as if they went into a store, took a CD off the shelf and put it in their back pack and left without paying for it." Everytime I heard this commercial, I had to resist the temptation to rip the goddamn radio apart! (don't shoot the messenger) The (broken) analogy the commercial makes flies in the face of the way all this electronic stuff works. I.e. when you make a copy, now you have two!. It's like that Jesus thing where he fed all the people from one loaf of bread and one fish... or whatever.
--:END Rant:--
Ok, no I'm not saying I have all the answers. Hell, I probably have no answers. No, I'm not really in favor of abolishing all copyright, all patents, all trademarks, etc. But it really bugs me when people overstress old analogies that really don't work very well, and when people try to slip strongly negatively biasing language into the discussion.
I'd even go so far as to say that, in the future, I'd like to see the word "steal" (and related words) get redefined. No, I don't expect it to actually happen--but then again I didn't think WotC'd stop printing dual lands either. You never know.
Don't blame evil for things more easily explained by stupidity.
I like your sig. It's a more compact from of Hanlon's Razor from The Jargon File: "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."
tell ya what, why don't you figure out how to make sense out of a velocity of 5E8*sqrt(-1) mph and get back to me on that.
Anyway, just 'caues we can't divide by zero doesn't mean we can't travel at the speed of light. It could simply mean that, that equation *doesn't work* at speed of light and above. duh.
Now me, I'm not gonna be holding my breath for some theoretical physics breakthrough that shows a way to go FTL anytime soon, I'm just sayin'...
Just 'cause the equation doesn't work, that don't necessarily mean the concept doesn't work.... It *does* mean the concept in question is incompatible with the current understanding embodied by the equations in question, but so what? That's happened many times before and it will happen again.
Gateway uses Siebel for all their "customer care" and sales. No, that's *not* a *good* Siebel story.:-) Only thing I can say in Siebel's favor here, is it's probably not the factor causing Gateway to suck horribly in the market right now. But, as a former part-time Gateway "tech support professional", I can tell you Siebel certainly doesn't help things there any.
Actually, I really *do* use att wireless and it really *does* have wireless Internet. (But I'm not on my phone right now.) It's still working. The "wireless Intnernet" is not the best since it's all WAP pages. To really get to any websites, you've gotta go through google--google has a WAP proxy server that operates behind the scenes to ensure that when you click on a google search result, you actually get a page back.
I was on my phone and yahoo messenger was working earlier this evening. Whatever att and cingular did, the "phone net" appears to still be functional.
Yeah, that was it. The encyclopedia remembers it better than I do. I just remembered the phrase "meat damage". It made it sound so gross, but at the same time it's just a PC way of saying "get the crap kicked out of you".
I'm somewhat impressed that WotC doesn't totally deny it's existence. I probably would if I were them. It's not that it was a bad game (it may or may not have been, I don't know), it's just that it tanked so completely.
Hmm. I guess the magic trick to getting a patent invalidated is to convince some sacrifical-goat-type company with an evil patent to go up against MS.
This may actually be feasable, in general, if only you can find a company (and lawyers) that are dumb enough. See--MS, at this point, has just about one of everything. I mean they've got a web browser, an OS, a game console, a TV network, a chat network, a website... you get the idea. They've got their fingers in everybody's pies.
And the kind of patents we want to get rid of are those that are overly broad... It follows that an overly broad patent will probably encroach on MS's territory somewhere down the line... So the only sticking point is finding the gullible company that we can cajole into making the mistake of attacking MS.
Hey, I know it's a dumb, hopeless plan. But hopeless plans have been known to succeed before. Just look at Frodo and Sam heading off to Mt. Doom in Mordor.
The point of my post was exactly that patents != inventions, which is why there are so many. My point is also that patents should be limited to actual useful inventions.
Okay, now we both know that, for some of these frivolous patents to be getting through, the patent clerks must obviously be stupid, but...
Your condition that "patents should be limited to actual useful inventions," strikes me as incredibly impractical. I challenge you to spontaneously tell me which ideas I present to you are "actual useful inventions" and which ones aren't. Besides, why should that be the criteria?
Perhaps the criteria that would make more sense in a capatilist world would be: ideas that are most likely to make money. Note that this is not the same as "useful". Example: is a 4th of July sparkler really useful? No, but if someone held a patent on it, they could make quite a bit of money.
Of course, it's not always easy to tell what ideas would make money and which ones wouldn't either. If it were, then people that invest in things like that wouldn't be called venture capitalists, and the practice of investing in those things wouldn't be known as speculation.
In summary: nothing is for certain. So how the hell are you, as a patent clerk, going to tell which ideas are the ones that represent "actual useful inventions" and which ones are the ones that only might become "actual useful invetions"?
A "few years" may make the movie seem disjointed from the rest of them.
That's ok. The Hobbit is disjointed from the rest of them. Besides, whenever Peter begins to lose his vision for it, all he has to do is start reading The Hobbit again. And let's not forget Fran Walsh. And if they can get Fillipa (sp) back on board, then there'll be three people again. Plus, I'm sure Weta would be doing most/all of the design and props again. When you put it all together, it makes sense. I'm more concnerned about how the actors will be three years from now (neither of the Ian's are all that young, you know).
What the parent was saying, I think, was: "how do they address the issue that the film's viewing audience will be expecting something significant to happen wrt to "Bilbo's funny magic ring" when nothing too significant or evil happens wrt to The Ring in The Hobbit at all?"
Ah yes. The powerful threat of "meat damage". There was some fakey "hacker" card game put out by WotC once where that could happen. I forget what it was called though.
Yeah, you're right about the citzens != consumers thing. It's alarming how often people forget that.
As to MS and SCO: You realize you're basing all this off some document that ESR claims is valid? Don't get me wrong--I've got nothing against ESR, and I've got plenty against Microsoft, but one supposedly leaked document is not necessarily conclusive. You know SCO currently has few friends. Isn't it possible that the leak is a fake? Perhaps someone handed it to ESR and only pretended to have gotten it from SCO.
But what I really wanted to know is: Where do you live? 'Cause if the people there understand that citizen != consumer, well then I might like to move there some decade.
Slashdot Mirror
quote: "Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thus: Absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely."
:-) Surely that would be a corollary.
So what are saying? God = Cthulhu or something?
But this is Microsoft, and Microsoft, unlike Pan IP, is the Evil Empire.
He'd eat everybody and howl inhumanly.
Yeah. Right. ... 'Cause ya know, regular, traditional cars are like so totally safe. They've got a combustible source and potentially sprakable metal everywhere. Let's not forget the battery acid, and various other noxious chemicals that could be in the engine. Man, sounds super safe to me.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the hybrids don't pose a new and different danger--I suspect they do. But I sense a lot of fearmongering in the article that I find annoying.
NPR allows you to listen to them online via realplayer stream. They ask for *donations*. Perhaps BBC Online should do the same. I'd donate.
:-)
Yes, it's true lots of people would leech, but this is always the dilemma of public domain vs. proprietary/corporate. Personally, I think, as long as the public entity is able to remain solvent, having leechers is better than having evil, smelly, corporate types. Leeches are the lesser of two evils.
--: BEGIN Rant --:
About the word "steal": Yeah, you're right, but while we're lookin' stuff up, let's look up connotation (sense 2b). IMHO, while you're right about the definition of "steal", that crime-y little word has many very negative connotations. And, in its most common usages, once something is stolen, it's previous posessor no longer has it.
But, of course, there's a fundamental difference between the electric world and the physical in this instance. In the physical world, it's much easier to move an object than it is to copy it. But it's the reverse in the electronic world. (at least most of the time ;-) ) In fact, to move things electronically, it's often necessary to copy, then delete the previous instance.
Websites that tell me to make no copies of their page annoy me since, most times, their page is already cached by my browser by the time I even see the notice.
A few years back there were anti-piracy radio commercials that said something close to: "When your kid installs pirated software, it's the same as if they went into a store, took a CD off the shelf and put it in their back pack and left without paying for it." Everytime I heard this commercial, I had to resist the temptation to rip the goddamn radio apart! (don't shoot the messenger) The (broken) analogy the commercial makes flies in the face of the way all this electronic stuff works. I.e. when you make a copy, now you have two!. It's like that Jesus thing where he fed all the people from one loaf of bread and one fish... or whatever.
--:END Rant:--
Ok, no I'm not saying I have all the answers. Hell, I probably have no answers. No, I'm not really in favor of abolishing all copyright, all patents, all trademarks, etc. But it really bugs me when people overstress old analogies that really don't work very well, and when people try to slip strongly negatively biasing language into the discussion.
I'd even go so far as to say that, in the future, I'd like to see the word "steal" (and related words) get redefined. No, I don't expect it to actually happen--but then again I didn't think WotC'd stop printing dual lands either. You never know.
Oh, ok. So then, a more elegant tranlation, moving from Swedish slang to American slang might go: "Stoppa fluktarna" = "Stop the Peeping Toms". Yes?
I like your sig. It's a more compact from of Hanlon's Razor from The Jargon File: "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."
Yeah, and yet almost all the image links still work. Well, we probably shouldn't expect a whole lot of technical savvy from 419'ers should we?
tell ya what, why don't you figure out how to make sense out of a velocity of 5E8*sqrt(-1) mph and get back to me on that.
... It *does* mean the concept in question is incompatible with the current understanding embodied by the equations in question, but so what? That's happened many times before and it will happen again.
Anyway, just 'caues we can't divide by zero doesn't mean we can't travel at the speed of light. It could simply mean that, that equation *doesn't work* at speed of light and above. duh.
Now me, I'm not gonna be holding my breath for some theoretical physics breakthrough that shows a way to go FTL anytime soon, I'm just sayin'...
Just 'cause the equation doesn't work, that don't necessarily mean the concept doesn't work.
You got your wish. I can't get the film, nor access your webserver. I'm thinkin' you're slashdotted.
Here it is, dude. Not quite feature length, but pretty cool. :-) (watch out for the pop-ups.)
Gateway uses Siebel for all their "customer care" and sales. No, that's *not* a *good* Siebel story. :-) Only thing I can say in Siebel's favor here, is it's probably not the factor causing Gateway to suck horribly in the market right now. But, as a former part-time Gateway "tech support professional", I can tell you Siebel certainly doesn't help things there any.
Actually, I really *do* use att wireless and it really *does* have wireless Internet. (But I'm not on my phone right now.) It's still working. The "wireless Intnernet" is not the best since it's all WAP pages. To really get to any websites, you've gotta go through google--google has a WAP proxy server that operates behind the scenes to ensure that when you click on a google search result, you actually get a page back.
I was on my phone and yahoo messenger was working earlier this evening. Whatever att and cingular did, the "phone net" appears to still be functional.
K9 is *way* better. I mean, sure he can be knocked on his side more easily than this thing can, but at least he's got a decent lasergun in his nose.
Yeah, that was it. The encyclopedia remembers it better than I do. I just remembered the phrase "meat damage". It made it sound so gross, but at the same time it's just a PC way of saying "get the crap kicked out of you".
I'm somewhat impressed that WotC doesn't totally deny it's existence. I probably would if I were them. It's not that it was a bad game (it may or may not have been, I don't know), it's just that it tanked so completely.
Hmm. I guess the magic trick to getting a patent invalidated is to convince some sacrifical-goat-type company with an evil patent to go up against MS.
This may actually be feasable, in general, if only you can find a company (and lawyers) that are dumb enough. See--MS, at this point, has just about one of everything. I mean they've got a web browser, an OS, a game console, a TV network, a chat network, a website... you get the idea. They've got their fingers in everybody's pies.
And the kind of patents we want to get rid of are those that are overly broad... It follows that an overly broad patent will probably encroach on MS's territory somewhere down the line... So the only sticking point is finding the gullible company that we can cajole into making the mistake of attacking MS.
Hey, I know it's a dumb, hopeless plan. But hopeless plans have been known to succeed before. Just look at Frodo and Sam heading off to Mt. Doom in Mordor.
Okay, now we both know that, for some of these frivolous patents to be getting through, the patent clerks must obviously be stupid, but...
Your condition that "patents should be limited to actual useful inventions," strikes me as incredibly impractical. I challenge you to spontaneously tell me which ideas I present to you are "actual useful inventions" and which ones aren't. Besides, why should that be the criteria?
Perhaps the criteria that would make more sense in a capatilist world would be: ideas that are most likely to make money. Note that this is not the same as "useful". Example: is a 4th of July sparkler really useful? No, but if someone held a patent on it, they could make quite a bit of money.
Of course, it's not always easy to tell what ideas would make money and which ones wouldn't either. If it were, then people that invest in things like that wouldn't be called venture capitalists, and the practice of investing in those things wouldn't be known as speculation.
In summary: nothing is for certain. So how the hell are you, as a patent clerk, going to tell which ideas are the ones that represent "actual useful inventions" and which ones are the ones that only might become "actual useful invetions"?
:-P :-)
That's ok. The Hobbit is disjointed from the rest of them. Besides, whenever Peter begins to lose his vision for it, all he has to do is start reading The Hobbit again. And let's not forget Fran Walsh. And if they can get Fillipa (sp) back on board, then there'll be three people again. Plus, I'm sure Weta would be doing most/all of the design and props again. When you put it all together, it makes sense. I'm more concnerned about how the actors will be three years from now (neither of the Ian's are all that young, you know).
Yeah.
We know that.
What the parent was saying, I think, was: "how do they address the issue that the film's viewing audience will be expecting something significant to happen wrt to "Bilbo's funny magic ring" when nothing too significant or evil happens wrt to The Ring in The Hobbit at all?"
Okay, about TTT Special Extended, just to give you an idea of what you're missing by not watching it:
Warning! the following could be considered
SPOILERS by some:
Boromir's in it. So's Denethor.
Ah yes. The powerful threat of "meat damage". There was some fakey "hacker" card game put out by WotC once where that could happen. I forget what it was called though.
More FUD at 11.
Yeah, you're right about the citzens != consumers thing. It's alarming how often people forget that.
As to MS and SCO: You realize you're basing all this off some document that ESR claims is valid? Don't get me wrong--I've got nothing against ESR, and I've got plenty against Microsoft, but one supposedly leaked document is not necessarily conclusive. You know SCO currently has few friends. Isn't it possible that the leak is a fake? Perhaps someone handed it to ESR and only pretended to have gotten it from SCO.
But what I really wanted to know is: Where do you live? 'Cause if the people there understand that citizen != consumer, well then I might like to move there some decade.
It's tempting to rebut your post. But actually there is no need.
If you are indeed correct on any of your points, the trial will likely bear that out.