"Definitions of business method patents always end up being circular. You can't really ban something unless you can define it and no one is offering a definition we can use." If I'm not missing something, it should take about 48 hours of concentrated blog reading to find a couple of REALLY good definitions of what should not be given a patent.
At least the ones in California. I'm absolutely certain that several doctors will be getting emergency visits in the coming days from **AA executives.
The smile on Trent's face should be worth a few pictures. ZOMG!! if you give consumers a choice and don't try to screw them over, they really do pay for stuff... WTF?
This was an experiment for Trent, but it cost the **AA more than he could have ever imagined. Yes, I did say **AA. Believe me when I say they are watching what happens to the RIAA with great interest.
Now, all of the **AA pretty much has to admit they got it wrong. They won't admit it of course, but you know how that conversation is going to go in the board room. 'I told you so' is the magic phrase that attracts flying chairs... or something like that
Innovative? Well, to get multiple departments, countries, people to agree on a single thing is amazing if not innovative. To get them to agree on a database, and data formats as well? I've not seen to much of that in the world of governments or big business. Perhaps there was some innovation going on there? It may well have been just innovation in how to politically leverage a size 10 shoe into a size 2 ass, but it does sound like they have done something different.:)
Yes, the story is old now (by Internet standards) and no, he's not actually winning. What he did do was make a great leap in the success of his process by using a better group of knowledge for a base to work with. This is neither new or amazing in anyway. The only reason it makes news is that it's so much common sense that the story is told as if he has had some huge breakthrough.
Even if he only gets to 9.25% I will bet he gets offers to work with AI researchers around the globe. That is, after all, what their stated goal is - more or less. Every programmer knows about the GUI wars, and has read stories about how programmers have trouble writing code or designing web sites that are intuitive for users. If you want to see you code break, put a user on the keyboard and wait a few minutes.
Just about everything that I do with computers shows me something that could be more impressive or intuitive. Can you say 'click START to shutdown' ? Applying psychology and math to a computer problem is a problem that programmers are faced with all the time, and the industry as a whole fails on this repeatedly. A matter of personal interest, hobby robotics, holds a particular problem that seems simple but is not and demonstrates the scope of the problem with this story. Try to build a small robot that can wander around your house and never get stuck behind the couch, or anywhere else. Even cockroaches can accomplish this, but sophisticated robotics cannot.
We've all seen people come from nowhere, solve a problem because they looked at it a different way than everyone else based on their experiences. I think that it is about time that we started doing more of this. The biggest problem that I can see thus far is that people don't act like computers, they seldom repeat anything with precision. Can you say manufacturing robot? Everyone of us has personal tastes, and it's usually only when Hollywood tells us what movies are good that we all fall in line. Sure, some 'blockbusters' fail, but they make money because of the hype. When you remove the hype, it falls apart. Picking out what other people like or might like based on a very small data set is a difficult task. Not everyone likes kids or movies for kids. Not everyone likes hollywood-ized cookie cutter movies. The task is daunting at best.
Apply that thinking to other things, and you can see why some websites work and others do not. Why some software works and why others fail. Should F1 be the help key or F3? Why not CTRL-H? Maybe your preferences for such things differ from mine. What I'm getting at is that predicting what a human will do is not simple. Categorizing movies by story, style, genre etc. is like applying a tag cloud to it and matching the tag hits of one group to your personal tag choices. It kind of works, kind of does not. Either way, it needs to be applied more often. Just today I received a thank you note from the local Honda dealer where I got my seat belt replaced under warranty. I bought the car 15 years ago from the dealer my mother likes, and is two states away from me now. The dealer that send the card is local to me (2 states from my mom) but they sent the card to her, at MY address. Tell me how a human would have done that?
The basic problem is that we humans accrue various bits of information and make decisions based on that. Our thinking process halts when something 'just doesn't make sense' to what we are doing. Computers don't do that... yet. Perhaps this guy is on to something, but then maybe not. A human would not only ask what other people liked this movie, but also "you really liked that piece of crap?"
To put the I in AI is going to take a lot of rethinking. Simply acting like a perfect human won't do it. Oh, you liked that movie? yeah, me too, I love the city where it was filmed. -- get a program to do that? That oddball out-of-left-field thinking is what will make the software very good at predicting what you will or will not like, maybe.
Have you ever tried to figure out what kind of music someone wou
If they had another few hands, they'd be triple and quadruple dipping. Once they figure out that separate email scanners could be sold... well, you know what I mean.
Meanwhile they are preventing nothing. Car analogy time: Lets pick on Ford today. Ford sells you a new car, and a yearly maintenance contract to keep everything working. Of course it is your responsibility to take the car in for that maintenance each year. If you put low profile tires/wheels on the car, it voids part of the maintenance warranty, but for another 75 dollars per year, you can buy the loPro rider guarantee.
That's all good, but you are out of warranty as soon as they figure out that global warming has caused roadways to be dirtier. Now to stay in maintenance warranty you have to buy a GW-100 airfilter system add-on.... only $75/year
Because of the new air filter, you now have to buy higher octane fuel to get the same performance, and that just shortened your powertrain warranty by 3 years.
And on and on it goes... at some point, you're better off just riding the fucking bus
that he is right. Of course the human effect in this loop will throw everything off schedule every time. This math answer to a psychology problem is interesting, but I think that if you avoid the space issues that make boarding a plane a lot like filling a cattle trailer it will all go better anyway. They tell you how to use the seat belts, the flotation devices, even the air cup thingies, and how to smile when you use all of them but they never tell you or show you how to fscking load your luggage in the over head bins. I've traveled quite a lot, and I ALWAYS see some diminutive person struggling, or the average joe trying to figure out how to get a hexagonal object in an square hole. People, in general, are not all cut out to do abstract puzzle solving in 3D domains under pressure. Some people are good at packing to move house, others are not. Same problems for both issues.
What is needed is training. Show people how it is supposed to be done the easiest way and most of them will comply.
Believe it or not, I like to have audio indication on many systems. I am at the point now that hearing certain sounds in conjunction with other events lets me know instinctively what is happening. I'm reasonably certain that one or two power outages would have a symphony of things going on with your proposal, and that symphony is easier to determine what is happening than reading several thousand kilobytes of log files. I like the idea. Even just knowing when something 'not normal' has happened by audible signal would be hugely cool:) especially in a Googleplex size data center blackout.
There is something to this. In a data center, if you have a brown-out or full power drop, the strain on power systems to restore power are what can only be described as epic.
When you take a 1400 amp back up system and drop it up and down like a yo-yo in a lightning storm, stress tends to bring out the worst of Murphy's Law. If all the components in a data center were orchestrated, that can be mitigated. It can be mitigated into nearly 'not a worry' status.
Monitors? low priority in most cases. Redundant supplies, in some cases bring them up separately. Cooling fans could be delayed by some seconds depending on usage. It may seem negligent power use, but on startup each system will draw it's max current, and when all do at the same instant, the peak draw can be overwhelming. In fact, computers themselves could bring up hardware in an orchestrated manner to reduce the startup surge.
In addition to this, by adding power management, it's possible to reduce data center power use also. If you monitored temp and turned off fans when not needed, less power used, less heat generated, less cooling needed overall. If all hardware were built in such a way the hardware on a quad nic card that is not used could be powered off after configuration... as an example. Nic cards could be the last thing to be powered up.
This type of design is practically rocket science. If you look at systems that go into space you will see that they count every milliamp of current draw and manage it with precision. Power use is a big concern for space craft.
While I understand what you are saying it would go a very long way if when I called customer service, while I was on hold waiting for an operator the interactive processing system could take my zip code and tell me if there are any known problems or outages in my area. That would alleviate much of the complaints because of technical problems that are out of your hands. I've had trouble getting anyone to tell me they are having problems of any kind, never mind that the problem happened 2 blocks from my house. I have patience for being called a dumb user that lasts about two seconds, and that goes for being treated like one also. If you can tell me in 60 seconds that there IS a problem in my area, then I won't wait on the phone for 10-15 minutes getting pissed off before I talk to a call center rep. I will probably hang up with the knowledge that you know about the problem and are working on it. If I'm **REALLY** lucky, you'll have given me a number to call for status updates or a website or both so I won't have to bother your customer service reps any more.... sigh... like that is going to happen
While you deserve the mod points, it should also be noted that consumer expectation is strangled into submission within 20 minutes on the first support call they make to ask about better service quality.I know a guy who is locally famous because he will spend 4,5,6 or more hours on the phone with customer service, supervisors, managers and anyone on the board of directors that he can find a phone number for. What is he fighting for? discounted service or reparations for lost service(s). That's right, it takes hours on the phone to get one of those companies to either own up to, and pay for losses accrued by their customers through loss of service.
In truth, most consumers won't complain when they should, so there is no marketplace pressure on those businesses to aim for five nines uptime.
increase the value of those parcels of the moon that have been sold thus far? Does anyone on/. own a piece of the moon? If so, what are you doing as far as time share arrangements?
The simple fact that the latest batch of lawyers see the wrongful doings of previous batches heralds a kind of change. It's not just a cry of 'that's not fair', it is a cry of 'that's not fair use'. The tide will have turned when older established lawyers hire the newer tech savvy lawyers. They will need to: DNA tests, AI, robotics, and many other new technologies will spawn legal cases that deal with matters unheard of before.
It is, in some way, perhaps the beginnings of the fight against the corporate control of America. It is definitely a fight against IP and copyright run amok, as well as shady lawyer tactics. It's not clear cut when looking at only one case but if you look at the situation on the whole, the RIAA still needs to get some wins in court somewhere. Add to this what is happening to MS and others in the EU with regard to their business practices a picture begins to form about the general state of play in courtrooms around the globe. In Russia schools are moving to F/OSS because of legal action. The EU lobbed a 1.3Billion Dollar fine against MS. US law students are fighting against the **AA. Of course that is only a few of the cases. The big picture is that the fight against software IP, extended copyright laws, and bad corporate tactics is taking shape one case at a time.
either 1) Make sure that your weapons cannot be reprogrammed by the enemy 2) Make certain that your mobile robotic weapons recognize the difference between friendly robotic weapons and those of the foe, as well as make sure it recognizes a new robotic devices as threatening before the small rat sized robots suicide bomb your 3 million dollar killing machine 3) Buy stock in Duracell 4) Invent anti-EMP armor before deploying $50 million dollars worth of machine gun 5).. 6) buy stock in Duracell 7) profit
so that I can sue for wind damage to my property caused by global warming exacerbation of El Nino winds...
Then, I'm going to sue US automakers for making too many cars with poor pollution standards, followed by litigation against California for not implementing better greenhouse gas controls, and finally a class action against the Bush administration for not forcing people to curb greenhouse gas emissions upon threat of pre-emptive nuclear strikes for non-compliance. Clearly those people need to be bombed because they are wasting precious oil resources to create greenhouse gases.
Is it just me or does anyone else think the warmer climate may have affected more than the villagers are letting on about?
Disagreement often causes productive conversation.
I disagree.
Look, hurting someone's feelings is unpleasant and distasteful, but understable and unavoidable in life. But deliberate attempts to undermine someone's self esteem *should* be illegal. Seriously, this isn't even just morality, it's important to society functioning well.
Can we include all kinds of deliberate attempts to undermine someone's self esteem in your list of things that should be illegal? Perhaps things that Scientologist do, or pentecostal preachers that promote violent or antisocial behavior towards pro-choice people. Perhaps we can snare the MSM for smearing atheists as immoral? You are coming dangerously close to thought police with your efforts to protect the children stuff.
I don't even think this is as hard to define as people seem to think. The real issue is not defining the mean behavior (is it really hard to categorize the age-old types of bullying? Here's just one: being surrounded by a group threatening physical harm. This is hard?). Luring someone into a relationship that they foresake their friends to be in, and then dumping them coldly. Some say that's just part of life, but when done deliberately it is unquestionably wrong.
And what is the difference between what you said and a classic 'one night stand'? I realized that one is more invovled, but there is very little separating them.
The hard part is PROVING it.
Didn't you say "I don't even think this is as hard to define as people seem to think." If it was easy to define, proving it would also be easy? right? Will your plan include corporations? Should Yahoo be able to sue MS for that takeover bid?
In the heart of most of these cases is a bully avoiding proof of their deeds. That is why this case resonates - the evil neighbor mom was hiding her identity. It's why typically bullies lure or ambush their victims in places outside of school and parental control. Which is also why this case resonates - MySpace being an area seemingly outside of that control.
Here, you seem to be limiting the dangerous kind of bullying to only that behavior which is done outside the prying eyes of the public? Should we be suing Washington lobbyists? Their constant greed can be directly linked to depression, loss of self esteem, and many other bad situations in people lives.
So I don't see a problem with lawmakers approaching this. Outlawing typical forms of bullying are to me a much more productive, honest and rewarding legislative activity than trying to spy on citizens or extend copyrights. It *will* be very hard to prove many of these cases, that is life. But when you do catch a sonfabitch, you should be able to throw the book at them as a deterrent for others. When adults facilitate bullying, they should pay for it.
You do realize that criminalizing drug use has not stopped drug use, right? Prohibition did not stop alcohol consumption... remember? How would this be productive legislation exactly? "Throw the book at them..." and how many people will be wrongly bludgeoned with that book? over what is nothing more than 'normal' human behaviors. You see, that cute head cheerleader also bullies in ways that you are not thinking about. Should we follow through on your plan, all sorts of rather normal people will end up as criminals, including Christians who go around demonizing those that do not think like them. Say, for instance, atheists, or pagans, or god-forbid, Jews and Islamics.
Would it really be so bad to have less emotionally scarred youth? I don't care if it's Star Wars Kid or Megan or some anonymous kid living Peter Parker's life without the radioactive spider to help him, people rationalizing this as being somehow good for them or demonstrative of their weak character are full of shit. No one wants to be in that situation, period.
Perhaps it would be better if we worked on giving them a much better education, including educ
Personally, I think this is a big step. Linux fanbois missed it. Microsoft is imploding. 2 years ago chairs would fly at even the suggestion that Windows should cater to Linux users in any form. Now MS seems to have a 'we do GNU too' attitude.
From bully on the playground to 'why can't we all play nice' ??
Don't believe it for a second, but take heart, GNU/Linux has made an impression in Redmond big enough to affect the marketing machine.
COTS - commercial off the shelf - parts is standard industry stuff. I'm wondering how this cut enough costs to be winner. What are the other people using? There is a lot of military hardware built with COTS. Does anyone have enough info on the other competitors to say why COTS undercut them?
Can anyone offer insight into whether user to server or server to users to users puts less stress on internet infrastructure? I'm not sure, but reading that three times put stress on me
if it was applied to tech support call waits. The longer they make you wait, the less it costs to fix your problem. At current waiting times I've experienced, it's possible that sending me a brand new computer would be the cost of making me wait.
I don't disagree... well, except for the fact that we humans often go headlong into a decision, sure that we are right, only to find out later that.. well, ooops, maybe killing 6 million other people wasn't such a good idea.
I'm all for making life energy efficient, for not polluting our eco-systems, and for doing all we can to make life healthy. We should have been doing that all along. We may make our species extinct with gray goo before global warming has a chance, by the way.
My point was simply that more information means better decisions all around. I'm not advocating that we wait for the information before doing anything. I'm saying that every bit of information should be used to shape our decisions as we move along. Is anyone worried that we are almost out of helium? What effect does that have?
The brain trust needed to put all this together is huge, so sure, do what we can, but do not be blinkered into thinking that we are done with the decision making.
Slashdot Mirror
What gives?
Trentzilla ?
Oh balls!
There goes Capital
Go Go TrentZilla
At least the ones in California. I'm absolutely certain that several doctors will be getting emergency visits in the coming days from **AA executives.
The smile on Trent's face should be worth a few pictures. ZOMG!! if you give consumers a choice and don't try to screw them over, they really do pay for stuff... WTF?
This was an experiment for Trent, but it cost the **AA more than he could have ever imagined. Yes, I did say **AA. Believe me when I say they are watching what happens to the RIAA with great interest.
Now, all of the **AA pretty much has to admit they got it wrong. They won't admit it of course, but you know how that conversation is going to go in the board room. 'I told you so' is the magic phrase that attracts flying chairs... or something like that
Innovative? Well, to get multiple departments, countries, people to agree on a single thing is amazing if not innovative. To get them to agree on a database, and data formats as well? I've not seen to much of that in the world of governments or big business. Perhaps there was some innovation going on there? It may well have been just innovation in how to politically leverage a size 10 shoe into a size 2 ass, but it does sound like they have done something different. :)
Yes, the story is old now (by Internet standards) and no, he's not actually winning. What he did do was make a great leap in the success of his process by using a better group of knowledge for a base to work with. This is neither new or amazing in anyway. The only reason it makes news is that it's so much common sense that the story is told as if he has had some huge breakthrough.
Even if he only gets to 9.25% I will bet he gets offers to work with AI researchers around the globe. That is, after all, what their stated goal is - more or less. Every programmer knows about the GUI wars, and has read stories about how programmers have trouble writing code or designing web sites that are intuitive for users. If you want to see you code break, put a user on the keyboard and wait a few minutes.
Just about everything that I do with computers shows me something that could be more impressive or intuitive. Can you say 'click START to shutdown' ? Applying psychology and math to a computer problem is a problem that programmers are faced with all the time, and the industry as a whole fails on this repeatedly. A matter of personal interest, hobby robotics, holds a particular problem that seems simple but is not and demonstrates the scope of the problem with this story. Try to build a small robot that can wander around your house and never get stuck behind the couch, or anywhere else. Even cockroaches can accomplish this, but sophisticated robotics cannot.
We've all seen people come from nowhere, solve a problem because they looked at it a different way than everyone else based on their experiences. I think that it is about time that we started doing more of this. The biggest problem that I can see thus far is that people don't act like computers, they seldom repeat anything with precision. Can you say manufacturing robot? Everyone of us has personal tastes, and it's usually only when Hollywood tells us what movies are good that we all fall in line. Sure, some 'blockbusters' fail, but they make money because of the hype. When you remove the hype, it falls apart. Picking out what other people like or might like based on a very small data set is a difficult task. Not everyone likes kids or movies for kids. Not everyone likes hollywood-ized cookie cutter movies. The task is daunting at best.
Apply that thinking to other things, and you can see why some websites work and others do not. Why some software works and why others fail. Should F1 be the help key or F3? Why not CTRL-H? Maybe your preferences for such things differ from mine. What I'm getting at is that predicting what a human will do is not simple. Categorizing movies by story, style, genre etc. is like applying a tag cloud to it and matching the tag hits of one group to your personal tag choices. It kind of works, kind of does not. Either way, it needs to be applied more often. Just today I received a thank you note from the local Honda dealer where I got my seat belt replaced under warranty. I bought the car 15 years ago from the dealer my mother likes, and is two states away from me now. The dealer that send the card is local to me (2 states from my mom) but they sent the card to her, at MY address. Tell me how a human would have done that?
The basic problem is that we humans accrue various bits of information and make decisions based on that. Our thinking process halts when something 'just doesn't make sense' to what we are doing. Computers don't do that... yet. Perhaps this guy is on to something, but then maybe not. A human would not only ask what other people liked this movie, but also "you really liked that piece of crap?"
To put the I in AI is going to take a lot of rethinking. Simply acting like a perfect human won't do it. Oh, you liked that movie? yeah, me too, I love the city where it was filmed. -- get a program to do that? That oddball out-of-left-field thinking is what will make the software very good at predicting what you will or will not like, maybe.
Have you ever tried to figure out what kind of music someone wou
If they had another few hands, they'd be triple and quadruple dipping. Once they figure out that separate email scanners could be sold... well, you know what I mean.
Meanwhile they are preventing nothing. Car analogy time: Lets pick on Ford today. Ford sells you a new car, and a yearly maintenance contract to keep everything working. Of course it is your responsibility to take the car in for that maintenance each year. If you put low profile tires/wheels on the car, it voids part of the maintenance warranty, but for another 75 dollars per year, you can buy the loPro rider guarantee.
That's all good, but you are out of warranty as soon as they figure out that global warming has caused roadways to be dirtier. Now to stay in maintenance warranty you have to buy a GW-100 airfilter system add-on.... only $75/year
Because of the new air filter, you now have to buy higher octane fuel to get the same performance, and that just shortened your powertrain warranty by 3 years.
And on and on it goes... at some point, you're better off just riding the fucking bus
that he is right. Of course the human effect in this loop will throw everything off schedule every time. This math answer to a psychology problem is interesting, but I think that if you avoid the space issues that make boarding a plane a lot like filling a cattle trailer it will all go better anyway. They tell you how to use the seat belts, the flotation devices, even the air cup thingies, and how to smile when you use all of them but they never tell you or show you how to fscking load your luggage in the over head bins. I've traveled quite a lot, and I ALWAYS see some diminutive person struggling, or the average joe trying to figure out how to get a hexagonal object in an square hole. People, in general, are not all cut out to do abstract puzzle solving in 3D domains under pressure. Some people are good at packing to move house, others are not. Same problems for both issues.
What is needed is training. Show people how it is supposed to be done the easiest way and most of them will comply.
Believe it or not, I like to have audio indication on many systems. I am at the point now that hearing certain sounds in conjunction with other events lets me know instinctively what is happening. I'm reasonably certain that one or two power outages would have a symphony of things going on with your proposal, and that symphony is easier to determine what is happening than reading several thousand kilobytes of log files. I like the idea. Even just knowing when something 'not normal' has happened by audible signal would be hugely cool :) especially in a Googleplex size data center blackout.
There is something to this. In a data center, if you have a brown-out or full power drop, the strain on power systems to restore power are what can only be described as epic.
When you take a 1400 amp back up system and drop it up and down like a yo-yo in a lightning storm, stress tends to bring out the worst of Murphy's Law. If all the components in a data center were orchestrated, that can be mitigated. It can be mitigated into nearly 'not a worry' status.
Monitors? low priority in most cases. Redundant supplies, in some cases bring them up separately. Cooling fans could be delayed by some seconds depending on usage. It may seem negligent power use, but on startup each system will draw it's max current, and when all do at the same instant, the peak draw can be overwhelming. In fact, computers themselves could bring up hardware in an orchestrated manner to reduce the startup surge.
In addition to this, by adding power management, it's possible to reduce data center power use also. If you monitored temp and turned off fans when not needed, less power used, less heat generated, less cooling needed overall. If all hardware were built in such a way the hardware on a quad nic card that is not used could be powered off after configuration... as an example. Nic cards could be the last thing to be powered up.
This type of design is practically rocket science. If you look at systems that go into space you will see that they count every milliamp of current draw and manage it with precision. Power use is a big concern for space craft.
simple: don't use sony batteries ?
While I understand what you are saying it would go a very long way if when I called customer service, while I was on hold waiting for an operator the interactive processing system could take my zip code and tell me if there are any known problems or outages in my area. That would alleviate much of the complaints because of technical problems that are out of your hands. I've had trouble getting anyone to tell me they are having problems of any kind, never mind that the problem happened 2 blocks from my house. I have patience for being called a dumb user that lasts about two seconds, and that goes for being treated like one also. If you can tell me in 60 seconds that there IS a problem in my area, then I won't wait on the phone for 10-15 minutes getting pissed off before I talk to a call center rep. I will probably hang up with the knowledge that you know about the problem and are working on it. If I'm **REALLY** lucky, you'll have given me a number to call for status updates or a website or both so I won't have to bother your customer service reps any more.... sigh... like that is going to happen
While you deserve the mod points, it should also be noted that consumer expectation is strangled into submission within 20 minutes on the first support call they make to ask about better service quality.I know a guy who is locally famous because he will spend 4,5,6 or more hours on the phone with customer service, supervisors, managers and anyone on the board of directors that he can find a phone number for. What is he fighting for? discounted service or reparations for lost service(s). That's right, it takes hours on the phone to get one of those companies to either own up to, and pay for losses accrued by their customers through loss of service.
In truth, most consumers won't complain when they should, so there is no marketplace pressure on those businesses to aim for five nines uptime.
increase the value of those parcels of the moon that have been sold thus far? Does anyone on /. own a piece of the moon? If so, what are you doing as far as time share arrangements?
The simple fact that the latest batch of lawyers see the wrongful doings of previous batches heralds a kind of change. It's not just a cry of 'that's not fair', it is a cry of 'that's not fair use'. The tide will have turned when older established lawyers hire the newer tech savvy lawyers. They will need to: DNA tests, AI, robotics, and many other new technologies will spawn legal cases that deal with matters unheard of before.
It is, in some way, perhaps the beginnings of the fight against the corporate control of America. It is definitely a fight against IP and copyright run amok, as well as shady lawyer tactics. It's not clear cut when looking at only one case but if you look at the situation on the whole, the RIAA still needs to get some wins in court somewhere. Add to this what is happening to MS and others in the EU with regard to their business practices a picture begins to form about the general state of play in courtrooms around the globe. In Russia schools are moving to F/OSS because of legal action. The EU lobbed a 1.3Billion Dollar fine against MS. US law students are fighting against the **AA. Of course that is only a few of the cases. The big picture is that the fight against software IP, extended copyright laws, and bad corporate tactics is taking shape one case at a time.
Add your preferred email address to a comment below this one so you can be contacted?
either ..
1) Make sure that your weapons cannot be reprogrammed by the enemy
2) Make certain that your mobile robotic weapons recognize the difference between friendly robotic weapons and those of the foe, as well as make sure it recognizes a new robotic devices as threatening before the small rat sized robots suicide bomb your 3 million dollar killing machine
3) Buy stock in Duracell
4) Invent anti-EMP armor before deploying $50 million dollars worth of machine gun
5)
6) buy stock in Duracell
7) profit
so that I can sue for wind damage to my property caused by global warming exacerbation of El Nino winds...
Then, I'm going to sue US automakers for making too many cars with poor pollution standards, followed by litigation against California for not implementing better greenhouse gas controls, and finally a class action against the Bush administration for not forcing people to curb greenhouse gas emissions upon threat of pre-emptive nuclear strikes for non-compliance. Clearly those people need to be bombed because they are wasting precious oil resources to create greenhouse gases.
Is it just me or does anyone else think the warmer climate may have affected more than the villagers are letting on about?
cyclic links?
I disagree.
Look, hurting someone's feelings is unpleasant and distasteful, but understable and unavoidable in life. But deliberate attempts to undermine someone's self esteem *should* be illegal. Seriously, this isn't even just morality, it's important to society functioning well.
Can we include all kinds of deliberate attempts to undermine someone's self esteem in your list of things that should be illegal? Perhaps things that Scientologist do, or pentecostal preachers that promote violent or antisocial behavior towards pro-choice people. Perhaps we can snare the MSM for smearing atheists as immoral? You are coming dangerously close to thought police with your efforts to protect the children stuff.
I don't even think this is as hard to define as people seem to think. The real issue is not defining the mean behavior (is it really hard to categorize the age-old types of bullying? Here's just one: being surrounded by a group threatening physical harm. This is hard?). Luring someone into a relationship that they foresake their friends to be in, and then dumping them coldly. Some say that's just part of life, but when done deliberately it is unquestionably wrong.
And what is the difference between what you said and a classic 'one night stand'? I realized that one is more invovled, but there is very little separating them.
The hard part is PROVING it.
Didn't you say "I don't even think this is as hard to define as people seem to think." If it was easy to define, proving it would also be easy? right? Will your plan include corporations? Should Yahoo be able to sue MS for that takeover bid?
In the heart of most of these cases is a bully avoiding proof of their deeds. That is why this case resonates - the evil neighbor mom was hiding her identity. It's why typically bullies lure or ambush their victims in places outside of school and parental control. Which is also why this case resonates - MySpace being an area seemingly outside of that control.
Here, you seem to be limiting the dangerous kind of bullying to only that behavior which is done outside the prying eyes of the public? Should we be suing Washington lobbyists? Their constant greed can be directly linked to depression, loss of self esteem, and many other bad situations in people lives.
So I don't see a problem with lawmakers approaching this. Outlawing typical forms of bullying are to me a much more productive, honest and rewarding legislative activity than trying to spy on citizens or extend copyrights. It *will* be very hard to prove many of these cases, that is life. But when you do catch a sonfabitch, you should be able to throw the book at them as a deterrent for others. When adults facilitate bullying, they should pay for it.
You do realize that criminalizing drug use has not stopped drug use, right? Prohibition did not stop alcohol consumption... remember? How would this be productive legislation exactly? "Throw the book at them..." and how many people will be wrongly bludgeoned with that book? over what is nothing more than 'normal' human behaviors. You see, that cute head cheerleader also bullies in ways that you are not thinking about. Should we follow through on your plan, all sorts of rather normal people will end up as criminals, including Christians who go around demonizing those that do not think like them. Say, for instance, atheists, or pagans, or god-forbid, Jews and Islamics.
Would it really be so bad to have less emotionally scarred youth? I don't care if it's Star Wars Kid or Megan or some anonymous kid living Peter Parker's life without the radioactive spider to help him, people rationalizing this as being somehow good for them or demonstrative of their weak character are full of shit. No one wants to be in that situation, period.
Perhaps it would be better if we worked on giving them a much better education, including educ
Personally, I think this is a big step. Linux fanbois missed it. Microsoft is imploding. 2 years ago chairs would fly at even the suggestion that Windows should cater to Linux users in any form. Now MS seems to have a 'we do GNU too' attitude.
From bully on the playground to 'why can't we all play nice' ??
Don't believe it for a second, but take heart, GNU/Linux has made an impression in Redmond big enough to affect the marketing machine.
Why don't they ever have dyxlesia? I mean, you'd think that this is a word that would get screwed up, right?
COTS - commercial off the shelf - parts is standard industry stuff. I'm wondering how this cut enough costs to be winner. What are the other people using? There is a lot of military hardware built with COTS. Does anyone have enough info on the other competitors to say why COTS undercut them?
if it was applied to tech support call waits. The longer they make you wait, the less it costs to fix your problem. At current waiting times I've experienced, it's possible that sending me a brand new computer would be the cost of making me wait.
I don't disagree... well, except for the fact that we humans often go headlong into a decision, sure that we are right, only to find out later that .. well, ooops, maybe killing 6 million other people wasn't such a good idea.
I'm all for making life energy efficient, for not polluting our eco-systems, and for doing all we can to make life healthy. We should have been doing that all along. We may make our species extinct with gray goo before global warming has a chance, by the way.
My point was simply that more information means better decisions all around. I'm not advocating that we wait for the information before doing anything. I'm saying that every bit of information should be used to shape our decisions as we move along. Is anyone worried that we are almost out of helium? What effect does that have?
The brain trust needed to put all this together is huge, so sure, do what we can, but do not be blinkered into thinking that we are done with the decision making.