Traditionally, you cannot patent discoveries. Discoveries aren't something new or novel that you created. You just found something that already existed. For instance, if you discoverd Klausonium - a new element awesome for everything from T-Shirts to nuclear weapons - you couldn't patent it because its existence isn't owed to you; it existed before you found and it would continue to exist whether you tell people about it or not.
Likewise, gene sequences shouldn't be patentable because they are discoveries. The European Patent Convention expressly forbids patents on discoveries. US patent law is slightly more vague allowing patents on "new. ..compositions of matter". One could argue that a gene sequence is a composition of matter, but it certainly is not new.
Well, I'm done thinking. Good luck with Klausonium. Hope you can be first to market:-).
A Dozen, a Gross, and a Score, plus three times the square root of four, divided by seven, plus five times eleven, equals nine squared and not a bit more.
I really hope this goes to trial and a judge rules on it. Partly because I think the judge would rule that Apple can't do what they're trying to do with their EULA, but even if the judge sides with them, it's still a clarification of the law.
I don't like existing in the murky world of armchair people positing what is and isn't legal. Plus, if it goes Psystar's way, I doubt it would be too long before larger manufacturers got on board. Once something becomes legal, corporations want all over it (well, I guess that applies to profitable things).
This is one of the smartest moves I've seen Yahoo make. The key is that you are required to run Yahoo ads alongside the search results (when said ads become available).
So, if I'm creating a search for my website, I can go the Google route, embed an iframe and look amateur or go with Yahoo and look professional and completely integrated.
Not only that, but there are a lot of niche markets that big players can't go after that add up to a lot. As someone who programs for those type of sites, Yahoo's BOSS is really appealing. Yahoo ups their ad revenue, I get access to world-class internet search.
It's all about increasing the number of ads served. The more people who choose BOSS, the more ads Yahoo serves and the more money Yahoo makes.
you're an airline pilot. A terrorist organization just used Semtex to destroy your reinforced door. I know my gut reaction is to look at a list of passengers and type in an id number to shock a specific individual.
As much as I don't like Tasers, it makes more sense to have a Taser gun than Taser wristbands. Those wristbands have to either be activated individually by number - not happening in an attack - or all at once - pissing everyone off.
For those that want to get outraged, this is an area where big business (airlines) can be your friends. The airlines won't allow this. Anything that makes flying more of a pain reduces their profits - even things like the new security fees on airline tickets reduce their profits. They aren't going to pay more money (I'm guessing at least $15-a-bracelet for the materials, location tag, and shock element considering that a Taser costs hundreds of dollars) to piss off customers.
What's really ironic is that Google is (from what I've heard) anal about anonymizing everything internally. Not only that, but it can take a good while before employees with a good reason to access such data get said access.
I mean, Google even anonymizes ping logs that employees are going to look at - and I really don't think my ping time is anything that private.
So, if I have spare room in my freezer and it's already running 24/7, does it take more energy if there's more items in it?
I assume freezers operate based on cooling the air to, say, -5C. If that's the case, if something has a high specific heat (like water) it doesn't take more energy for it to cool it, it just takes longer for it to cool.
So, that ice-pack AC-like machine would use less electricity (if you don't use your freezer for food)?
Not that it's so practical since you'd constantly need to be changing and refreezing the packs, but it might be greener in that respect. Of course, getting a smaller freezer would probably be even greener.
In any truly competitive market (like the market for bulk, wholesale USDA Grade A Wheat where there is no product differentiation and lots of buyers and lots of sellers), sellers make zero economic profit. Economic profit is the profit above the profit you could make in another industry - so, if you build a computer business with 100,000 and get a 20,000 profit and that 100,000 would only have gotten you a 5,000 profit in the pizza business, that 15,000 difference is the economic profit).
Over the long-term, companies don't play in markets that don't have zero economic profit or better - because they have better options to put their time and money into.
Now, these mini notebooks aren't going to be a truly competitive market because, like standard laptops, there is significant product differentiation. People do have a certain amount of brand loyalty, they want different features (20GB vs 16GB, Windows vs GNU/Linux, screen size, subjective thoughts about aesthetics and the like). This is very similar to the laptops most people use today - they're vastly the same, but have little tweaks to them that cause consumers to favor one over another.
If these mini notebooks achieve the same level of product differentiation as current laptops, margins should be similar. In fact, if the mini notebooks are sold with service, that offers the chance for more differentiation. I mean, when people buy mobile phones, they usually choose their carrier first (usually). That means that the margins for the device can be higher because the different service is adding another level of differentiation.
What is really ridiculous is that Apple doesn't sell a laptop with a slower processor than 2.1GHz. Seriously ridiculous. I can't get a laptop without a high-quality webcam. I can't get a non-pro laptop that has real graphics. I have to pay $200 for a DVD burner because Apple wants to have a "good, better, best" layout. Apple charges $200 for a better looking black case.
With Apple, it's a game of getting you to buy the highest margin items by withholding what you need. It's bait and switch. Where PC manufacturers give you choices, Apple forces you to buy things that pump up their profits. Where PC manufacturers have sales that give you good deals on soon-to-be replaced models, Apple screws you over as hard as they can.
And I put up with it because of the Mac OS (user since System 6). Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that Apple's pricing is as fair, honest, and competitive as their PC counterparts. We pay up to use our favorite system. Apple knows that they have something special and they know they can get much greater profit margins because of it and they take advantage of that. Apple isn't evil or anything, but they aren't cuddly either.
The machine doesn't look that impressive. The thing that's really important is that they've forced the ball into Apple's court. At this point, Apple can respond to the violation of the EULA and see if a court says that the provision is legal or they can ignore it.
If they ignore it, others are likely to follow Psystar (after a long enough time to see that Apple doesn't go after them). Of course, in this case, there's still some threat, but I don't think it's outrageous to argue that if Apple ignores it for over a year that the provision looses some weight.
Personally, I hope they get sued. If they win their suit, it will be a new era for the Macintosh. If they loose their suit, they've lost, but at least we know.
Originally, I thought that this would be a great competitor for EC2, but in reality it's very different.
EC2 allows you to configure a GNU/Linux environment to your liking and use it almost the same as you would use a dedicated server or VPS. Google's App Engine allows you to create Google Applications. They're written in Python (one of Google's production languages) and need to be written specifically to use things like Google's Bigtable.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Google's infrastructure is top notch, but don't expect to try and launch the next Web 2.0 app this way. If you use Google's App Engine, your only course is independent or being bought by Google - because you'd have to rewrite so much of your app to migrate to other infrastructure. With EC2, it's decently easy to switch to dedicated servers. S3 could be replaced by a MogileFS cluster. That's much more appealing to anyone that isn't Google.
Essentially, Google's App Engine locks you into Google in a way that EC2/S3 doesn't lock you into Amazon (in fact, some of the considerations like lack of persistent storage make it easier to move away).
Billing is based on instance-hours not cpu-hours. So, for every hour or partial hour your instance is running, you get charged. It doesn't matter if you're a 1% cpu usage or 100% cpu usage during that time: http://www.amazon.com/ec2
There's still one glaring problem. There is no persistent storage (other than shuttling data to S3). That means that if your website is database-backed, you need to figure out what to do should your instance crash. Hourly backups? Mounting S3 as a slow FUSE filesystem that you can put your database on? It's all ugly.
And it's still not a great value. It seems cheap. $72/mo for a 1.7GB RAM server. Well, look at Slicehost and you can get a 2GB RAM Xen instance (same virtualization software as EC2) for $140 WITH persistent storage and 800GB of bandwidth. That doesn't sound like a great deal UNTIL you calculate what EC2 bandwidth costs. 800GB would cost you $144 at $0.18 per GB bringing the total cost to $216 ($76 more than Slicehost). That 18 cents doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. The same situation happens with Joyent. For $250 you get a 2GB RAM server from them (running under Solaris' Zones) with 10TB of bandwidth. That would cost you $1,872 with EC2. Even if you assume that you'll only use 10% of what Joyent is giving you, EC2 still comes in at a cost of $252 - and without persistent storage!
EC2 really got the ball rolling, but it just isn't such a leader. Other operations have critical features (persistent storage) that EC2 is lacking along with pricing that just isn't more expensive. I want to like EC2, but their competitors are simply better.
When you want to leave, start adding bogus data. Friend people you don't know. Change the bio data. Tag yourself in pictures you aren't in. Basically, generate random activity. Defriend your actual friends. Change your name.
After a time, it becomes very difficult to determine what is real and what is fake.
In 10 grants contingent on recipients of said aid only use it to purchase special Educational Grant Editions of my Ubuntu clone at a cost of $600,000,000,000 a piece. That way, I'm donating a huge amount, but I don't actually have to donate a penny (unless I'm off by a decimal place there).
On a more serious level, I could donate $1,000,000 to schools that could only be used to buy licenses of my slightly modified Ubuntu clone and never have to spend money - if they don't buy my licenses, they don't get the money; if they do buy my Ubuntu clone, I get the money back and maybe have to eat the cost of some CD-Rs.
"Donating" money that can only be used to purchase an intangible good (and software, other than the physical media, is intangible) from yourself is like donating nothing - especially when you're donating to people who wouldn't buy your product if it weren't being given to them.
I don't want to get into whether they have a copyright on those types of games, but I do want to talk about the trademark issue.
Calling a Scrabble knockoff Scrabulous or a Boggle knockoff Bogglific is pretty clear gounds for trademark infringement. I mean, this site is Slashdot. If I created a Slashdot.us - and always referred to it as Slashdot.us - it's still too close to being Slashdot. Same with Slashdotic or something like that. People who are casual observers would get confused as to the owner. And in order to keep that trademark, they have to litigate. So, if someone were to create a Slashdot.us site, Slashdot would have to file against them. If they didn't, slashdot would become a generic term like aspirin that anyone could use.
Now, I'm sure Hasbro doesn't just want them to change the name, but they have a really great case there. While Hasbro is being craptacular here, the Scrabulous people aren't completely innocent - they wanted to play off the Scrabble name to make money.
This is simply true.com trying to legislate their business model. They pay a lot for background checks on their members and the public seems to think these background checks aren't important. By legislating this, they're hoping to a) force other companies to take on a huge financial burden or b) force other companies to look shady by having a disclaimer "warning: people on this site might be axe murders".
What they should really be requiring is for everyone to do a background check on anyone they ever interact with. That clerk at the coffee shop? Who knows what s/he might be hiding!
So, let me get this straight: you (mySQL) use a dolphin to fetch data while PostgreSQL uses an elephant to fetch data. Would that explain why PostgreSQL is better at fetching large datasets? Like, the elephant can haul more, but is slower while the dolphin is faster, but can't carry as well? Have you thought about using a non-animal to fetch your data? Maybe a racecar? Those are fast and could probably haul as much as an elephant. Plus, then I wouldn't need to have fish or peanuts in my server room.
Not quite.
So, my friend Amy posts a picture of the two of us on Facebook as her profile picture. She has given Facebook a license to that photo. That's what the agreement stipulates.
First, if Amy didn't take the photo, she might not own the rights to it and Facebook could be sued for copyright infringement. Yeah, they have that clause saying that you warrant that you have the rights to post it, but that simply won't hold up if they're sublicensing it. Sites can't be sued for what their users post, but then if they start sublicensing it in an intentional manner, it gets a lot more blurry.
Second, and this one is a lot more air tight, the agreement does NOT include a clause granting endorsement rights. As the original post said, that is very different from copyright rights. Amy might own the copyright on many pictures of me. She does NOT have the right to license my image and likeness for the purposes of endorsement. She has the right to post the picture and even to give Facebook the right to use the image how they see fit as long as it isn't considered using the image/likeness as an advertisement or the like.
The fact that the FBI is racially data mining to find terrorists or the fact that they're so incompetent at it. If you're going to do something like this, you have to pick something a little less universal than middle-eastern food. By going off this data, one has to think the FBI has captured at least 50m Americans who buy Falafel and probably more than 100m (a third of the population). At that point, random checking would be nearly as effective.
Think of it this way, what if Google used the word "the" as a screen for a reputable website. Well, I can't imagine many English language sites without "the" in them. So, Google eliminates sites without "the" as non-reputable (like the FBI is eliminating non-Falafel buyers as not terrorists). Google is still left with almost all their sites and so the presence of "the" hasn't been an effective screen. Neither is buying middle-eastern food.
Frankly, they probably would have had a smaller set simply by looking at place of birth. Not that they should be racist/anti-immigrant like that, but the stupidity of this screen is just so bothersome.
They see your DoubleClick cookie. There isn't a way to do this cross-adnetwork. So, I can opt out with DoubleClick, AdSense, Microsoft, Yahoo, TextLinkAds. . . individually. But I can't get a cookie from the FTC or someone that will be readable by all the advertizers.
The problem with the suggestion is implementation. IP Addresses are shared and reused and so aren't unique to a user or household. Cookies also don't work since they are only sent to the site you're hitting - so a cookie for ftc.gov isn't going to be sent to DoubleClick. Having individual advertisers have opt-out systems isn't great since a lot of the time I don't know who is serving the ads I'm seeing (without delving into the HTML).
Unfortunately, there is no simple way of defining something like this. A better solution might be to regulate the type of information that they are allowed to collect in the first place. If they aren't allowed to record my IP address (or any other identifying information like a zip code I type in a form or POST/GET data), then there would seem to be limited privacy implications. They could gather data showing that people who like power tools also like Sony stereos or whatnot, but without information like IP addresses, form and GET/POST data, there is little they can use to violate my privacy.
So, I want a new hard drive, but don't want to pay for it. I go to Best Buy, get the hard drive, throw some tiles into the box and claim it came that way. Yeah, Western Digital must be a tile and hard drive company or something. I'm not trying to rip Best Buy off.
Oh, and I do an exchange so it appears like I'm not stealing. Then I get two drives for the price of one!
-OR-
I'm pissed at Best Buy for reason X. Everyone laughed at me and called me a troll in the forums when I complained about X. So, I can create a story with no documentation. Yeah, Best Buy sold me tiles and wouldn't take them back. Those corporate goons are trying to steal from me! No one should shop there! LOL, let's see if they call me a troll this time!
-----
The fact is that there is no evidence that this person isn't a crook. There is no evidence that they are a crook. Why is it likely that Best Buy is the bad party in this situation? More importantly, what happens when it gets out that you can get free hard drives from Best Buy for a few bathroom tiles?
What we really need is creativity - a way to figure out accuracy and truthfulness in this situation. Yelling that Best Buy is evil (in this case) doesn't help. There is no evidence that the complainant is being truthful. If someone could establish a way of ascertaining truth in a situation like this - which currently hinges on one person's word that his hard drive was bathroom tiles when he got it - it would be really helpful for society.
Whether or not the child was speeding, his parents seem to take an active role in policing him. A monetary punishment probably just punishes the parents and the parents have already taken punishment steps in the past.
One of the reasons that punishments are as strong as they are is because you're unlikely to be caught every time. This child is more likely to be caught (by his parents) than most and the parents are already grounding the child (which is probably worse than the ticket for a teenager). So, if the judge lets him off this time, it's not as if he's free to do whatever he wants. His parents are punishing him for infractions harsher than the ticket already and likely catching him more often than any speed trap would. This family is a libertarian's dream. I'm not a libertarian, but in this case I think it's easy enough to say "just don't do it again" and trust that this isn't a habitual reckless driver (at least until the next time, if there is one).
Slashdot Mirror
Traditionally, you cannot patent discoveries. Discoveries aren't something new or novel that you created. You just found something that already existed. For instance, if you discoverd Klausonium - a new element awesome for everything from T-Shirts to nuclear weapons - you couldn't patent it because its existence isn't owed to you; it existed before you found and it would continue to exist whether you tell people about it or not.
Likewise, gene sequences shouldn't be patentable because they are discoveries. The European Patent Convention expressly forbids patents on discoveries. US patent law is slightly more vague allowing patents on "new. . .compositions of matter". One could argue that a gene sequence is a composition of matter, but it certainly is not new.
Well, I'm done thinking. Good luck with Klausonium. Hope you can be first to market :-).
To create your new Gmail account, please translate the following equation into a limerick:
(12 + 144 + 20 + 3 * sqrt(4))/7 + 5 * 11 = 9^2 + 0
Answer:
A Dozen, a Gross, and a Score,
plus three times the square root of four,
divided by seven,
plus five times eleven,
equals nine squared and not a bit more.
via: http://www.trottermath.net/humor/limricks.html
I really hope this goes to trial and a judge rules on it. Partly because I think the judge would rule that Apple can't do what they're trying to do with their EULA, but even if the judge sides with them, it's still a clarification of the law.
I don't like existing in the murky world of armchair people positing what is and isn't legal. Plus, if it goes Psystar's way, I doubt it would be too long before larger manufacturers got on board. Once something becomes legal, corporations want all over it (well, I guess that applies to profitable things).
This is one of the smartest moves I've seen Yahoo make. The key is that you are required to run Yahoo ads alongside the search results (when said ads become available).
So, if I'm creating a search for my website, I can go the Google route, embed an iframe and look amateur or go with Yahoo and look professional and completely integrated.
Not only that, but there are a lot of niche markets that big players can't go after that add up to a lot. As someone who programs for those type of sites, Yahoo's BOSS is really appealing. Yahoo ups their ad revenue, I get access to world-class internet search.
It's all about increasing the number of ads served. The more people who choose BOSS, the more ads Yahoo serves and the more money Yahoo makes.
you're an airline pilot. A terrorist organization just used Semtex to destroy your reinforced door. I know my gut reaction is to look at a list of passengers and type in an id number to shock a specific individual.
As much as I don't like Tasers, it makes more sense to have a Taser gun than Taser wristbands. Those wristbands have to either be activated individually by number - not happening in an attack - or all at once - pissing everyone off.
For those that want to get outraged, this is an area where big business (airlines) can be your friends. The airlines won't allow this. Anything that makes flying more of a pain reduces their profits - even things like the new security fees on airline tickets reduce their profits. They aren't going to pay more money (I'm guessing at least $15-a-bracelet for the materials, location tag, and shock element considering that a Taser costs hundreds of dollars) to piss off customers.
So, this won't happen.
What's really ironic is that Google is (from what I've heard) anal about anonymizing everything internally. Not only that, but it can take a good while before employees with a good reason to access such data get said access.
I mean, Google even anonymizes ping logs that employees are going to look at - and I really don't think my ping time is anything that private.
It's a little sad that this has happened.
So, if I have spare room in my freezer and it's already running 24/7, does it take more energy if there's more items in it?
I assume freezers operate based on cooling the air to, say, -5C. If that's the case, if something has a high specific heat (like water) it doesn't take more energy for it to cool it, it just takes longer for it to cool.
So, that ice-pack AC-like machine would use less electricity (if you don't use your freezer for food)?
Not that it's so practical since you'd constantly need to be changing and refreezing the packs, but it might be greener in that respect. Of course, getting a smaller freezer would probably be even greener.
Am I completely off base?
In any truly competitive market (like the market for bulk, wholesale USDA Grade A Wheat where there is no product differentiation and lots of buyers and lots of sellers), sellers make zero economic profit. Economic profit is the profit above the profit you could make in another industry - so, if you build a computer business with 100,000 and get a 20,000 profit and that 100,000 would only have gotten you a 5,000 profit in the pizza business, that 15,000 difference is the economic profit).
Over the long-term, companies don't play in markets that don't have zero economic profit or better - because they have better options to put their time and money into.
Now, these mini notebooks aren't going to be a truly competitive market because, like standard laptops, there is significant product differentiation. People do have a certain amount of brand loyalty, they want different features (20GB vs 16GB, Windows vs GNU/Linux, screen size, subjective thoughts about aesthetics and the like). This is very similar to the laptops most people use today - they're vastly the same, but have little tweaks to them that cause consumers to favor one over another.
If these mini notebooks achieve the same level of product differentiation as current laptops, margins should be similar. In fact, if the mini notebooks are sold with service, that offers the chance for more differentiation. I mean, when people buy mobile phones, they usually choose their carrier first (usually). That means that the margins for the device can be higher because the different service is adding another level of differentiation.
This is completely ridiculous and I'm sure any judge would see a printer downloading copyrighted songs as completely silly.
So, anyone wanna help me get NetBSD on my Epson?
Apple's machines aren't ridiculously priced.
What is really ridiculous is that Apple doesn't sell a laptop with a slower processor than 2.1GHz. Seriously ridiculous. I can't get a laptop without a high-quality webcam. I can't get a non-pro laptop that has real graphics. I have to pay $200 for a DVD burner because Apple wants to have a "good, better, best" layout. Apple charges $200 for a better looking black case.
With Apple, it's a game of getting you to buy the highest margin items by withholding what you need. It's bait and switch. Where PC manufacturers give you choices, Apple forces you to buy things that pump up their profits. Where PC manufacturers have sales that give you good deals on soon-to-be replaced models, Apple screws you over as hard as they can.
And I put up with it because of the Mac OS (user since System 6). Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that Apple's pricing is as fair, honest, and competitive as their PC counterparts. We pay up to use our favorite system. Apple knows that they have something special and they know they can get much greater profit margins because of it and they take advantage of that. Apple isn't evil or anything, but they aren't cuddly either.
The machine doesn't look that impressive. The thing that's really important is that they've forced the ball into Apple's court. At this point, Apple can respond to the violation of the EULA and see if a court says that the provision is legal or they can ignore it.
If they ignore it, others are likely to follow Psystar (after a long enough time to see that Apple doesn't go after them). Of course, in this case, there's still some threat, but I don't think it's outrageous to argue that if Apple ignores it for over a year that the provision looses some weight.
Personally, I hope they get sued. If they win their suit, it will be a new era for the Macintosh. If they loose their suit, they've lost, but at least we know.
Originally, I thought that this would be a great competitor for EC2, but in reality it's very different.
EC2 allows you to configure a GNU/Linux environment to your liking and use it almost the same as you would use a dedicated server or VPS. Google's App Engine allows you to create Google Applications. They're written in Python (one of Google's production languages) and need to be written specifically to use things like Google's Bigtable.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Google's infrastructure is top notch, but don't expect to try and launch the next Web 2.0 app this way. If you use Google's App Engine, your only course is independent or being bought by Google - because you'd have to rewrite so much of your app to migrate to other infrastructure. With EC2, it's decently easy to switch to dedicated servers. S3 could be replaced by a MogileFS cluster. That's much more appealing to anyone that isn't Google.
Essentially, Google's App Engine locks you into Google in a way that EC2/S3 doesn't lock you into Amazon (in fact, some of the considerations like lack of persistent storage make it easier to move away).
Billing is based on instance-hours not cpu-hours. So, for every hour or partial hour your instance is running, you get charged. It doesn't matter if you're a 1% cpu usage or 100% cpu usage during that time: http://www.amazon.com/ec2
There's still one glaring problem. There is no persistent storage (other than shuttling data to S3). That means that if your website is database-backed, you need to figure out what to do should your instance crash. Hourly backups? Mounting S3 as a slow FUSE filesystem that you can put your database on? It's all ugly.
And it's still not a great value. It seems cheap. $72/mo for a 1.7GB RAM server. Well, look at Slicehost and you can get a 2GB RAM Xen instance (same virtualization software as EC2) for $140 WITH persistent storage and 800GB of bandwidth. That doesn't sound like a great deal UNTIL you calculate what EC2 bandwidth costs. 800GB would cost you $144 at $0.18 per GB bringing the total cost to $216 ($76 more than Slicehost). That 18 cents doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. The same situation happens with Joyent. For $250 you get a 2GB RAM server from them (running under Solaris' Zones) with 10TB of bandwidth. That would cost you $1,872 with EC2. Even if you assume that you'll only use 10% of what Joyent is giving you, EC2 still comes in at a cost of $252 - and without persistent storage!
EC2 really got the ball rolling, but it just isn't such a leader. Other operations have critical features (persistent storage) that EC2 is lacking along with pricing that just isn't more expensive. I want to like EC2, but their competitors are simply better.
When you want to leave, start adding bogus data. Friend people you don't know. Change the bio data. Tag yourself in pictures you aren't in. Basically, generate random activity. Defriend your actual friends. Change your name. After a time, it becomes very difficult to determine what is real and what is fake.
In 10 grants contingent on recipients of said aid only use it to purchase special Educational Grant Editions of my Ubuntu clone at a cost of $600,000,000,000 a piece. That way, I'm donating a huge amount, but I don't actually have to donate a penny (unless I'm off by a decimal place there).
On a more serious level, I could donate $1,000,000 to schools that could only be used to buy licenses of my slightly modified Ubuntu clone and never have to spend money - if they don't buy my licenses, they don't get the money; if they do buy my Ubuntu clone, I get the money back and maybe have to eat the cost of some CD-Rs.
"Donating" money that can only be used to purchase an intangible good (and software, other than the physical media, is intangible) from yourself is like donating nothing - especially when you're donating to people who wouldn't buy your product if it weren't being given to them.
I don't want to get into whether they have a copyright on those types of games, but I do want to talk about the trademark issue.
Calling a Scrabble knockoff Scrabulous or a Boggle knockoff Bogglific is pretty clear gounds for trademark infringement. I mean, this site is Slashdot. If I created a Slashdot.us - and always referred to it as Slashdot.us - it's still too close to being Slashdot. Same with Slashdotic or something like that. People who are casual observers would get confused as to the owner. And in order to keep that trademark, they have to litigate. So, if someone were to create a Slashdot.us site, Slashdot would have to file against them. If they didn't, slashdot would become a generic term like aspirin that anyone could use.
Now, I'm sure Hasbro doesn't just want them to change the name, but they have a really great case there. While Hasbro is being craptacular here, the Scrabulous people aren't completely innocent - they wanted to play off the Scrabble name to make money.
This is simply true.com trying to legislate their business model. They pay a lot for background checks on their members and the public seems to think these background checks aren't important. By legislating this, they're hoping to a) force other companies to take on a huge financial burden or b) force other companies to look shady by having a disclaimer "warning: people on this site might be axe murders". What they should really be requiring is for everyone to do a background check on anyone they ever interact with. That clerk at the coffee shop? Who knows what s/he might be hiding!
So, let me get this straight: you (mySQL) use a dolphin to fetch data while PostgreSQL uses an elephant to fetch data. Would that explain why PostgreSQL is better at fetching large datasets? Like, the elephant can haul more, but is slower while the dolphin is faster, but can't carry as well? Have you thought about using a non-animal to fetch your data? Maybe a racecar? Those are fast and could probably haul as much as an elephant. Plus, then I wouldn't need to have fish or peanuts in my server room.
Not quite. So, my friend Amy posts a picture of the two of us on Facebook as her profile picture. She has given Facebook a license to that photo. That's what the agreement stipulates. First, if Amy didn't take the photo, she might not own the rights to it and Facebook could be sued for copyright infringement. Yeah, they have that clause saying that you warrant that you have the rights to post it, but that simply won't hold up if they're sublicensing it. Sites can't be sued for what their users post, but then if they start sublicensing it in an intentional manner, it gets a lot more blurry. Second, and this one is a lot more air tight, the agreement does NOT include a clause granting endorsement rights. As the original post said, that is very different from copyright rights. Amy might own the copyright on many pictures of me. She does NOT have the right to license my image and likeness for the purposes of endorsement. She has the right to post the picture and even to give Facebook the right to use the image how they see fit as long as it isn't considered using the image/likeness as an advertisement or the like.
The fact that the FBI is racially data mining to find terrorists or the fact that they're so incompetent at it. If you're going to do something like this, you have to pick something a little less universal than middle-eastern food. By going off this data, one has to think the FBI has captured at least 50m Americans who buy Falafel and probably more than 100m (a third of the population). At that point, random checking would be nearly as effective.
Think of it this way, what if Google used the word "the" as a screen for a reputable website. Well, I can't imagine many English language sites without "the" in them. So, Google eliminates sites without "the" as non-reputable (like the FBI is eliminating non-Falafel buyers as not terrorists). Google is still left with almost all their sites and so the presence of "the" hasn't been an effective screen. Neither is buying middle-eastern food.
Frankly, they probably would have had a smaller set simply by looking at place of birth. Not that they should be racist/anti-immigrant like that, but the stupidity of this screen is just so bothersome.
They see your DoubleClick cookie. There isn't a way to do this cross-adnetwork. So, I can opt out with DoubleClick, AdSense, Microsoft, Yahoo, TextLinkAds. . . individually. But I can't get a cookie from the FTC or someone that will be readable by all the advertizers.
The problem with the suggestion is implementation. IP Addresses are shared and reused and so aren't unique to a user or household. Cookies also don't work since they are only sent to the site you're hitting - so a cookie for ftc.gov isn't going to be sent to DoubleClick. Having individual advertisers have opt-out systems isn't great since a lot of the time I don't know who is serving the ads I'm seeing (without delving into the HTML).
Unfortunately, there is no simple way of defining something like this. A better solution might be to regulate the type of information that they are allowed to collect in the first place. If they aren't allowed to record my IP address (or any other identifying information like a zip code I type in a form or POST/GET data), then there would seem to be limited privacy implications. They could gather data showing that people who like power tools also like Sony stereos or whatnot, but without information like IP addresses, form and GET/POST data, there is little they can use to violate my privacy.
Am I missing something?
So, I want a new hard drive, but don't want to pay for it. I go to Best Buy, get the hard drive, throw some tiles into the box and claim it came that way. Yeah, Western Digital must be a tile and hard drive company or something. I'm not trying to rip Best Buy off. Oh, and I do an exchange so it appears like I'm not stealing. Then I get two drives for the price of one! -OR- I'm pissed at Best Buy for reason X. Everyone laughed at me and called me a troll in the forums when I complained about X. So, I can create a story with no documentation. Yeah, Best Buy sold me tiles and wouldn't take them back. Those corporate goons are trying to steal from me! No one should shop there! LOL, let's see if they call me a troll this time! ----- The fact is that there is no evidence that this person isn't a crook. There is no evidence that they are a crook. Why is it likely that Best Buy is the bad party in this situation? More importantly, what happens when it gets out that you can get free hard drives from Best Buy for a few bathroom tiles? What we really need is creativity - a way to figure out accuracy and truthfulness in this situation. Yelling that Best Buy is evil (in this case) doesn't help. There is no evidence that the complainant is being truthful. If someone could establish a way of ascertaining truth in a situation like this - which currently hinges on one person's word that his hard drive was bathroom tiles when he got it - it would be really helpful for society.
Whether or not the child was speeding, his parents seem to take an active role in policing him. A monetary punishment probably just punishes the parents and the parents have already taken punishment steps in the past. One of the reasons that punishments are as strong as they are is because you're unlikely to be caught every time. This child is more likely to be caught (by his parents) than most and the parents are already grounding the child (which is probably worse than the ticket for a teenager). So, if the judge lets him off this time, it's not as if he's free to do whatever he wants. His parents are punishing him for infractions harsher than the ticket already and likely catching him more often than any speed trap would. This family is a libertarian's dream. I'm not a libertarian, but in this case I think it's easy enough to say "just don't do it again" and trust that this isn't a habitual reckless driver (at least until the next time, if there is one).