Which means that I hope that people shooting at me have M16s rather than those nasty heavy slugs that could do so much more damage to my favourite body parts!
I hope you're intentional being stupid but I dare you to let me shoot you with each and then tell me which one hurts less.
to be fair, the ak is 9.5lb to the m16's 7.8lb. not a massive difference
To be fair you should have used the weight with a 30 round clip not empty and included the weight of the 6 spare 30 round clips in the ammo pouches on the web gear.
Vonage doesn't need to bring its prior art to the US Patent Office and wait for a decision. They will just bring it directly to the judge/jury who have the power to determine that the VoIP patents are all invalid. Claiming that patents are invalid is a standard defense in any litigation. If Verizon's patents are found to be invalid in this case, then Verizon can never sue on them again.
You're missing a key point here. If an injunction is issued on the supposed infringing companies they no longer have any money to fight in court for the year or more it will take to defeat the patents. So Verizon wins by default.
It's not the Supreme Court's job to fix stupid laws, only unconstitutional ones. Patent law is actually pretty clearly within the constitutional domain of Congress. It's up to Congress to fix the law, not the courts.
Now wait a minute. It was the the court system that expand the scope of patents to cover ridiculous things like business processes and software but it's not up to the court system to control what in created. The expansion of the scope of patents is allowing patents on tax deductions for gods sake. And software is mathematics. There was plenty of precedent prior to the expansion of scope that math formulas were not patentable.
The simple fact that they were found guilty of "patent infringement" has convinced people that Vonage simply "stole" some "technology" from Verizon. Nobody in the general population that I've talked to has any understanding of how vague and general the patents are, how this type of activity is better known as a "corporate grunge match" and how the patents have no bearing on reality.
Even worse, as I understand it Vonage is using off the shelf hardware that they bought from someone else.
when you write a book for 2 years you get paid NOTHING, and the BIG chance is you wont sell any and still earn nothing. its a HUGE risk.
If you spend 2 years writing a book and get nothing for it most likely it's because of the protectionist laws. New technology has reduced the cost of production and distribution to slightly above nothing. If there was a free market you wouldn't have to get your work past the oligarch of gatekeepers that control the industry to make money.
Did *you* get paid for those 30 years?
They didn't keep paying me for 90 years after I completed the work because there was a law saying no one could touch my work unless they paid me every time they looked at it. No, unfortunately my industry doesn't have protectionist laws like that. I have to continue working for a living producing new and innovative things if I want to continue getting paid.
nope, im suggesting we enforce the law. If your employer stopped paying you, youd want them sued right? your just another specific group (waged employees) who would be the very first to run screaming to the law if you didn't get paid.
That has to be the one of the most idiotic statements I've ever heard. I have had employers stop paying me. You know what I did? I found another job just like the billions of other people who have had employers stop paying them that don't work in industries with protectionist laws. I would get laughed out of court if I sued someone because they stopped paying me for work I completed 20 years ago. But the RIAA wins every case where they sue a band for playing a 40 year old song that the RIAA members didn't even create.
By the way, creative works are not a 'closed shop'. If you think its such an easy life creating stuff and selling it, why have you spent 30 years doing the opposite?
I have created stuff and sold it. I just don't happen to work in an industry where they keep paying me forever for anything I create because anything remotely resembling what I created is owned by me also even if it was created by someone else.
But the discussion was about dicking around with laws for the specific purpose of changing their research methods. That's not a competitive market working better.
No the discussions was dicking around with the protectionist laws that are restricting competition in the market thus creating a competitive market rather than an industry where research is specifically geared towards exploiting the current protectionist laws.
That would certainly bring down prices for consumers quite a bit... for existing drugs. However, it would disincent pharmeceutical companies to make the mammouth R&D investments needed to discover new ones.
Several recent studies have shown that their making "mammouth R&D investments" in creating one off drugs that have the same effect as current drugs not creating new drugs. Eliminating the patents might force them to continually invest in creating innovative new drugs to stay ahead of everyone else rather then creating a drug one atom different than one about to go off patent so they can patent it and continue their monopoly.
I'm not trolling, or being negative, I repesct people who believe in communist principles, but often (in my experience) they don't realise what they are.
You expect people who can manufacture products (songs, software etc) to do so without any expectation of being compensated for the fruits of their labour (assuming those fruits are desired and consumed). That remind me of "to each according to their needs, from each according to their means".
No, what you're advocating is that a specific group have their specific industry artificially protected by laws so they can continue using outdated business models to make money. That's more like socialism. No one wants to prevent anyone from making money off the "fruits of their labour". People who make statements like the above have so bought into the propaganda put out by the *IAA that they can't see the forest for the trees. What the *IAA is trying to do is create a legal structure such that they are the only ones who can publish artistic works and in such a manner that they have exclusive control over how any of those works are used. They have largely maintained that control in the past because it was expensive to produce and distribute artistic works. Note that create wasn't included there. They don't create anything. They control the artistic works but they aren't the creators. So what you're advocating is that the creators of artistic works are required to hand over all rights to their works to a third party who then determines how much of the money made off that work is going to go to the person who actually created it.
Of course the flipside of it, is that everyone has to go out and work and abide by the same principle. If you are a farmer, and I'm a software developer, I can pop round your hosue and take some bread and eggs and meat when I am hungry, without paying you. That's how the system works.
Again you've got it backwards. What you're advocating is that just because someone spent 2 years writing a book they should be protected by law so that they can live off that 2 years of work forever. I've spent the last 30 years working. I think they should pass a law that I should keep getting payed for everything I've produced in those 30 years so I don't have to continue working.
the employees that testified were very knowledgeable and diligent.
If they're like most IT shops I've encountered they probable have one competent admin and a couple dozen morans. Who do you think they're going to send to testify in court.
I'm not trying to be snide here, but I suspect you haven't seen very many mainstream films. Most of them *suck* *incredibly*, but the very best 0.1% are quite good indeed
all the people who go to see them in their millions?
That's fine with me. They can pay big bucks to go see the big budget soulless, storyless special effects orgies while I pull the cheaply made high quality movies off the net for cheap.
Unfortunately that's exactly what terrifies the MPAA and their ilk and is exactly what they are trying to make illegal and technically difficult.
If it's an "undue burden" then Viacom should approach Congress to change the law to alleviate that burden.
The problem is that it's an impossible burden for the service providers to do it. It's impossible to know the exact status and rights with regards to every single copyrighted work ever created which is what Viacom is expecting of YouTube. Under current copyright law pretty much every clip uploaded to YouTube is copyrighted. How can YouTube determine the copyright owner and status of every video clip uploaded? They can't. Only the copyright owner can provide that information.
They need to take responsibility and self police. The company started out as viewer clip oriented but when large numbers of copyrighted clips started appearing they looked the other way.
Do you realize that under current copyright law pretty much every clip posted to YouTube is copyrighted. Kinda makes your suggesting that the service providers remove copyrighted content idiotic. How is the service provider suppose to know the status of every copyrighted work ever produced? How can they determine if the person uploading a clip owns the copyright or has the copyright owners permission to post the clip? Only the copyright owner can determine the answer to these questions thus the reason they are responsible for keeping control of the works they own.
And how many disasters have been caused by having a human in the loop? How many cases of runway incursions, etc?
A computer doesn't need to be perfect - it just needs to be better than a human. And how many more software bugs could be fixed with the money we'd save by not paying pilots?
Hmmm... Both are outstanding in their separate areas. Software is much better than humans at doing boring routine predictable things that cause humans to become bored out of their minds. When humans are bored they tend towards mistakes. Humans are much better than software at handling dynamic rapidly changing and unique situations. When inputs to software start straying from the expected the software's functionality tends to rapidly deteriorate.
Software doesn't have to have bugs. And if it stays in production long enough it eventually won't have any - if there is a standard of perfection and the complexity of software is finite, then eventually that standard will be reached.
I would be willing to bet that all non-trivial software has bugs. In many cases those bugs will never manifest themselves or will only manifest themselves under an unusual set of inputs. What I think you're missing here is the enormous complexity of flying an airplane especially one as complex as an airliner. Software requires exact inputs and exactly known effects of outputs. You don't have either of these when flying. Hell even the aerodynamics of any given aircraft aren't exactly known.
I've work on some pretty complex realtime projects. One involved a toll tag lane controller. Half a dozen sensors and 3 or 4 devices that had to be controlled based on the inputs from those sensors. I won't get into details except to state that even with that small of a system it was impossible to program for ever possible combination inputs. You anticipate as many states as are likely but when the state machine gets confused you programatically reset the state machine. On rare occasions it would even require a human to reset the controller when it got really confused. In this application it meant you missed the tolls for a couple of cars costing $20 or $30. In an airplane a reset is not an option. If I programed an automatic pilot the first time that program encountered an input outside a narrowly defined range or the effect of an output was remotely unexpected the only option is to disable the software and let one of those meat calculators figure out what was going on.
I think that the idea that no machine could ever be engineered capable of flight better in EVERY respect than ANY human pilot is a romantic one.
"ever" is a long time and I wouldn't disagree with "ever" but we have a long way to go before we can automate something well enough to handle completely unexpected inputs or unanticipated results from outputs.
Oh, I know. But if we think that the Government can't/won't pull these stunts, we're rather blind sheep. Well, I'm not, but... the vast majority out there are.
They already are in collusion with the corporations. Look at the Justice Department audit of the FBI access to communications.
For someone who claims to "loves to study European antiquity" the level of ignorance displayed in that post is phenomenal. Just for one example off the top of my head read a little on the Punic Wars. There were far more massacres in the three Punic wars than what you claim to be the only examples of such. It ended with the complete annihilation of everyone and anything Carthagian which was pretty much the last remnant of a once flourishing Phoenician culture. It included destroying the city so thoroughly that site of the city was lost to history. I could go on for hours on a similar theme throughout history.
I also don't think there was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the indigenous population of North America so much as stealing the land since the civilized westerners would make much better use of than the backwards savages. The killing came when the savages resisted the theft.
Good point about paid shills - but I believe the facts will show that happens to be those in the Global Warming Denier camp.
A perfect example, you're claiming it's a fact that anyone who questions current global warming is a paid shill. I can give one counter example that proves you're wrong. I question the global warming fanatics theories and far from being a paid shill, I get pissed at the energy industry every time I put gas in my car.
Billions of people in Bangladesh, India and China will lose their homes and be forced to illegally migrate to other countries because of the climate "scientists" who deny global warming is happening.
But that's the practical side of it.
Ignore the hurricanes, tsunamis flooding Bangladesh, and the loss of island nations worldwide, if you must. But don't call your "belief" science.
I'm not sure what world you're living on but in my world none of this has happened. Water levels haven't risen significantly and weather patterns haven't changed radically. You'd be hard pressed to show hundreds of thousands have died (unless you blame global warming for earthquakes) even give that millions more live in areas more vulnerable to severe weather.
Hmmm... You have one side saying that it's a damnable complex system and that there are some pretty large facts that just don't seem to fit the theory and that we really need to study all aspects and approaches rather than jumping into actions with incomplete information when those actions may have unintended consequences because of the complexity and incomplete knowledge.
Then we have the other side saying shut the fuck up because it's been completely conclusively proven and there is no debate and we have a complete 100% full understanding of the complex system and no one will ever show otherwise and anyone who makes any claims otherwise is a payed shill and if we don't take these drastic actions now it means billions of people are going to die.
Now, tell me again who the fanatics in this argument are?
Oh, and irrational statements like the above get modded Insightful.
IE: it's exactly the same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
No, it's not. With RedHat I just pay for a server. I can have 5000 clients accessing that server without paying a dime for each client accessing the server not to mention being able to use something cheap or even free on the clients. Oh, and I can switch to Suse or Ubuntu without have to completely rebuild all my information systems and apps from scratch.
Another comment "Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and I.P.O.s" is laughable. Does indexing all that data come for free? Does it have no value? Same could be said of RIAA MPAA but they do provide 'services' although they might be overpaid for what they offer. Actually now that I think of it, ALL services offer no content of their own but make something of that content.
Someone mod this up. The RIAA and MPAA members not only don't produce any content they keep most of the money generated by the content with the actually content creator only getting what RIAA and MPAA members decide they should. Google's model promotes the content without taking a dime from the content creator.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you're intentional being stupid but I dare you to let me shoot you with each and then tell me which one hurts less.
To be fair you should have used the weight with a 30 round clip not empty and included the weight of the 6 spare 30 round clips in the ammo pouches on the web gear.
You're missing a key point here. If an injunction is issued on the supposed infringing companies they no longer have any money to fight in court for the year or more it will take to defeat the patents. So Verizon wins by default.
Now wait a minute. It was the the court system that expand the scope of patents to cover ridiculous things like business processes and software but it's not up to the court system to control what in created. The expansion of the scope of patents is allowing patents on tax deductions for gods sake. And software is mathematics. There was plenty of precedent prior to the expansion of scope that math formulas were not patentable.
Even worse, as I understand it Vonage is using off the shelf hardware that they bought from someone else.
They couldn't go after them sooner. They didn't have the patents yet.
If you spend 2 years writing a book and get nothing for it most likely it's because of the protectionist laws. New technology has reduced the cost of production and distribution to slightly above nothing. If there was a free market you wouldn't have to get your work past the oligarch of gatekeepers that control the industry to make money.
Did *you* get paid for those 30 years?They didn't keep paying me for 90 years after I completed the work because there was a law saying no one could touch my work unless they paid me every time they looked at it. No, unfortunately my industry doesn't have protectionist laws like that. I have to continue working for a living producing new and innovative things if I want to continue getting paid.
nope, im suggesting we enforce the law. If your employer stopped paying you, youd want them sued right? your just another specific group (waged employees) who would be the very first to run screaming to the law if you didn't get paid.That has to be the one of the most idiotic statements I've ever heard. I have had employers stop paying me. You know what I did? I found another job just like the billions of other people who have had employers stop paying them that don't work in industries with protectionist laws. I would get laughed out of court if I sued someone because they stopped paying me for work I completed 20 years ago. But the RIAA wins every case where they sue a band for playing a 40 year old song that the RIAA members didn't even create.
By the way, creative works are not a 'closed shop'. If you think its such an easy life creating stuff and selling it, why have you spent 30 years doing the opposite?I have created stuff and sold it. I just don't happen to work in an industry where they keep paying me forever for anything I create because anything remotely resembling what I created is owned by me also even if it was created by someone else.
No the discussions was dicking around with the protectionist laws that are restricting competition in the market thus creating a competitive market rather than an industry where research is specifically geared towards exploiting the current protectionist laws.
Several recent studies have shown that their making "mammouth R&D investments" in creating one off drugs that have the same effect as current drugs not creating new drugs. Eliminating the patents might force them to continually invest in creating innovative new drugs to stay ahead of everyone else rather then creating a drug one atom different than one about to go off patent so they can patent it and continue their monopoly.
No, what you're advocating is that a specific group have their specific industry artificially protected by laws so they can continue using outdated business models to make money. That's more like socialism. No one wants to prevent anyone from making money off the "fruits of their labour". People who make statements like the above have so bought into the propaganda put out by the *IAA that they can't see the forest for the trees. What the *IAA is trying to do is create a legal structure such that they are the only ones who can publish artistic works and in such a manner that they have exclusive control over how any of those works are used. They have largely maintained that control in the past because it was expensive to produce and distribute artistic works. Note that create wasn't included there. They don't create anything. They control the artistic works but they aren't the creators. So what you're advocating is that the creators of artistic works are required to hand over all rights to their works to a third party who then determines how much of the money made off that work is going to go to the person who actually created it.
Of course the flipside of it, is that everyone has to go out and work and abide by the same principle. If you are a farmer, and I'm a software developer, I can pop round your hosue and take some bread and eggs and meat when I am hungry, without paying you. That's how the system works.Again you've got it backwards. What you're advocating is that just because someone spent 2 years writing a book they should be protected by law so that they can live off that 2 years of work forever. I've spent the last 30 years working. I think they should pass a law that I should keep getting payed for everything I've produced in those 30 years so I don't have to continue working.
If they're like most IT shops I've encountered they probable have one competent admin and a couple dozen morans. Who do you think they're going to send to testify in court.
There. I fixed that little typo for yeah.
Yeah, but the entire energy requirements of Greenland could probably be handled by half a dozen Honda generators.
That's fine with me. They can pay big bucks to go see the big budget soulless, storyless special effects orgies while I pull the cheaply made high quality movies off the net for cheap.
Unfortunately that's exactly what terrifies the MPAA and their ilk and is exactly what they are trying to make illegal and technically difficult.
The problem is that it's an impossible burden for the service providers to do it. It's impossible to know the exact status and rights with regards to every single copyrighted work ever created which is what Viacom is expecting of YouTube. Under current copyright law pretty much every clip uploaded to YouTube is copyrighted. How can YouTube determine the copyright owner and status of every video clip uploaded? They can't. Only the copyright owner can provide that information.
Do you realize that under current copyright law pretty much every clip posted to YouTube is copyrighted. Kinda makes your suggesting that the service providers remove copyrighted content idiotic. How is the service provider suppose to know the status of every copyrighted work ever produced? How can they determine if the person uploading a clip owns the copyright or has the copyright owners permission to post the clip? Only the copyright owner can determine the answer to these questions thus the reason they are responsible for keeping control of the works they own.
Hmmm... Both are outstanding in their separate areas. Software is much better than humans at doing boring routine predictable things that cause humans to become bored out of their minds. When humans are bored they tend towards mistakes. Humans are much better than software at handling dynamic rapidly changing and unique situations. When inputs to software start straying from the expected the software's functionality tends to rapidly deteriorate.
Software doesn't have to have bugs. And if it stays in production long enough it eventually won't have any - if there is a standard of perfection and the complexity of software is finite, then eventually that standard will be reached.I would be willing to bet that all non-trivial software has bugs. In many cases those bugs will never manifest themselves or will only manifest themselves under an unusual set of inputs. What I think you're missing here is the enormous complexity of flying an airplane especially one as complex as an airliner. Software requires exact inputs and exactly known effects of outputs. You don't have either of these when flying. Hell even the aerodynamics of any given aircraft aren't exactly known.
I've work on some pretty complex realtime projects. One involved a toll tag lane controller. Half a dozen sensors and 3 or 4 devices that had to be controlled based on the inputs from those sensors. I won't get into details except to state that even with that small of a system it was impossible to program for ever possible combination inputs. You anticipate as many states as are likely but when the state machine gets confused you programatically reset the state machine. On rare occasions it would even require a human to reset the controller when it got really confused. In this application it meant you missed the tolls for a couple of cars costing $20 or $30. In an airplane a reset is not an option. If I programed an automatic pilot the first time that program encountered an input outside a narrowly defined range or the effect of an output was remotely unexpected the only option is to disable the software and let one of those meat calculators figure out what was going on.
I think that the idea that no machine could ever be engineered capable of flight better in EVERY respect than ANY human pilot is a romantic one."ever" is a long time and I wouldn't disagree with "ever" but we have a long way to go before we can automate something well enough to handle completely unexpected inputs or unanticipated results from outputs.
They already are in collusion with the corporations. Look at the Justice Department audit of the FBI access to communications.
For someone who claims to "loves to study European antiquity" the level of ignorance displayed in that post is phenomenal. Just for one example off the top of my head read a little on the Punic Wars. There were far more massacres in the three Punic wars than what you claim to be the only examples of such. It ended with the complete annihilation of everyone and anything Carthagian which was pretty much the last remnant of a once flourishing Phoenician culture. It included destroying the city so thoroughly that site of the city was lost to history. I could go on for hours on a similar theme throughout history.
I also don't think there was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the indigenous population of North America so much as stealing the land since the civilized westerners would make much better use of than the backwards savages. The killing came when the savages resisted the theft.
A perfect example, you're claiming it's a fact that anyone who questions current global warming is a paid shill. I can give one counter example that proves you're wrong. I question the global warming fanatics theories and far from being a paid shill, I get pissed at the energy industry every time I put gas in my car.
I'm not sure what world you're living on but in my world none of this has happened. Water levels haven't risen significantly and weather patterns haven't changed radically. You'd be hard pressed to show hundreds of thousands have died (unless you blame global warming for earthquakes) even give that millions more live in areas more vulnerable to severe weather.
Hmmm... You have one side saying that it's a damnable complex system and that there are some pretty large facts that just don't seem to fit the theory and that we really need to study all aspects and approaches rather than jumping into actions with incomplete information when those actions may have unintended consequences because of the complexity and incomplete knowledge.
Then we have the other side saying shut the fuck up because it's been completely conclusively proven and there is no debate and we have a complete 100% full understanding of the complex system and no one will ever show otherwise and anyone who makes any claims otherwise is a payed shill and if we don't take these drastic actions now it means billions of people are going to die.
Now, tell me again who the fanatics in this argument are?
Oh, and irrational statements like the above get modded Insightful.
No, it's not. With RedHat I just pay for a server. I can have 5000 clients accessing that server without paying a dime for each client accessing the server not to mention being able to use something cheap or even free on the clients. Oh, and I can switch to Suse or Ubuntu without have to completely rebuild all my information systems and apps from scratch.
Someone mod this up. The RIAA and MPAA members not only don't produce any content they keep most of the money generated by the content with the actually content creator only getting what RIAA and MPAA members decide they should. Google's model promotes the content without taking a dime from the content creator.
So who is the parasite here?
Yeah, a few of the ditch diggers getting killed a year is far worse than 10% of kids dieing of disease before they're 20.
It wouldn't be illegal or even an issue for Microsoft to bundle OpenOffice with Windows either.