Under no circumstances should it be possible to sell a right. (In a non competes case the purchase price would be the original job.)
You also shouldn't be able to be bought off by the rich and powerful to silence your story. They can pay and ask you not to speak, but they shouldn't be able to go after you if you do it anyway.
This is why I think we should eliminate the fungibility of intellectual property. If patents and copyrights were an inalienable personal right of the creator rather than being real estate, any exploiting IP that you created would have to maintain a personal contractual relationship with you, and only within your lifetime. No more having to sign away your IP rights on employment and then having the company kick you to the curb and plug in a cheap offshore replacement. No more patent troll companies hoarding the inventions of others.
This is why I think we should eliminate the fungibility of intellectual property. If patents and copyrights were an inalienable personal right of the creator rather than being real estate, any exploiting IP that you created would have to maintain a personal contractual relationship with you, and only within your lifetime. No more having to sign away your IP rights on employment and then having the company kick you to the curb and plug in a cheap offshore replacement. No more patent troll companies hoarding the inventions of others.
"Fungibility" presumably isn't the word you're looking for, which more-or-less means "interchangeable." Money is fungible, because $1 from one source can be interchanged with $1 from another source, and one usually doesn't care exactly where any given dollar came from.
On the other hand, any particular valid patent is by definition novel (or it would be invalid, see 35 U.S.C. 102) and therefore not "fungible" with another.
I suspect you mean "alienability," which refers to the ability of an owner of a right to sell or otherwise transfer it (and which I see you also use).
Nonsense. That would mean that it was misleading to say that the US employed it until the Emancipation proclamation. The US had only existed for a little under a hundred years. The metric isn't time immemorial, it is that an existing government employed it.
"Time immemorial" was a rhetorical flourish. My point is that "until," without a corresponding "from," implies "from the beginning," or at least "from a very long time previous." In America, there was indeed slavery from very close to the beginning of English settlement, and certainly from the beginning of the country. That is why it would be correct to say that America had slavery "until the 13th Amendment." (Not until the Emancipation Proclamation -- slavery remained legal in Unionist slave states such as Maryland, even after the Emancipation Proclamation.)
On the other hand, slavery in Germany ceased to exist for many hundreds of years, before being revived for about 6 years. Someone reading your statement, but otherwise ignorant of the context, would understand you to mean that in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, one could find slaves in Germany. That is most certainly not correct.
And finally, the most recent user of slavery, Germany who employed it until 1945, a mere 73 years ago. Presumably they would have continued to use slave labor except that the British, the Russians, and the Americans stopped them.
It's misleading to say that Germany employed it until 1945. That implies that it was continuously employed in Germany from time immemorial until 1945. In fact, slavery ceased to exist in Western Europe in the High Middle Ages (albeit later practiced in those countries' overseas colonies), and even serfdom was abolished in Prussia (i.e., what became the majority of modern Germany in 1871) in 1810.
But to try to make it happen, the southern States sent an army into northern territory, surrounded a military fort, pointed their weapons at it, and then later quibbled about who actually fired the first shot. As if it fucking matters who shoots first when you send an invasion force and point your weapons at a military installation.
Are you talking about Fort Sumter? That's not in "northern territory" by any definition, but rather in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
I've never heard of a case where a Nazi was prosecuted for just saying horrible things.
Let me help you out, then: an Austrian man will be serving six months in prison for simply having a bottle of wine in his house with a picture of Hitler on it. He didn't say anything, nor was he selling or distributing the bottles. There's no evidence that the man was a Nazi sympathizer, or held racist views in any way. He simply bought some bottles as a joke souvenir on a trip. And for that, he's going to prison.
America certainly has it's faults, but whenever I see a news article like this about Europe, I practically hear Lee Greenwood.
It will be centuries before robots are able to perform basic jobs as plumber, electrician, drywaller, or carpenter (speaking as someone who has both done these tasks, and hired numerous people to perform these tasks). I had an apartment with two water pipes that were outside the wall, from floor to ceiling, and I wanted to put them behind the wall. Consider the range of tasks that he had to perform:
The plumber had to cut open the drywall, cut open the floor, cut off the pipes above the ceiling and below the floor, move the old pipes behind the plane of the wall and find a wooden crossbeam to which a fastener could be attached to secure the pipe, drill holes through studs to fit the new flex tubing, attach new fittings to the flex tubing, solder the fittings to the old pipes, cut new drywall to rough shape, screw the new drywall patch to the studs, and apply two coats of plaster with tape, and then sand down the plaster to make it smooth. And then someone had to paint the wall.
I can't imagine how complex a robot and AI you would have to have in order to perform all of those tasks. Even if you could build one that could do a half-reasonable job, it would cost a fortune. But a trained person can do it in a relatively straightforward manner, without extraordinary cost (in my case, a couple hours total time, and about $400). Yet although that was much cheaper than a robot, its still a very decent wage for the plumber.
This question originated in a patent writing effort I was a part of 3 years ago. Basically, we were drafting the patent document for an invention on one PC that had no internet connection at all - to keep the invention safe from prying eyes until the patent could be filed.
Purely out of curiosity: did you ever file the patent application? If so, what is the application number? I'd be interested in
The reason I saw this article is because of RSS (I use Feedly). In fact, the only way I see *any*/. articles is through my RSS reader. I really don't have the time or the Interest to randomly click around to every site that I subscribe to in order to see if there are new articles. There are about 25 sites that I subscribe to. Perhaps if they went away, I'd "Like" or "Follow" them on Facebook, but scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed would be a lot less efficient than just seeing the headlines in Feedly and deciding in a couple seconds whether there is anything that I want to click on. More likely, if not for RSS, I would never go to those sites.
I'm curious: what do you do to find articles to read, and in particular, how did you find this article?
Contracts should never be allowed to waive legal rights.
The entire point of a contract is to waive legal rights. A contract says that I agree to be bound from exercising certain of my legal rights, and in exchange, you agree to be bound from exercising certain of your legal rights.
For example, if I own a house, I usually have the legal right to walk into that house at any time. However, if I sign a contract with you by which you lease the house from me, I no longer have that right. Similarly, before the contract, you had the legal right to the money in your bank account, and to spend your money however you choose. However, after the contract, you've now waived that right: I can demand that you pay me the agreed-upon rent every month, and if you don't, I can get an order to have the money taken directly from your bank account.
Obviously, there are some legal rights that cannot and should not be waivable. We as a society agree that each person has a basic right not to be enslaved, and therefore we won't enforce a contract for slavery, even one voluntarily entered into by both sides. But it always comes down to which legal rights are waivable, and under which circumstances, and not whether rights are waivable at all.
Just like the GPL. If copyright ceases to exist then there would be no need of the GPL. But until then the GPL will use copyright law provisions.
You would still need copyright to achieve the purposes of the GPL. Without copyright and enforcement of the GPL, someone who modifies GPL'd code and would have no obligation to release the modified source. They could just distribute binaries. The public would have no way of forcing them to release the source.
>Ah, but USPTO switched over from first-to-invent to first-to-file, so now prior art is completely moot and anything, no matter how obvious, can be patented.
I see this repeated a lot on/., but I don't understand what they mean. Prior art still matters (assuming the patent office is being run competently, which is a separate matter). There's nothing in first-to-file that inherently invalidates prior art. Where are people getting this?
They're pulling this little pearl of wisdom from the same place as most other Internet "facts" -- out of their ass.
You're absolutely correct in that the First to File of the AIA has nothing to do with the types of publications that are available as prior art. (I speak as an attorney who spends all day, every day looking at patents). And you're right that interferences were expensive and time consuming. But the AIA has an even more important effect of preventing what is known as "swearing behind" prior art.
To "swear behind" a prior art reference means that the patentee submits a declaration that he or she in fact "conceived" of the invention prior to the publication date of the prior art reference, and exercised "continuous, reasonable, and ordinary diligence" towards "reducing the invention to actual practice" (by making an actual implementation) or "reducing the invention to constructive practice" (by filing the application) from the day prior to the publication date of the prior art reference. This can be done not only during prosecution at the PTO, but also during litigation.
Thus, I have seen cases where the defendant showed a spot-on prior art reference, but the plaintiff pulled out some scraps of paper from a 18-year-old lab notebook argued that this showed conception and diligent reduction to practice. And once the plaintiff meets its burden of showing some evidence, the burden shifts to *defendant* to prove, by the high standard of "clear and convincing evidence," that the patentee *didn't* actually do all of the above. Unlike an interference, which usually happened a few years after the purported invention, "swearing behind" in a litigation can be decades later -- making it extremely challenging for a defendant to disprove plaintiff's version of the events.
Because of the shifting burden, the defendant could have in fact actually come up with the invention first, and also filed a patent first, but because of lack of "clear and convincing" documentation from decades prior (or the relevant witnesses are dead), they could end up losing (pre-AIA) to the plaintiff.
These challenges significantly increased the expense of patent litigation because, generally, what happened many years ago doesn't matter (the statute of limitations on patent damages only goes back six years, for example). Therefore, but for the issue of showing invention date, discovery on events that happened so long ago wouldn't be important. Nor would it be important to get, for example, all the emails that were exchanged between the inventor and everyone he or she ever worked with, which are necessary in pre-AIA cases to try to undermine the invention date.
Again, there are only two countries making more money and with lower unemployment: Norway and Switzerland. And if you're considering just median income (to account for income inequality), there's just Norway. I hope you aren't under the impression that those countries' populations or economies (both with a population less than NYC, and dominated by oil or banking, respectively) generalize to the US.
Ten years ago, I walked into a McDonalds in Zurich. The cost of an extra value meal was (in USD equivalent) about $12 dollars. As a poor grad student, I couldn't afford it. I suspect its more expensive now. (One source puts the cost of a Big Mac in Switzerland at about $7.50; again, that's without the fries and a drink.). The well-off Swiss population can afford such things. To the average working class American, a price increase of that magnitude would make a McDonalds meal a rare luxury. (Especially if that person has kids, who don't earn any wage, minimum or not.)
You can argue all you want that if we just raised the minimum wage, had universal health care, guaranteed a universal basic income, etc., etc. that it would raise everyone's standard of living at some point in the future such that we eventually become like the Swiss and the Norwegians. But please don't pretend that the price increases that are the natural result of raising costs (of which wages are one of the largest for restaurants), to say nothing of the lost jobs that are now too expensive, wouldn't have a real and negative impact on the lives of poor people right now -- even if that negative impact isn't so bad as "the end of the world."
This scaremongering makes zero sense, there are plenty of countries with higher income than USA and they don't starve from unemployment, rather the opposite.
Citation needed.
You're correct only if by "plenty" you mean 3-5. There are 5 countries with higher median income than the US: Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Denmark.
There are 3 countries with higher average wage than the US: Luxembourg again, Switzerland, and Ireland (according to the OECD). (Though this depends on who you ask: according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the US is flat-out No. 1 for average income.)
All but 2 of those (Norway and Switzerland) have higher unemployment rates than the US.
It would be close but not exact. The way you would get close is to set the 8x8 quantization matrix to all 1's. In JPEG compression, the image is divided into 8x8 blocks, discrete cosine transformed, elementwise divided by an 8x8 quantization matrix, rounded to the nearest integer, and then (usually) Huffman encoded. The primary problem with being perfectly lossless is that the DCT produces a fractional result. So even if you set the quantization matrix to all 1's, the rounding step would lose information.
Care to enlighten me as to how one sets jpeg compression to 0%?
It's not easy to do in most image editors; even the highest (12) quality setting in Photoshop has quantization. You can do it in ImageMagick, however.
Also, no, RAW formats are not simply uncompressed, but largely unprocessed data as well (certainly less processed than what you get from an out of camera tif or jpf.)
Raw formats are indeed compressed; they're just losslessly compressed.
Finally, there is a true lossless JPEG format, though it is distinct from the usual JPEGs.
Bet you anything they've a managed workflow system and their solution can't deal with raw files.
It's actually worse than that: they aren't merely saying, "Don't send us raw files" (Note no caps -- "raw" isn't an abbreviation); they're saying "Don't send us anything that was even *processed* from raw files." It's as if the raw processing algorithms in the camera are somehow sacrosanct, but the equivalent algorithms run in Lightroom is suspect.
In fact, I think it would be harder to doctor a RAW format because all image sensors have random imperfections, their own physical "fingerprint" that can be traced back to a specific camera. (These imperfections are fixed in processing. All serious cameras have a built-in imperfection reference map created during manufacture and testing. More serious cameras let you update this manually too) Not to mention doctoring a RAW would require inanimate knowledge of the imaging sensor.
I'm not sure what you're talking about by "imperfection reference map" -- do you mean dust delete data? That isn't built-in; you need to take a reference photo of something white in order to generate that. Some software processors also have hot/dead pixel detection.
Otherwise, there is definitely nothing in serious cameras (I assuming that the Canons and Nikons that the vast majority of photojournalists journalists use are "serious") that has any sort of built-in calibration for random imperfections in the sensor. While I have no doubt that, given enough samples and enough time, you might be able to find a way to "fingerprint" a camera, in most cases, sensor noise (whether photon-shot noise, readout noise, or others) is going to significantly overpower any sort of unique characteristics.
They're weeds. You need to cut them down and drive them out.
No, you need to expose them. You need to let them spew whatever drivel they want out in public, and then publicly refute them. If you make their words illegal, then you drive them underground to persuade others in private, giving them an excuse never to expose their lies to the sunlight of public refutation.
And people certainly do like banned things; it makes them feel that they're learning some secret information that the powers that be have ulterior motives for concealing.
You'd do best to use a repository that was designed to fit your needs so you're not constantly butting heads with your version control system.
I'd love to know if such thing exists (in an open source form, ideally). As far as I'm aware, no such thing exists. (Boar is getting close, however, so I'm hopeful).
(2) permanently delete those files that I know I will no longer need.
I'm confused. The entire purpose of an archive database is to KEEP things, forever, so you can go back to them when you need to. If you have files that you expect to delete, maybe they shouldn't be going into the database.
No you're not; you're being patronizing. I am a photographer. I take lots of photos. The negatives are over 30 MB each. A single day's shooting can be dozens of GB. And while I expect to delete many of them, I don't know which of those will be deleted until I've gone through and worked with them. But I want them in an archive immediately, so I can have them tracked, versioned (the XMP sidecars/DNG headers are plaintext), backed-up, remotely accessible, etc.
The funny thing is, despite pretentious boosters of one modern VCS after another arguing that their lack of a feature is a feature in and of itself, and that I'm stupid for having different needs than them, ancient CVS does *exactly* what I need it to do. (Proprietary Perforce is even better, though I'd prefer something open source). So until its competitors catch up with its state-of-the-art 1990's technology, I'm going to keep using CVS.
CVS should die though, yes. Move to SVN or Git depending on your particular needs.
My particular needs are to (1) check out only a subset of files, because those files are binary and very large, and (2) permanently delete those files that I know I will no longer need. Unfortunately, neither SVN nor Git meets those needs, but CVS does. (And as much as I like SVN, rebuilding the entire repository doesn't count for (2)).
The burns were extremely severe. And they were her fault.
That lawsuit was premised on hot coffee being a "defective product," such that the McDonald's would be strictly liable. But most of us are aware -- and expect -- that coffee is routinely made with boiling water. Moreover she shouldn't have put it in her lap. When she did, and it spilled, her insurance should have been on the hook for the damages, not McD's.
I'm quite sorry for her -- I've stupidly spilled coffee in my lap, and it hurt like hell. But that was my fault, and no one else's.
Seriously, your stuffed-full-of-mail strawman is still a strawman, and a rather absurd one at that. Do you think that the NYSE has a little mailslot out in the front door, so that if you send a letter, the postman just tosses it in, and if 9,999,999 others send a letter, they keep piling them in the little slot until they're piling up so much in the hallway that no one can push the front door open with all the mail? Is that really the image that you have in your head?
The basis of the criminal law is intent: they presumably intended to cause damage to Paypal, and had no legitimate reason for their action. Note that I say *presumably* -- their intent must still be proven to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt. This bears no relation to sending a letter of complaint. And their intent -- and taking actions upon that intent -- is all that matters for the criminal law. For most crimes (homicide generally excepted) the attempt or conspiracy to commit a crime is subject to the same penalties as the completed offense.
Slashdot Mirror
Under no circumstances should it be possible to sell a right. (In a non competes case the purchase price would be the original job.)
You also shouldn't be able to be bought off by the rich and powerful to silence your story. They can pay and ask you not to speak, but they shouldn't be able to go after you if you do it anyway.
This is why I think we should eliminate the fungibility of intellectual property. If patents and copyrights were an inalienable personal right of the creator rather than being real estate, any exploiting IP that you created would have to maintain a personal contractual relationship with you, and only within your lifetime. No more having to sign away your IP rights on employment and then having the company kick you to the curb and plug in a cheap offshore replacement. No more patent troll companies hoarding the inventions of others.
This is why I think we should eliminate the fungibility of intellectual property. If patents and copyrights were an inalienable personal right of the creator rather than being real estate, any exploiting IP that you created would have to maintain a personal contractual relationship with you, and only within your lifetime. No more having to sign away your IP rights on employment and then having the company kick you to the curb and plug in a cheap offshore replacement. No more patent troll companies hoarding the inventions of others.
"Fungibility" presumably isn't the word you're looking for, which more-or-less means "interchangeable." Money is fungible, because $1 from one source can be interchanged with $1 from another source, and one usually doesn't care exactly where any given dollar came from.
On the other hand, any particular valid patent is by definition novel (or it would be invalid, see 35 U.S.C. 102) and therefore not "fungible" with another.
I suspect you mean "alienability," which refers to the ability of an owner of a right to sell or otherwise transfer it (and which I see you also use).
Nonsense. That would mean that it was misleading to say that the US employed it until the Emancipation proclamation. The US had only existed for a little under a hundred years. The metric isn't time immemorial, it is that an existing government employed it.
"Time immemorial" was a rhetorical flourish. My point is that "until," without a corresponding "from," implies "from the beginning," or at least "from a very long time previous." In America, there was indeed slavery from very close to the beginning of English settlement, and certainly from the beginning of the country. That is why it would be correct to say that America had slavery "until the 13th Amendment." (Not until the Emancipation Proclamation -- slavery remained legal in Unionist slave states such as Maryland, even after the Emancipation Proclamation.)
On the other hand, slavery in Germany ceased to exist for many hundreds of years, before being revived for about 6 years. Someone reading your statement, but otherwise ignorant of the context, would understand you to mean that in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, one could find slaves in Germany. That is most certainly not correct.
And finally, the most recent user of slavery, Germany who employed it until 1945, a mere 73 years ago. Presumably they would have continued to use slave labor except that the British, the Russians, and the Americans stopped them.
It's misleading to say that Germany employed it until 1945. That implies that it was continuously employed in Germany from time immemorial until 1945. In fact, slavery ceased to exist in Western Europe in the High Middle Ages (albeit later practiced in those countries' overseas colonies), and even serfdom was abolished in Prussia (i.e., what became the majority of modern Germany in 1871) in 1810.
But to try to make it happen, the southern States sent an army into northern territory, surrounded a military fort, pointed their weapons at it, and then later quibbled about who actually fired the first shot. As if it fucking matters who shoots first when you send an invasion force and point your weapons at a military installation.
Are you talking about Fort Sumter? That's not in "northern territory" by any definition, but rather in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
I've never heard of a case where a Nazi was prosecuted for just saying horrible things.
Let me help you out, then: an Austrian man will be serving six months in prison for simply having a bottle of wine in his house with a picture of Hitler on it. He didn't say anything, nor was he selling or distributing the bottles. There's no evidence that the man was a Nazi sympathizer, or held racist views in any way. He simply bought some bottles as a joke souvenir on a trip. And for that, he's going to prison.
America certainly has it's faults, but whenever I see a news article like this about Europe, I practically hear Lee Greenwood.
It will be centuries before robots are able to perform basic jobs as plumber, electrician, drywaller, or carpenter (speaking as someone who has both done these tasks, and hired numerous people to perform these tasks). I had an apartment with two water pipes that were outside the wall, from floor to ceiling, and I wanted to put them behind the wall. Consider the range of tasks that he had to perform:
The plumber had to cut open the drywall, cut open the floor, cut off the pipes above the ceiling and below the floor, move the old pipes behind the plane of the wall and find a wooden crossbeam to which a fastener could be attached to secure the pipe, drill holes through studs to fit the new flex tubing, attach new fittings to the flex tubing, solder the fittings to the old pipes, cut new drywall to rough shape, screw the new drywall patch to the studs, and apply two coats of plaster with tape, and then sand down the plaster to make it smooth. And then someone had to paint the wall.
I can't imagine how complex a robot and AI you would have to have in order to perform all of those tasks. Even if you could build one that could do a half-reasonable job, it would cost a fortune. But a trained person can do it in a relatively straightforward manner, without extraordinary cost (in my case, a couple hours total time, and about $400). Yet although that was much cheaper than a robot, its still a very decent wage for the plumber.
This question originated in a patent writing effort I was a part of 3 years ago. Basically, we were drafting the patent document for an invention on one PC that had no internet connection at all - to keep the invention safe from prying eyes until the patent could be filed.
Purely out of curiosity: did you ever file the patent application? If so, what is the application number? I'd be interested in
The reason I saw this article is because of RSS (I use Feedly). In fact, the only way I see *any* /. articles is through my RSS reader. I really don't have the time or the Interest to randomly click around to every site that I subscribe to in order to see if there are new articles. There are about 25 sites that I subscribe to. Perhaps if they went away, I'd "Like" or "Follow" them on Facebook, but scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed would be a lot less efficient than just seeing the headlines in Feedly and deciding in a couple seconds whether there is anything that I want to click on. More likely, if not for RSS, I would never go to those sites.
I'm curious: what do you do to find articles to read, and in particular, how did you find this article?
Contracts should never be allowed to waive legal rights.
The entire point of a contract is to waive legal rights. A contract says that I agree to be bound from exercising certain of my legal rights, and in exchange, you agree to be bound from exercising certain of your legal rights.
For example, if I own a house, I usually have the legal right to walk into that house at any time. However, if I sign a contract with you by which you lease the house from me, I no longer have that right. Similarly, before the contract, you had the legal right to the money in your bank account, and to spend your money however you choose. However, after the contract, you've now waived that right: I can demand that you pay me the agreed-upon rent every month, and if you don't, I can get an order to have the money taken directly from your bank account.
Obviously, there are some legal rights that cannot and should not be waivable. We as a society agree that each person has a basic right not to be enslaved, and therefore we won't enforce a contract for slavery, even one voluntarily entered into by both sides. But it always comes down to which legal rights are waivable, and under which circumstances, and not whether rights are waivable at all.
Just like the GPL. If copyright ceases to exist then there would be no need of the GPL. But until then the GPL will use copyright law provisions.
You would still need copyright to achieve the purposes of the GPL. Without copyright and enforcement of the GPL, someone who modifies GPL'd code and would have no obligation to release the modified source. They could just distribute binaries. The public would have no way of forcing them to release the source.
>Ah, but USPTO switched over from first-to-invent to first-to-file, so now prior art is completely moot and anything, no matter how obvious, can be patented.
I see this repeated a lot on /., but I don't understand what they mean. Prior art still matters (assuming the patent office is being run competently, which is a separate matter). There's nothing in first-to-file that inherently invalidates prior art. Where are people getting this?
They're pulling this little pearl of wisdom from the same place as most other Internet "facts" -- out of their ass.
You're absolutely correct in that the First to File of the AIA has nothing to do with the types of publications that are available as prior art. (I speak as an attorney who spends all day, every day looking at patents). And you're right that interferences were expensive and time consuming. But the AIA has an even more important effect of preventing what is known as "swearing behind" prior art.
To "swear behind" a prior art reference means that the patentee submits a declaration that he or she in fact "conceived" of the invention prior to the publication date of the prior art reference, and exercised "continuous, reasonable, and ordinary diligence" towards "reducing the invention to actual practice" (by making an actual implementation) or "reducing the invention to constructive practice" (by filing the application) from the day prior to the publication date of the prior art reference. This can be done not only during prosecution at the PTO, but also during litigation.
Thus, I have seen cases where the defendant showed a spot-on prior art reference, but the plaintiff pulled out some scraps of paper from a 18-year-old lab notebook argued that this showed conception and diligent reduction to practice. And once the plaintiff meets its burden of showing some evidence, the burden shifts to *defendant* to prove, by the high standard of "clear and convincing evidence," that the patentee *didn't* actually do all of the above. Unlike an interference, which usually happened a few years after the purported invention, "swearing behind" in a litigation can be decades later -- making it extremely challenging for a defendant to disprove plaintiff's version of the events.
Because of the shifting burden, the defendant could have in fact actually come up with the invention first, and also filed a patent first, but because of lack of "clear and convincing" documentation from decades prior (or the relevant witnesses are dead), they could end up losing (pre-AIA) to the plaintiff.
These challenges significantly increased the expense of patent litigation because, generally, what happened many years ago doesn't matter (the statute of limitations on patent damages only goes back six years, for example). Therefore, but for the issue of showing invention date, discovery on events that happened so long ago wouldn't be important. Nor would it be important to get, for example, all the emails that were exchanged between the inventor and everyone he or she ever worked with, which are necessary in pre-AIA cases to try to undermine the invention date.
Yes, 5 is enough to see what happens
Again, there are only two countries making more money and with lower unemployment: Norway and Switzerland. And if you're considering just median income (to account for income inequality), there's just Norway. I hope you aren't under the impression that those countries' populations or economies (both with a population less than NYC, and dominated by oil or banking, respectively) generalize to the US.
Ten years ago, I walked into a McDonalds in Zurich. The cost of an extra value meal was (in USD equivalent) about $12 dollars. As a poor grad student, I couldn't afford it. I suspect its more expensive now. (One source puts the cost of a Big Mac in Switzerland at about $7.50; again, that's without the fries and a drink.). The well-off Swiss population can afford such things. To the average working class American, a price increase of that magnitude would make a McDonalds meal a rare luxury. (Especially if that person has kids, who don't earn any wage, minimum or not.)
You can argue all you want that if we just raised the minimum wage, had universal health care, guaranteed a universal basic income, etc., etc. that it would raise everyone's standard of living at some point in the future such that we eventually become like the Swiss and the Norwegians. But please don't pretend that the price increases that are the natural result of raising costs (of which wages are one of the largest for restaurants), to say nothing of the lost jobs that are now too expensive, wouldn't have a real and negative impact on the lives of poor people right now -- even if that negative impact isn't so bad as "the end of the world."
This scaremongering makes zero sense, there are plenty of countries with higher income than USA and they don't starve from unemployment, rather the opposite.
Citation needed.
You're correct only if by "plenty" you mean 3-5. There are 5 countries with higher median income than the US: Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Denmark.
There are 3 countries with higher average wage than the US: Luxembourg again, Switzerland, and Ireland (according to the OECD). (Though this depends on who you ask: according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the US is flat-out No. 1 for average income.)
All but 2 of those (Norway and Switzerland) have higher unemployment rates than the US.
Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image?
It would be close but not exact. The way you would get close is to set the 8x8 quantization matrix to all 1's. In JPEG compression, the image is divided into 8x8 blocks, discrete cosine transformed, elementwise divided by an 8x8 quantization matrix, rounded to the nearest integer, and then (usually) Huffman encoded. The primary problem with being perfectly lossless is that the DCT produces a fractional result. So even if you set the quantization matrix to all 1's, the rounding step would lose information.
Care to enlighten me as to how one sets jpeg compression to 0%?
It's not easy to do in most image editors; even the highest (12) quality setting in Photoshop has quantization. You can do it in ImageMagick, however.
Also, no, RAW formats are not simply uncompressed, but largely unprocessed data as well (certainly less processed than what you get from an out of camera tif or jpf.)
Raw formats are indeed compressed; they're just losslessly compressed.
Finally, there is a true lossless JPEG format, though it is distinct from the usual JPEGs.
Bet you anything they've a managed workflow system and their solution can't deal with raw files.
It's actually worse than that: they aren't merely saying, "Don't send us raw files" (Note no caps -- "raw" isn't an abbreviation); they're saying "Don't send us anything that was even *processed* from raw files." It's as if the raw processing algorithms in the camera are somehow sacrosanct, but the equivalent algorithms run in Lightroom is suspect.
In fact, I think it would be harder to doctor a RAW format because all image sensors have random imperfections, their own physical "fingerprint" that can be traced back to a specific camera. (These imperfections are fixed in processing. All serious cameras have a built-in imperfection reference map created during manufacture and testing. More serious cameras let you update this manually too) Not to mention doctoring a RAW would require inanimate knowledge of the imaging sensor.
I'm not sure what you're talking about by "imperfection reference map" -- do you mean dust delete data? That isn't built-in; you need to take a reference photo of something white in order to generate that. Some software processors also have hot/dead pixel detection.
Otherwise, there is definitely nothing in serious cameras (I assuming that the Canons and Nikons that the vast majority of photojournalists journalists use are "serious") that has any sort of built-in calibration for random imperfections in the sensor. While I have no doubt that, given enough samples and enough time, you might be able to find a way to "fingerprint" a camera, in most cases, sensor noise (whether photon-shot noise, readout noise, or others) is going to significantly overpower any sort of unique characteristics.
They're weeds. You need to cut them down and drive them out.
No, you need to expose them. You need to let them spew whatever drivel they want out in public, and then publicly refute them. If you make their words illegal, then you drive them underground to persuade others in private, giving them an excuse never to expose their lies to the sunlight of public refutation.
And people certainly do like banned things; it makes them feel that they're learning some secret information that the powers that be have ulterior motives for concealing.
My apologies for my overly combative response. Thank you for your kind clarification.
You'd do best to use a repository that was designed to fit your needs so you're not constantly butting heads with your version control system.
I'd love to know if such thing exists (in an open source form, ideally). As far as I'm aware, no such thing exists. (Boar is getting close, however, so I'm hopeful).
(2) permanently delete those files that I know I will no longer need.
I'm confused. The entire purpose of an archive database is to KEEP things, forever, so you can go back to them when you need to. If you have files that you expect to delete, maybe they shouldn't be going into the database.
No you're not; you're being patronizing. I am a photographer. I take lots of photos. The negatives are over 30 MB each. A single day's shooting can be dozens of GB. And while I expect to delete many of them, I don't know which of those will be deleted until I've gone through and worked with them. But I want them in an archive immediately, so I can have them tracked, versioned (the XMP sidecars/DNG headers are plaintext), backed-up, remotely accessible, etc.
The funny thing is, despite pretentious boosters of one modern VCS after another arguing that their lack of a feature is a feature in and of itself, and that I'm stupid for having different needs than them, ancient CVS does *exactly* what I need it to do. (Proprietary Perforce is even better, though I'd prefer something open source). So until its competitors catch up with its state-of-the-art 1990's technology, I'm going to keep using CVS.
CVS should die though, yes. Move to SVN or Git depending on your particular needs.
My particular needs are to (1) check out only a subset of files, because those files are binary and very large, and (2) permanently delete those files that I know I will no longer need. Unfortunately, neither SVN nor Git meets those needs, but CVS does. (And as much as I like SVN, rebuilding the entire repository doesn't count for (2)).
Comcast's binding arbitration, no class action allowed clause in their service agreement.
Illegal
Nope.
Why the hell has the parent post been modded (1, Redundant)? This is the most insightful post I've seen on /. all day. Shame on the mods.
The burns were extremely severe. And they were her fault.
That lawsuit was premised on hot coffee being a "defective product," such that the McDonald's would be strictly liable. But most of us are aware -- and expect -- that coffee is routinely made with boiling water. Moreover she shouldn't have put it in her lap. When she did, and it spilled, her insurance should have been on the hook for the damages, not McD's.
I'm quite sorry for her -- I've stupidly spilled coffee in my lap, and it hurt like hell. But that was my fault, and no one else's.
Seriously, your stuffed-full-of-mail strawman is still a strawman, and a rather absurd one at that. Do you think that the NYSE has a little mailslot out in the front door, so that if you send a letter, the postman just tosses it in, and if 9,999,999 others send a letter, they keep piling them in the little slot until they're piling up so much in the hallway that no one can push the front door open with all the mail? Is that really the image that you have in your head?
The basis of the criminal law is intent: they presumably intended to cause damage to Paypal, and had no legitimate reason for their action. Note that I say *presumably* -- their intent must still be proven to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt. This bears no relation to sending a letter of complaint. And their intent -- and taking actions upon that intent -- is all that matters for the criminal law. For most crimes (homicide generally excepted) the attempt or conspiracy to commit a crime is subject to the same penalties as the completed offense.