I know a guy who works for Microsoft and he is seriously demoralized because of the crap associated with Microsoft even though his project isn't involved in all the mudslinging. He feels trapped because there hasn't been another local employer for his skills and he doesn't want to uproot his family.
But... the other day I mentioned a project that Google is getting into that has natural extensions into his area. He really perked up at that. Google has opened an office quite close to Microsoft. Hmm...
Patents encourage people to look beyond their own needs. If I can make a living by helping to solve your needs, then I'll look into them. Certainly altruism can do the same, but altruism falls off considerably when you get outside the sphere of people you know. This is a major consideration of society today.
But what if the method of making the skin crisp involves an algorithm that takes the weight and surface area of the piece of chicken, and programmatically adjusts the temperature during cooking to achieve the crisp skin. What if one invention achieved this using mechanical gears that in essence performed the calculations and the other used an embedded ROM? What is the difference?
I don't like the really stupid patents that are out there, but if there is no protection for some areas of creative endeavor, some people are going to get screwed. You spend years of development working on your super crisping oven (which many Bothan chickens gave their life for the information), and within three months of first sale, every oven on the market has super crisping technology because all your competitors dismantled one to discover your algorithm and since the only novel aspect is in how to compute the temperature curve given the weight and surface area of the piece to be cooked, you're screwed. Sure you can still sell yours, but you won't be able to command even a cent of price premium above commodity to pay for all those Bothan chickens.
Given those problems, the only people who can afford to do anything novel in the field are big companies. I think the big difference is in whether your "invention" requires a big R&D budget. Me sitting at home hacking on my computer has no incremental costs other than a piddling amount for electricity and Chinese take-out. Inventing the super crisping oven required that one or more prototypes be built, and that a large supply of Bothan chickens be obtained, many of which might not have been edible following experimentation. At least it used to require that, nowadays you just file your patent on a sort of hypothetical oven that could use some (mumble) calculations to do (mumble) and always produce crisp chicken. That's not invention, that's speculation that such a thing could be done. I think we need to go back to requiring that inventors demonstrate an actual device that can do what they say.
Perhaps the solution is a new sort of patent, one of very limited duration. Five years. The purpose of patent and copyright is to encourage creativity, and stop people from knowledge hording. If your invention does nothing but manipulate data, and does not produce any effect on something physical (like a piece of Bothan chicken), then you can get a five year patent. After five years it would be legal for someone to use the crispy chicken algorithm to produce a game, or a cooking simulation, but not to cook real Bothan chickens.
If they offered decent customer service, they wouldn't have any money left for that aggressive marketing.
It's been my observation that the heavier a company markets itself relative to its competitors, the crappier its products/services. It's common sense that the money for marketing doesn't just come out of thin air.
Do you honestly think they would launch a missile (expensive to develop) that is very easily tracked back to the source rather than smuggling something in? Tons of drugs are imported to this country every year and you don't think they could get a nuke on site, and avoid retaliation?
Spammers don't care if you don't buy anything from the spam. The people who pay the spammers to spam you with their product might care, but there is an unending supply of suckers who believe that all they have to do is pay someone $500 for an "email blast" and the money will roll in.
I voted for Gregoire in a "hold your nose and vote for the least evil" move. Gregoire stinks, but Rossi stinks even more.
I heard an ad for the "we need a revote" movement by the Republicans, but at the time I hadn't yet heard that a recount had put Gregoire in the lead, and until the "paid for by the Washington State Republican Party", I assumed it was from either the Democratic Party or supporters of Gregoire, and I thought it was stupid all around, regardless of which party was sponsoring it.
I don't understand how you can misplace ballots. Do they not have a dedicated place to store ballots, such that they need to cram them in places they can get forgotten?
Note that while sys-con was getting "DDoS'd", access to Groklaw was also spotty because of the large amount of interest in everything that was going on.
There is no proof that this "DDoS" was anything other than a slashdotting.
It isn't necessary that O'Gara be a paid shill for her to have written what she did, but it's quite obvious that she has been getting "inside scoops" from the SCO camp.
Another poster says she has a hate on for IBM, and that would certainly explain it, but does anybody know why she has it in for IBM?
Yes, I see great applications in public safety. There are traffic speed sensors on the highways, and a sudden slowdown is often the first indicator of an accident. There are cameras but they don't cover end-to-end. Nest one of these every few miles and you can launch to investigate traffic slowdowns or confirmed accidents. Pipe the video to emergency response and they can dispatch exactly what resources are needed and paramedics can get a heads up on the kinds of injuries they are likely to be dealing with.
Call 911 and get an automatic dispatch of one to your location, arriving within 30 seconds in an urban location. Gives police and fire a heads up on what they will be facing when they arrive a few minutes later. Use them to monitor views of fires that can't be seen from the ground.
That's bunk. I never met a pre-med who had any interest in the material beyond that they needed to get a good grade. Doctors are mechanics, mechanics don't need to know anything beyond very basic engineering. I knew long before the research came out that dietary cholesterol had nothing to do with atherosclerosis, and that trans fatty acids would turn out to be bad news. There's still a lot of doctors out there who advise their patients to drastically limit their intake of eggs because of how much cholesterol they contain. 9 out of 10 research studies conducted by MD's are useless, and most of the rest claim more significance for their results than is warranted.
I've yet to find a doctor who wants to do anything other than throw medication or surgery at a chronic problem. Find the cause and eliminate that? They have no clue where to even start looking unless it's been covered in their mechanics books.
You don't need to break into Microsoft or Apple's corporate computers. You can demonstrate on your own computer or someone else's with their permission. I'm not saying that publicizing security weaknesses is a bad thing, but going the route of breaking into someone else's property to expose a security flaw is stupid and unnecessary, and should be prosecuted.
I've had to notify many, many people that their systems were either vulnerable or already compromised, and I have never "had" to resort to illegal acts to convince them of that fact, even when I was nobody to them.
Your computers? That's like me saying, "I'll give you access to my empty garden shed out back." Not all systems are equally valuable. If I had to either give you the key to my house, or the root password on my systems, I'd rather give you the key to my house.
What you do then is offer to make a bet. Offer him something nice and juicy, and get it in writing. Never do security testing without written permission.
I would think that people would have learned from the example of Randall Schwartz. You especially don't want to do it with someone who would be publically embarrassed by it because you're at high risk that they will file charges.
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I know a guy who works for Microsoft and he is seriously demoralized because of the crap associated with Microsoft even though his project isn't involved in all the mudslinging. He feels trapped because there hasn't been another local employer for his skills and he doesn't want to uproot his family.
But... the other day I mentioned a project that Google is getting into that has natural extensions into his area. He really perked up at that. Google has opened an office quite close to Microsoft. Hmm...
Patents encourage people to look beyond their own needs. If I can make a living by helping to solve your needs, then I'll look into them. Certainly altruism can do the same, but altruism falls off considerably when you get outside the sphere of people you know. This is a major consideration of society today.
But what if the method of making the skin crisp involves an algorithm that takes the weight and surface area of the piece of chicken, and programmatically adjusts the temperature during cooking to achieve the crisp skin. What if one invention achieved this using mechanical gears that in essence performed the calculations and the other used an embedded ROM? What is the difference?
I don't like the really stupid patents that are out there, but if there is no protection for some areas of creative endeavor, some people are going to get screwed. You spend years of development working on your super crisping oven (which many Bothan chickens gave their life for the information), and within three months of first sale, every oven on the market has super crisping technology because all your competitors dismantled one to discover your algorithm and since the only novel aspect is in how to compute the temperature curve given the weight and surface area of the piece to be cooked, you're screwed. Sure you can still sell yours, but you won't be able to command even a cent of price premium above commodity to pay for all those Bothan chickens.
Given those problems, the only people who can afford to do anything novel in the field are big companies. I think the big difference is in whether your "invention" requires a big R&D budget. Me sitting at home hacking on my computer has no incremental costs other than a piddling amount for electricity and Chinese take-out. Inventing the super crisping oven required that one or more prototypes be built, and that a large supply of Bothan chickens be obtained, many of which might not have been edible following experimentation. At least it used to require that, nowadays you just file your patent on a sort of hypothetical oven that could use some (mumble) calculations to do (mumble) and always produce crisp chicken. That's not invention, that's speculation that such a thing could be done. I think we need to go back to requiring that inventors demonstrate an actual device that can do what they say.
Perhaps the solution is a new sort of patent, one of very limited duration. Five years. The purpose of patent and copyright is to encourage creativity, and stop people from knowledge hording. If your invention does nothing but manipulate data, and does not produce any effect on something physical (like a piece of Bothan chicken), then you can get a five year patent. After five years it would be legal for someone to use the crispy chicken algorithm to produce a game, or a cooking simulation, but not to cook real Bothan chickens.
Mine lists it as "Locally administered MAC address". It's the built in wireless on my HP laptop.
If they offered decent customer service, they wouldn't have any money left for that aggressive marketing.
It's been my observation that the heavier a company markets itself relative to its competitors, the crappier its products/services. It's common sense that the money for marketing doesn't just come out of thin air.
Do you honestly think they would launch a missile (expensive to develop) that is very easily tracked back to the source rather than smuggling something in? Tons of drugs are imported to this country every year and you don't think they could get a nuke on site, and avoid retaliation?
Spammers don't care if you don't buy anything from the spam. The people who pay the spammers to spam you with their product might care, but there is an unending supply of suckers who believe that all they have to do is pay someone $500 for an "email blast" and the money will roll in.
I voted for Gregoire in a "hold your nose and vote for the least evil" move. Gregoire stinks, but Rossi stinks even more.
I heard an ad for the "we need a revote" movement by the Republicans, but at the time I hadn't yet heard that a recount had put Gregoire in the lead, and until the "paid for by the Washington State Republican Party", I assumed it was from either the Democratic Party or supporters of Gregoire, and I thought it was stupid all around, regardless of which party was sponsoring it.
I don't understand how you can misplace ballots. Do they not have a dedicated place to store ballots, such that they need to cram them in places they can get forgotten?
Note that while sys-con was getting "DDoS'd", access to Groklaw was also spotty because of the large amount of interest in everything that was going on.
There is no proof that this "DDoS" was anything other than a slashdotting.
It isn't necessary that O'Gara be a paid shill for her to have written what she did, but it's quite obvious that she has been getting "inside scoops" from the SCO camp.
Another poster says she has a hate on for IBM, and that would certainly explain it, but does anybody know why she has it in for IBM?
The National Enquirer generates a ton of readership too.
Yes, I see great applications in public safety. There are traffic speed sensors on the highways, and a sudden slowdown is often the first indicator of an accident. There are cameras but they don't cover end-to-end. Nest one of these every few miles and you can launch to investigate traffic slowdowns or confirmed accidents. Pipe the video to emergency response and they can dispatch exactly what resources are needed and paramedics can get a heads up on the kinds of injuries they are likely to be dealing with.
Call 911 and get an automatic dispatch of one to your location, arriving within 30 seconds in an urban location. Gives police and fire a heads up on what they will be facing when they arrive a few minutes later. Use them to monitor views of fires that can't be seen from the ground.
The harm done is to the National Health budget, of course. Withhold food and water and they die faster, thus less money needs to be spent.
That's bunk. I never met a pre-med who had any interest in the material beyond that they needed to get a good grade. Doctors are mechanics, mechanics don't need to know anything beyond very basic engineering. I knew long before the research came out that dietary cholesterol had nothing to do with atherosclerosis, and that trans fatty acids would turn out to be bad news. There's still a lot of doctors out there who advise their patients to drastically limit their intake of eggs because of how much cholesterol they contain. 9 out of 10 research studies conducted by MD's are useless, and most of the rest claim more significance for their results than is warranted.
I've yet to find a doctor who wants to do anything other than throw medication or surgery at a chronic problem. Find the cause and eliminate that? They have no clue where to even start looking unless it's been covered in their mechanics books.
We used to run those through the dishwasher if they got too sticky (no soap).
There will still be working Model M's when the sun fries the earth to a crisp.
Am I in the wrong place? Cuz, uh, I don't really consider "Jiz" food.
Hey, I have some of that. I swear by the Glad brand, but a friend prefers the thinner, more flexible Private Selection brand.
Having a chauffeur would really defeat the purpose of buying an S2000. Why buy a hot car and then let someone else drive it?
Didn't see anything in Seattle. Oh, maybe our perpetual cloud cover had something to do with that.
They issued their alert on the 13th, this is just a nice PR piece. You can see this months alerts at http://www.sec.noaa.gov/alerts/archive/current_mon th.html.
What was observed on the 13th was solar flare activity. It doesn't become a geomagnetic storm until it reaches the earth, which it did on the 15th.
Is it really that hard to copy the right information out of sources?
You don't need to break into Microsoft or Apple's corporate computers. You can demonstrate on your own computer or someone else's with their permission. I'm not saying that publicizing security weaknesses is a bad thing, but going the route of breaking into someone else's property to expose a security flaw is stupid and unnecessary, and should be prosecuted. I've had to notify many, many people that their systems were either vulnerable or already compromised, and I have never "had" to resort to illegal acts to convince them of that fact, even when I was nobody to them.
I don't think breaking in, stealing the data, and then sitting on it for months until they were caught falls under "forced to act".
Your computers? That's like me saying, "I'll give you access to my empty garden shed out back." Not all systems are equally valuable. If I had to either give you the key to my house, or the root password on my systems, I'd rather give you the key to my house.
What you do then is offer to make a bet. Offer him something nice and juicy, and get it in writing. Never do security testing without written permission.
I would think that people would have learned from the example of Randall Schwartz. You especially don't want to do it with someone who would be publically embarrassed by it because you're at high risk that they will file charges.