AC is a doofus. Speaker cables do not need shielding. The idea is ludicrous.
AC probably also insists on running power through his cables before using them first to break them in, using $485 wooden stereo knobs, vertical turntables, and Monster Cables.
Clearly, deducing that somebody is Jewish because they bought Hanukkah wrapping paper is a brilliant invention worthy of the full protective power of the United States government and international intellectual property treaties. How else is America going to survive in the information age?
This one seems like one of the safest useless patents ever. I seriously doubt any of Amazon's competitors would ever infringe on this one either unintentionally or knowingly, since it is so idiotic.
The net result of this is that the patent office got a nice little fee, and Amazon got nothing useful in return (by their own choosing).
I am independent, not relying on anyone for bills, food, rent, or anything else. And I still have no need for a phone, despite having a life, a small circle of friends, and biz to attend to.
As amusing and timeless as the basement dweller meme is (and yes, even though that witty AC directed it at me, it still gave me a smile), I can honestly say:
1 - My humble little home has no basement 2 - I may not have myself surrounded by a bunch of so-called friends, but the small circle of friends I have is quite reliable and we are there for each other when needed. We all hang out together once a month or so and get caught up on what is happening in our humble lives, and none of us are all that interested in yakking for hours on end on the phone about every last little detail of our lives. 3 - My nearest family is about 500 miles away, and I keep in touch with them via email and Facebook. I am visiting them at this moment, having completed the not so arduous trip in my reliable little Geo Metro an hour and a half ago. I typically do this trip twice or three times a year. But after my second oldest sister passed away end of May, just a couple weeks shy of her 45th birthday, I have determined to make this trip more frequently. 4 - During the trip today, I was able to note that there were only a couple places along the way where I would be severely inconvenienced by not having a cell phone should an emergency come up, not significant enough to warrant a phone and the additional expense of the service that goes with it. 5 - My landline runs $25 per month. And if sales ever got so bad that I had to start severely cutting corners, that would be one of the first things to go. 6 - There is no 6.
This may be a sample size of only one, but I can definitely state that not only do I not need or have a smart phone, I also do not need or have a dumb cell phone.
My landline gets little enough use as it is, and when I need to call outside of my local area, I have more minutes on this prepaid phonecard I keep around than I will ever use.
Shoot first, ask questions never, over things that are arguably as Fair Use as it gets. It will only get worse from here.
A shame no one who has the power to do anything about this B.S. is willing to treat suppressing fair use rights as a violation of copyright law, with all the penalties that would entail.
My question isn't so much "what could possibly go wrong", but rather "What right gives you to make such a decision for the whole world to live by".
Dangerous words there. Isn't it usually the one who asks such a question one of those who typically gets eaten early on by a gigantic mutant radioactive version of the creature he was trying to protect?
How about if people crying about "there are no jobs for me" would either make new products or services people want or improve themselves to be more useful to employers? But nooo, now they're crying how no one is giving money for what they think they want to do.
That's a bit of a catch 22. In this day and age, if they did manage to come up with a new product or service that people want, then odds are, before they have a chance to be successful in their endeavour, some troll will either sue them into oblivion or force them into a settlement that wipes them out because they somehow managed to infringe some little b.s. patent that should never have been awarded in the first place and which they had no way to reasonably know about.
It is highly likely that the spontaneous combustion of that iPhone is due to the phone holding in a fart, causing a build up of methane which then ignited.
Actually, the letters could be extortion even if they are true. For example, if I see someone rob a bank, and I send them a letter demanding money or I'll turn them in, that's extortion and I can be criminally prosecuted. But you're right that the guilty probably wouldn't call the police to report the extortion.
In that case, instead of the police, they may very likely go to another agency to deal with you. After all, it is often much less expensive to dispose of a body than it is to fight a big court case.
Amen to that! "Intellectual Property" craze is just about reinventing aristocracy as a form of government - it became obvious as soon as copyright protection started being concerned with authors' offspring, pushing for perpetuation of copyright. IP is latest sanctuary for elite classes against ongoing slow democratization of the world, a floating device to keep minority of controllers above masses. Our duty as free human beings is to resist, and if that fails and we fall into slavery, to rebel. We have to substitute their poisonous gifts (well... not gifts, not even merchandise, we have to pay just to be allowed limited access and usage to their... stuff) with truly free culture, and leave the chains they forged for us in the darkness of damnatio memoriae, unwanted and unnoticed, thrown roadside, until the evil spell upon them wears out.
Translated (preachy melodrama stripped out, in other words)
Give the independently produced content (using creative commons, public domain, open source, etc terms) a fair shake. In time, enough alternative content will be discovered of sufficient quality that the more traditional content, encumbered by more and more draconian imaginary property laws, will simply become irrelevant, or at least greatly diminished in relevance.
We have the tools for production, distribution, and easy access available to us now. Use them.
And that said, the above post by me (can't speak for the AC quoted) is hereby presented CC: BY/SA.
People want to test drive before they buy. The people that download and don't buy were never going to buy in the first place, there is not a single lost sale there.
And on top of that, going this route could save a lot of other people a lot of cash, when you can intelligently inform them that the product is crap and not worth considering for purchase.
How 'bout we just tell the manufacturer 'hey, just sell the stupid thing. Release all of YOUR rights that you magically granted yourself above and beyond what various copyright laws already provide when you take the purchaser's money and SUCK IT THE HECK UP!'
What we really need is a free (or extremely cheap) option to block domains from being registered if there is a valid trademark. Of course, this would eliminate the profit motive of introducing new TLDs, so it would stop happening.
This is something that needs legislation to solve.
Would this take into account the possibility of two or more businesses having the same name, but operating in totally different fields? If not, then a movie studio calling itself Acme Entertainment could then just register acme-entertainment.com and then prevent an arcade machines distributer also called Acme Entertainment from ever having a hope of taking acme-entertainment.(whatever other tld would be acceptable). They are in effectively different fields of business, so neither are infringing on the other's trademark.
That's weird; with Windows, I have to waste all kinds of time hunting down drivers for devices, and the UI is so deficient I can't get much work done because there's no virtual desktops to separate my activities into, and the one workspace gets so cluttered with dozens of open windows.
As someone who has gone from Windows to Linux and now uses both equally for various purposes, I understand the addiction of virtual desktops. In fact, when KDE went from 3.5 to 4.0 and took away the ability to have a different background image for each desktop (yes, I know, petty; but that is a quirk of mine), I ended up shopping around for a new desktop environment, eventually discovering Enlightenment.
Anyway, for Windows, if you are using ATI or nVidia video cards, the driver and utility packages for them should have a virtual desktop feature (I'm sure at least the ATI Catalyst package does. Can't remember if the nVidia package does as well.) However, even though I have both ATI and nVidia on various systems, I have become rather fond of Virtual Dimension. If you must have virtual desktops on Windows, this is definitely a good one worth looking at.
I'm just hoping that the results of this experiment will provide once and for all, a definitive answer to the ages old question of:
If three astronauts are flying over the Gobi Desert in a canoe, and they crash land, how many pancakes does it take to shingle a doghouse?"
I've only been able to narrow it down to two possible answers:
Three, because ice cream has no bones.
or
Nine, because watermelons can't use night vision goggles.
And even then, I am only about 70% sure the answer is one of those. This experiment with the great big lasers could reveal a completely different answer.
Slashdot Mirror
AC is a doofus. Speaker cables do not need shielding. The idea is ludicrous.
AC probably also insists on running power through his cables before using them first to break them in, using $485 wooden stereo knobs, vertical turntables, and Monster Cables.
Clearly, deducing that somebody is Jewish because they bought Hanukkah wrapping paper is a brilliant invention worthy of the full protective power of the United States government and international intellectual property treaties. How else is America going to survive in the information age?
This one seems like one of the safest useless patents ever. I seriously doubt any of Amazon's competitors would ever infringe on this one either unintentionally or knowingly, since it is so idiotic.
The net result of this is that the patent office got a nice little fee, and Amazon got nothing useful in return (by their own choosing).
Mysterious Space Ball fell to earth in Namibia, presumably from outer space.
I could have sworn Namibia was presumably from Africa.
I am independent, not relying on anyone for bills, food, rent, or anything else. And I still have no need for a phone, despite having a life, a small circle of friends, and biz to attend to.
As amusing and timeless as the basement dweller meme is (and yes, even though that witty AC directed it at me, it still gave me a smile), I can honestly say:
1 - My humble little home has no basement
2 - I may not have myself surrounded by a bunch of so-called friends, but the small circle of friends I have is quite reliable and we are there for each other when needed. We all hang out together once a month or so and get caught up on what is happening in our humble lives, and none of us are all that interested in yakking for hours on end on the phone about every last little detail of our lives.
3 - My nearest family is about 500 miles away, and I keep in touch with them via email and Facebook. I am visiting them at this moment, having completed the not so arduous trip in my reliable little Geo Metro an hour and a half ago. I typically do this trip twice or three times a year. But after my second oldest sister passed away end of May, just a couple weeks shy of her 45th birthday, I have determined to make this trip more frequently.
4 - During the trip today, I was able to note that there were only a couple places along the way where I would be severely inconvenienced by not having a cell phone should an emergency come up, not significant enough to warrant a phone and the additional expense of the service that goes with it.
5 - My landline runs $25 per month. And if sales ever got so bad that I had to start severely cutting corners, that would be one of the first things to go.
6 - There is no 6.
This may be a sample size of only one, but I can definitely state that not only do I not need or have a smart phone, I also do not need or have a dumb cell phone.
My landline gets little enough use as it is, and when I need to call outside of my local area, I have more minutes on this prepaid phonecard I keep around than I will ever use.
Shoot first, ask questions never, over things that are arguably as Fair Use as it gets. It will only get worse from here.
A shame no one who has the power to do anything about this B.S. is willing to treat suppressing fair use rights as a violation of copyright law, with all the penalties that would entail.
I read this an instantly thought of Government Motors... They have a hard time making a good vehicle at a profit, I don't want them making animals...
I too initially thought General Motors, and was thinking, "What? Is GM developing a little robotic mosquito? Cool, man."
My question isn't so much "what could possibly go wrong", but rather "What right gives you to make such a decision for the whole world to live by".
Dangerous words there. Isn't it usually the one who asks such a question one of those who typically gets eaten early on by a gigantic mutant radioactive version of the creature he was trying to protect?
Result: Males will find it difficult to find a mate, resulting in fewer mosquitoes all together.
And then those mateless male mosquitos will either go into IT, become imaginary property lawyers, or become politicians.
Maybe some of the smaller breweries ... but Budweiser and Miller aren't "better" beers than ... well, thousands of beers, actually.
They're pretty much the most boring, generic beers you can get.
Those are more appropriately designated beer flavored water actually (and probably even barely that).
How about if people crying about "there are no jobs for me" would either make new products or services people want or improve themselves to be more useful to employers? But nooo, now they're crying how no one is giving money for what they think they want to do.
That's a bit of a catch 22. In this day and age, if they did manage to come up with a new product or service that people want, then odds are, before they have a chance to be successful in their endeavour, some troll will either sue them into oblivion or force them into a settlement that wipes them out because they somehow managed to infringe some little b.s. patent that should never have been awarded in the first place and which they had no way to reasonably know about.
It is highly likely that the spontaneous combustion of that iPhone is due to the phone holding in a fart, causing a build up of methane which then ignited.
Upbringing, networking, persistence, work and a hefty dose of luck.
And determining your own victory conditions helps as well. In other words, you need to set your own definition of success (within reason).
Actually, the letters could be extortion even if they are true. For example, if I see someone rob a bank, and I send them a letter demanding money or I'll turn them in, that's extortion and I can be criminally prosecuted. But you're right that the guilty probably wouldn't call the police to report the extortion.
In that case, instead of the police, they may very likely go to another agency to deal with you. After all, it is often much less expensive to dispose of a body than it is to fight a big court case.
Amen to that! "Intellectual Property" craze is just about reinventing aristocracy as a form of government - it became obvious as soon as copyright protection started being concerned with authors' offspring, pushing for perpetuation of copyright. IP is latest sanctuary for elite classes against ongoing slow democratization of the world, a floating device to keep minority of controllers above masses. Our duty as free human beings is to resist, and if that fails and we fall into slavery, to rebel. We have to substitute their poisonous gifts (well ... not gifts, not even merchandise, we have to pay just to be allowed limited access and usage to their ... stuff) with truly free culture, and leave the chains they forged for us in the darkness of damnatio memoriae, unwanted and unnoticed, thrown roadside, until the evil spell upon them wears out.
Translated (preachy melodrama stripped out, in other words)
Give the independently produced content (using creative commons, public domain, open source, etc terms) a fair shake. In time, enough alternative content will be discovered of sufficient quality that the more traditional content, encumbered by more and more draconian imaginary property laws, will simply become irrelevant, or at least greatly diminished in relevance.
We have the tools for production, distribution, and easy access available to us now. Use them.
And that said, the above post by me (can't speak for the AC quoted) is hereby presented CC: BY/SA.
People want to test drive before they buy. The people that download and don't buy were never going to buy in the first place, there is not a single lost sale there.
And on top of that, going this route could save a lot of other people a lot of cash, when you can intelligently inform them that the product is crap and not worth considering for purchase.
How 'bout we just tell the manufacturer 'hey, just sell the stupid thing. Release all of YOUR rights that you magically granted yourself above and beyond what various copyright laws already provide when you take the purchaser's money and SUCK IT THE HECK UP!'
Fixed that for you.
What we really need is a free (or extremely cheap) option to block domains from being registered if there is a valid trademark. Of course, this would eliminate the profit motive of introducing new TLDs, so it would stop happening.
This is something that needs legislation to solve.
Would this take into account the possibility of two or more businesses having the same name, but operating in totally different fields? If not, then a movie studio calling itself Acme Entertainment could then just register acme-entertainment.com and then prevent an arcade machines distributer also called Acme Entertainment from ever having a hope of taking acme-entertainment.(whatever other tld would be acceptable). They are in effectively different fields of business, so neither are infringing on the other's trademark.
Invented Almond Joy?
Please spare us the insipid plugs for Almond Joy's! Mounds are infinitely better! Mounds forever!!
That all depends. Becaaauuuuussseeeee...
Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't.
The third answer is "None, because oranges have no doors."
Of course, the question to that answer is: "If a ship sank in the ocean, how many pizzas could you fit into a doghouse?"
Actually, the answer to that one is "18, because bananas can't moonwalk."
That's weird; with Windows, I have to waste all kinds of time hunting down drivers for devices, and the UI is so deficient I can't get much work done because there's no virtual desktops to separate my activities into, and the one workspace gets so cluttered with dozens of open windows.
As someone who has gone from Windows to Linux and now uses both equally for various purposes, I understand the addiction of virtual desktops. In fact, when KDE went from 3.5 to 4.0 and took away the ability to have a different background image for each desktop (yes, I know, petty; but that is a quirk of mine), I ended up shopping around for a new desktop environment, eventually discovering Enlightenment.
Anyway, for Windows, if you are using ATI or nVidia video cards, the driver and utility packages for them should have a virtual desktop feature (I'm sure at least the ATI Catalyst package does. Can't remember if the nVidia package does as well.) However, even though I have both ATI and nVidia on various systems, I have become rather fond of Virtual Dimension. If you must have virtual desktops on Windows, this is definitely a good one worth looking at.
Vivienne is female. Vivian is male.
Then Ethel must have had one helluva rough time when she was growing up.
reports all coming in from all from all over the world flying saucers are attacking from mars it's a attack from mars.
Why don't we just direct them to Uranus?
I'm just hoping that the results of this experiment will provide once and for all, a definitive answer to the ages old question of:
If three astronauts are flying over the Gobi Desert in a canoe, and they crash land, how many pancakes does it take to shingle a doghouse?"
I've only been able to narrow it down to two possible answers:
Three, because ice cream has no bones.
or
Nine, because watermelons can't use night vision goggles.
And even then, I am only about 70% sure the answer is one of those. This experiment with the great big lasers could reveal a completely different answer.