The phone line works; your cordless phones don't because there's no power to the base station. Or, if you have Comcast, Vonnage, or some other VoIP based phone system, those will go out with the power. A large number of people don't have a handset that works without additional power.
The martian atmosphere is already 95% CO2. It's as warm as it's going to get. Furthermore, the martian atmosphereic pressure (at its lowest elevation) is only 3% of Earth's atmostphere (at sea level). Mars simply is not terraformable. It lacks the gravity and a magnetosphere requried to support an adequate atmosphere. You might be able to establish a colony of photosynthesizing bacteria or even some very rugged desert plants and let that run for a few millenia and see what happens. Anyone who thinks it is remotely possible to colonize Mars doesn't know shit about Mars.
Except that copyright only protects the right of first publication. There is no redress for reselling a legally obtained copy. And fair use protects your right to transcribe something to an alternate format. So, thought experiment time, if something is being freely published on the web, is there any reason that someone couldn't download it 30,000 times and then resell those copies in a printed format?
Well, you've got me beat. Best I can offer is an NT4 Server based router circa 1998. However, I don't think I added a wireless card to it until about 2001. And then ditched the whole setup for a retail router and wireless bridge shortly thereafter. Problem is, I didn't document any of this. I was just another college dropout at the time, and if I could do it, it certainly ought to qualify as obvious to "one skilled in the art." However, I don't think the USPTO has any sense of that phrase whatsoever.
I recall undertaking various networking projects aroundt that time to improve my own understanding, including work on Linux, BSD, and Solaris. Can't remember too much of what I did, but I did a lot of stuff.
Nothing more complicated than a "hello world" page is browswer-agnostic.
But it's also a pretty safe bet that it's not a true browser app (I'm not sure what that means), but will be Silverlight based. So on that front, so long as you're running a browser that supports Silverlight, you should get the exact same experiance. There may be more info in TFA, but it's down for me at the moment, so I'm just going to speculate wildly.
That's what I love about these threads. Everyone spouting off about whether a fusion or anti-matter spaceship would be better, despite the fact that neither exist. We haven't even gotten to the mean free path of space and how much damage a speck of dust would cause to the hull at 0.0001C. The one thing we all seem to agree on is that we're not getting there any time soon. Baby steps, people. Shouldn't we be sending a probe of some sort to Proxima Centauri first?
A little broad, but then again it was filed in 1995
No, that's pretty much what long distance companies were doing back in the mid 90s. Instead of the internet, they were digitizing calls through a private network, and reconstituting them on the other end. The basic idea is pretty obvious: take a call and route the long distance portion over a free network. That's the easy and obvious part. The hard part (especially in 1995) is the apparatus to digitize and reconsitute the call on the other end. What are the specifics, what makes it unique, and where is the reference invention to evaluate this against. The biggest obstacle to doing this in 1995 is that the network wasn't robust enough to handle the call. Lag times were so high that in most cases you had to buffer at least a second of audio in order to have a mostly clear conversation (that was the case in 1997, and I was, at the time, having voice chats with my girlfriend at another school).
I have a problem with that. My arrow keys only point in 4 directions. Also, the world appears to still be a flat rectangle. Is it that hard to make the game work as an actual globe with climate zones?
You'll also note from reading the article that the prices on both solar and nuclear include subsidies. The subsidies on solar are huge. Without the subsidies they estimate that the crossover point is about 9 years away. I would also note that the nuclear plants in the US are getting quite old, use technology developed in the 1970s, and I'm sure are not particularly efficient.
I did a quick search for prices on solar panels. At $.16/kwh, the most cost effective panel I could find, under optimistic conditions, had a payback of about 14 years. If you added interest at 4%, the payback is never. And that was just the panel, no install, inverter, or maintenance. Wake me up when it's cost effective to put on my roof.
The whole non-comercial clause is idiotic, at least on the internet. As long as the image can be freely downloaded by anyone, it's non-comercial use. That it's linked from another web page is entierly irrelevant. There's still the issue of attribution, and how and where that's accomplished. Ideally, the image file should contain metadata indicating this.
In physical, printed materials, I think you've got a very clear case for infringement.
Let me demonstarte: image. If/. allowed the embedding of images, I'd do that. Since I'm not actually providing the image myself, I haven't infringed anything. I don't even need to give an attribution, because again, wired is providing the image. In fact, if they wanted to be doubly vigilant, they could run a separate webserver that provides the images and attributions and not have to worry about a thing. Until they're dumb enough to run it in the print version of their magazine.
I'm here to tell you, I think this is a good idea. I like the design. See, my wife is generally quite smart. She's got BAs in chemsitry and biology and a MS in forensic science and she still can't put batteries in the WiiMote correctly. I make electronics, and if there's any way, however improbable, to hook things up wrong, my customers will find that way. If this connection works half as well as advertised, it'll be fantastic. I'm sure MS can dig up statistics about what percentage of their tech support calls are from people who put the batteries in backwards. And I'd bet that that number is high enough that someone sat down and said, "we need to find a better way of dealing with batteries".
The problem, as I see it, isn't so much in letting the officers interpret it; it's fundamentally impossible for a code of laws to describe every possible scenario. The problem is that juries are generally instructed to not interpret the law, but merely accept the government's interpretation.
Yeah, it also turns out that a lot of times you need to be able to name any arbitrary thing, be it an object, animal, person, business, concept, or whatever. I generally try not to put any unneccesary constraints on my users, other than providing an ASCII approximation, which works so far because I only have customers in North America. Also, Unicode is an invention of the devil. Addresses are equally problematic. Often times, localities and the USPS can't agree on what is correct. The locals will insist on using the name of their little suburb while the USPS wants the major city nearby because that's where the post office is. And international addresses? Fuhgetaboutit.
I, for one, remain skeptical. My wife doesn't play driving games of any sort and she's an awful driver. I don't play driving games either, and I'm about as boring of a driver as you'll find outside of rural Iowa. (I've been to rural Iowa, everyone drives exactly 3 miles under the posted speed limit.)
Can we do a controlled study on this? Subject some non-gamers to a large dose of GTA for 6 months and see how their driving changes with respect to a control group? Can we do actual science instead of bullshit stuides? Also, get off my lawn.
Ok, it's also time for an Econ 102 lesson here: increased efficiency tends to increase consumption of a resource. By increasing the efficiency of a vehicle, people are likely to find more reasons to drive it. They take more weekend road trips, live farther from work, etc. If you double the mileage, but also double the usage, there is no net savings of gasoline. There is, however, a doubling of utility, and that's a very good thing. It's also a difficult thing to model. The correlation between efficiency and consumption isn't a constant, but an awkward curve (actually, it's a 3d surface if you factor in price; you could probably find a number of other signifcant variables and extend it out to N dimensions, but I digress), which at some points has a value greater than 1, particularly over the lower ranges, but at the extremes approaches 0. So which increase in efficiency translates to a decrease in consumption? I have no idea.
.... and it's also the part of the building that's easier to cool and isn't in demand for office space. A lot of businesses put their data centers in basements. I've seen a few places that built dedicated buildings for the data center, but usually, cost dictates that they stick it where they can.
Frankly, while it will be a pain in the butt for 2 weeks, they'll get through this just fine. If they had a redundant data center, people would be whining about the waste of money and so on. There's no right answer here.
RTFA - they used a Honda 4 cylinder engine. It probably took 3 minutes to get up to 55mph. And no word on how expensive they would have been to build. I'm guessing that there are a plethora of reasons why they were never built. Remeber, Ford tried to sell a safe car back in the 60s. It didn't sell, but not because people didn't want safe cars, but because it was a really crappy car. As usual, Detroit learned the wrong lesson from that experiance.
What have ISPs done over the years? I don't know all the details, but I've got 20mbit DSL to my house and 50mbit cable to my office, both for what I feel are very reasonable prices. A dozen years ago, the best I could get was a 384k DSL connection and no cable modem option. It may not be South Korea here, but my family can watch streaming video on multiple TVs in my house. I've got more bandwidth than I know what to do with. I've got a buddy that works for the local phone company and they're rolling out FTTN about as fast as they can. What am I supposed to be complaining about? We're in this big uproar over net neutrality, only we've already got that. Other than some bigwigs testing the waters with public comments (and getting a lot of backlash), nothing appears likely to change anytime soon.
Quite the contrary, there are some areas that desparately need the patent system to continue and flourish. The medical industry in general, and the pharmaceutical industry specifically are a good example. R&D is extremely expensive and depends on the windfall of blockbuster drugs to sustain it. Drugs and medical devices are extrodinarily expensive to develop, but fairly easy to replicate. 20 years isn't that big of a price to pay.
Software and engineering in general are bad areas for patents. Rarely is anything revolutionary generated, and nearly every software patent should be obvious to one skilled in the art. Furthermore, it is a case of many people simultaneously and independantly solving the same problems, further proof that these things should fail the obiousness test. The issue then, as I see it, is simply protecting the fruits of one's labors and that is easily handled by copyright.
My biggest complaint is that the patent system seems to not merely protect the how, but also the what. My second biggest complaint is that patents are unreadable gobbledygook.
Yes, kind of. Government shouldn't micromanage. Just give the guy a lump sum or a payment schedule and let him figure out what to do with it. Unfortunately, there are just enough idiots out there who can't handle that level of freedom to wreck the system for the rest of us.
The problem is that Congress did a lousy job of writing section 602 of the copyright code. It's clear to me that the intent of the law is that this should apply to goods manufactured abroad without the consent of the copyright holder. It calls it a violation of the copyright holder's right to produce and distribute something. Except, of course, that the copyright holder has already exercised that right.
Interestingly enough, if I read it correctly, this doesn't apply to people importing things for their own personal use. So downloading music from a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize US copyrights is completely legit, as long as you don't share it with anyone.:)
I have an i3 cpu. Given the pricing, I don't expect great things from the integrated graphics, but it's certainly been capable for light to medium gaming, and as an office desktop (we're standardizing on it at work), it's fantastic. If you want to run Crysis or Dragon Age, go buy a $150 gaming card. Otherwise, as an integrated graphics package, it's all I need and much better than I'm accustomed to.
'It is almost impossible to be sent to prison for these kinds of crimes in Spain, where prison is mainly for serious crime cases,'
Do they grasp the economic impact of these botnets? There may not be any physical violence, but the spam hassels, system cleanup, and DDOS attacks create hundreads of millions of dollars in economic damages. Sure, that's distributed over millions of people, but this sort of macroscopic vandalism is, in fact, a major crime. Throw the book at 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
The phone line works; your cordless phones don't because there's no power to the base station. Or, if you have Comcast, Vonnage, or some other VoIP based phone system, those will go out with the power. A large number of people don't have a handset that works without additional power.
The martian atmosphere is already 95% CO2. It's as warm as it's going to get. Furthermore, the martian atmosphereic pressure (at its lowest elevation) is only 3% of Earth's atmostphere (at sea level). Mars simply is not terraformable. It lacks the gravity and a magnetosphere requried to support an adequate atmosphere. You might be able to establish a colony of photosynthesizing bacteria or even some very rugged desert plants and let that run for a few millenia and see what happens. Anyone who thinks it is remotely possible to colonize Mars doesn't know shit about Mars.
Except that copyright only protects the right of first publication. There is no redress for reselling a legally obtained copy. And fair use protects your right to transcribe something to an alternate format. So, thought experiment time, if something is being freely published on the web, is there any reason that someone couldn't download it 30,000 times and then resell those copies in a printed format?
Well, you've got me beat. Best I can offer is an NT4 Server based router circa 1998. However, I don't think I added a wireless card to it until about 2001. And then ditched the whole setup for a retail router and wireless bridge shortly thereafter. Problem is, I didn't document any of this. I was just another college dropout at the time, and if I could do it, it certainly ought to qualify as obvious to "one skilled in the art." However, I don't think the USPTO has any sense of that phrase whatsoever.
I recall undertaking various networking projects aroundt that time to improve my own understanding, including work on Linux, BSD, and Solaris. Can't remember too much of what I did, but I did a lot of stuff.
Nothing more complicated than a "hello world" page is browswer-agnostic.
But it's also a pretty safe bet that it's not a true browser app (I'm not sure what that means), but will be Silverlight based. So on that front, so long as you're running a browser that supports Silverlight, you should get the exact same experiance. There may be more info in TFA, but it's down for me at the moment, so I'm just going to speculate wildly.
[citation needed]
That's what I love about these threads. Everyone spouting off about whether a fusion or anti-matter spaceship would be better, despite the fact that neither exist. We haven't even gotten to the mean free path of space and how much damage a speck of dust would cause to the hull at 0.0001C. The one thing we all seem to agree on is that we're not getting there any time soon. Baby steps, people. Shouldn't we be sending a probe of some sort to Proxima Centauri first?
A little broad, but then again it was filed in 1995
No, that's pretty much what long distance companies were doing back in the mid 90s. Instead of the internet, they were digitizing calls through a private network, and reconstituting them on the other end. The basic idea is pretty obvious: take a call and route the long distance portion over a free network. That's the easy and obvious part. The hard part (especially in 1995) is the apparatus to digitize and reconsitute the call on the other end. What are the specifics, what makes it unique, and where is the reference invention to evaluate this against. The biggest obstacle to doing this in 1995 is that the network wasn't robust enough to handle the call. Lag times were so high that in most cases you had to buffer at least a second of audio in order to have a mostly clear conversation (that was the case in 1997, and I was, at the time, having voice chats with my girlfriend at another school).
I have a problem with that. My arrow keys only point in 4 directions. Also, the world appears to still be a flat rectangle. Is it that hard to make the game work as an actual globe with climate zones?
You'll also note from reading the article that the prices on both solar and nuclear include subsidies. The subsidies on solar are huge. Without the subsidies they estimate that the crossover point is about 9 years away. I would also note that the nuclear plants in the US are getting quite old, use technology developed in the 1970s, and I'm sure are not particularly efficient.
I did a quick search for prices on solar panels. At $.16/kwh, the most cost effective panel I could find, under optimistic conditions, had a payback of about 14 years. If you added interest at 4%, the payback is never. And that was just the panel, no install, inverter, or maintenance. Wake me up when it's cost effective to put on my roof.
The whole non-comercial clause is idiotic, at least on the internet. As long as the image can be freely downloaded by anyone, it's non-comercial use. That it's linked from another web page is entierly irrelevant. There's still the issue of attribution, and how and where that's accomplished. Ideally, the image file should contain metadata indicating this.
/. allowed the embedding of images, I'd do that. Since I'm not actually providing the image myself, I haven't infringed anything. I don't even need to give an attribution, because again, wired is providing the image. In fact, if they wanted to be doubly vigilant, they could run a separate webserver that provides the images and attributions and not have to worry about a thing. Until they're dumb enough to run it in the print version of their magazine.
In physical, printed materials, I think you've got a very clear case for infringement.
Let me demonstarte: image. If
I'm here to tell you, I think this is a good idea. I like the design. See, my wife is generally quite smart. She's got BAs in chemsitry and biology and a MS in forensic science and she still can't put batteries in the WiiMote correctly. I make electronics, and if there's any way, however improbable, to hook things up wrong, my customers will find that way. If this connection works half as well as advertised, it'll be fantastic. I'm sure MS can dig up statistics about what percentage of their tech support calls are from people who put the batteries in backwards. And I'd bet that that number is high enough that someone sat down and said, "we need to find a better way of dealing with batteries".
The problem, as I see it, isn't so much in letting the officers interpret it; it's fundamentally impossible for a code of laws to describe every possible scenario. The problem is that juries are generally instructed to not interpret the law, but merely accept the government's interpretation.
Yeah, it also turns out that a lot of times you need to be able to name any arbitrary thing, be it an object, animal, person, business, concept, or whatever. I generally try not to put any unneccesary constraints on my users, other than providing an ASCII approximation, which works so far because I only have customers in North America. Also, Unicode is an invention of the devil. Addresses are equally problematic. Often times, localities and the USPS can't agree on what is correct. The locals will insist on using the name of their little suburb while the USPS wants the major city nearby because that's where the post office is. And international addresses? Fuhgetaboutit.
I, for one, remain skeptical. My wife doesn't play driving games of any sort and she's an awful driver. I don't play driving games either, and I'm about as boring of a driver as you'll find outside of rural Iowa. (I've been to rural Iowa, everyone drives exactly 3 miles under the posted speed limit.)
Can we do a controlled study on this? Subject some non-gamers to a large dose of GTA for 6 months and see how their driving changes with respect to a control group? Can we do actual science instead of bullshit stuides? Also, get off my lawn.
Ok, it's also time for an Econ 102 lesson here: increased efficiency tends to increase consumption of a resource. By increasing the efficiency of a vehicle, people are likely to find more reasons to drive it. They take more weekend road trips, live farther from work, etc. If you double the mileage, but also double the usage, there is no net savings of gasoline. There is, however, a doubling of utility, and that's a very good thing. It's also a difficult thing to model. The correlation between efficiency and consumption isn't a constant, but an awkward curve (actually, it's a 3d surface if you factor in price; you could probably find a number of other signifcant variables and extend it out to N dimensions, but I digress), which at some points has a value greater than 1, particularly over the lower ranges, but at the extremes approaches 0. So which increase in efficiency translates to a decrease in consumption? I have no idea.
.... and it's also the part of the building that's easier to cool and isn't in demand for office space. A lot of businesses put their data centers in basements. I've seen a few places that built dedicated buildings for the data center, but usually, cost dictates that they stick it where they can.
Frankly, while it will be a pain in the butt for 2 weeks, they'll get through this just fine. If they had a redundant data center, people would be whining about the waste of money and so on. There's no right answer here.
RTFA - they used a Honda 4 cylinder engine. It probably took 3 minutes to get up to 55mph. And no word on how expensive they would have been to build. I'm guessing that there are a plethora of reasons why they were never built. Remeber, Ford tried to sell a safe car back in the 60s. It didn't sell, but not because people didn't want safe cars, but because it was a really crappy car. As usual, Detroit learned the wrong lesson from that experiance.
What have ISPs done over the years? I don't know all the details, but I've got 20mbit DSL to my house and 50mbit cable to my office, both for what I feel are very reasonable prices. A dozen years ago, the best I could get was a 384k DSL connection and no cable modem option. It may not be South Korea here, but my family can watch streaming video on multiple TVs in my house. I've got more bandwidth than I know what to do with. I've got a buddy that works for the local phone company and they're rolling out FTTN about as fast as they can. What am I supposed to be complaining about? We're in this big uproar over net neutrality, only we've already got that. Other than some bigwigs testing the waters with public comments (and getting a lot of backlash), nothing appears likely to change anytime soon.
Quite the contrary, there are some areas that desparately need the patent system to continue and flourish. The medical industry in general, and the pharmaceutical industry specifically are a good example. R&D is extremely expensive and depends on the windfall of blockbuster drugs to sustain it. Drugs and medical devices are extrodinarily expensive to develop, but fairly easy to replicate. 20 years isn't that big of a price to pay.
Software and engineering in general are bad areas for patents. Rarely is anything revolutionary generated, and nearly every software patent should be obvious to one skilled in the art. Furthermore, it is a case of many people simultaneously and independantly solving the same problems, further proof that these things should fail the obiousness test. The issue then, as I see it, is simply protecting the fruits of one's labors and that is easily handled by copyright.
My biggest complaint is that the patent system seems to not merely protect the how, but also the what. My second biggest complaint is that patents are unreadable gobbledygook.
Yes, kind of. Government shouldn't micromanage. Just give the guy a lump sum or a payment schedule and let him figure out what to do with it. Unfortunately, there are just enough idiots out there who can't handle that level of freedom to wreck the system for the rest of us.
The problem is that Congress did a lousy job of writing section 602 of the copyright code. It's clear to me that the intent of the law is that this should apply to goods manufactured abroad without the consent of the copyright holder. It calls it a violation of the copyright holder's right to produce and distribute something. Except, of course, that the copyright holder has already exercised that right.
:)
Interestingly enough, if I read it correctly, this doesn't apply to people importing things for their own personal use. So downloading music from a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize US copyrights is completely legit, as long as you don't share it with anyone.
I have an i3 cpu. Given the pricing, I don't expect great things from the integrated graphics, but it's certainly been capable for light to medium gaming, and as an office desktop (we're standardizing on it at work), it's fantastic. If you want to run Crysis or Dragon Age, go buy a $150 gaming card. Otherwise, as an integrated graphics package, it's all I need and much better than I'm accustomed to.
It's still more efficient than producing Ethanol, so what's your beef?
'It is almost impossible to be sent to prison for these kinds of crimes in Spain, where prison is mainly for serious crime cases,'
Do they grasp the economic impact of these botnets? There may not be any physical violence, but the spam hassels, system cleanup, and DDOS attacks create hundreads of millions of dollars in economic damages. Sure, that's distributed over millions of people, but this sort of macroscopic vandalism is, in fact, a major crime. Throw the book at 'em.
Try using a DDR dance mat. Playing Super Mario Bros on the Wii with one I made it to level 1-4. Then I decided that was really dumb.