I work at a retailer that sells several different kinds of TVs and I've found that the average consumer that I'm dealing with is really in the dark about current TV technology and tends to follow the notion that more expensive = better. I found myself having to really educate people who come in since they often have no idea that LCD is diffrent from flat CRTs, or plasmas, or HDTV. Most consumers really have very little to go on, and the battles between manufacturers on what will be the next standard really isn't helping.
I still think that this is doomed to failure as the average person doesn't want to be seen in their natural state. I just know that I'd be getting all kinds of unwanted calls from guys who stare at my source code rather than attempt communication.
I'm no aviator, so I don't know why the team has to slog it there on foot. Why can't they simply drop in with a helicopter? I'm sure there's a simple reason I'm overlooking.
Since dogs have a sense of smell that is somewhere between 10k and 100k times better than our own, could you define your smell as significantly different than a pattented or trademarked smell based upon a dog's ability to tell the difference? I mean, couldn't you train a dog to recognize the difference between what us humans would regard as identical smells?
This raises the question - do our own limited senses define what is and isn't patent infringement, or is the truth more concrete? .
I fear looking at the link just in case there is something about the notorious kitten modding community I keep hearing about. If you mod your kitten, don't you violate the warranty?
Portland relies on hydro power rather than dirty power. Isn't it odd that a region that sells its excess kilowatts to other regions is one of the few places in the US where green housing is seriously considered?
Why don't the regions of the US that rely heavily on coal or nucler power have the same impitus for cleaner alternatives?
I took my 65 year old mother and my 4 year old nephew to see Spirited away, and though some parts were a little scary for my nephew, we all loved this movie. Since then I've loaned my mother several other Studio Ghibli movies so she can show them to her grandchildren when they visit. They're a whole lot better than the 90 minute long commercials that Disney craps out every year.
My uncle was a classic tech scrounger, and had all manner of things that used tubes and early transistors. I fondly remember when he once showed me one of his prized posessions, a nixie tube calculator. It was maybe 25x25cm and the warm glow of the numbers was much friendlier than the simple black on grey of the LCDs I grew up with.
I could tell that even then it was something special by the way he treated it and obviously treasured it. It wasn't until I was older that I learned to appreciate the tech of yesteryear and the creativity and genius of those who created so much with the limited tools they had at the time.
/. readers don't need unions
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 2
But remember, for each one of us sitting comfortably in our cubes or dorm rooms there are 20 people working in a fab actually making the chips to run our computers. I'm not talking about engineers, I'm talking about the grunt-level fab operator actually running the equipment. Some companies treat this rank and file quite well, most treat them as disposable. Do they need to unionize? Possibly.
I know that in the short history of modern chipmaking there have been numerous cases of people being 'asked' to work more than their usual 12 hour shifts, or being routinely exposed to hazardous chemicals, or other abuses. I'm willing to bet the vast majority of/. readers have degrees or are working towards them. It is easy to forget that the majority of the nation doesn't have a four year degree and the earning potential that goes along with one and the mobility that goes along with their earning potential./. readers, including myself, don't need unions, but there are a lot of people who do. Union workers teach our children, police our streets, deliver our Amazon.com orders, and build our cars. America has lost touch with the real reason unions exist, including the unions. But thats no reason to say that they aren't necessary.
I'm really curious as to what people think are the reasons why we have had so many bad patents. I can't immagine that there is one point source, but rather a range of reasons. Is it corruption within the system, an incompetent system? How much of this is due to problems in government, or greed of industry? Where can we make changes to improve things? Is the whole concept of IP flawed to begin with, or does patenting non-physical concepts have a place in the information age? Is there a good informational resource that would answer some of these questions in a manner accessible to a legal and technical novice like myself?
A Slashdot team would be brilliant. We would have to use the moderation system to select team members. That way we could avoid having a team that would keep saying 'first post!' every time the camera crew came around.
A team of three should probably include an 'informative' an 'interesting' and a 'funny' for good measure.
Even if we get Gnutella to a point where even those folks on dial up modems can participate in the grand link-up, I'm a bit worried about what the broadband ISP monopolies (@home anyone?) will do to dissuade their customers from using such a product. Most broadband providers prohibit their users from running 'servers'.
Now you know what a server is, and I know what a server is, but my ISP seems to have a very broad definition of what a server is, and they seem to change it to suit their needs. I think that it will be used as a very unsubtle smackdown for anything that threattens to use all the bandwidth I pay for.
The media industry will whine about a functional Gnutella, and the media providers will be happy to try a ham-handed solution.
just my.02$
Now that King George II has been crowned, the US will see a rollback of environmental policies that were already insufficient.
But hey, without restrictions we'll be using petrolium products faster. If we time things right, maybe we can run out of oil before doing irreovacable damage to the earth's atmosphere.
Since the net-enabled multiplayer games seem to be becomming the norm for most RPG and strategy types of games, do you think that there will ever be away to make a game completely safe?
For example: Neverwinter Nights will be using two methods of character storage: one will be to store characters locally on the 'DMs' computer (i.e. the computer that is hosting the game, since in NWN anybody can set up a server), the other will be the official 'character vault' where people check out their characters and take them to whatever server they're playing before checking them back in.
It would seem that between these two storage methods, the kind of abuse that is plaguing Diablo II would have a much reduced affect since people's characters would be distributed over the entire net.
If you haven't been keeping up with NWN and their character vault concept, check out
http://www.planetneverwinter.com
Every time I hear about computer seizures by law enforcement agencies, a cold chill runs down my spine. The common perspective seems to be that a computer is an amalgam of files simply like a filing cabinet might be, and because of this, the FBI or whoever can simply cart it off for whatever reason.
I don't know about you, but my computer is so much more than an amalgam of files to me. If I were saving everything in hardcopy, I wouldn't be putting it all in one cabinet. The letters to familiy and friends would go in one box, the tax forms would be stored in another, and my games would be in the toybox.
Seizing a computer, in my opinion, is the equivalent of someone seizing my entire house and everything in it, simply because they think that one of my boxes contains something incriminating. If its the data that is needed, why not simply make a hard disk image? Police snap photos to use as evidence, so why is it necessary to have both the data and the simple hardware shell that it happens to be located in?
In Oregon a sales tax has been voted down again and again, and I am surprised that there are only a couple of other states that don't have one. If I go to California, all I have to do is to prove my Oregon residency to avoid sales tax (actually its pretty hard since most merchants don't want to screw with the paperwork). Does anyone know if this provision is being made?
Hell, even if I order from a catalogue, I don't have to pay sales tax, so why should internet be any different?
They determined a single gecko about two inches in length is capable of holding onto about 90 pounds -- about the weight of two small children. Hide your children or else the geckos will steal them in the dark of night!!! Woe be to the tots who are hoisted aloft and spirited away by the deadly talons of the common gecko!
Knowing the US government's penchant for doing things in the most expensive way possible, it is not inconcievable that other nations could be using numbers stations as a very cheap way to tie up resources at US intelligence agencies. Think about it - supercomputers are spendy, crypto experts are spendy, coming up with a random bunch of numbers and broadcasting them over shortwave is incredibly cheap. So, I can immagine that for every dollar Cuba spends on numbers broadcasts, the US spends 1000 or even 10,000 times that to track and (try to?) decode the transmitions. Sure, you and I think, "Why bother trying to decode these if they are one-use keys?" But remember, this is the US 'intelligence' community that have no accountability for their budgets.
But then I realized, wait a minute... Stevie makes a boatload of cash doing the programming she loves, and she's not some dumb bimbo hoping that somehow nude modeling will get her into an acting career. I don't think that I would ever pose nude (even if I had her measurements) but I realize I shouldn't bag on her for her choice.
Many people on this board are involved in the software end of things and so may not realize that the people who actually do the grunt work in the fabs are paid rather poorly. In the 1950's, '60's and early 70's, the American auto industry was booming, and a person could drop out of high school and in a few years of working for Ford, GM, Studebaker, etc. he could be making a wage that would support a stay at home wife, children, mortgage, and a car of his own. Today's Fab employees don't have the benefit of a union to represent them. Now granted, some benefits that unions once fought for are standard (such as health insurance), but the wages are not high enough for a household with a single working parent to achieve any kind of financial security. All this without a pension. The only way to achieve a living wage in the semiconductor industry is to either stay at the same job excessively long (10+ years) or to advance into some kind of engineering. The social darwinists that sometimes appear on this board will probably say that anyone who can't get out of being a fab lackey after a couple of years doesn't deserve better. But I look into my own fab and see many single mothers working the night shift so they can be home during the day because they can't afford child care. They don't have time to finish the 2 year EE degree that would get them a higher paying job maintaining the equipment. The semiconductor industry that we so often hold up as a great symbol of improvement is built on the backs of these kind of people.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at a retailer that sells several different kinds of TVs and I've found that the average consumer that I'm dealing with is really in the dark about current TV technology and tends to follow the notion that more expensive = better.
I found myself having to really educate people who come in since they often have no idea that LCD is diffrent from flat CRTs, or plasmas, or HDTV. Most consumers really have very little to go on, and the battles between manufacturers on what will be the next standard really isn't helping.
Could it be because Mars does not have floating tectonic plates as does earth? I'm no vulcanologist but I am curious.
Does this spacesuit make me look fat? I mean, seriously? Space travel always makes me feel soooooo bloated.
I still think that this is doomed to failure as the average person doesn't want to be seen in their natural state. I just know that I'd be getting all kinds of unwanted calls from guys who stare at my source code rather than attempt communication.
How long before someone in the US gov't proposes this kind of system to help control the southern border? :)
I'm no aviator, so I don't know why the team has to slog it there on foot. Why can't they simply drop in with a helicopter? I'm sure there's a simple reason I'm overlooking.
Since dogs have a sense of smell that is somewhere between 10k and 100k times better than our own, could you define your smell as significantly different than a pattented or trademarked smell based upon a dog's ability to tell the difference? I mean, couldn't you train a dog to recognize the difference between what us humans would regard as identical smells?
This raises the question - do our own limited senses define what is and isn't patent infringement, or is the truth more concrete?
.
Wasn't it just a few years back that people who played games all day and neglected the rest of their lives were called 'lazy'?
I'm so glad that we now have a label for this kind of behaviour that helps show that it isn't their fault.
.
I fear looking at the link just in case there is something about the notorious kitten modding community I keep hearing about. If you mod your kitten, don't you violate the warranty?
'
Portland relies on hydro power rather than dirty power. Isn't it odd that a region that sells its excess kilowatts to other regions is one of the few places in the US where green housing is seriously considered?
Why don't the regions of the US that rely heavily on coal or nucler power have the same impitus for cleaner alternatives?
I took my 65 year old mother and my 4 year old nephew to see Spirited away, and though some parts were a little scary for my nephew, we all loved this movie. Since then I've loaned my mother several other Studio Ghibli movies so she can show them to her grandchildren when they visit. They're a whole lot better than the 90 minute long commercials that Disney craps out every year.
My uncle was a classic tech scrounger, and had all manner of things that used tubes and early transistors. I fondly remember when he once showed me one of his prized posessions, a nixie tube calculator. It was maybe 25x25cm and the warm glow of the numbers was much friendlier than the simple black on grey of the LCDs I grew up with.
I could tell that even then it was something special by the way he treated it and obviously treasured it. It wasn't until I was older that I learned to appreciate the tech of yesteryear and the creativity and genius of those who created so much with the limited tools they had at the time.
But remember, for each one of us sitting comfortably in our cubes or dorm rooms there are 20 people working in a fab actually making the chips to run our computers. I'm not talking about engineers, I'm talking about the grunt-level fab operator actually running the equipment. Some companies treat this rank and file quite well, most treat them as disposable. Do they need to unionize? Possibly. /. readers have degrees or are working towards them. It is easy to forget that the majority of the nation doesn't have a four year degree and the earning potential that goes along with one and the mobility that goes along with their earning potential. /. readers, including myself, don't need unions, but there are a lot of people who do.
I know that in the short history of modern chipmaking there have been numerous cases of people being 'asked' to work more than their usual 12 hour shifts, or being routinely exposed to hazardous chemicals, or other abuses.
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of
Union workers teach our children, police our streets, deliver our Amazon.com orders, and build our cars. America has lost touch with the real reason unions exist, including the unions. But thats no reason to say that they aren't necessary.
These are breasts; this is source code.
I'm really curious as to what people think are the reasons why we have had so many bad patents.
I can't immagine that there is one point source, but rather a range of reasons.
Is it corruption within the system, an incompetent system?
How much of this is due to problems in government, or greed of industry?
Where can we make changes to improve things?
Is the whole concept of IP flawed to begin with, or does patenting non-physical concepts have a place in the information age?
Is there a good informational resource that would answer some of these questions in a manner accessible to a legal and technical novice like myself?
These are breasts; this is source code.
A Slashdot team would be brilliant. We would have to use the moderation system to select team members. That way we could avoid having a team that would keep saying 'first post!' every time the camera crew came around.
A team of three should probably include an 'informative' an 'interesting' and a 'funny' for good measure.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Even if we get Gnutella to a point where even those folks on dial up modems can participate in the grand link-up, I'm a bit worried about what the broadband ISP monopolies (@home anyone?) will do to dissuade their customers from using such a product. Most broadband providers prohibit their users from running 'servers'. .02$
Now you know what a server is, and I know what a server is, but my ISP seems to have a very broad definition of what a server is, and they seem to change it to suit their needs. I think that it will be used as a very unsubtle smackdown for anything that threattens to use all the bandwidth I pay for.
The media industry will whine about a functional Gnutella, and the media providers will be happy to try a ham-handed solution.
just my
These are breasts; this is source code.
Now that King George II has been crowned, the US will see a rollback of environmental policies that were already insufficient. But hey, without restrictions we'll be using petrolium products faster. If we time things right, maybe we can run out of oil before doing irreovacable damage to the earth's atmosphere.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Since the net-enabled multiplayer games seem to be becomming the norm for most RPG and strategy types of games, do you think that there will ever be away to make a game completely safe? For example: Neverwinter Nights will be using two methods of character storage: one will be to store characters locally on the 'DMs' computer (i.e. the computer that is hosting the game, since in NWN anybody can set up a server), the other will be the official 'character vault' where people check out their characters and take them to whatever server they're playing before checking them back in. It would seem that between these two storage methods, the kind of abuse that is plaguing Diablo II would have a much reduced affect since people's characters would be distributed over the entire net. If you haven't been keeping up with NWN and their character vault concept, check out http://www.planetneverwinter.com
Every time I hear about computer seizures by law enforcement agencies, a cold chill runs down my spine. The common perspective seems to be that a computer is an amalgam of files simply like a filing cabinet might be, and because of this, the FBI or whoever can simply cart it off for whatever reason. I don't know about you, but my computer is so much more than an amalgam of files to me. If I were saving everything in hardcopy, I wouldn't be putting it all in one cabinet. The letters to familiy and friends would go in one box, the tax forms would be stored in another, and my games would be in the toybox. Seizing a computer, in my opinion, is the equivalent of someone seizing my entire house and everything in it, simply because they think that one of my boxes contains something incriminating. If its the data that is needed, why not simply make a hard disk image? Police snap photos to use as evidence, so why is it necessary to have both the data and the simple hardware shell that it happens to be located in?
In Oregon a sales tax has been voted down again and again, and I am surprised that there are only a couple of other states that don't have one. If I go to California, all I have to do is to prove my Oregon residency to avoid sales tax (actually its pretty hard since most merchants don't want to screw with the paperwork). Does anyone know if this provision is being made? Hell, even if I order from a catalogue, I don't have to pay sales tax, so why should internet be any different?
They determined a single gecko about two inches in length is capable of holding onto about 90 pounds -- about the weight of two small children.
Hide your children or else the geckos will steal them in the dark of night!!! Woe be to the tots who are hoisted aloft and spirited away by the deadly talons of the common gecko!
Knowing the US government's penchant for doing things in the most expensive way possible, it is not inconcievable that other nations could be using numbers stations as a very cheap way to tie up resources at US intelligence agencies. Think about it - supercomputers are spendy, crypto experts are spendy, coming up with a random bunch of numbers and broadcasting them over shortwave is incredibly cheap. So, I can immagine that for every dollar Cuba spends on numbers broadcasts, the US spends 1000 or even 10,000 times that to track and (try to?) decode the transmitions. Sure, you and I think, "Why bother trying to decode these if they are one-use keys?" But remember, this is the US 'intelligence' community that have no accountability for their budgets.
Why should the boys have all the fun!!! I already have a substantial collection of CowboyNeal pinups already, though.
But then I realized, wait a minute... Stevie makes a boatload of cash doing the programming she loves, and she's not some dumb bimbo hoping that somehow nude modeling will get her into an acting career. I don't think that I would ever pose nude (even if I had her measurements) but I realize I shouldn't bag on her for her choice.
Many people on this board are involved in the software end of things and so may not realize that the people who actually do the grunt work in the fabs are paid rather poorly. In the 1950's, '60's and early 70's, the American auto industry was booming, and a person could drop out of high school and in a few years of working for Ford, GM, Studebaker, etc. he could be making a wage that would support a stay at home wife, children, mortgage, and a car of his own. Today's Fab employees don't have the benefit of a union to represent them. Now granted, some benefits that unions once fought for are standard (such as health insurance), but the wages are not high enough for a household with a single working parent to achieve any kind of financial security. All this without a pension. The only way to achieve a living wage in the semiconductor industry is to either stay at the same job excessively long (10+ years) or to advance into some kind of engineering. The social darwinists that sometimes appear on this board will probably say that anyone who can't get out of being a fab lackey after a couple of years doesn't deserve better. But I look into my own fab and see many single mothers working the night shift so they can be home during the day because they can't afford child care. They don't have time to finish the 2 year EE degree that would get them a higher paying job maintaining the equipment. The semiconductor industry that we so often hold up as a great symbol of improvement is built on the backs of these kind of people.