From Business Week: Old Economy companies face similar trouble. Apparel maker VF Corp., for instance, regularly gets letters complaining it has infringed bra patents. "In the old days you would think of these things as the tinkering of a technician who knew his way around women's apparel...and wouldn't even think about getting a patent on it," says Peter Sullivan, the attorney who filed the brief in the KSR case on behalf of VF and others. "How many bra patents can you possibly have?"
...but at least these folks are trying. Will it catch on? Who knows. But those of us in the USA could take a page from this book. There are lots of complaints that you can't get a voice in the system thanks to the Republicans and Democrats, but last I checked people in this country were allowed to hold contrary opinions to the major parties. And their are literally hundreds of parties in this country, though most represent small minorities of people.
All it would take is a grass roots campaign, an issue that people of many stripes could believe in and would vote for. Start with the Internet, work on people, gather funds, and make noise. Look at well Howard Dean did gathering support (until the media crucified him) on the Internet, and Al Gore to a lesser extent. It would take time, organization, dedication, and commitment, but ti could work. What's the worst that happens?
From The Inquirer: Its massage is that corporations are engaging in racketeering in the developing world and a few power hungry individuals and greedy corporate entities are infringing on privacy and integrity.
Got to hand it to the Swedes, combining political advocacy with pirates and massages.
Is there some kind of science behind it, or is it just guesswork?
Yes there is science behind it, but it's far too hard to understand. That flash wouldn't have been caused by aliens, or the secret NASA Moonbase, or any of the other possible.... [sounds of gunfire]
Pay no attention to the previous paragraph. We're with the government and there is no cover-up...
Forget MP3s/min; that's only really useful for broadband connections. For mobile phones it should be Ringtones/min, although I'm not sure of the conversion factor. But just imagine having te ability to almost instantaneously download the most irritating and annoying rings possible -- brilliant! What will Samsung think of next!
Somebody call me when they invent a mobile phone with a built-in plasma cannon.
Grotesquely-attired monster struggles in ingenious, home-made trap.
Fred: "Now let's see who's really trying to control the Internet!"
Fred pulls off mask.
Velma: Jinkies!
Shaggy: Zoinks!
Daphne: Why it's...
All (in unison): Jack Thompson!
Thompson: I have to save the world from itself! Too much garbage on the Internet, perverting the minds of our children! And I'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids!
I don't think the article is stating that people will NEVER get into the idea of cars that drive and monitor themselves... just that it will take quite some time, even with the tech getting there quickly, for people to adapt.
Of course they will eventually, unless the idea that the liability is too great stifles creation. Let's face it -- if we'd wanted electric cars to become reality and put our best efforts into it 30 years ago, we would have them in abundance right now. But "Big Oil" and "Big Auto" have spent a lot of time stifiling the idea, afraid to lose their grip on consumers.
It's the Frankenstein Complex at work. And then here will come the lawyers, who will trot into court the first time an automated car kills someone, to claim they are a danger and a menace to society. Tablois journalism will spread the word and people will begin demanding so many safeguards that the cost of vehicles will soar, making them unaffordable to most.
It's not just a question of when these things will exist, but what we can do to ensure, how we can anticipate the potential social problems caused by them, and heading off those interests that would seek to stifle them. The only bright spot is that since DARPA was behind the competition, you know the military will be hot for the technology and they will insist on it being robust before they deploy it actively.
I can't understand someone who blindly puts faith in other's technology instead of wanting any kind of responsibility for their choices for themselves.
I'm not putting blind faith into the technology. More than that, I want to put my ability into the technology. I want to be one of the guys who writes the programs that make the car safer. I want to be the one to accept responsibility when it doesn't work and lives are still lost. And I want others to join the cause, programmers with enough social coscience to say "hey, this is good and useful and demands our best effort."
It's easy to sit there and piss on the bricks and claim that only by wrapping your hands around the steering wheel can you take responsibility for what happens. We all take responsibility when we don't step up to the plate and use our talents to improve things. The robotic car would be an improvement, and if every so often people were killed, at least it wouldn't be an everyday occurrence. I think you don't give the general populace enough credit and the fact that you'd prefer to keep feeding people into the maw of unsafe drivers shows a tremendous lack of imagination and forethought.
That phenomenom exists merely as the continued foreshadowing of stupidification of verbalized communication caused by the fact that human beings (and alternate intelligent, rights-bearing creatures) would front their preferences towards behaving as uni-syllable-ized moving corpses as opposed to learning pronunciation and extremely long, multisyllable words that other people only use because they think it makes them seem intelligent.
From Wired: The resulting liability issues are a major hurdle. If a robotically driven car gets in an accident, who is to blame? If a software bug causes a car to swerve off the road, should the programmer be sued, or the manufacturer? Or is the accident victim at fault for accepting the driving decisions of the onboard computer? Would Ford or GM be to blame for selling a "faulty" product, even if, in the larger view, that product reduced traffic deaths by tens of thousands?
It figures. A technological advance that would cut the number of traffic deaths by about 95% by taking drunks and maniacs out from behind the wheel, and preventing 93 year-old men with dementia from killing people, will be bogged down by liability issues should the robot kill someone. C'mon people! Even the best system will not prevent a fluke accident or yes, even a bit of bad code, from killing someone, but weight that against the number of road-rage infested idiots on the road now, driving at 100+ mph, swerving in and out of traffic, and I think libility needs to be the furthest thing from anyone's mind.
The two combined make "vlog" possibly the most unpronouncable word ever.
It's just the continuation of the dumbing down of language because people would rather be monosyllabic zombies than learn pronunciation and vocabulary. Why did it need to be "blog?" Was "web log" too hard to say? And "vlog?" Let's not go there. I won't even start on "podcast"...
A minority of blogs I find actually noteworthy, very few of them on non-commecial sites. Of course I don't consider them "blogs"; they're opinion pieces more than anything. But even the ones I like, I would hate to have to watch. Let's face it, not everyone's that pretty to look at.
I think it's pointless to make on-line versions of newspapers mirror their printed counterparts. As was said, given the variablitlity in the technologies, platforms, and browsers, there can be no imposition of style that will work on all devices and in all markets. It's the same as this relentless drive to make a Linux desktop look like Windows; you can copy the look and feel, but you chain yourself to a set of requirements that are increasingly hard to maintian.
What is needed is perhaps some new newsreading device/software, specially designed with newspapers (and perhaps TV news) in mind, to deliver news content. An upgraded version of RSS, accessible through the news-browser, which being a single-purpose entity, could be stripped of all the crap that tends to clog regular browsers and would provide standardized, contextualized formatting. Add in some CSS-like directives to allow news outlets to customize their output and you're all set.
The one thing I want to see go is online registration. I don't have to register with anyone to buy my paper at the newsstand.
From the aricle: There are a number of things preventing Windows users from moving en masse to Linux. While the naming of applications is probably not a make-or-break issue when considering a new operating system, it is a legitimate consideration. This is the case because many of the names chosen for Linux programs are downright confusing, and the last thing desktop Linux needs right now is to make the transition from Windows or the acquisition of new users any harder than it has to be.
Windows users are not switching to Linux because they cannot for the most part open a catalog and buy a Linux-loaded machine. MS still dominates the home PC market. Also, Linux is used more as server software than personal software and the uninformaed tend to look at it only in those terms. And frankly, perhaps it's for the best that Linux not try to follow Windows in any fashion. If someone wants to make a GUI interface to Linux, fine, but to build it along the lines of the current Windows model is asking for trouble. Linux should be breaking new ground, not following along with the crowd.
From MarketWatch: Opera Software trades on the Oslo Stock Exchange for around 21 Norwegian Kroner or about $3 a share. Microsoft could buy the whole company for less than $400 million.
Now if the Norwegians were smart, they'd put Opera up on eBay, to drive up the price. I can see MS and Firefox duking it out, and then Google comes along and snatches it away from both of them at the last second!
You have been reported to the Dept of Homeland Security for scurrilous and subversive talk about the Patriot Act. Turn yourself in. We know where you live.
Brought to you by the Government of the United States, keeping it's citizens safe from democracy for over 200 years.
...reciprocity, the legal tenet that says each state, being part of the United States, is obliged to respect the rights and laws espoused by the other states in The Republic. Which is why your driver's license is valid in all 50 states and the territories. This includes taxation for the purposes of interstate commerce - exemptions can (and have been) made in the past, but it requires the agreement of all 50 states. And it is also possible to recoup these sales taxes in certain cases.
Slashdot Mirror
From Business Week: Old Economy companies face similar trouble. Apparel maker VF Corp., for instance, regularly gets letters complaining it has infringed bra patents. "In the old days you would think of these things as the tinkering of a technician who knew his way around women's apparel...and wouldn't even think about getting a patent on it," says Peter Sullivan, the attorney who filed the brief in the KSR case on behalf of VF and others. "How many bra patents can you possibly have?"
That says it all.
I would, if it were in fact to be taken literally. It's not. It's a metaphor. Thank you for playing our game.
...but at least these folks are trying. Will it catch on? Who knows. But those of us in the USA could take a page from this book. There are lots of complaints that you can't get a voice in the system thanks to the Republicans and Democrats, but last I checked people in this country were allowed to hold contrary opinions to the major parties. And their are literally hundreds of parties in this country, though most represent small minorities of people.
All it would take is a grass roots campaign, an issue that people of many stripes could believe in and would vote for. Start with the Internet, work on people, gather funds, and make noise. Look at well Howard Dean did gathering support (until the media crucified him) on the Internet, and Al Gore to a lesser extent. It would take time, organization, dedication, and commitment, but ti could work. What's the worst that happens?
From The Inquirer: Its massage is that corporations are engaging in racketeering in the developing world and a few power hungry individuals and greedy corporate entities are infringing on privacy and integrity.
Got to hand it to the Swedes, combining political advocacy with pirates and massages.
Yes there is science behind it, but it's far too hard to understand. That flash wouldn't have been caused by aliens, or the secret NASA Moonbase, or any of the other possible.... [sounds of gunfire]
Pay no attention to the previous paragraph. We're with the government and there is no cover-up...
Forget MP3s/min; that's only really useful for broadband connections. For mobile phones it should be Ringtones/min, although I'm not sure of the conversion factor. But just imagine having te ability to almost instantaneously download the most irritating and annoying rings possible -- brilliant! What will Samsung think of next!
Somebody call me when they invent a mobile phone with a built-in plasma cannon.
Grotesquely-attired monster struggles in ingenious, home-made trap.
Fred: "Now let's see who's really trying to control the Internet!"
Fred pulls off mask.
Velma: Jinkies!
Shaggy: Zoinks!
Daphne: Why it's...
All (in unison): Jack Thompson!
Thompson: I have to save the world from itself! Too much garbage on the Internet, perverting the minds of our children! And I'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Believe it or not, the general populace is pretty dumb and high proportion of them use AOL.
Of course they will eventually, unless the idea that the liability is too great stifles creation. Let's face it -- if we'd wanted electric cars to become reality and put our best efforts into it 30 years ago, we would have them in abundance right now. But "Big Oil" and "Big Auto" have spent a lot of time stifiling the idea, afraid to lose their grip on consumers.
It's the Frankenstein Complex at work. And then here will come the lawyers, who will trot into court the first time an automated car kills someone, to claim they are a danger and a menace to society. Tablois journalism will spread the word and people will begin demanding so many safeguards that the cost of vehicles will soar, making them unaffordable to most.
It's not just a question of when these things will exist, but what we can do to ensure, how we can anticipate the potential social problems caused by them, and heading off those interests that would seek to stifle them. The only bright spot is that since DARPA was behind the competition, you know the military will be hot for the technology and they will insist on it being robust before they deploy it actively.
I'm not putting blind faith into the technology. More than that, I want to put my ability into the technology. I want to be one of the guys who writes the programs that make the car safer. I want to be the one to accept responsibility when it doesn't work and lives are still lost. And I want others to join the cause, programmers with enough social coscience to say "hey, this is good and useful and demands our best effort."
It's easy to sit there and piss on the bricks and claim that only by wrapping your hands around the steering wheel can you take responsibility for what happens. We all take responsibility when we don't step up to the plate and use our talents to improve things. The robotic car would be an improvement, and if every so often people were killed, at least it wouldn't be an everyday occurrence. I think you don't give the general populace enough credit and the fact that you'd prefer to keep feeding people into the maw of unsafe drivers shows a tremendous lack of imagination and forethought.
Thts nt wh i mnt at ll.
From Wired: The resulting liability issues are a major hurdle. If a robotically driven car gets in an accident, who is to blame? If a software bug causes a car to swerve off the road, should the programmer be sued, or the manufacturer? Or is the accident victim at fault for accepting the driving decisions of the onboard computer? Would Ford or GM be to blame for selling a "faulty" product, even if, in the larger view, that product reduced traffic deaths by tens of thousands?
It figures. A technological advance that would cut the number of traffic deaths by about 95% by taking drunks and maniacs out from behind the wheel, and preventing 93 year-old men with dementia from killing people, will be bogged down by liability issues should the robot kill someone. C'mon people! Even the best system will not prevent a fluke accident or yes, even a bit of bad code, from killing someone, but weight that against the number of road-rage infested idiots on the road now, driving at 100+ mph, swerving in and out of traffic, and I think libility needs to be the furthest thing from anyone's mind.
Just don't let Microsoft write the software.
It's just the continuation of the dumbing down of language because people would rather be monosyllabic zombies than learn pronunciation and vocabulary. Why did it need to be "blog?" Was "web log" too hard to say? And "vlog?" Let's not go there. I won't even start on "podcast"...
A minority of blogs I find actually noteworthy, very few of them on non-commecial sites. Of course I don't consider them "blogs"; they're opinion pieces more than anything. But even the ones I like, I would hate to have to watch. Let's face it, not everyone's that pretty to look at.
I can see the old joke resurrected now: "He has a face made for HTML".
I think it's pointless to make on-line versions of newspapers mirror their printed counterparts. As was said, given the variablitlity in the technologies, platforms, and browsers, there can be no imposition of style that will work on all devices and in all markets. It's the same as this relentless drive to make a Linux desktop look like Windows; you can copy the look and feel, but you chain yourself to a set of requirements that are increasingly hard to maintian.
What is needed is perhaps some new newsreading device/software, specially designed with newspapers (and perhaps TV news) in mind, to deliver news content. An upgraded version of RSS, accessible through the news-browser, which being a single-purpose entity, could be stripped of all the crap that tends to clog regular browsers and would provide standardized, contextualized formatting. Add in some CSS-like directives to allow news outlets to customize their output and you're all set.
The one thing I want to see go is online registration. I don't have to register with anyone to buy my paper at the newsstand.
From the aricle: There are a number of things preventing Windows users from moving en masse to Linux. While the naming of applications is probably not a make-or-break issue when considering a new operating system, it is a legitimate consideration. This is the case because many of the names chosen for Linux programs are downright confusing, and the last thing desktop Linux needs right now is to make the transition from Windows or the acquisition of new users any harder than it has to be.
Windows users are not switching to Linux because they cannot for the most part open a catalog and buy a Linux-loaded machine. MS still dominates the home PC market. Also, Linux is used more as server software than personal software and the uninformaed tend to look at it only in those terms. And frankly, perhaps it's for the best that Linux not try to follow Windows in any fashion. If someone wants to make a GUI interface to Linux, fine, but to build it along the lines of the current Windows model is asking for trouble. Linux should be breaking new ground, not following along with the crowd.
From MarketWatch: Opera Software trades on the Oslo Stock Exchange for around 21 Norwegian Kroner or about $3 a share. Microsoft could buy the whole company for less than $400 million.
Now if the Norwegians were smart, they'd put Opera up on eBay, to drive up the price. I can see MS and Firefox duking it out, and then Google comes along and snatches it away from both of them at the last second!
You have been reported to the Dept of Homeland Security for scurrilous and subversive talk about the Patriot Act. Turn yourself in. We know where you live.
Brought to you by the Government of the United States, keeping it's citizens safe from democracy for over 200 years.
Ok, faux pas, part deux. Never post to /. with a fever.
Faux pas on my previous post; the Yahoo article has it wrong, but the Saes Tax Clearinghouse has it as Oregon and not Washington.
...reciprocity, the legal tenet that says each state, being part of the United States, is obliged to respect the rights and laws espoused by the other states in The Republic. Which is why your driver's license is valid in all 50 states and the territories. This includes taxation for the purposes of interstate commerce - exemptions can (and have been) made in the past, but it requires the agreement of all 50 states. And it is also possible to recoup these sales taxes in certain cases.
Not every state has a sales tax; Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming do not, according to Sales Tax Clearinghouse.
Bad News about Good News: Until that actually comes to pass (and there is some doubt), you may in fact be pilloried.
...perhaps it's not so cut-and-dried. From The Register: France and Finland are preparing to crack down on illegal firesharing with tougher punishments for hardcore miscreants.