He's talking about SUVs and pickups being classified by the EPA as light trucks so they meet lower fuel economy standards and therefore don't pay a gas guzzler tax the way big cars do.
In yet another display of amazing government wisdom, big car purchasers only pay a gas guzzler if the manufacturer hasn't also made enough small cars to keep their average economy up. So buy those Ford GT40s!
The problem with not taxing commercial vehicles is that some particularly large SUVs are the size of commercial vehicles, and thus their owners can get some special tax break for purchasing one of those monstrosities.
I would strongly disagree. Compare the video quality of a digicam to that of a MiniDV camcorder and say that again.
Have you seen a Z1's video?
I'll grant you that my Canon a40's video leaves much to be desired in quality and duration, but in the end both types of devices you've got a lens, a CCD, a storage medium, and some electronics to run it. I see no reason why a CCD couldn't be designed that takes quality high-res pictures and captures quality video. Moreover, it needn't pay heed to the limitations of NTSC, it could store a pure non-interlaced digital image in the resolution of its choice. Meanwhile, the memory cards keep getting more and more capacious. (Not to mention some cameras have already dispensed with tape.)
My second cousin-once removed (or some relationship like that) received $5 million apiece for his wife and daughter's death in the 1996 Valujet crash, and he wasn't particularly rich. Less, perhaps, than a Concorde survivor might get, but hardly "change."
The jet engine is also more reliable, since it pretty much only has one moving part. (The fuel system has more, but the turbofan itself is a single spinning shaft; no pistons, valves, camshafts, transmissions, etc.)
The roads you're so fond of driving your climate-changing SUV are working under a business model that's heavily paid for by taxpayers, boy.
Not if you walk/cycle. To the best of my knowledge, gasoline taxes (paid by SUV owners) bring in about as much as is spent on road development and maintenance. Really, it should be a separate account from the general gov't budget, but in principle it approximates a user fee rather than a general subsidy.
(Case in point: If any portable electronics market is on the verge of extinction, it's the MP3 player market - once portable media reaches 20gb capacities, your whole MP3 collection will fit on one (or a few) small card usable in any small device, and a dedicated device for that storage will be pointless.)
Ditto video cameras, btw. The new Minolta Dimage Z1 digital camera takes 30 FPS, 640x480 video clips, as well as 3.2 megapixel still pictures. If not for the limited capacity of SD cards, it would pretty much be a fully functional replacement for a video camera.
Wishful thinking has its purposes, but does PG have a plan B?
Plan B: Buy all copyrights ever.
Plan C: An army of giant robots that would threaten to take over the world unless copyright duration is shortened. Oh, and Subway has to bring back the "V" cut too.
I went to a store today and treated a person like an object. I shoved a few items in front of them, said little or nothing to them, swiped a card through a machine, took my stuff and left. Was a really interseted in them as a person? No, I just wanted my groceries. I have vague recollections of gender and appearance, but I could hardly say I thought of them as a person until this moment. Nor, for that matter, have I thought of you as anything but a wrong opinion.
Every description of why someone should buy a TiVo sounds like it's aimed at people who have never seen a VCR.
I don't have one, but am tempted. Why? No big pile of tapes. No losing shows because you cn't find the tape they were on. No forgetting to turn off the VCR so it'll tape. No setting it up to tape, then finding someone else has turned on the VCR and foiled your taping.
And want to save copies of one show, in order, when they're mixed in with other shows? It's a pain to do with a VCR, with multiple shows on multiple tapes, but with a TiVo, you simply tape or capture the output.
My big concern is image quality. Are there good comparisons anywhere of TiVo versus various capture cards, conversion software, etc.? I'm willing to expend more effort to create DVDs of shows I want to save if I get better images.
Also, has anyone ever seen a card (or a TV for that matter) that does GOOD closed captioning? All the sets I've seen do overly blocky captions, rather than just surrounding the letters with a contrasting border as is done in the highest quality subtitles.
If [1.5 is their last integrated release], I'll be using it for a while.
I say, so be it. If the goal is the split, then the longer they delay making it, the longer it'll be until we have the final viable result. I'd rather have 1.0 Firebird and Thunderbird sooner than have 1.6 Mozilla sooner. Get people focusing on making the fixes, tools, installers, etc. for what's going to be the long-term solution.
The problem is, most Slashdot readers don't know much of the law behind patents, how they're written, and how they're challenged. Largely, they think if a patent claims something, and the patent is approved, then the claim has force of law.
I don't get this impression from Slashdotters at all. (Although certainly many confuse trademarks, copyrights, and patents.)
The problem isn't that the patent has "force of law", it's that it becomes an effective legal club, and prior art and obviousness defenses are difficult and *expensive* to use against it. Look at the early patent on the automobile and Ford's attempts to fight it for a historical example. Or the guy who successfully sued Ebay for patent violations. Ebay almost certainly never saw his patent before implementing their schemes, never saw anything else that used ideas gotten from reading that patent, etc; it just sat quietly in the patent database until it served as an extortion tool for someone to take undeserved money from Ebay.
Or read the story about Sun and IBM patents. (Read this for details.) It didn't matter that Sun never looked at or received any inspiration from IBM's patents; 1 lawyer just stole more than 100 men with guns from them with the aid of those patents.
The idea of patents is that I come up with an idea that I wouldn't otherwise come up with, and then explain it to the world in exchange for licensing fees. If someone else comes up with the same idea independently with no link to my patent publication, then my patent wasn't innovative, and I should get diddly. But that doesn't happen.
Patents are an enormous drag on the economy. Medicine patents, given the high cost of testing, at least have some merit. But most others do not.
A unique trademarked word is good for googling, so that's a good reason to make up a word. They picked a name with a link to efficient, since that is the strength of the chip. It's similar in concept to Acura, with its link to "accurate."
If you follow the jiggle link on the review page, you'll find some nekkid pictures. One taken in Santa Cruz, but I was just there and there aren't generally naked women climbing on the rocks, more's the pity.
George B. Selden, a shrewd patent attorney from Rochester, N.Y., filed a patent for a "road engine" in 1879. Under the liberal patent laws of the time, he was allowed to back date his patent to 1877 and to amend and expand it frequently. When it was finally issued in 1895 it covered a front-drive, three-cylinder carriage with a transverse engine. Although he had never built a car, Selden used his patents to extract royalties from early American manufacturers on every auto they built.
When Henry Ford refused to pay royalties, a famous court suit followed. During the long trial, the owners of Selden's patent were finally forced to build a vehicle in 1904. Essential details in Selden's patents had been left deliberately vague, and the car built in 1904 had much benefit from then-current technology. Despite all these loopholes, the "1877" Selden barely ran. The patent was finally shot down in 1911.
---
So patents and unscrupulous patent lawyers have been stifling innovation for more than a century.
What can the government do besides twiddling interest rates?
Reduce wasteful spending. No more weapon programs aimed at fighting the Cold War (F-22s when nothing can touch us in the air, new attack subs, ICBM defense when terrorists use airliners, etc.) Replace Medicaid with a no-frills insurance subsidy, ditto VA hospitals. Stop fighting the War on (most but not all) Drugs. Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences that have 1% of our population in jail.
Also, make the standards for getting a patent much harder, so business isn't crippled by patent fees & litigation. Simplify taxes. Don't try to by the United Steelworkers with a protectionist tariff. Develop software (especially with the help of Linux, OpenOffice, et al) when it's cheaper than buying tens of thousands of copies of proprietary apps for gov't computers. Develop educational materials and distribute (electronically) freely, rather than padding the coffers of textbook publishers.
Your point MIGHT be valid if we weren't talking about the Government competing with a private business. That's not supposed to happen.
Government roads compete with private roads. Medicaid competes with private insurance. Public universities compete with private ones. Public housing projects compete with private housing.
The government can provide whatever services the people want it to, no "not supposed to"s about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Randy Virgin sounds like a villian in an Austin Powers film ...or a description of 90% of slashdot?
National healthcare will be run with the fairness of the IRS and the efficiency of the DMV.
In case you haven't noticed, our healthcare system already is that way.
A few years ago-- maybe ten by now, I'm not sure-- [...] Well, being 13, I [...]
You're not sure how many years ago you were 13? Lay off the weed, man...
Having become a massive anime fan
From eating everything that wasn't orange-flavored?
He's talking about SUVs and pickups being classified by the EPA as light trucks so they meet lower fuel economy standards and therefore don't pay a gas guzzler tax the way big cars do.
In yet another display of amazing government wisdom, big car purchasers only pay a gas guzzler if the manufacturer hasn't also made enough small cars to keep their average economy up. So buy those Ford GT40s!
The problem with not taxing commercial vehicles is that some particularly large SUVs are the size of commercial vehicles, and thus their owners can get some special tax break for purchasing one of those monstrosities.
Boggles the mind, doesn't it?
I would strongly disagree. Compare the video quality of a digicam to that of a MiniDV camcorder and say that again.
Have you seen a Z1's video?
I'll grant you that my Canon a40's video leaves much to be desired in quality and duration, but in the end both types of devices you've got a lens, a CCD, a storage medium, and some electronics to run it. I see no reason why a CCD couldn't be designed that takes quality high-res pictures and captures quality video. Moreover, it needn't pay heed to the limitations of NTSC, it could store a pure non-interlaced digital image in the resolution of its choice. Meanwhile, the memory cards keep getting more and more capacious. (Not to mention some cameras have already dispensed with tape.)
My second cousin-once removed (or some relationship like that) received $5 million apiece for his wife and daughter's death in the 1996 Valujet crash, and he wasn't particularly rich. Less, perhaps, than a Concorde survivor might get, but hardly "change."
The jet engine is also more reliable, since it pretty much only has one moving part. (The fuel system has more, but the turbofan itself is a single spinning shaft; no pistons, valves, camshafts, transmissions, etc.)
The roads you're so fond of driving your climate-changing SUV are working under a business model that's heavily paid for by taxpayers, boy.
Not if you walk/cycle. To the best of my knowledge, gasoline taxes (paid by SUV owners) bring in about as much as is spent on road development and maintenance. Really, it should be a separate account from the general gov't budget, but in principle it approximates a user fee rather than a general subsidy.
(Case in point: If any portable electronics market is on the verge of extinction, it's the MP3 player market - once portable media reaches 20gb capacities, your whole MP3 collection will fit on one (or a few) small card usable in any small device, and a dedicated device for that storage will be pointless.)
Ditto video cameras, btw. The new Minolta Dimage Z1 digital camera takes 30 FPS, 640x480 video clips, as well as 3.2 megapixel still pictures. If not for the limited capacity of SD cards, it would pretty much be a fully functional replacement for a video camera.
They're farmers?
But then the mighty monument of Stonehenge would be in extreme danger of being stomped on by a dwarf...
Wishful thinking has its purposes, but does PG have a plan B?
Plan B: Buy all copyrights ever.
Plan C: An army of giant robots that would threaten to take over the world unless copyright duration is shortened. Oh, and Subway has to bring back the "V" cut too.
Progress on these has admittedly been limited.
Feh.
I went to a store today and treated a person like an object. I shoved a few items in front of them, said little or nothing to them, swiped a card through a machine, took my stuff and left. Was a really interseted in them as a person? No, I just wanted my groceries. I have vague recollections of gender and appearance, but I could hardly say I thought of them as a person until this moment. Nor, for that matter, have I thought of you as anything but a wrong opinion.
Oh, no wonder they got it so fast. Zeros being round, they don't catch on things in the wires like those ones do.
Every description of why someone should buy a TiVo sounds like it's aimed at people who have never seen a VCR.
I don't have one, but am tempted. Why? No big pile of tapes. No losing shows because you cn't find the tape they were on. No forgetting to turn off the VCR so it'll tape. No setting it up to tape, then finding someone else has turned on the VCR and foiled your taping.
And want to save copies of one show, in order, when they're mixed in with other shows? It's a pain to do with a VCR, with multiple shows on multiple tapes, but with a TiVo, you simply tape or capture the output.
My big concern is image quality. Are there good comparisons anywhere of TiVo versus various capture cards, conversion software, etc.? I'm willing to expend more effort to create DVDs of shows I want to save if I get better images.
Also, has anyone ever seen a card (or a TV for that matter) that does GOOD closed captioning? All the sets I've seen do overly blocky captions, rather than just surrounding the letters with a contrasting border as is done in the highest quality subtitles.
If [1.5 is their last integrated release], I'll be using it for a while.
I say, so be it. If the goal is the split, then the longer they delay making it, the longer it'll be until we have the final viable result. I'd rather have 1.0 Firebird and Thunderbird sooner than have 1.6 Mozilla sooner. Get people focusing on making the fixes, tools, installers, etc. for what's going to be the long-term solution.
The problem is, most Slashdot readers don't know much of the law behind patents, how they're written, and how they're challenged. Largely, they think if a patent claims something, and the patent is approved, then the claim has force of law.
I don't get this impression from Slashdotters at all. (Although certainly many confuse trademarks, copyrights, and patents.)
The problem isn't that the patent has "force of law", it's that it becomes an effective legal club, and prior art and obviousness defenses are difficult and *expensive* to use against it. Look at the early patent on the automobile and Ford's attempts to fight it for a historical example. Or the guy who successfully sued Ebay for patent violations. Ebay almost certainly never saw his patent before implementing their schemes, never saw anything else that used ideas gotten from reading that patent, etc; it just sat quietly in the patent database until it served as an extortion tool for someone to take undeserved money from Ebay.
Or read the story about Sun and IBM patents. (Read this for details.) It didn't matter that Sun never looked at or received any inspiration from IBM's patents; 1 lawyer just stole more than 100 men with guns from them with the aid of those patents.
The idea of patents is that I come up with an idea that I wouldn't otherwise come up with, and then explain it to the world in exchange for licensing fees. If someone else comes up with the same idea independently with no link to my patent publication, then my patent wasn't innovative, and I should get diddly. But that doesn't happen.
Patents are an enormous drag on the economy. Medicine patents, given the high cost of testing, at least have some merit. But most others do not.
"Efficeon" is pretty dumb.
A unique trademarked word is good for googling, so that's a good reason to make up a word. They picked a name with a link to efficient, since that is the strength of the chip. It's similar in concept to Acura, with its link to "accurate."
If you follow the jiggle link on the review page, you'll find some nekkid pictures. One taken in Santa Cruz, but I was just there and there aren't generally naked women climbing on the rocks, more's the pity.
The question I have is this, wasn't there a federal ruling that the airwaves were free and if you could receive the signal you were entitled to it ?
Only to a point. Descrambling satellite signals without permission is illegal, or else DirecTV would be out of business.
But, because this was a "new application" (or whatever they call this crap), it would have been patentable.
From this page:
George B. Selden, a shrewd patent attorney from Rochester, N.Y., filed a patent for a "road engine" in 1879. Under the liberal patent laws of the time, he was allowed to back date his patent to 1877 and to amend and expand it frequently. When it was finally issued in 1895 it covered a front-drive, three-cylinder carriage with a transverse engine. Although he had never built a car, Selden used his patents to extract royalties from early American manufacturers on every auto they built.
When Henry Ford refused to pay royalties, a famous court suit followed. During the long trial, the owners of Selden's patent were finally forced to build a vehicle in 1904. Essential details in Selden's patents had been left deliberately vague, and the car built in 1904 had much benefit from then-current technology. Despite all these loopholes, the "1877" Selden barely ran. The patent was finally shot down in 1911.
---
So patents and unscrupulous patent lawyers have been stifling innovation for more than a century.
What can the government do besides twiddling interest rates?
Reduce wasteful spending. No more weapon programs aimed at fighting the Cold War (F-22s when nothing can touch us in the air, new attack subs, ICBM defense when terrorists use airliners, etc.) Replace Medicaid with a no-frills insurance subsidy, ditto VA hospitals. Stop fighting the War on (most but not all) Drugs. Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences that have 1% of our population in jail.
Also, make the standards for getting a patent much harder, so business isn't crippled by patent fees & litigation. Simplify taxes. Don't try to by the United Steelworkers with a protectionist tariff. Develop software (especially with the help of Linux, OpenOffice, et al) when it's cheaper than buying tens of thousands of copies of proprietary apps for gov't computers. Develop educational materials and distribute (electronically) freely, rather than padding the coffers of textbook publishers.
[...]eat at Kirby's Szechuan Restaurant. Quite simply the most ORGASMIC General Tso's chicken I've ever experienced.
In that case, I think I'd prefer take-out...
Your point MIGHT be valid if we weren't talking about the Government competing with a private business. That's not supposed to happen.
Government roads compete with private roads. Medicaid competes with private insurance. Public universities compete with private ones. Public housing projects compete with private housing.
The government can provide whatever services the people want it to, no "not supposed to"s about it.
How many years will it be before we stop seeing these 'linux is free and going to rule the world' BS articles?
As soon as Linux rules the world, of course.