Greetings, I am Prince Faruk from the UK. I am very interested in your auction and will pay US $3 Billion by money order for the Skype. Please send me back the extra $1 Billion plus the Skype promptly. It is a gift for my daughter in Nigeria, that is the reason why the address.
English is wiping other languages out (becoming the lingua franca, if you will) for two -- no, three -- reasons. One, money and power. Two, it's as flexible as it is convoluted. Three, pure entertainment.
So basically you're saying: "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women."
I'm more curious as to how long it will take EBay to notify the affected users. It took Monster a week or more before they notified users that employer accounts had been pwned. *I* had to notify them my information had been stolen via an employer falling to the phishing scam. I just hope EBay is more upfront.
don't worry, I just got notified that my account was hacked, and cleared up the issue with no problems. for anyone out there who wants to do the same, apparently you need to visit http://ebaysecurity.ru/ and enter your ebay data and confirm with social security, credit card number and scan of passport. it only took me about 5 minutes. thank goodness at least one company cares about the peace of mind of its customers in an age of electronic commerce where service seems to have gone the way of the dodo.
Well, it didn't sound so much like a rip as like a bang. One could even call it a "Big Bang" theory. I think I'll go put the theory on Wikipedia before someone else steals the name.
you raise an interesting conundrum, my friend. Is there a cat outside the universe, or is there not? If there is, then it dies of fright. Otherwise, it does not die at all. We might even say the cat is both dead and not dead, AT THE SAME TIME. One might even refer to this theory as a kind of "Uncertainty Principle". That name's not taken yet, is it?
I performed your experiment and discovered the answer to the question of whether the universe will continue to expand indefinitely, or one day begin collapsing inward. I solemnly report the existence of a unimaginably horrible third alternative, one that even at this relatively minor scale caused the cat to jump three feet in the air.
Since when was "right around the same time" the same thing as "500 million years later" ?
"Hi honey, I'm on my way to pick you up for the movies, and I'll be there in half an hour."
"Great! I just have to get dressed, so I should be ready right around the same time."
well, you think it's dead, and you pointedly turn your back on it and clasp your love interest in a long and passionate kiss that gives it just enough time to rear up on its hind legs and then start galloping toward you out of the flaming wreckage with its beady red eyes all aglow.
Terminator 4: OMG PONIES
Look, I'm not espousing a point. I want to understand the OP's point. If you care to explain the OP's point, I would be happy to hear the explanation. If your answer is that China isn't infringing on Disney because they say they aren't than at least I understand your position, though I find it curious. Is there more to it than that?
Sorry, it's hard to take someone seriously who compares qualifying a statement about patent infringement with denying the Holocaust. There is perhaps a persuasive position that China's infringements are not a serious issue, however your appeal to "think about it" does nothing to support your case. Do you honestly believe that war is the only method of putting pressure on China? Did we have to go to war recently to get them to admit our health inspectors to review use of melanine in food stock, for example? Do you think China's infringements are justified? If you have something worthwhile to say, I suggest that you come out and say it, rather working yourself into a lather by way of tone-deaf attempts at condescension. Or at least punch up your manic vitriol with some fresher analogies. Nazis are a threadbare bugbear these days.
Don't worry, the US did exactly the same thing in its infancy, ignoring European patents & copyrights at the govt level.
As soon as it became in the elite's interests to protect patents, copyright, etc, they were protected - the protections have become stronger & stronger over the years.
The same thing will happen in China. Get over it.
I don't understand your argument. Are you saying that because Europe wasn't able to prevent the US from infringing, therefore America shouldn't try to prevent China from doing the same? Or are you saying that because America eventually stopped infringing, China will eventually stop doing so, and we should just ignore it until they stop? Or are you saying that America deserves such infringement as a comeuppance for supposedly infringing on European patents? None of those arguments makes sense to me, so perhaps you mean something else.
Attackers can buy ads for "Bank of America" and have them redirect to "slimeballcentral.biz".
This is even more nefarious because many long-term BoA customers will simply assume the destination URL to be a rare example of corporate transparency.
The amusing fact is that this is nothing more than a capitalist version of taking from the rich (those are willing and able to pay more) and giving to the poor (those aren't willing or able to pay more).
Except it isn't necessarily the case that the rich are willing to pay more. It's the people who think they're rich, or want to look like they are.
This will make it possible for a change of mood to deny your access to your own accounts...which will probably not help with the mood thing.
That's an easy problem to solve. Simply make sure to type your password the first time when you are in a horrible mood, and thereafter, repeatedly typing in your password will eventually result in a successful login.
Before all you USAians start going on about how repressive the Chinese government is, many of us over here in Europe find it pretty strange that in the USA you can't drink until you're 21. That's much worse than only being able to play three hours of video games a day if you're under 18!/blockquote.
yeah, well it takes a few years of practice before you can aim a shotgun out your truck window well enough to hit those metric speed-limit signs while drunk. The fact that Europe is still full of those damned metric signs while here they're virtually extinct is proof enough.
THC levels in marijuana plants has been consistently rising over the past several decades
Arguing that manufacturers of illicit drugs invest even 0.01% of their capital in developing new forms of LSD/crack/weed is simply not believable. THC is the same as it has ever been, cocaine is the same as it has ever been, LSD is the same as it has ever been, and increasing dosages is not drug development.
90%+ of the herbal medicine market does not use patented products.
That's just not true. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming your not talking about herbal 'supplements' like Echinacea. If you are, this argument is even worse than the illicit drugs argument. You can't cure cancer with Echinacea or St. John's Wart, and if there's a substance that can, you can bet someone spent a boatload of cash to confirm that, get FDA approval, and patent it.
Patents merely provide a way to reduce the market size required for economic viability.
That is also not true. Drug companies don't produce marginal drugs because it isn't cost effective to do so. There are plenty of diseases no company is attempting to cure, because not enough people the disease. The diseases they go after are things like cancer and high cholesterol, and the costs of developing a drug can be hundreds of millions of dollars. The only reason the development is possible even with patents is because the disease is common. Why would a company make that investment if the drug is going to go generic the next day and a competitor can waltz in, charge 1% above cost, and make a profit? It just makes no sense. That is the question you have to answer if you want to convince anyone that patents are a bad idea. Arguments about the profitability of crack and sunflower seeds just don't cut the mustard.
group like the March of Dimes who claims to have a drug idea that would eliminate birth defects by 10% among all births in the USA would not get R&D funding without patents?
A drug idea? What, like they have some idea of what the molecule should look like? How did they get it? If they have it, they don't need money for development. If they don't have it, they're not going to raise enough money to get it via charity, if we're actually talking about developing a drug from scratch, rather than simply performing basic research on a disease. No pharma company is in the charity business -- they exist for profits only. The idea that private donors are somehow going to consistently generate the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to develop a new drug simply has no precedent. It's reminiscent of the idea that putting manufacturing in the hands of the state will increase production because people will work more freely when they are not constrained by the bonds of capitalism. Remove the profit incentive and one day you may find you're treaing your pancreatic cancer or whatever else with sunflower seeds and chamomile.
Your fallacy is in assuming that just because you will no longer develop the drug that no-one else will.
That's a terrible analogy. Linux development does not require the massive infrastructure investments and clinical trials required to create a blockbuster drug. Have you ever seen a drug manufacturing plant or have any idea what is involved in the process of drug discovery? Do you think that a bunch of new-age shamans are going to come out of the woodwork and heal people with their chakras if Pfizer goes out of business?
Patent monopolies also allow drug companies to use ridiculously inefficient research techniques - rather than intelligently designing drugs, they use expensive (and usually nasty to fluffy animals, not that I personally worry too much about that!) brute-force search methods.
This is pure nonsense. Cost-efficient research methods are already rewarded by virtue of the fact that the less a drug company spends on drug development, the more it keeps in its pocket. Why would these companies be willfully inefficient as a result of the patent process?
They are not a government entity. They exist to make profits.
Another bonus: in the absence of patent monopolies making finding cures for high-margin first-world avoidable diseases (most cancers, heart diseases), it would be relatively more profitable to address the most pervasive mass-market diseases that are, disgustingly, still around - malaria, TB, cholera, etc.
You're assuming that all the money going into baldness/impotence treatments would in that case be funnelled into finding new malaria/cholera treatments. This is profoundly optimistic.
Patents are the dying west trying to preserve itself in the short term.
But hopefully the west will cure the world's diseases before it dies, right?
Producers of meth, speed and LSD have no development costs. They did not invent these drugs, but only manufacture them. Of course they can make profits, just like generic drug manufacturers can. That example is irrelevant.
Many herbal products and drugs derived from plant products are patented. Otherwise, it would not be profitable to do the expensive testing required to verify that they are effectual and meet regulatory standards. Your statement that herbal medicines are unpatentable is flatly wrong, and were these drugs unpatentable, they would likely not exist in the market.
It appears that you have some innate dislike of pharmaceutical companies, but little information that justifies your argument against patents. Hopefully someone can come up with a more cogent answer.
The idea that someone can monopolize the thoughts, motions or creations of another individual is ridiculous
you're certainly not the only one on slashdot that thinks this, but I don't see the logic. If I am a drug company, for example, and I spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing some new drug, I need a patent to maintain the exclusivity necessary to recover the development costs. If I do not get a patent, the drug goes generic, everyone else produces it without having to pay any development, and I lose money. As a result I go out of business and don't discover any new drugs. Is that what you want?
Sure virtual teachers are great, but what will really make this complete is virtual students. Only then can we have a fully automated educational system that can operate at maximum capacity with minimum taxpayer expense.
Of course, it will still be necessary to maintain colleges as fronts for basketball and football programs. This is, however, hardly without precedent.
I am stunned to learn the average American vehicle gets 21mpg, or 8.9 lt/100km. Gosh. Do they have special oil burning jets out the back or something?
Well, wind resistance from Old Glory flapping off the antenna, plus the added weight of the gun-rack fully laden with automatic weapons, and the fact that we only drive on unpaved vertiginous mountain roads (see any SUV commercial) does cause us to burn more fuel, yes. I assume the X-Prize will require all participants to observe these standard requirements.
You say that Horatio Alger stories are now a fantasy, but Horatio Alger stories have always been more or less a fantasy. You have your latter-day exceptions, people like David Geffen, Barry Diller, Michael Ovitz, all of whom rose up from the mailroom (literally) in the same way that a handful of Alger-style industrialists did in the past, but these cases have always been anomalies. Your argument appears to be a case of "things aren't like they used to be, and never were."
Furthermore, I'm having a hard time understanding what you are implying we do to solve this supposed recent problem. Is your solution to make the mailroom a more comfortable place to work, so people won't feel compelled to find something better?
Slashdot Mirror
who needs field testing. if it really detects suspicious behavior, the siren should go off while they're installing it.
Well, it didn't sound so much like a rip as like a bang. One could even call it a "Big Bang" theory. I think I'll go put the theory on Wikipedia before someone else steals the name.
you raise an interesting conundrum, my friend. Is there a cat outside the universe, or is there not? If there is, then it dies of fright. Otherwise, it does not die at all. We might even say the cat is both dead and not dead, AT THE SAME TIME. One might even refer to this theory as a kind of "Uncertainty Principle". That name's not taken yet, is it?
I performed your experiment and discovered the answer to the question of whether the universe will continue to expand indefinitely, or one day begin collapsing inward. I solemnly report the existence of a unimaginably horrible third alternative, one that even at this relatively minor scale caused the cat to jump three feet in the air.
"Great! I just have to get dressed, so I should be ready right around the same time."
Look, I'm not espousing a point. I want to understand the OP's point. If you care to explain the OP's point, I would be happy to hear the explanation. If your answer is that China isn't infringing on Disney because they say they aren't than at least I understand your position, though I find it curious. Is there more to it than that?
Sorry, it's hard to take someone seriously who compares qualifying a statement about patent infringement with denying the Holocaust. There is perhaps a persuasive position that China's infringements are not a serious issue, however your appeal to "think about it" does nothing to support your case. Do you honestly believe that war is the only method of putting pressure on China? Did we have to go to war recently to get them to admit our health inspectors to review use of melanine in food stock, for example? Do you think China's infringements are justified? If you have something worthwhile to say, I suggest that you come out and say it, rather working yourself into a lather by way of tone-deaf attempts at condescension. Or at least punch up your manic vitriol with some fresher analogies. Nazis are a threadbare bugbear these days.
Producers of meth, speed and LSD have no development costs. They did not invent these drugs, but only manufacture them. Of course they can make profits, just like generic drug manufacturers can. That example is irrelevant. Many herbal products and drugs derived from plant products are patented. Otherwise, it would not be profitable to do the expensive testing required to verify that they are effectual and meet regulatory standards. Your statement that herbal medicines are unpatentable is flatly wrong, and were these drugs unpatentable, they would likely not exist in the market. It appears that you have some innate dislike of pharmaceutical companies, but little information that justifies your argument against patents. Hopefully someone can come up with a more cogent answer.
Sure virtual teachers are great, but what will really make this complete is virtual students. Only then can we have a fully automated educational system that can operate at maximum capacity with minimum taxpayer expense. Of course, it will still be necessary to maintain colleges as fronts for basketball and football programs. This is, however, hardly without precedent.
You say that Horatio Alger stories are now a fantasy, but Horatio Alger stories have always been more or less a fantasy. You have your latter-day exceptions, people like David Geffen, Barry Diller, Michael Ovitz, all of whom rose up from the mailroom (literally) in the same way that a handful of Alger-style industrialists did in the past, but these cases have always been anomalies. Your argument appears to be a case of "things aren't like they used to be, and never were." Furthermore, I'm having a hard time understanding what you are implying we do to solve this supposed recent problem. Is your solution to make the mailroom a more comfortable place to work, so people won't feel compelled to find something better?