"But it would make much more sense to rapidly evaporate all of them, perhaps with a large scale hairdryer task force and/or a few strategically placed nukes."
If you cause it to rain here in L.A., I'm going to drive to wherever you live and kick your ass. That is.. assuming I can find a road that leads out of this city.
"Switch to Linux - or better yet, Mac OS X - and you will not only have a better internet experience, you'll have a better desktop experience overall."
Not if you're a gamer.
Oh, and by the way, make sure to keep installing all those security updates no matter which OS you use.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was found dead in his Santiago home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an Chilean icon.
Heh. This is the first time I read about some famous person dying... and it turned out to be true!
I'm using this site to do my Christmas shopping this year. Sounds a little funny, I suppose. But the truth is I spent several years trying to find presents that were meaninful to them. After the fifth or sixth year, I just wasn't able to find anything they needed or wanted.
One Christmas I hit upon an interesting idea. I took my entire Christmas budget for them and focused it in a different direction. The company I was working at had a Christmas tree with cards from needy children describing what they wanted most for Christmas. I plucked a number of the cards off the tree, went down to Toys R Us, and bought up a bunch of stuff. I then wrote a letter to each member of my family, described the charity to them, and told them why I thought of them when I got that gift. Each 'gift' was chosen in the context of a particular family member attached to a good memory from the past. For example, I found a 'wish' for a bicycle. I told my dad that I remembered when he bought a bike for me as a child and that I wanted to pass that happiness on to somebody else.
I recieved the most heartfelt phone call from my uncle that year. The entire family was really touched by the gesture and the phone was passed around so everybody could let me know. That was the most successful Christmas shopping I had ever had. Surprisingly, it was also the most stress free. I put more time into writing the cards than I did searching for and purchasing the gifts. Plus... well darnit, it just felt good.
This year, I'm more or less following the same theme, only I'm using Child's Play this time. What makes this a little different from what I did the last time is that the games you purchase for this site go into a hospital library. All year round those games will get a lot of use from a lot of kids. In other words, a gift from here will likely benefit a child recovering from a broken leg or something 6 months from now. I think my family will appreciate that. I think they'll also appreciate the letters that'll come along with this round. I couldn't really find a suitable game-related gift for my aunt and uncle. So I'm doing something different for them. I think they'll appreciate the extra consideration.
I can imagine there's lots of people here on Slashdot that have the same Christmas trouble I do and I wanted to suggest this as an alternative gift. It's far easier, far more meaningful, and goes a longer way.
I listened to the audio clip and I think there are two factors coming into play. First is that the Verizon reps have absolute faith in the accuracy of their computers. This is leading them to think that the computer's always right without considering the possibility that the programming of the machine was incorrect. The second is that they have probably seen this equation written two different ways. "$.002" and ".002 cents." (as opposed to $.002 and $.00002...) They're seeing that the.002 bit is the same, but they're not mentally connecting the $ with "divide by 100". For these reasons, they're not mentally breaking this down as a simple math calculation. Sadly, it is a very human mistake. Unfortunately, I think this will forever keep the Verizon reps' heads wedged firmly in their posteriors.
If I were in George's shoes, here's what my reply would be:
Dear Verizon,
Before we agree to cutting the bill in half, please do me this one little favor. Go find somebody in your office, somebody who is NOT in sales and has not been bombarded with pricing sheets etc (preferably a programmer.. maybe your web guy or something... actually, a non-employee of Verizon would be nice.), and pose this to him:
You have downloaded 36,000 KB of data. You are being charged.002 cents per KB. How much would that cost?
Please do not ever say the word 'dollar', and please do not show him any dollar signs ($). Don't even give him context of the question. Just ask him this and jot down his answer, then send it back to me.
I really don't know if that'd do any good. Assuming they held their end of that bargain, there's still the problem if actually convincing them. But I'd at least give it a shot. Otherwise, I'm not really sure how to get them to realize this issue. I've got half a mind to send them an email right now with links to the story and the audio file with an explanation that his resolution of this issue is pivotal to my ever choosing them as a service. I'm just worried this company's too big and disconnected to get the message across. It's a pity... I'm on the market for a new cell phone provider right now, I'm not making an idle threat.
"I feel like we may have just discovered a new corollary to Godwin's law."
Hehehe. Nah. I've worked on patent applications before and it has given me a different perspective on cases of prior art than most Slashdotters have. Patent applications are meant for something specific, not broad. You couldn't patent using a database for everything in the world, but you can at least attempt to patent using a database in an MP3 player because it's specific enough to say "MP3 player". RCA had a patent on drawing alpha numeric characters on a screen, but they couldn't sue Casio for having a digital display on a wristwatch. (erm.. take that example with a grain of salt and a dash of imagination, I don't think digital watches existed back then... sorry, I'm too tired to think of a more real world example.)
I don't think it's terribly likely that this company recieved a patent on "a trigger button". It's more likely that the mechanism for making the trigger clickable was unique to them. That's all I meant by the orphan meat comment. We can't start generating a list of prior art until we know the nature of the complaint. If it's about driving a mouse cursor, for example, then the Zapper can immediately be tossed aside. Oops. Waste of an insightful mod.
On one of the various CSI type programs on TV, a crime was recorded by a security camera. They noticed a small reflection in on of the victims pupils so they zoomed in and enhanced the picture. There was the reflection of the killers face visible in the reflection. I have zoomed in on a few digital images on my computer and the image very quickly becomes a useless collection of large individual pixels. Who has security cameras that record at that kind of resolution?
This was mostly bullshit, but not total bullshit. I worked at a company a few years ago that was looking at image sequences, determining their rate of movement, and working out where the sub-pixel data went. In other words, if you captured a video of a slowly panning camera, the software could track the movement and watch how the sub-pixels changed. With that data, they could fill in the missing pixels and make a higher resolution image.
This doesn't really make your example plausible, but I just wanted to point out that with video, you actually can pull out information even if the pixel resolution is limited.
Until we know what specific part of the patent is being 'infringed' on, you cannot declare anything as prior art. For all we know, it could be a patent for using ground up orphan meat as a conductor. In that case, the NES Light Zapper wouldn't be prior art since Wikipedia didn't say anything about using orphan meat.
Note: I am in no way saying they have a case or a good patent, just pointing out that simply calling up a list of devices that use triggers and calling them 'prior art' is a big waste of time.
I read somewhere that the Earth exists in a state commonly referred to as 'round', so sometimes there are parts of the planet that light while others are dark. It's an interesting theory but I cannot claim to be an expert on the topic because I haven't looked out the window to observe this myself.
"it's worded in a way that somehow subcontious it will produce the "feeling" that somehow Apple did copycat Microsoft."
I don't see how. Vista's not even out yet and it describes having Vista-like graphics "for years". It is poorly phrased, but it doesn't make sense anybody'd read it that way.
Thirded. The statement was poorly phrased, yet still difficult to interpret the way he did. I can't believe mod points were frittered away on that dumb debate.
"I haven't heard of a single person who has picked up a game over 10 years old and spent a lot of time with, let alone 30 minutes."
Last week I popped in the SNES version of Zelda. I've put about 5 hours into it and still intend to put in some more. A couple of months ago I was into Star Control 2. Both those games are past the 10 year old mark.
"True, although I don't see much difference. Attacks (ohps, I meant accidents) would not be so common if the software was not so broken."
Perhaps. However FireFox, developed with security in mind, is constantly zigging and zagging over security issues. Writing a browser is pretty f'n hard when it's such a tempting target. I certainly didn't blame Honda when my car was broken into.
"Why not? Because of the law? That's mutable. Maybe you don't have the right to disturb my peace when I'm watching a film at the theatre."
You're correct, you're not given that right. However, you do not have the right to not be annoyed by people. You do not, for example, have the right to cut the power to your apartment complex because your neighbor's playing his music too loud. What do you do? Worst case, you call the police. What do the police do? They come by and ask him to keep the noise down. What they wouldn't do is take his music away. It's a social problem, not a technological one.
I know a lot of people here have been annoyed by cell phone users in theaters. Believe me, I share this annoyance. I don't, however, feel that jamming the signals is the way to approach it. The main problem I have with this is that lots of people have reasons to carry a phone with them (doctors, for example) and they would have to consider whether or not they really could go to a theater. Lots of you would probably say "So what? Less annoyance for me!", but that reasoning fails to include the number of people who ARE considerate and silence their phones. I can't speak for everybody, but every time I go see a movie and the "Please silence your phones" blurb hits the screen, I see a number of people actually reach into their pockets and check on their phones. It's not fair to them to just blank the signal.
The other problem I have with this approach is that it merely treats a symptom, but doesn't solve the problem. The real issue isn't the cell phone it's people being inconsiderate. Crying babies are annoying. People rustling through their snacks are annoying. People holding a conversation are annoying. Is any of this being addressed with this solution? Nope. Heck, it doesn't even fully address the cell phone problem. Some phones emit a chirp when there's no signal. Oops. So what does one do? Lots of people out there realize how annoying they're being and take steps to avoid it. They silence their phones, carefully handle their snacks, and decide to hire a babysitter for the kid. These people behave better because it is socially unacceptable to do otherwise. I remember one time during the trailers somebody was messing around with a laser pointer. Somebody in the audience stood up and said "If that dot appears during the movie, I'm going to break your f'n arm." The audience roared with applause. No more laser, and not a peep out of that dude. This is what I mean by it being a social problem. The whole audience there learned a lesson about not being annoying in a theater. That went a lot farther than simply making the screen laser-proof.
If we start phsyically making it impossible for people to be annoying, then you'll teach people it's okay to do something simply because you're not being prevented from doing it. "My PSP works in here, so it must be okay."
I agree that phones are annoying, but I think we can do a little better than just rendering them inoperable.
"My mom would go out and work her ass off and pay taxes so my friend could have a new video game system. If that's okay with you, well, I'm glad you're so tolerant."
I'm a tax payer and I can honestly say that doesn't instantly bug me. For all I know, she bought it because they lived in a shitty neighborhood and she wanted her boy to have something to do besides drugs and vandalism. Maybe they've been poor for ages and she wanted to finally get something nice for her boy. I dunno. I'm not interested in rushing to judgement. Living is more than just about eating and sleeping. And, frankly, those were the developmental years of his life. Maybe you're right that it was wrong for her to do so, but that doesn't give you the green light to give somebody shit because they're 'tolerant'.
I use the site because I move from country to country a lot. It is the best way for me to remain in a social group (albeit virtually) with my friends from home and the friends I have made elsewhere.
Man, I hear you there. MySpace drives me nuts. The pages are bloated and everybody puts a song on it that MUST PLAY AS SOON AS THE PAGE LOADS. That's really annoying when you use tabs to load a bunch of pages. It's also covered with the sorts of ads that you really don't want showing up when you're at work. That said, I've actually been far more successfull reconnecting to people I went to highschool with than Classmates.com. It's easy to use, so lots of people have created an account.
I hate MySpace for technical reasons, but man, it is a great social networking site. I just hope it becomes fashionable to not make it so annoying.
"Apple seems to have a philosophy of "just because we *can*, that doesn't mean we *should*""
That could be said of just about any technology company. Heck, I worked at a really small software company a few years ago and despite a shortage of resources, they invested some time into a variety of products that never saw the light of day. The philosophy was more like "it's neat... but would it sell?" Any project goes through this phase, it's not just some business practice exclusive to Apple. Yeah, stupid products still make it to market, but there's a great deal more that never saw the light of day.
Slashdot Mirror
"But it would make much more sense to rapidly evaporate all of them, perhaps with a large scale hairdryer task force and/or a few strategically placed nukes."
If you cause it to rain here in L.A., I'm going to drive to wherever you live and kick your ass. That is.. assuming I can find a road that leads out of this city.
"And I was due to have some river front property."
Boy I hear ya. Superman foiled my plans, too. Tights wearin git.
"Switch to Linux - or better yet, Mac OS X - and you will not only have a better internet experience, you'll have a better desktop experience overall."
Not if you're a gamer.
Oh, and by the way, make sure to keep installing all those security updates no matter which OS you use.
Heh. This is the first time I read about some famous person dying... and it turned out to be true!
"ALL teens have sexual urges, but only a handful of nutcases have the urge to shoot their classmates."
On an unrelated topic: This is why sex on TV/Video games gets more attention than violence.
I'm using this site to do my Christmas shopping this year. Sounds a little funny, I suppose. But the truth is I spent several years trying to find presents that were meaninful to them. After the fifth or sixth year, I just wasn't able to find anything they needed or wanted.
One Christmas I hit upon an interesting idea. I took my entire Christmas budget for them and focused it in a different direction. The company I was working at had a Christmas tree with cards from needy children describing what they wanted most for Christmas. I plucked a number of the cards off the tree, went down to Toys R Us, and bought up a bunch of stuff. I then wrote a letter to each member of my family, described the charity to them, and told them why I thought of them when I got that gift. Each 'gift' was chosen in the context of a particular family member attached to a good memory from the past. For example, I found a 'wish' for a bicycle. I told my dad that I remembered when he bought a bike for me as a child and that I wanted to pass that happiness on to somebody else.
I recieved the most heartfelt phone call from my uncle that year. The entire family was really touched by the gesture and the phone was passed around so everybody could let me know. That was the most successful Christmas shopping I had ever had. Surprisingly, it was also the most stress free. I put more time into writing the cards than I did searching for and purchasing the gifts. Plus... well darnit, it just felt good.
This year, I'm more or less following the same theme, only I'm using Child's Play this time. What makes this a little different from what I did the last time is that the games you purchase for this site go into a hospital library. All year round those games will get a lot of use from a lot of kids. In other words, a gift from here will likely benefit a child recovering from a broken leg or something 6 months from now. I think my family will appreciate that. I think they'll also appreciate the letters that'll come along with this round. I couldn't really find a suitable game-related gift for my aunt and uncle. So I'm doing something different for them. I think they'll appreciate the extra consideration.
I can imagine there's lots of people here on Slashdot that have the same Christmas trouble I do and I wanted to suggest this as an alternative gift. It's far easier, far more meaningful, and goes a longer way.
Kudos to Child's Play.
If I were in George's shoes, here's what my reply would be:
"I feel like we may have just discovered a new corollary to Godwin's law."
Hehehe. Nah. I've worked on patent applications before and it has given me a different perspective on cases of prior art than most Slashdotters have. Patent applications are meant for something specific, not broad. You couldn't patent using a database for everything in the world, but you can at least attempt to patent using a database in an MP3 player because it's specific enough to say "MP3 player". RCA had a patent on drawing alpha numeric characters on a screen, but they couldn't sue Casio for having a digital display on a wristwatch. (erm.. take that example with a grain of salt and a dash of imagination, I don't think digital watches existed back then... sorry, I'm too tired to think of a more real world example.)
I don't think it's terribly likely that this company recieved a patent on "a trigger button". It's more likely that the mechanism for making the trigger clickable was unique to them. That's all I meant by the orphan meat comment. We can't start generating a list of prior art until we know the nature of the complaint. If it's about driving a mouse cursor, for example, then the Zapper can immediately be tossed aside. Oops. Waste of an insightful mod.
This was mostly bullshit, but not total bullshit. I worked at a company a few years ago that was looking at image sequences, determining their rate of movement, and working out where the sub-pixel data went. In other words, if you captured a video of a slowly panning camera, the software could track the movement and watch how the sub-pixels changed. With that data, they could fill in the missing pixels and make a higher resolution image.
This doesn't really make your example plausible, but I just wanted to point out that with video, you actually can pull out information even if the pixel resolution is limited.
Until we know what specific part of the patent is being 'infringed' on, you cannot declare anything as prior art. For all we know, it could be a patent for using ground up orphan meat as a conductor. In that case, the NES Light Zapper wouldn't be prior art since Wikipedia didn't say anything about using orphan meat.
Note: I am in no way saying they have a case or a good patent, just pointing out that simply calling up a list of devices that use triggers and calling them 'prior art' is a big waste of time.
"Why not use dilithium, instead?"
Because Klingons flooded the market with substandard crystals. Damn near caused humpbacks to go extinct.
"No matter how good it is, it still reminds me of a child's name for urine."
I would have read your post, but I was distracted by your nick sounding like a sound a fat woman makes at McDonald's.
"Un, no. Its 'state' is more or less 'spherical'."
It was in public school, cut me a little slack!
"I don't get the joke on Thailand."
I read somewhere that the Earth exists in a state commonly referred to as 'round', so sometimes there are parts of the planet that light while others are dark. It's an interesting theory but I cannot claim to be an expert on the topic because I haven't looked out the window to observe this myself.
"I actually read 'geek' first and sat here wondering 'when did we get our own language?"
Linux and BSG. Frak and fsck are interchangable.
"it's worded in a way that somehow subcontious it will produce the "feeling" that somehow Apple did copycat Microsoft."
I don't see how. Vista's not even out yet and it describes having Vista-like graphics "for years". It is poorly phrased, but it doesn't make sense anybody'd read it that way.
"I hate to agree with an AC troll, but seconded."
Thirded. The statement was poorly phrased, yet still difficult to interpret the way he did. I can't believe mod points were frittered away on that dumb debate.
"I haven't heard of a single person who has picked up a game over 10 years old and spent a lot of time with, let alone 30 minutes."
Last week I popped in the SNES version of Zelda. I've put about 5 hours into it and still intend to put in some more. A couple of months ago I was into Star Control 2. Both those games are past the 10 year old mark.
"True, although I don't see much difference. Attacks (ohps, I meant accidents) would not be so common if the software was not so broken."
Perhaps. However FireFox, developed with security in mind, is constantly zigging and zagging over security issues. Writing a browser is pretty f'n hard when it's such a tempting target. I certainly didn't blame Honda when my car was broken into.
"If Ford makes cars with faulty breaks (or bad tires, as it actually happened), you cannot blame the customer, but only Ford itself."
The main problem with this rationale is that incidents involving bad brakes/tires are described as accidents, not attacks.
"Why not? Because of the law? That's mutable. Maybe you don't have the right to disturb my peace when I'm watching a film at the theatre."
You're correct, you're not given that right. However, you do not have the right to not be annoyed by people. You do not, for example, have the right to cut the power to your apartment complex because your neighbor's playing his music too loud. What do you do? Worst case, you call the police. What do the police do? They come by and ask him to keep the noise down. What they wouldn't do is take his music away. It's a social problem, not a technological one.
I know a lot of people here have been annoyed by cell phone users in theaters. Believe me, I share this annoyance. I don't, however, feel that jamming the signals is the way to approach it. The main problem I have with this is that lots of people have reasons to carry a phone with them (doctors, for example) and they would have to consider whether or not they really could go to a theater. Lots of you would probably say "So what? Less annoyance for me!", but that reasoning fails to include the number of people who ARE considerate and silence their phones. I can't speak for everybody, but every time I go see a movie and the "Please silence your phones" blurb hits the screen, I see a number of people actually reach into their pockets and check on their phones. It's not fair to them to just blank the signal.
The other problem I have with this approach is that it merely treats a symptom, but doesn't solve the problem. The real issue isn't the cell phone it's people being inconsiderate. Crying babies are annoying. People rustling through their snacks are annoying. People holding a conversation are annoying. Is any of this being addressed with this solution? Nope. Heck, it doesn't even fully address the cell phone problem. Some phones emit a chirp when there's no signal. Oops. So what does one do? Lots of people out there realize how annoying they're being and take steps to avoid it. They silence their phones, carefully handle their snacks, and decide to hire a babysitter for the kid. These people behave better because it is socially unacceptable to do otherwise. I remember one time during the trailers somebody was messing around with a laser pointer. Somebody in the audience stood up and said "If that dot appears during the movie, I'm going to break your f'n arm." The audience roared with applause. No more laser, and not a peep out of that dude. This is what I mean by it being a social problem. The whole audience there learned a lesson about not being annoying in a theater. That went a lot farther than simply making the screen laser-proof.
If we start phsyically making it impossible for people to be annoying, then you'll teach people it's okay to do something simply because you're not being prevented from doing it. "My PSP works in here, so it must be okay."
I agree that phones are annoying, but I think we can do a little better than just rendering them inoperable.
Can I get one and use it in my apartment?
Please?
"My mom would go out and work her ass off and pay taxes so my friend could have a new video game system. If that's okay with you, well, I'm glad you're so tolerant."
I'm a tax payer and I can honestly say that doesn't instantly bug me. For all I know, she bought it because they lived in a shitty neighborhood and she wanted her boy to have something to do besides drugs and vandalism. Maybe they've been poor for ages and she wanted to finally get something nice for her boy. I dunno. I'm not interested in rushing to judgement. Living is more than just about eating and sleeping. And, frankly, those were the developmental years of his life. Maybe you're right that it was wrong for her to do so, but that doesn't give you the green light to give somebody shit because they're 'tolerant'.
Man, I hear you there. MySpace drives me nuts. The pages are bloated and everybody puts a song on it that MUST PLAY AS SOON AS THE PAGE LOADS. That's really annoying when you use tabs to load a bunch of pages. It's also covered with the sorts of ads that you really don't want showing up when you're at work. That said, I've actually been far more successfull reconnecting to people I went to highschool with than Classmates.com. It's easy to use, so lots of people have created an account.
I hate MySpace for technical reasons, but man, it is a great social networking site. I just hope it becomes fashionable to not make it so annoying.
"Apple seems to have a philosophy of "just because we *can*, that doesn't mean we *should*""
That could be said of just about any technology company. Heck, I worked at a really small software company a few years ago and despite a shortage of resources, they invested some time into a variety of products that never saw the light of day. The philosophy was more like "it's neat... but would it sell?" Any project goes through this phase, it's not just some business practice exclusive to Apple. Yeah, stupid products still make it to market, but there's a great deal more that never saw the light of day.