When you get far enough away from the source, then it is inverse square. If you have a short antenna, then close to it, it is not inverse square, but if the antenna is a couple of inches from your head, then you have a strong field.
Because they require less energy, thus the smaller batteries and the longer life between charges. The mechanism that makes cell phones harmful is that they inject comparatively high amounts of RF energy into cells, which damages the DNA. There are too many cases of tumors on the side of the head where sufferers hold their phone to deny a correspondence.
My WiFi antennas aren't an inch from my head. I don't think there is any doubt that hand held analogue cell phones, when they used often, are associated with tumors. I don't know if this finding is also true for digital phones. In any city people are awash with RF energy from a multitude of sources. Most of the sources are not a couple of inches from the person's brain.
I read as much as I could before my eyes glazed over. The patent doesn't simply address individual customers, it describes a system to minimize costs where a large vendor, such as Amazon, has a number of distribution centers. It as much concerns regional demographic features as individual customers.
Now, I hate business method patents in general, but this one appears to be sufficiently arcane as to not risk much litigation. The point being that it would be extremely difficult to prove infringement by another business, given that business practices are typically kept private.
Of course somebody probably has a patent on labeling isles in stores according to what products are found, and I know somebody had to at least try to patent the mall display that provides a map and legend system to locate stores. Those patents, if they exist, would be an easier target for an infringement suit.
Have we reached such a perfect state of justice that lawyers have nothing better to do than this? Isn't there an ambulance to chase somewhere?
Two advantages. It scales easily, and it is auditable. Braille ballots for the blind, and help for the handicapped. Everything original paper, with the right to be reviewed and recounted.
There are few groundbreaking solutions to database scaling that are worthy of a patent. Patents are granted for this kind of crap because the Patent Office is basically working on commission, and has employees who are more likely to be impressed by lawyerspeak mind numbing detail than an understanding of the originality of the underlying methods.
Perhaps whatever protection offered by the law for software should be more similar to a copyright. Many smart people can solve a particular difficult problem, and some will come up with roughly similar approaches. The granting of patents for pedestrian solutions inhibits innovation and makes creation fraught with economic risks. A successful suit for patent infringement should be required to prove by preponderance of evidence that the defendant knew about the plaintiff's patent and relied on the disclosures therein to develop the infringing product.
Maybe have some sort of ratings system, like the lame ass parental warnings, but for adults. Have something like ST-8, for so stupid that anyone with a cognitive age or eight or above should not watch. For people who blunder onto Faux Noise, they should be warned with a VS-LDSV, meaning Very Stupid - Lies, Distortions, Stupidity and Vitriol.
Plenty of people get convicted, who with better lawyers, would have been acquitted. Think OJ. Now if I could escape life in prison, I would. I don't think flight in and of itself is unpunishable under US law, but an otherwise exemplary life should count for something.
One of the problems I have with so called homeland security laws is the application of extraordinary powers of investigation collecting evidence to prosecute pedestrian offenses. Forget the Fourth Amendment. They bug your computer because they claim you are contacting your terrorist conspirators and only discover your MP3 collection. Then they phone up their RIAA buddies.
Before a move a couple of years ago I had been on Comcast for several years and had numerous issues. They couldn't seem to keep a DNS system working. I wish I had known about Opendns back then. Nothing is ultimately surprising, but I find it hard to believe that Comcast's anti-p2p methods would target google.com.
There are too many obvious patents awarded. The system requires a good deal of money to establish and defend a patent. Patents are granted in some fields for an unreasonably long period of time compared the rate of discovery in the field. Software and drug patents are good examples.
Given the above, many patents obstruct progress instead of encouraging it. They generate business for lawyers who get paid always by the hour and not on contingency. I think the legal abuse of intellectual property law is more costly than tort abuse.
Patents and copyrights should be used for their Constitutional purpose, and not to provide monopoly rents to entities that can afford the costs to protect them.
Criminals do. The fact that we have gunpowder and pistols make it where an asshole requires a lot less in the balls department to rob a liquor store. I suppose you could try to pass photocopied 20 dollar bills, but you would be not only an asshole, but a stupid asshole. The world is always going to have a complement of assholes, but the cost of crime generated by most technologies is much less than the productive value.
It is also a stupid idea. It takes more work to prioritize luggage and sort it according to a set of rules determined by the price of tickets than to put the luggage on randomly in a first come, first served basis. You don't usually have to wait that long anyway. The intelligent objective is to load and unload the plane in as little time as possible. Gate time is expensive.
I kind of imagined that buying a season ticket entitled the buyer to something more than a privilege to attend games. I suppose they could give a prorated refund for unused tickets, but I doubt they would get very far "revoking" the ticket. I guess it's not a bad as "Hannah Montana" tickets, that the promoters seem to scalping themselves.
It is beginning to look like we will have to fight for a free Internet, one that is not just another top down distribution system for "content." It's too bad, I am big fan of information being free, even though it is inanimate and has no intrinsic desires.
It is a political problem, and our current politics are based on bribery and commercial media. Public campaign financing also has problems, but candidates can say almost anything if they pay for it, and not be called on it by the "journalists" at Faux News, unless they are Democrats.
Excuse my bitterness, the Air America station was just shut down in Austin.
The essential problem is the tendency to accelerate the concentration of wealth. Owners can always find proxies to hide the influence of a media outlet. Small players can print any limited distribution screed they want, but it takes a major daily, or a cable channel or a decent powered radio or TV station to get the mass coverage, and those are all going to big corporate ownership. Of course, you don't have to watch, read, or listen, or, especially, believe.
Right, I had a buddy who is deceased that had diabetes insipidus. He injected himself with vasopressin tannate in oil that was extracted from the pituitary glands of cows. The drug company quit making it and the only drug left was in the form of a nasal spray that was comparatively short acting and not as effective.
Don't worry though, Pharma is busy developing better drugs to treat male erectile insecurity.
How do you plan to stop me, or even discover it if I do it? I'm so scared. Please don't sic any of your shysters on me. You have me terrified that I might even be so much as accused of viewing your HTML source. Maybe you can make me pay you some money to not sue me, even though I couldn't care less about your chickenshit HTML.
The purpose of patents in the Constitution is the promotion of innovation. This is original law. It is clear that in many cases patents are used merely to suppress competition by capable competitors. I think software and drug patents are especially illustrative. The rate of invention is much faster than the periods for patents warrant.
We have, largely at public expense, mapped the human genome. Many drugs are patented that were developed at public expense and licensed to drug companies to be sold for whatever they can get. Scientists are not going to stop being interested in biochemistry because they are less likely to become billionaires.
Too many software patents are trivial. Every now and then somebody comes up with an algorithm that is groundbreaking. IBM, as a joke, patented an algorithm for assigning access to restrooms on a train. Don't even get me started on "business method" patents.
So, if you are beaming collected energy from space, cloud cover doesn't matter. I have no objection to the theoretical theoretical and engineering aspects of this sort of system being developed. At this point there is little to no established work. We can put solar panels on houses, but beaming large rates of energy from space to ground collectors is just a science fiction fantasy at this point.
I want to replace fossil fuels as much as practical, and improve the collection and distribution of electrical energy. At this time space based solutions are not something that makes sense in light of the ancillary technologies and expenses that would be involved.
My bad, I forgot to turn on the irony light. I basically distrust military solutions for what is essentially a civilian problem, that is developing alternative energy sources. I figure that such a beam would destroy an aircraft that crossed it. While receivers could be moved to provide energy to the battlefield, it's not a practical solution to ordinary peacetime energy requirements. And like the so-called missile defense, it is basically an idiotic idea. In the case of the Star Wars system, it might be worse not to have it, than to have it and gamble mistakenly that it will work as promised.
It takes the military to come up with a REALLY stupid idea. We can develop better solar cells, or improve battery technology, or maybe put up more wind energy farms, but why not put the solar cells in space and beam the power down in focused beams with some sort of Buck Rogers scheme that has never been developed or tested and would probably, if it could work at all and not just be a cover for spending for a space weapons platform, be much more vulnerable to attack by potential adversary countries with access to space, e.g. the Russians or the Chinese. God save us from these morons.
Slashdot Mirror
When you get far enough away from the source, then it is inverse square. If you have a short antenna, then close to it, it is not inverse square, but if the antenna is a couple of inches from your head, then you have a strong field.
Because they require less energy, thus the smaller batteries and the longer life between charges. The mechanism that makes cell phones harmful is that they inject comparatively high amounts of RF energy into cells, which damages the DNA. There are too many cases of tumors on the side of the head where sufferers hold their phone to deny a correspondence.
My WiFi antennas aren't an inch from my head. I don't think there is any doubt that hand held analogue cell phones, when they used often, are associated with tumors. I don't know if this finding is also true for digital phones. In any city people are awash with RF energy from a multitude of sources. Most of the sources are not a couple of inches from the person's brain.
I think I go to Amazon and buy another couple of seasons.
Now, I hate business method patents in general, but this one appears to be sufficiently arcane as to not risk much litigation. The point being that it would be extremely difficult to prove infringement by another business, given that business practices are typically kept private.
Of course somebody probably has a patent on labeling isles in stores according to what products are found, and I know somebody had to at least try to patent the mall display that provides a map and legend system to locate stores. Those patents, if they exist, would be an easier target for an infringement suit.
Have we reached such a perfect state of justice that lawyers have nothing better to do than this? Isn't there an ambulance to chase somewhere?
Fine, let me get those chips out for you. Bring the back after you get the information off of them.
Should have the Monty Python style bare foot icon.
Two advantages. It scales easily, and it is auditable. Braille ballots for the blind, and help for the handicapped. Everything original paper, with the right to be reviewed and recounted.
Perhaps whatever protection offered by the law for software should be more similar to a copyright. Many smart people can solve a particular difficult problem, and some will come up with roughly similar approaches. The granting of patents for pedestrian solutions inhibits innovation and makes creation fraught with economic risks. A successful suit for patent infringement should be required to prove by preponderance of evidence that the defendant knew about the plaintiff's patent and relied on the disclosures therein to develop the infringing product.
Maybe have some sort of ratings system, like the lame ass parental warnings, but for adults. Have something like ST-8, for so stupid that anyone with a cognitive age or eight or above should not watch. For people who blunder onto Faux Noise, they should be warned with a VS-LDSV, meaning Very Stupid - Lies, Distortions, Stupidity and Vitriol.
One of the problems I have with so called homeland security laws is the application of extraordinary powers of investigation collecting evidence to prosecute pedestrian offenses. Forget the Fourth Amendment. They bug your computer because they claim you are contacting your terrorist conspirators and only discover your MP3 collection. Then they phone up their RIAA buddies.
Before a move a couple of years ago I had been on Comcast for several years and had numerous issues. They couldn't seem to keep a DNS system working. I wish I had known about Opendns back then. Nothing is ultimately surprising, but I find it hard to believe that Comcast's anti-p2p methods would target google.com.
Given the above, many patents obstruct progress instead of encouraging it. They generate business for lawyers who get paid always by the hour and not on contingency. I think the legal abuse of intellectual property law is more costly than tort abuse.
Patents and copyrights should be used for their Constitutional purpose, and not to provide monopoly rents to entities that can afford the costs to protect them.
Criminals do. The fact that we have gunpowder and pistols make it where an asshole requires a lot less in the balls department to rob a liquor store. I suppose you could try to pass photocopied 20 dollar bills, but you would be not only an asshole, but a stupid asshole. The world is always going to have a complement of assholes, but the cost of crime generated by most technologies is much less than the productive value.
It is also a stupid idea. It takes more work to prioritize luggage and sort it according to a set of rules determined by the price of tickets than to put the luggage on randomly in a first come, first served basis. You don't usually have to wait that long anyway. The intelligent objective is to load and unload the plane in as little time as possible. Gate time is expensive.
I kind of imagined that buying a season ticket entitled the buyer to something more than a privilege to attend games. I suppose they could give a prorated refund for unused tickets, but I doubt they would get very far "revoking" the ticket. I guess it's not a bad as "Hannah Montana" tickets, that the promoters seem to scalping themselves.
It is a political problem, and our current politics are based on bribery and commercial media. Public campaign financing also has problems, but candidates can say almost anything if they pay for it, and not be called on it by the "journalists" at Faux News, unless they are Democrats.
Excuse my bitterness, the Air America station was just shut down in Austin.
The essential problem is the tendency to accelerate the concentration of wealth. Owners can always find proxies to hide the influence of a media outlet. Small players can print any limited distribution screed they want, but it takes a major daily, or a cable channel or a decent powered radio or TV station to get the mass coverage, and those are all going to big corporate ownership. Of course, you don't have to watch, read, or listen, or, especially, believe.
Don't worry though, Pharma is busy developing better drugs to treat male erectile insecurity.
How do you plan to stop me, or even discover it if I do it? I'm so scared. Please don't sic any of your shysters on me. You have me terrified that I might even be so much as accused of viewing your HTML source. Maybe you can make me pay you some money to not sue me, even though I couldn't care less about your chickenshit HTML.
We have, largely at public expense, mapped the human genome. Many drugs are patented that were developed at public expense and licensed to drug companies to be sold for whatever they can get. Scientists are not going to stop being interested in biochemistry because they are less likely to become billionaires.
Too many software patents are trivial. Every now and then somebody comes up with an algorithm that is groundbreaking. IBM, as a joke, patented an algorithm for assigning access to restrooms on a train. Don't even get me started on "business method" patents.
I want to replace fossil fuels as much as practical, and improve the collection and distribution of electrical energy. At this time space based solutions are not something that makes sense in light of the ancillary technologies and expenses that would be involved.
My bad, I forgot to turn on the irony light. I basically distrust military solutions for what is essentially a civilian problem, that is developing alternative energy sources. I figure that such a beam would destroy an aircraft that crossed it. While receivers could be moved to provide energy to the battlefield, it's not a practical solution to ordinary peacetime energy requirements. And like the so-called missile defense, it is basically an idiotic idea. In the case of the Star Wars system, it might be worse not to have it, than to have it and gamble mistakenly that it will work as promised.
It takes the military to come up with a REALLY stupid idea. We can develop better solar cells, or improve battery technology, or maybe put up more wind energy farms, but why not put the solar cells in space and beam the power down in focused beams with some sort of Buck Rogers scheme that has never been developed or tested and would probably, if it could work at all and not just be a cover for spending for a space weapons platform, be much more vulnerable to attack by potential adversary countries with access to space, e.g. the Russians or the Chinese. God save us from these morons.
and a hit of blotter acid is a pretty danceable combination too.