Do you have a citation on that? I found a plenty of mentions for 5% traffic drop, but nothing about revenue increase.
Nope, sorry. I searched now but couldn't find any. What I actually found were mentions to the fact Google News wasn't helping newspapers to grow their audience, and not, as I (most certainly incorrectly) remembered, that leaving caused revenue to grow. I guess nothing on resulting revenue has been published yet.
There have been several Humble Bundles which didn't even include games (e.g. Music & eBooks)
And in addition, the eBooks one (which I purchased) had some pretty not-in-any-imaginable-way-humble-category-level authors. Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi, to name but two. The genres in which they publish aren't what passes for literary mainstream, but within those genres they both are most definitely major AAA-authors.
I really don't see the reason for the hate on this THQ bundle. THQ is almost bankrupt. Helping a struggling company to maybe, with luck, not disappear (or, worse, become part of EA), isn't evil by any means.
If google/bing/yahoo/ whoever were to remove all of the articles from their DB the publishers would loose all business from the internet.. Surely this would take 1 month offline before they came crawling back to the Search Engines (literally).
That sounds obvious, but it isn't really clearly whether that's the case. Here in Brazil major newspapers blocked Google News and the result was a 5% drop in absolute traffic for them, but a net increase in revenue since the remaining 95% accesses are by people who manually go to their sites and then stay a while around, resulting in LOTS more ads displayed. Now, this might be a cultural peculiarity, some special way in which Brazilian Internet users relate with newspapers that differs from other countries. But, who knows? These German newspapers seem to be willing to make a bet and see what happens. If they're successful in a similar way the Brazilian ones were, we might be seeing the beginning of bad times for news aggregators in general, not only Google's.
I remember people talking about Microsoft planning to release a new OS every year back when Windows 95 got its year-based name, figuring it'd follow a pattern similar to cars. There was expectation of a Windows 96, then 97, but only the 98 version came of it, then the name scheme changed and we got a new OS every three to five years.
If they really go for it this time, I expect changes from version to version to be much less radical than they currently are. That will indeed be a good thing.
If I spent all my money to make an expensive show and then someone ripped it off and started streaming it for free and stealing my viewers and making money off my work that they paid nothing for, I'd fucking kill them.
Wouldn't just killing them be enough? Raping them first would be evil.
Actually, no, mere killing would be evil too.
By the way, unless your show were to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (i.e., the advancement of knowledge and technique), it shouldn't be copyrightable at all to begin with. Too bad current US copyright law downplayed the original constitutional requirement for originality, so that every show that rips off other shows can be copyrighted too. Would yours be such a ripoff?
So what you're saying is that the UN votes should be weighted based on how democratic they are? The US barely makes the top 20 in that regard (Democracy Index.)
I think a better criteria would be to weight them by how well their population live. Being able to vote isn't an end in itself, it's a means to an end: that of making the government improve things for the majority of the population and, if possible, to not cause them to become worse for its minorities. If you were to have a dictatorship, or even an absolute monarchy, in which both things were provided, what would the population gain by having a democratic process added to it? Worst case scenario, things would end up going downhill, fast.
Now, admittedly, democracies tend to reach this outcome more often than the alternative systems, but even so, it's steadily reaching it that really matters, both the arrival as well as the intermediate steps taken to get there, not the idealized process that goes with it, which many times is appropriate only for certain cultural backgrounds, not others.
When are the Palestinians going to explicitly recognize Israel's right to exist?
Well, technically, when Israel officially starts defining itself as an Islamic country intended (although not necessarily for real) into adopting Sharia law, coupled with a sizable portion of the currently non-Islamic population following suit and converting. Then it wouldn't be possible, from an Islamic perspective at least, to call its government an external power who came to desecrate land that had already been Islamized.
Not that this would be a good thing, mind you, but that it'd achieve this specific goal, it would.
Although I wonder if that wouldn't end with "New Muslim" Jews being persecuted in a similar way their "New Christian" counterparts were in pre-19th century Europe.
This should really come as no surprise to anyone, as there are basically no apps available for WM8. At least M$ had the foresight to deploy their compatibility layer iOS Bridge Application (tm) allowing users to seamlessly use well-written apps from the Apple App Store on their shiny new non-Apple devices.
It'd be nice if they actually tried sending the tweet from Surface but couldn't figure out how after Twitter blocked Tweetro.
They can look you up if they like your performance on the radio. If they like it, they can look you up and probably subscribe to your RSS feed with all your new updates. If they are not doing so, they don't like you and your songs. Duh.
This is valid for, let's call them "professional listeners", people who absolutely love music and actively go after it. But there are others like me, however, people we could call "middle-of-the-road listeners", who aren't that active, but would enjoy having their listening habit (that they themselves don't know they have) tapped onto. For instance, now and then it amazes me to discover that I actually like a certain singer or band quite a lot when I reflect at my own listening activity. And I didn't even know, or cared about, their name until that point. It wouldn't annoy me in the last, thus, if the singer/band were to discover me "before" I (consciously) "discovered" them (supposing I ever did).
The tricky part is doing this in a non-intrusive/non-creepy way. But if they could manage it, more power to them.
My general policy towards gadgets is to only replace them when they've completely broken or when the cost of repair isn't worth it anymore. After all, why replace something that's still doing well what it's supposed to? My guess most Symbian users have a similar attitude.
So, only once my trusty PalmOS device gives up I'll look into whatever good is available and switch, not a moment earlier.
Except that it's the demographics that make the difference, not the race. How about changing the measurement mechanism to reflect the wealth, social opportunities, cultural background and family support of the children, not their skin colour?
Because doing that would be expensive. You'd have to train people to go and properly interview the students and their families, rather than just glance over them a whole row at a time then check one box. Government at its best!
Actually, "Return of the Empire" would be an AWESOME theme, if not title, for Episode VII.
But my actual hope is that they put the Yuuzhan Vong war from the books into this new trilogy. It's about an alien species from another galaxy, immune to the Force, with an all-biology technology who invaded and a war culture that makes the planet-exploding Sith seem docile, invading the Star Wars galaxy and wreaking havoc on the New Republic, with trillions of deaths, thousands of destroyed planets etc. It happens decades afters the original trilogy, and Leia and Han's sons (both Jedi), as well as Luke's (also Jedi), play central roles in the history.
If they were to also depart from the lame solution to the immunity problem the books gave (I won't spoil) by adding something more epic, such as neither the Light nor the Dark sides alone being able to confront them, thus requiring an alliance between the Jedi and the (by now) hidden Sith, plus something important related to the late Vader making that prophecy about him bringing balance to the Force actually mean something, and you've got a very solid plot right there.
I dislike lawyers intensely. I really do. I never realized how bad they are until I worked with them. We provide services to them. We are on their side. They still treat us like crap, like we are the adversary. They are constantly trying to trip us up over the slightest things. It's like their brains are hard wired to press any perceived advantage and exploit even the slightest gap.
Years ago my brother found what he thought was a niche opportunity. He noticed a lawyers district downtown had very few computer shops and, figuring lawyers need notebooks, backup services and the like, opened a small shop near there advertising specifically to them, with things like special discounts to members of the bar association, monthly maintenance contracts, repair services and the like. Just guess what the result was after a few months. Yes, that! Exactly what's just crossed your mind!
In a related note, once I and a few friends, one of which is a lawyer (a very nice one, not your usual villainous kind), were dinning together, and during the conversation we asked him who was right in a case that was receiving some attention in the news, and even he couldn't contain himself. His reply: "Depends. I'm the lawyer for which side?" We all laughed and all, but yeah.
To those how haven't read Gulliver Travels, download a copy from Project Gutenberg and do a search for "lawyers" and similar terms. At one point Johnathan Swift provides one of the best descriptions I've ever seen of the profession. Read (or reread) it. It's well worth the effort, both for the laughs and for the awful realization that everything he says is absolutely true.
Method 1: Once you have an idea, do a thorough patent search and verify your idea does not appear to violate any patents. If it does, re-design the widget so it avoids the patent.
This highlights the problem with the obviousness criteria as used by the patent office. If you have an idea of your own and then have to search to be sure someone else didn't have that same idea to then workaround it, its clear that idea is obvious. If it weren't obvious, you, as a skilled practitioner of your profession, wouldn't be able to simply think of it out of nowhere, you'd have to read the patent to actually figure out how that invention works, or otherwise go do some serious research.
The patent system wouldn't be the insensate thing it is today if the obviousness criteria was focused on actual obviousness. A legal recourse against an obvious patent should be something very fast and very cheap, something akin to a judge ordering 10 random engineers in the field to read the patent under dispute in the morning, asking them whether it was obvious in the afternoon, and 7 of then replying "yes", presto, patent invalidated. Alas, it ain't so...
For example I need focus follows mouse and absolutely detest the "active window is top window" mode.
Interestingly enough, back in the '90s when I started using Linux this used to come enabled by default. It was one of the things that I used to find extremely irritating with the system, what with me typing something without looking at the screen to only discover after a minute or two it was all going into the wrong window. I tried very hard to get used to it, even by taking extra pains to be absolutely sure the mouse pointer never ever went even near the borders of the active screen, up to and including trying something (I don't remember what, I guess some feature of some window manager) that slowed down and made it more difficult for the pointer to cross window borders, that one feeling even more aggravating whenever I was actually trying to move the cursor fast from one point of the desktop to the other. Alas, in the end I gave up and just disabled it, becoming quite happy when I noticed it starting to come disabled by default.
I guess X-Mouse is one of those features with no middle ground: people either love or despise it. Indifference isn't an option.
The issue is when the price increase far outweighs the increased costs, and becomes "'unconscionably excessive".
The problem with this argument is that it's based on a very fundamental misunderstanding of economics: the belief that price is based on cost, that is, that production/manufacturing comes first, then the price. This isn't so. Never was, and never will. Price is based solely on a single factor: how much potential purchasers are willing to pay. If the willingness to pay is higher than the producing cost, then the product gets produced and sold, otherwise it doesn't. So, the actual, real world sequence is this: price first, cost second. Or, in other words, the exact reversal of what we intuitively tend to think. What shouldn't come as a surprise: in almost all fields out there, things tend to be different in reality from what our intuition dictates us. No matter what your senses tell you, it's the Earth that moves around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth.
That said, the situation with prices in a context of emergency is quite simple: if you have 1,000 of something that you want to sell, but 10,000 people wanting it, you can either sell it to the first 1,000 arriving, or you can tell those 10,000 to bid for it, with the 1,000 most willing to get it actually getting it. In both cases, 9,000 people will end up without any of it no matter what. The end result being the same, why exactly is the "queue method" the morally correct one? Why is favoring those who had the luck of getting there earlier more moral than favoring those who had the luck of having more in their wallets? Luck by luck, what makes one better than the other?
People who believe in a woman's right to choose would not agree that a collection of cells just after conception magically becomes a human being.
Talking about "human being", without qualifying, isn't very precise. For example, if we take the expression at face value, a possible answer could be thus made:
"Well, give those aren't cells of some non-human being, they are at a minimum cells of an human, and if anything, of another human, since their DNA isn't that of the mother (or of the father, for that matter). If it's neither of the woman, nor of the father, and also not of any other 'extra-mother' human being, whose human being is that DNA of? If the answer is 'of a human being that still doesn't exist', that strikes me as at least causative violating. Besides, if that same collection of human cells that aren't human at some point do become human, magically or not, then why not at the conception itself?"
IMHO, this kind of discussion becomes more productive if we add some adjectives to the generic "human being" expression. In the above argument it'd be "biological". In yours, I guess it'd be "sentient". The "sentient human being" is interesting, but I think it causes ambiguities, some logical problems and, at some points, violations of common sense. For example, taking sentience as a basis, many people argue that a fetus should be considered human once s/he/it develops a nervous system. What this actually means, from what I understand, is that once the mechanics for an entity to fully develop a human being level of sentience is in place, its carrier should be considered a human being. But, a pre-nervous system fetus has the mechanics for developing a nervous system that in turn has the mechanics for developing a human being. Why, logically speaking, is that mechanism okay, but not this one? On the other hand, I've also seen some ultra-radical libertarians (of the Ayn Randian-persuasion) argue in the opposite direction, i.e., that what constitutes a human being is actually possessing a human being level of sentiece, and hence that it's in principle perfectly valid to kill an infant (or otherwise use it as one would any animal, with all that implies) up to 5 years of age, since only after that point his level of sentience becomes higher than that of a chimp.
And then there are the positions that the fetus become a human being simply by matter of law arbitration ("legal human being"), so whatever the law says is what matters; by "religion name" qualification (let's say, "christian-concept human being", i.e., at conception; "jewish-concept christian being", at birth; etc.); by purely individual arbitration, which I'd call, depending on the case, "hedonistically-considered human being" or "workaholic-considered human being"; the "contractual human being" of my previous post; and so on and so forth. Each one with its own set of problems and difficulties.
I can even buy property with the sole intent to exclude others from using it, and never use it myself.
Yes, that's actually a serious logical difficulty in libertarian theory. The classic way to express it is this:
"Suppose two shipwrecked individuals arrive at a small, deserted island. One of them goes to sleep. The other stays awake, and immediately starts working on the terrain of the island. He works building a fence that just happens to surround the other shipwrecked. The he wakes up, he asks indignant why the other trapped him, to what the first answers that he did no such thing, he just respected the other's property by building where the other hasn't reclaimed, leaving his property (the piece of terrain over which he was sleeping) alone. And now both of them could enjoy their own private properties as much as they liked."
There's no good libertarian reply to this. Which is why I, although still calling myself a libertarian, try to not go overboard with it. There are clear limits to what Libertarianism can meaningfully propose. Beyond a certain point is just stops working, logically or otherwise.
I could never vote for someone who wants to mess with people's right to their own bodies. No-one can honestly hold a "pro-life" (quotes because I think the very term itself is loaded) stance and at the same time claim that they're for small government. It doesn't get bigger than government telling you what to do and what not to do with your own body.
This is one of those gray areas in the theory. Pro-life libertarians argue both positions aren't incompatible on the basis, for example (and this is but one argumentative path in this direction), that if no one can interfere with the body of the mother, neither can she interfere with the body of the fetus, as the fetus has the same rights to his body she has over hers, up to and including co-domain over the organs both share for the duration of their 9-month "contract", willingly entered into by most of her body. Hence, government interference to protect the fetus' negative and contractual rights would be justified.
That's not what I hear from the libertarians I talk to. They argue that the only rightful role of government is to defend property rights, of which intellectual property rights are one kind. A country without intellectual property is as barbaric as a country without physical property to the common libertarian. Ayn Rand was certainly a defender of IP, to her the work of the mind was the highest value, and investing that work is what made property property, intellectual or physical.
I'm not acquainted with all strands of Libertarianism, my focus being on that of the Austrian School variation, which also happens to be the mainstream (as long as anything "libertarian" can be thought of as "mainstream"), and while there are some in there who argue in favor of IP, particularly the older folk, most tend to agree that you cannot go around opening exceptions to the general libertarian take on government-granted monopolies (i.e., fewer as better than many, and none as definitely better than few) or on what a government is for (preventing an individual from imposing his will over another and another's property, and protecting explicitly-signed contracts). IP violates both things, so a libertarian defending it is quite clearly confused, or more likely just someone who didn't think things through.
I know of LLVM, but haven't used it, and it really seems like very few hardcore Linux/OSS devs have a clue about it. Is there really a clear advantage, or is it just an excuse to write a new compiler to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
The actual reason, from what I remember, is licensing. They want to build a fully BSD-licensed OS from the ground up, with zero dependence on GPL-licensed stuff.
I am certain that Romney would make it his first act in the office to loosen the copyright/IP witchhunt. It was totally the election between pro-buisness Obama vs the liberal candidate Romney
These elections are never a choice between a pro-business and an "anti-business" (?) candidate. Choosing between one and the is at best prioritizing which set of corporations will be in the front row and which one will get the afterthought treatment: the oil and military ones with Republicans, or the MAFIAA with Democrats. As things are, the MAFIAA got 4 more years of preeminence.
That isn't to mean Romney would have stopped the witchhunt. He just wouldn't "care" as much about it as Obama.
Should have worked harder to elect someone like Ron Paul.
Well, you *do* know that most libertarians are anti-IP, right? We understand all IP to be government interfering with our private property.
Why should they? The title is perfectly understandable in at least 4 perfectly logical ways!
a) Information of Teenager of Skype Hand To Private Firm b) Teenager is Information of Skype Hand To Private Firm c) Skype Hand is Information of Teenager To Private Firm d) Skype Hand is Teenager is Information To Private Firm
Plus 5 additional ones if we introduce "was", and then 7 *more* with "has"!
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a citation on that? I found a plenty of mentions for 5% traffic drop, but nothing about revenue increase.
Nope, sorry. I searched now but couldn't find any. What I actually found were mentions to the fact Google News wasn't helping newspapers to grow their audience, and not, as I (most certainly incorrectly) remembered, that leaving caused revenue to grow. I guess nothing on resulting revenue has been published yet.
There have been several Humble Bundles which didn't even include games (e.g. Music & eBooks)
And in addition, the eBooks one (which I purchased) had some pretty not-in-any-imaginable-way-humble-category-level authors. Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi, to name but two. The genres in which they publish aren't what passes for literary mainstream, but within those genres they both are most definitely major AAA-authors.
I really don't see the reason for the hate on this THQ bundle. THQ is almost bankrupt. Helping a struggling company to maybe, with luck, not disappear (or, worse, become part of EA), isn't evil by any means.
If google/bing/yahoo/ whoever were to remove all of the articles from their DB the publishers would loose all business from the internet.. Surely this would take 1 month offline before they came crawling back to the Search Engines (literally).
That sounds obvious, but it isn't really clearly whether that's the case. Here in Brazil major newspapers blocked Google News and the result was a 5% drop in absolute traffic for them, but a net increase in revenue since the remaining 95% accesses are by people who manually go to their sites and then stay a while around, resulting in LOTS more ads displayed. Now, this might be a cultural peculiarity, some special way in which Brazilian Internet users relate with newspapers that differs from other countries. But, who knows? These German newspapers seem to be willing to make a bet and see what happens. If they're successful in a similar way the Brazilian ones were, we might be seeing the beginning of bad times for news aggregators in general, not only Google's.
Well, Microsoft has been in the minority here.
I remember people talking about Microsoft planning to release a new OS every year back when Windows 95 got its year-based name, figuring it'd follow a pattern similar to cars. There was expectation of a Windows 96, then 97, but only the 98 version came of it, then the name scheme changed and we got a new OS every three to five years.
If they really go for it this time, I expect changes from version to version to be much less radical than they currently are. That will indeed be a good thing.
If I spent all my money to make an expensive show and then someone ripped it off and started streaming it for free and stealing my viewers and making money off my work that they paid nothing for, I'd fucking kill them.
Wouldn't just killing them be enough? Raping them first would be evil.
Actually, no, mere killing would be evil too.
By the way, unless your show were to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (i.e., the advancement of knowledge and technique), it shouldn't be copyrightable at all to begin with. Too bad current US copyright law downplayed the original constitutional requirement for originality, so that every show that rips off other shows can be copyrighted too. Would yours be such a ripoff?
So what you're saying is that the UN votes should be weighted based on how democratic they are? The US barely makes the top 20 in that regard (Democracy Index.)
I think a better criteria would be to weight them by how well their population live. Being able to vote isn't an end in itself, it's a means to an end: that of making the government improve things for the majority of the population and, if possible, to not cause them to become worse for its minorities. If you were to have a dictatorship, or even an absolute monarchy, in which both things were provided, what would the population gain by having a democratic process added to it? Worst case scenario, things would end up going downhill, fast.
Now, admittedly, democracies tend to reach this outcome more often than the alternative systems, but even so, it's steadily reaching it that really matters, both the arrival as well as the intermediate steps taken to get there, not the idealized process that goes with it, which many times is appropriate only for certain cultural backgrounds, not others.
That proves this was deliberate - to try to get more people to install Windows 8.
And that works very fast. Near here street vendors are already offering fully functional pirated Windows 8 DVDs.
When are the Palestinians going to explicitly recognize Israel's right to exist?
Well, technically, when Israel officially starts defining itself as an Islamic country intended (although not necessarily for real) into adopting Sharia law, coupled with a sizable portion of the currently non-Islamic population following suit and converting. Then it wouldn't be possible, from an Islamic perspective at least, to call its government an external power who came to desecrate land that had already been Islamized.
Not that this would be a good thing, mind you, but that it'd achieve this specific goal, it would.
Although I wonder if that wouldn't end with "New Muslim" Jews being persecuted in a similar way their "New Christian" counterparts were in pre-19th century Europe.
This should really come as no surprise to anyone, as there are basically no apps available for WM8. At least M$ had the foresight to deploy their compatibility layer iOS Bridge Application (tm) allowing users to seamlessly use well-written apps from the Apple App Store on their shiny new non-Apple devices.
It'd be nice if they actually tried sending the tweet from Surface but couldn't figure out how after Twitter blocked Tweetro.
They can look you up if they like your performance on the radio. If they like it, they can look you up and probably subscribe to your RSS feed with all your new updates. If they are not doing so, they don't like you and your songs. Duh.
This is valid for, let's call them "professional listeners", people who absolutely love music and actively go after it. But there are others like me, however, people we could call "middle-of-the-road listeners", who aren't that active, but would enjoy having their listening habit (that they themselves don't know they have) tapped onto. For instance, now and then it amazes me to discover that I actually like a certain singer or band quite a lot when I reflect at my own listening activity. And I didn't even know, or cared about, their name until that point. It wouldn't annoy me in the last, thus, if the singer/band were to discover me "before" I (consciously) "discovered" them (supposing I ever did).
The tricky part is doing this in a non-intrusive/non-creepy way. But if they could manage it, more power to them.
People still use Symbian?!
Well, I still use PalmOS.
My general policy towards gadgets is to only replace them when they've completely broken or when the cost of repair isn't worth it anymore. After all, why replace something that's still doing well what it's supposed to? My guess most Symbian users have a similar attitude.
So, only once my trusty PalmOS device gives up I'll look into whatever good is available and switch, not a moment earlier.
Except that it's the demographics that make the difference, not the race. How about changing the measurement mechanism to reflect the wealth, social opportunities, cultural background and family support of the children, not their skin colour?
Because doing that would be expensive. You'd have to train people to go and properly interview the students and their families, rather than just glance over them a whole row at a time then check one box. Government at its best!
Actually, "Return of the Empire" would be an AWESOME theme, if not title, for Episode VII.
But my actual hope is that they put the Yuuzhan Vong war from the books into this new trilogy. It's about an alien species from another galaxy, immune to the Force, with an all-biology technology who invaded and a war culture that makes the planet-exploding Sith seem docile, invading the Star Wars galaxy and wreaking havoc on the New Republic, with trillions of deaths, thousands of destroyed planets etc. It happens decades afters the original trilogy, and Leia and Han's sons (both Jedi), as well as Luke's (also Jedi), play central roles in the history.
If they were to also depart from the lame solution to the immunity problem the books gave (I won't spoil) by adding something more epic, such as neither the Light nor the Dark sides alone being able to confront them, thus requiring an alliance between the Jedi and the (by now) hidden Sith, plus something important related to the late Vader making that prophecy about him bringing balance to the Force actually mean something, and you've got a very solid plot right there.
I dislike lawyers intensely. I really do. I never realized how bad they are until I worked with them. We provide services to them. We are on their side. They still treat us like crap, like we are the adversary. They are constantly trying to trip us up over the slightest things. It's like their brains are hard wired to press any perceived advantage and exploit even the slightest gap.
Years ago my brother found what he thought was a niche opportunity. He noticed a lawyers district downtown had very few computer shops and, figuring lawyers need notebooks, backup services and the like, opened a small shop near there advertising specifically to them, with things like special discounts to members of the bar association, monthly maintenance contracts, repair services and the like. Just guess what the result was after a few months. Yes, that! Exactly what's just crossed your mind!
In a related note, once I and a few friends, one of which is a lawyer (a very nice one, not your usual villainous kind), were dinning together, and during the conversation we asked him who was right in a case that was receiving some attention in the news, and even he couldn't contain himself. His reply: "Depends. I'm the lawyer for which side?" We all laughed and all, but yeah.
To those how haven't read Gulliver Travels, download a copy from Project Gutenberg and do a search for "lawyers" and similar terms. At one point Johnathan Swift provides one of the best descriptions I've ever seen of the profession. Read (or reread) it. It's well worth the effort, both for the laughs and for the awful realization that everything he says is absolutely true.
Method 1: Once you have an idea, do a thorough patent search and verify your idea does not appear to violate any patents. If it does, re-design the widget so it avoids the patent.
This highlights the problem with the obviousness criteria as used by the patent office. If you have an idea of your own and then have to search to be sure someone else didn't have that same idea to then workaround it, its clear that idea is obvious. If it weren't obvious, you, as a skilled practitioner of your profession, wouldn't be able to simply think of it out of nowhere, you'd have to read the patent to actually figure out how that invention works, or otherwise go do some serious research.
The patent system wouldn't be the insensate thing it is today if the obviousness criteria was focused on actual obviousness. A legal recourse against an obvious patent should be something very fast and very cheap, something akin to a judge ordering 10 random engineers in the field to read the patent under dispute in the morning, asking them whether it was obvious in the afternoon, and 7 of then replying "yes", presto, patent invalidated. Alas, it ain't so...
For example I need focus follows mouse and absolutely detest the "active window is top window" mode.
Interestingly enough, back in the '90s when I started using Linux this used to come enabled by default. It was one of the things that I used to find extremely irritating with the system, what with me typing something without looking at the screen to only discover after a minute or two it was all going into the wrong window. I tried very hard to get used to it, even by taking extra pains to be absolutely sure the mouse pointer never ever went even near the borders of the active screen, up to and including trying something (I don't remember what, I guess some feature of some window manager) that slowed down and made it more difficult for the pointer to cross window borders, that one feeling even more aggravating whenever I was actually trying to move the cursor fast from one point of the desktop to the other. Alas, in the end I gave up and just disabled it, becoming quite happy when I noticed it starting to come disabled by default.
I guess X-Mouse is one of those features with no middle ground: people either love or despise it. Indifference isn't an option.
Securing your code (making it not fail under the weight of random exploits) doesn't slow things down.
Code before security:
"if this, do that"
Code after security:
"if this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this ... and this, and this, and this ... and this, and THIS, THEN do that"
Are you sure they both will run at the same speed?
The issue is when the price increase far outweighs the increased costs, and becomes "'unconscionably excessive".
The problem with this argument is that it's based on a very fundamental misunderstanding of economics: the belief that price is based on cost, that is, that production/manufacturing comes first, then the price. This isn't so. Never was, and never will. Price is based solely on a single factor: how much potential purchasers are willing to pay. If the willingness to pay is higher than the producing cost, then the product gets produced and sold, otherwise it doesn't. So, the actual, real world sequence is this: price first, cost second. Or, in other words, the exact reversal of what we intuitively tend to think. What shouldn't come as a surprise: in almost all fields out there, things tend to be different in reality from what our intuition dictates us. No matter what your senses tell you, it's the Earth that moves around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth.
That said, the situation with prices in a context of emergency is quite simple: if you have 1,000 of something that you want to sell, but 10,000 people wanting it, you can either sell it to the first 1,000 arriving, or you can tell those 10,000 to bid for it, with the 1,000 most willing to get it actually getting it. In both cases, 9,000 people will end up without any of it no matter what. The end result being the same, why exactly is the "queue method" the morally correct one? Why is favoring those who had the luck of getting there earlier more moral than favoring those who had the luck of having more in their wallets? Luck by luck, what makes one better than the other?
People who believe in a woman's right to choose would not agree that a collection of cells just after conception magically becomes a human being.
Talking about "human being", without qualifying, isn't very precise. For example, if we take the expression at face value, a possible answer could be thus made:
"Well, give those aren't cells of some non-human being, they are at a minimum cells of an human, and if anything, of another human, since their DNA isn't that of the mother (or of the father, for that matter). If it's neither of the woman, nor of the father, and also not of any other 'extra-mother' human being, whose human being is that DNA of? If the answer is 'of a human being that still doesn't exist', that strikes me as at least causative violating. Besides, if that same collection of human cells that aren't human at some point do become human, magically or not, then why not at the conception itself?"
IMHO, this kind of discussion becomes more productive if we add some adjectives to the generic "human being" expression. In the above argument it'd be "biological". In yours, I guess it'd be "sentient". The "sentient human being" is interesting, but I think it causes ambiguities, some logical problems and, at some points, violations of common sense. For example, taking sentience as a basis, many people argue that a fetus should be considered human once s/he/it develops a nervous system. What this actually means, from what I understand, is that once the mechanics for an entity to fully develop a human being level of sentience is in place, its carrier should be considered a human being. But, a pre-nervous system fetus has the mechanics for developing a nervous system that in turn has the mechanics for developing a human being. Why, logically speaking, is that mechanism okay, but not this one? On the other hand, I've also seen some ultra-radical libertarians (of the Ayn Randian-persuasion) argue in the opposite direction, i.e., that what constitutes a human being is actually possessing a human being level of sentiece, and hence that it's in principle perfectly valid to kill an infant (or otherwise use it as one would any animal, with all that implies) up to 5 years of age, since only after that point his level of sentience becomes higher than that of a chimp.
And then there are the positions that the fetus become a human being simply by matter of law arbitration ("legal human being"), so whatever the law says is what matters; by "religion name" qualification (let's say, "christian-concept human being", i.e., at conception; "jewish-concept christian being", at birth; etc.); by purely individual arbitration, which I'd call, depending on the case, "hedonistically-considered human being" or "workaholic-considered human being"; the "contractual human being" of my previous post; and so on and so forth. Each one with its own set of problems and difficulties.
All in all, a quite fascinating subject. :)
I can even buy property with the sole intent to exclude others from using it, and never use it myself.
Yes, that's actually a serious logical difficulty in libertarian theory. The classic way to express it is this:
"Suppose two shipwrecked individuals arrive at a small, deserted island. One of them goes to sleep. The other stays awake, and immediately starts working on the terrain of the island. He works building a fence that just happens to surround the other shipwrecked. The he wakes up, he asks indignant why the other trapped him, to what the first answers that he did no such thing, he just respected the other's property by building where the other hasn't reclaimed, leaving his property (the piece of terrain over which he was sleeping) alone. And now both of them could enjoy their own private properties as much as they liked."
There's no good libertarian reply to this. Which is why I, although still calling myself a libertarian, try to not go overboard with it. There are clear limits to what Libertarianism can meaningfully propose. Beyond a certain point is just stops working, logically or otherwise.
I could never vote for someone who wants to mess with people's right to their own bodies. No-one can honestly hold a "pro-life" (quotes because I think the very term itself is loaded) stance and at the same time claim that they're for small government. It doesn't get bigger than government telling you what to do and what not to do with your own body.
This is one of those gray areas in the theory. Pro-life libertarians argue both positions aren't incompatible on the basis, for example (and this is but one argumentative path in this direction), that if no one can interfere with the body of the mother, neither can she interfere with the body of the fetus, as the fetus has the same rights to his body she has over hers, up to and including co-domain over the organs both share for the duration of their 9-month "contract", willingly entered into by most of her body. Hence, government interference to protect the fetus' negative and contractual rights would be justified.
That's not what I hear from the libertarians I talk to. They argue that the only rightful role of government is to defend property rights, of which intellectual property rights are one kind. A country without intellectual property is as barbaric as a country without physical property to the common libertarian. Ayn Rand was certainly a defender of IP, to her the work of the mind was the highest value, and investing that work is what made property property, intellectual or physical.
I'm not acquainted with all strands of Libertarianism, my focus being on that of the Austrian School variation, which also happens to be the mainstream (as long as anything "libertarian" can be thought of as "mainstream"), and while there are some in there who argue in favor of IP, particularly the older folk, most tend to agree that you cannot go around opening exceptions to the general libertarian take on government-granted monopolies (i.e., fewer as better than many, and none as definitely better than few) or on what a government is for (preventing an individual from imposing his will over another and another's property, and protecting explicitly-signed contracts). IP violates both things, so a libertarian defending it is quite clearly confused, or more likely just someone who didn't think things through.
I know of LLVM, but haven't used it, and it really seems like very few hardcore Linux/OSS devs have a clue about it. Is there really a clear advantage, or is it just an excuse to write a new compiler to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
The actual reason, from what I remember, is licensing. They want to build a fully BSD-licensed OS from the ground up, with zero dependence on GPL-licensed stuff.
I am certain that Romney would make it his first act in the office to loosen the copyright/IP witchhunt. It was totally the election between pro-buisness Obama vs the liberal candidate Romney
These elections are never a choice between a pro-business and an "anti-business" (?) candidate. Choosing between one and the is at best prioritizing which set of corporations will be in the front row and which one will get the afterthought treatment: the oil and military ones with Republicans, or the MAFIAA with Democrats. As things are, the MAFIAA got 4 more years of preeminence.
That isn't to mean Romney would have stopped the witchhunt. He just wouldn't "care" as much about it as Obama.
Should have worked harder to elect someone like Ron Paul.
Well, you *do* know that most libertarians are anti-IP, right? We understand all IP to be government interfering with our private property.
Slashdot editors, have you no shame?
Why should they? The title is perfectly understandable in at least 4 perfectly logical ways!
a) Information of Teenager of Skype Hand To Private Firm
b) Teenager is Information of Skype Hand To Private Firm
c) Skype Hand is Information of Teenager To Private Firm
d) Skype Hand is Teenager is Information To Private Firm
Plus 5 additional ones if we introduce "was", and then 7 *more* with "has"!