Geez, I've been reading this page and it looks like knows exactly who these guys are, their political affiliations and motivations for the bombings. When I went to bed last night there weren't even decent pictures of these guys and we just got their names this mornings. Their high-school friends have no idea why they did this. Their father hasn't said -- and may not know -- why they did it. Neither brother has explained their motivations and one of them never will.
Give it time. We don't have nearly enough information yet, so if everyone could just vacate their pulpit-of-preference until we do we might be able to raise the signal-to-noise ratio around here.
The problem isn't terror, it's the fact that this numbnut is trying to conduct a running firefight in the city, trying to avoid the police he's been shooting and trying to place bombs where he can. He's an indiscriminate killer and may be wearing a suicide vest on top of that. There are police all over trying to catch this clown, but crowds of people will complicate their jobs and give the nutjob more targets. We're not staying inside from fear, we're trying to help them do their jobs.
Stepping out from the middle of an active firefight isn't being terrorized, it's common sense. When the manhunt is over -- and I don't expect it to take long -- we're going back to our lives. And I predict a record turnout for next year's marathon.
According to CNN they lowered the missile again not much later. What can I say? Some folks just can't keep it up.
Seriously, though. The missiles they're tinkering with are using a less volitile fuel that doesn't have to be used right after fueling, so they could be messing around with this thing for days before the oxidizer they're using ruins their new toy.
It's not a patent war, and Microsoft already knew what it was getting into. The Motorola patent was disclosed as part of proposing some open standards. When Motorola created those standards they promised to license them on a "fair and reasonable" basis. Everyone else who implemented the standard negotiated an agreement with Motorola.
Until Microsoft came along. Rather than negotiate a reasonable fee, Microsoft found a friendly judge in their home state of Washington and asked him to set a rate. Microsoft hasn't been contributing to the open standards, so they're trying to get the open standards devalued to increase the value of their own patents. There's a good piece on the subject that Groklaw posted back in September after a German judge told Microsoft to play nice and Microsoft responded by taking their marbles and running back to Seattle to find a friendlier judge.
If you have pet rabbits -- or any other critters that chew cables out of instinct -- you need to cover your cables with this stuff. We had one chew through a lamp cord and it dang near cooked the little beast.
Labeling helps you if you need to unplug or move one cable, but it's still a mess if you need to remove a cable from the snarl, as when replacing components or swapping out a bad cable. The answer to that is to eliminate all the extra wire that causes the snarl by taking up the slack. There are a bunch of gadgets that can be used for that. My personal preference are the velcro cable ties. I wrap the excess cord around my fingers and then wrap it with the velcro tie to keep it out of the way. I like them because they're reusable, cheap and can be used when storing cables as well.
I suspect Microsoft made the Surface expensive for the same reason that companies make sneakers so expensive. In theory cognitive dissonance will make people assume that anything that pricey must be good. Not that sticking a keyboard on a tablet is exactly unique. Even my cell phone has a keyboard.
I've been doing this for over thirty years. I started programming in Basic and Assembler and have a long list of technologies that I used to do. They've all gone off the boards and I'm still always picking up new skills. When you stop learning, you're done.
Someone asked the 87 year old Da Vinci how long it took him to accumulate his vast knowledge. He replied, "I'm still learning."
The jury foreman said the judge only asked for ten years, but the transcripts (reproduced on Groklaw) clearly show that he was asked if he was ever involved in a lawsuit. The original poster wasn't trolling, but he wasn't careful reading the article either.
Before getting excited about any new system, the first question would be, how hard is this to hack? All a bar owner would need to do is have a few pretty girls come in the front door and out the back and the system will start saying that the bar has more women in it than it does. And let the fat ugly fat guys come in the back as well.
I was smart enough to use an interactive CRT session to debug everything first
I had a punch card assignment as well (circa 1979 because "in the real world, everybody uses punch cards") but my preferred machine was a TTY. Part of it was because none of the engineering students knew the thing existed. It was in the basement of the dorm and it was mostly a commuter school. But it also meant I could get printouts any time I wanted. The tubes only had line editors anyway, so the teletype machine wasn't a big step backward anyway.
So...you're saying we should charge for EVERYTHING to maintain interest?
Welcome to to Leon Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance theory. In a nutshell, people try to justify their own decisions. If you paid for something you perceive it as having more value than if you got it for free. Otherwise, why would you have paid for it? Likewise, if you do something dull and boring for free you are more deeply invested in it than if you got paid.
Sneaker companies found this out long ago. The hideously expensive sneakers are no better than the cheap ones, but they are perceived as better because you paid more for them.
Yes, but where? We've done a huge amount of hiring in India, Argentina, and Brazil, and have been laying off US employees left and right.
From TFA:
Loughridge said IBM planned "some acceleration" in what he called "work force rebalancing" in 2009. By rebalancing, Loughridge referred to IBM's practice of reassigning workers or hiring workers in other locations, such as overseas, while displacing current employees.
While companies are supposed to look for onshore talent before hiring overseas, many companies -- including IBM -- find it easier to skip that step and go straight to petitioning Congress for more H1B visas. It's not that the workers brought in from overseas have talents that cannot be found in the US, it's just cheaper to ship the talent in from overseas, with predictable results: record profits for IBM, resulting in big bonuses for the execs, more layoffs of the U.S. rank-and-file, followed by more petitions to Congress for still more H1B visas.
What's wrong? Mostly that every week or so someone comes up with another article claiming cold fusion or gas made from dirty sweat socks or some such. The article seemed a bit thin to me so I did some googling and found an Edmunds article claiming the car would be out next year. But that article came out last year. See any cars around yet? Then I cam across this one that says the car won't be available around here until 2011. And then there's a Bloomberg article that claims that, "The government may subsidize hybrid cars to cut costs for consumers." So is the $22k price tag with or without the subsidy?
For comparison purposes, I've been following the saga of the Chevy Volt and I think the BYD offering falls into the too-good-to-be-true category. The best guess seems to be the Volt will cost around $35k to $40k, mostly because of the expensive lithium-ion batteries, and the all-electric range is about 40 miles. But the BYD says they're using the same batteries and selling around $22k with a 62 mile all-electric range. And while the Chinese model is allegedly "here" you and I won't get to see or touch one until at least 2011. Until I see better specs or more detailed plans I can't get excited about this.
Mind you, I think plug-in hybrids are the way to go, but cars like the Volt and Tesla never recover the extra cost of the vehicle in fuel savings. I suspect the answer is to ditch the fancy batteries and stick with cheap lead-acid packs and a limited all-electric range of about 20 miles for a basic two adult and two kid car. It still means that half the forty mile range will be all electric. The last piece of the puzzle will fall into place when parking spots (malls, office complexes, parking structures) offer recharging for a fee. How many people drive to work, then park for eight hours? Until then you're in a chicken-and-egg trade off. The rechargers won't be put in until people are buying plug-ins, but not many will buy plug-ins without the rechargers.
Is there hope for computer enthusiasts who didn't go to college?"
I've been working professionally with computer since 1981, but with no computer degree. I took one course in college and then, several years later, went back for two more courses. At the time I heard the interesting statistic that the majority of computer programmers had undergrad degrees either in English or Psychology. Being a Psych/English double major myself, I assume it's because they found out that real-world jobs in those fields were few and poorly paid compared to the lucrative field of computer programming. Companies were so hungry for computer folk that they were willing to give you a shot if you claimed the necessary skills, whether or not you had the requisite paperwork. Even now, you'll find that later in your career nobody pays much attention to your degree if you have enough experience.
The trouble now is in getting that first job. There are plenty of folk out there with computer degrees and many of those have experience as well. On top of that you have the various "certifications" that are also supposed to imply competence on the part of the bearer. I suppose it's theoretically possible to work your way up under those circumstances, but nobody's going to give you a job just because you know the difference between a GOTO and a GOSUB.
Before you make any moves, you're going to first want to gather together your employment contracts and take them to a lawyer along with a description of what you want to do. Non-compete clauses are one concern, but some are not enforceable since they would prevent a person from earning a living. Even without a non-compete clause, you could be hit with a lawsuit based on the inevitable disclosure doctrine, where a company can argue that their trade secrets would inevitably be compromised by the new employment. Finally, there could be wording in the contract that says that anything developed while you work for them belongs to them. If that's a concern, you need to make sure that any serious work on the new project doesn't start until after you terminate the old. A lawyer can help you deal with these issues in such a way as to keep your new company from being shut down.
Once you know what your options are, you need to make a plan. Who is going to be available? What's your new target market? When will your product be available? When will it be profitable? And how are you going to live in the meantime? You're going to want answers to all those questions before you make any moves you can't take back.
I somehow doubt that Halliburton is trying to get the patent as a way to block others from patent trolling.
Actually, I'm not sure what else it could be used for. A patent on patent trolling can only be used against other patent trolls. If Halliburton wanted to be a patent troll, they wouldn't need a patent to do it. Besides, patent trolls typically don't have any other source of income that can be threatened by their "business", so Halliburton wouldn't really qualify.
Looks like someone's stab at a defensive patent to me.
Personally, if this is such a problem you're probably carrying too many electronic widgets. But if you really need them, then this thing is supposed to have adapters for most stuff.
In particular, they cited its requirement that U.S. employers participate in E-Verify, the government's electronic verification program for immigrants.... "Less than 1% of U.S. employers are currently enrolled in E-Verify, so the vast majority of employers wishing to retain or hire" an OTP graduate "will not already be enrolled in the program,"
Since businesses are reluctant to sign on to the TSA's latest invasion of privacy, they're resorting to bribery. If your business wants to hire foreign workers at bargain basement prices, you need to sign up for the DHS program. Apparently the DHS's charter is so broad that they can tinker with stuff like this if they pretend it's some kind of "emergency". The DHS has surpassed even the IRS as the most out-of-control government agency.
Remember, the DHS is in the business of snooping. If the economy gets wrecked in the process, well, that's someone else's job.
The extended rant, long on opinion and short on fact, does not alter the fact that the original poster was distorting the facts to suit his own biases. Much as you are doing now. For example:
Plagiarism assumes a mentality that accepts the concept of "stealing" intellectual property. This would have been an alien concept at the point in history in which the gospels were written.
The Gospel of Mark was one of the sources for Matthew and Luke, but not the only one. Both books also draw from a third source, called Q by scholars, and both contain independent material as well.
The Gospel of John does not rely on Matthew and appears to be a completely independent account.
Skipping over the gratuitous pejoratives ("pretend", "fairy tale", et cetera) you claim that the other gospels were written "long after" Matthew. But the Ryland Papyrus proves that the Gospel of John could not possibly have been written latter than 100 A.D. Just how "long after" Matthew do you figure that is? If you're pegging it as -- for example -- thirty years, that would mean putting Mark within forty years of the event, easily within the lifetime of eyewitnesses.
It's a free county and you can believe what you want; I'm not claiming to have proof of anything one way or another, but you really need to at least keep the known facts straight. Which was my gripe with the poster's remarks, since they obviously weren't representing the original article correctly.
Evidently the poster couldn't be bothered to RTFA. The actual article doesn't say the codex has "no mention of the resurrection". It says that, "The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus' disciples discover his empty tomb." What this refers to is Mark 16:9-20, which most modern translations note as a later addition or discard entirely. The gospel ends abruptly with the discovery of the empty tomb and skips later appearances of Jesus. The remaining three gospels pretty much have the usual resurrection stories in the usual places.
There are eight planets and four dwarf planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, (Ceres), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, (Pluto), (Eris), (Makemake). (Dwarf planets in quotes.) Ceres used to be called an asteroid because it's in the asteroid belt, but it's really too big for that. The others have been there all along, but they're way out there, so it takes a while to figure out if they qualify as a planet. If you're really trying to keep up, you might want to make some notes about Quaoar and Sedna which might wind up on the list.
On the bright side, at least you don't have Fisher Price's problem. They've got a toy line called Planet Heroes and their designer apparently hasn't been keeping up on his email. They were two planets down when the line came out and they just fell further behind by one more, but the kids are being taught with more current material.
My seven-year-old was telling a friend all about Planet Heroes when my friend, just to be funny, asked him about Ceres. My son gave him a disgusted look and said, in the tone of someone pointing out the obvious, "That's in the asteroid belt."
Slashdot Mirror
Geez, I've been reading this page and it looks like knows exactly who these guys are, their political affiliations and motivations for the bombings. When I went to bed last night there weren't even decent pictures of these guys and we just got their names this mornings. Their high-school friends have no idea why they did this. Their father hasn't said -- and may not know -- why they did it. Neither brother has explained their motivations and one of them never will.
Give it time. We don't have nearly enough information yet, so if everyone could just vacate their pulpit-of-preference until we do we might be able to raise the signal-to-noise ratio around here.
Thanks.
The problem isn't terror, it's the fact that this numbnut is trying to conduct a running firefight in the city, trying to avoid the police he's been shooting and trying to place bombs where he can. He's an indiscriminate killer and may be wearing a suicide vest on top of that. There are police all over trying to catch this clown, but crowds of people will complicate their jobs and give the nutjob more targets. We're not staying inside from fear, we're trying to help them do their jobs.
Stepping out from the middle of an active firefight isn't being terrorized, it's common sense. When the manhunt is over -- and I don't expect it to take long -- we're going back to our lives. And I predict a record turnout for next year's marathon.
According to CNN they lowered the missile again not much later. What can I say? Some folks just can't keep it up.
Seriously, though. The missiles they're tinkering with are using a less volitile fuel that doesn't have to be used right after fueling, so they could be messing around with this thing for days before the oxidizer they're using ruins their new toy.
See? There's a nerdy side to every news story.
It's not a patent war, and Microsoft already knew what it was getting into. The Motorola patent was disclosed as part of proposing some open standards. When Motorola created those standards they promised to license them on a "fair and reasonable" basis. Everyone else who implemented the standard negotiated an agreement with Motorola.
Until Microsoft came along. Rather than negotiate a reasonable fee, Microsoft found a friendly judge in their home state of Washington and asked him to set a rate. Microsoft hasn't been contributing to the open standards, so they're trying to get the open standards devalued to increase the value of their own patents. There's a good piece on the subject that Groklaw posted back in September after a German judge told Microsoft to play nice and Microsoft responded by taking their marbles and running back to Seattle to find a friendlier judge.
If you have pet rabbits -- or any other critters that chew cables out of instinct -- you need to cover your cables with this stuff. We had one chew through a lamp cord and it dang near cooked the little beast.
Labeling helps you if you need to unplug or move one cable, but it's still a mess if you need to remove a cable from the snarl, as when replacing components or swapping out a bad cable. The answer to that is to eliminate all the extra wire that causes the snarl by taking up the slack. There are a bunch of gadgets that can be used for that. My personal preference are the velcro cable ties. I wrap the excess cord around my fingers and then wrap it with the velcro tie to keep it out of the way. I like them because they're reusable, cheap and can be used when storing cables as well.
I suspect Microsoft made the Surface expensive for the same reason that companies make sneakers so expensive. In theory cognitive dissonance will make people assume that anything that pricey must be good. Not that sticking a keyboard on a tablet is exactly unique. Even my cell phone has a keyboard.
I've been doing this for over thirty years. I started programming in Basic and Assembler and have a long list of technologies that I used to do. They've all gone off the boards and I'm still always picking up new skills. When you stop learning, you're done.
Someone asked the 87 year old Da Vinci how long it took him to accumulate his vast knowledge. He replied, "I'm still learning."
The jury foreman said the judge only asked for ten years, but the transcripts (reproduced on Groklaw) clearly show that he was asked if he was ever involved in a lawsuit. The original poster wasn't trolling, but he wasn't careful reading the article either.
It was in the movie.
Before getting excited about any new system, the first question would be, how hard is this to hack? All a bar owner would need to do is have a few pretty girls come in the front door and out the back and the system will start saying that the bar has more women in it than it does. And let the fat ugly fat guys come in the back as well.
John Wayne isn't dead.
Nope. He's making beer commercials for Coors Light.
Whether he knows it or not.
I had a punch card assignment as well (circa 1979 because "in the real world, everybody uses punch cards") but my preferred machine was a TTY. Part of it was because none of the engineering students knew the thing existed. It was in the basement of the dorm and it was mostly a commuter school. But it also meant I could get printouts any time I wanted. The tubes only had line editors anyway, so the teletype machine wasn't a big step backward anyway.
From TFA:
While companies are supposed to look for onshore talent before hiring overseas, many companies -- including IBM -- find it easier to skip that step and go straight to petitioning Congress for more H1B visas. It's not that the workers brought in from overseas have talents that cannot be found in the US, it's just cheaper to ship the talent in from overseas, with predictable results: record profits for IBM, resulting in big bonuses for the execs, more layoffs of the U.S. rank-and-file, followed by more petitions to Congress for still more H1B visas.
What's wrong? Mostly that every week or so someone comes up with another article claiming cold fusion or gas made from dirty sweat socks or some such. The article seemed a bit thin to me so I did some googling and found an Edmunds article claiming the car would be out next year. But that article came out last year. See any cars around yet? Then I cam across this one that says the car won't be available around here until 2011. And then there's a Bloomberg article that claims that, "The government may subsidize hybrid cars to cut costs for consumers." So is the $22k price tag with or without the subsidy?
For comparison purposes, I've been following the saga of the Chevy Volt and I think the BYD offering falls into the too-good-to-be-true category. The best guess seems to be the Volt will cost around $35k to $40k, mostly because of the expensive lithium-ion batteries, and the all-electric range is about 40 miles. But the BYD says they're using the same batteries and selling around $22k with a 62 mile all-electric range. And while the Chinese model is allegedly "here" you and I won't get to see or touch one until at least 2011. Until I see better specs or more detailed plans I can't get excited about this.
Mind you, I think plug-in hybrids are the way to go, but cars like the Volt and Tesla never recover the extra cost of the vehicle in fuel savings. I suspect the answer is to ditch the fancy batteries and stick with cheap lead-acid packs and a limited all-electric range of about 20 miles for a basic two adult and two kid car. It still means that half the forty mile range will be all electric. The last piece of the puzzle will fall into place when parking spots (malls, office complexes, parking structures) offer recharging for a fee. How many people drive to work, then park for eight hours? Until then you're in a chicken-and-egg trade off. The rechargers won't be put in until people are buying plug-ins, but not many will buy plug-ins without the rechargers.
I've been working professionally with computer since 1981, but with no computer degree. I took one course in college and then, several years later, went back for two more courses. At the time I heard the interesting statistic that the majority of computer programmers had undergrad degrees either in English or Psychology. Being a Psych/English double major myself, I assume it's because they found out that real-world jobs in those fields were few and poorly paid compared to the lucrative field of computer programming. Companies were so hungry for computer folk that they were willing to give you a shot if you claimed the necessary skills, whether or not you had the requisite paperwork. Even now, you'll find that later in your career nobody pays much attention to your degree if you have enough experience.
The trouble now is in getting that first job. There are plenty of folk out there with computer degrees and many of those have experience as well. On top of that you have the various "certifications" that are also supposed to imply competence on the part of the bearer. I suppose it's theoretically possible to work your way up under those circumstances, but nobody's going to give you a job just because you know the difference between a GOTO and a GOSUB.
Before you make any moves, you're going to first want to gather together your employment contracts and take them to a lawyer along with a description of what you want to do. Non-compete clauses are one concern, but some are not enforceable since they would prevent a person from earning a living. Even without a non-compete clause, you could be hit with a lawsuit based on the inevitable disclosure doctrine, where a company can argue that their trade secrets would inevitably be compromised by the new employment. Finally, there could be wording in the contract that says that anything developed while you work for them belongs to them. If that's a concern, you need to make sure that any serious work on the new project doesn't start until after you terminate the old. A lawyer can help you deal with these issues in such a way as to keep your new company from being shut down.
Once you know what your options are, you need to make a plan. Who is going to be available? What's your new target market? When will your product be available? When will it be profitable? And how are you going to live in the meantime? You're going to want answers to all those questions before you make any moves you can't take back.
Good luck.
Actually, I'm not sure what else it could be used for. A patent on patent trolling can only be used against other patent trolls. If Halliburton wanted to be a patent troll, they wouldn't need a patent to do it. Besides, patent trolls typically don't have any other source of income that can be threatened by their "business", so Halliburton wouldn't really qualify.
Looks like someone's stab at a defensive patent to me.
Personally, if this is such a problem you're probably carrying too many electronic widgets. But if you really need them, then this thing is supposed to have adapters for most stuff.
Since businesses are reluctant to sign on to the TSA's latest invasion of privacy, they're resorting to bribery. If your business wants to hire foreign workers at bargain basement prices, you need to sign up for the DHS program. Apparently the DHS's charter is so broad that they can tinker with stuff like this if they pretend it's some kind of "emergency". The DHS has surpassed even the IRS as the most out-of-control government agency.
Remember, the DHS is in the business of snooping. If the economy gets wrecked in the process, well, that's someone else's job.
It's a free county and you can believe what you want; I'm not claiming to have proof of anything one way or another, but you really need to at least keep the known facts straight. Which was my gripe with the poster's remarks, since they obviously weren't representing the original article correctly.
Evidently the poster couldn't be bothered to RTFA. The actual article doesn't say the codex has "no mention of the resurrection". It says that, "The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus' disciples discover his empty tomb." What this refers to is Mark 16:9-20, which most modern translations note as a later addition or discard entirely. The gospel ends abruptly with the discovery of the empty tomb and skips later appearances of Jesus. The remaining three gospels pretty much have the usual resurrection stories in the usual places.
There are eight planets and four dwarf planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, (Ceres), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, (Pluto), (Eris), (Makemake). (Dwarf planets in quotes.) Ceres used to be called an asteroid because it's in the asteroid belt, but it's really too big for that. The others have been there all along, but they're way out there, so it takes a while to figure out if they qualify as a planet. If you're really trying to keep up, you might want to make some notes about Quaoar and Sedna which might wind up on the list.
On the bright side, at least you don't have Fisher Price's problem. They've got a toy line called Planet Heroes and their designer apparently hasn't been keeping up on his email. They were two planets down when the line came out and they just fell further behind by one more, but the kids are being taught with more current material.
My seven-year-old was telling a friend all about Planet Heroes when my friend, just to be funny, asked him about Ceres. My son gave him a disgusted look and said, in the tone of someone pointing out the obvious, "That's in the asteroid belt."
I almost fell out of my chair laughing.