I am so retarded. This is embarrassing. I guess that's what I get for trying to "be cool and use perl in my slashdot posts". I am such a douche-bag. No more posting for me today.
As a graduate student, I was actually extremely surprised that the numbers are so high, and not because it implies a certain level of honesty. It was inconceivable to me that anyone would cheat at the graduate level; it doesn't make any sense. What do they have to gain (in the sciences, anyway). And then I remembered that grad students also include Master's students. Still, I'd like to know how exactly one can "cheat" to get a publication? While peer-reviewed publications in respected journals might not be important for getting a business degree, it's essential in any of the sciences (and it's kind of curious that they don't list chem or bio anywhere on there, or are those "physical sciences"?). None of the graduate students I know cheat. They don't do it because it doesn't achieve anything.
It's only true for things that get radio play. I assume that the guy went into this in his "mytho of radio-ready mastering" section and you just didn't get to that section (it's a long article, I understand), so if you did read it please bear with me. Often songs are mastered "hot" because, all else being equal, louder = better, and you want kids to go out and buy your stuff instead of Britney Spears'. This competition does not exist in the movie industry. Not that I'm particularly fond of the industry at the moment, but one thing they did right is figure out how to optimize the delivery of the audio experience. And one of the ways they did that is to normalize to 83 dB (don't ask me what they're using for 0 dB: I don't know). You will find a surprisingly uniform experience (wrt the audio, anyway) regardless of the venue. I assume, however, that they do compress dynamic range somewhat, since otherwise it could get hard to hear what the hell people are saying.
Is this yet another sign of the 'greying gamer' phenomenon, or simply evidence indicating the marketers have had it wrong all along?
I don't understand where this comment comes from. The alleged "core gamer" demographic was stated to be 18--34, which includes most of us that started gaming 20--30 years ago (though obviously not all), and what the article is trying to say is that the "core gamer" (what they call "heavy gamers") are more closely clustered around 6--17 years-of-age (45% of "heavy gamers" fall into that demographic, specifically). The point---which is obvious if you've bothered to read the article---is that marketers have had it totally wrong all along.
What I found most interesting is that 21% of the "heavy gamers" are female, which suggests that either
The study is bunk, or
I am clearly hanging out with the wrong groups of gamers (although, now that I think about it, they're all babies anyway [i.e., aged 6--17 years]).
I didn't say that kids playing music is, in principle, an awkward activity, but I, for one, would not bring my violin with me to launch rockets with. I rarely played outdoors, and when I did, it was always bothersome, even when provided with a chair and a decent music stand (that is to say, a stable one that wouldn't blow over, which is, generally speaking, not one that fits in the trunk of a car so well). There are instruments better and worse to bring along to a rocket-launching party, but just because a kid's playing her gameboy at a park doesn't mean she doesn't enjoy practicing piano at home (although it also doesn't suggest that, were she to practice piano at home, she would enjoy it). More generally, I don't understand why playing a gameboy while bored implies anything about what other activities one engages in while not bored.
As a child, I enjoyed running around outside, catching bugs, harrassing dogs, etc. In particular, going to the beach was a common site for these sorts of activities. I have never enjoyed singing, but I am a violinist, and as a child and high school student played in many state-wide ensembles. I am an avid bookworm, and as an elementary school student would read upwards of 30 books a year (those short, elementary-school-kid books). I also happened to really enjoy videogames, and I must confess that, had I found myself at a rocket launching site and with a gameboy, I would probably be playing the gameboy. You might try to argue that I'm an exception, but how many people do you know that
Play video games,
have other (outdoor) hobbies, and
aren't interested in everything under the sun?
Because that's pretty much all you need to have someone that'll play a gameboy at some boring event, despite enjoying other non-gaming (outdoor) activities (nearly every gamer I know fits this description, in case you were wondering).
Oh sure, they aren't interested in launching rockets. Or reading a book. Or playing a musical instrument. Or singing. Or hiking. Or playing a game of baseball with the neighbor kids. Or any else almost.
I could very easily be misinterpretting something here, but were the kids there of their own volition, or did someone (say, a father) drag them out there for some "fun outdoors"? Supposing that they were interested in playing musical instruments, singing, hiking, and playing baseball with neighboors, (and I am honestly curious here) what opportunities existed at the rocket launching site for engaging in such activities? Sure, I imagine it'd be fairly straight forward to sing or play music, but wouldn't that be a little awkward/embarrassing at a venue like that?
I was with you until that cookie thing. Even given an infinite supply of money, I don't think the parent ought to get the kid cookies. Does s/he need the cookies? If little Billy were tugging on my sleeve asking for his $4 cough syrup or something, yeah, but cookies? More directly, how is buying cookies for your kid not indulging them? I would have thought that giving one's kid everything it wanted would train it to expect satisfaction---resulting in an infantile adult. Speaking as a person who, as a child, got nearly everything he wanted, it's important to not give your child everything they ask for. Then again, it really isn't my place to tell anyone how to raise their children, so I think I'll just retract everything I just said.
Obviously we are in some disagreement here, since I am bothering to reply, but I really like having standards. I had thought that the slashdot crowd was with me on this, but maybe I was wrong. Just as would like all browsers to support web standards and all wordprocessors to support standard (well-documented) document formats, I would like everyone (when using English) to write in standard English. It just makes things easier.
Yes, I have seen enough people use "irregardless" and "rediculous" that I can parse it (it takes me awhile since I still parse it as "not regardless" on the first pass). I don't mind typos (or left-out words) or people who don't speak English as a first language. I don't even care if the mess up while talking to me. My bitch is with people that supposedly "speak" English, but for some god-forsaken reason can't manage to write a sentence without using fake words.
This is how I thought academic "cred" worked. "Cred" is what you get for producing works (that is, publishing articles) that a large number of people respect. Once you've established yourself by doing that sort of thing for awhile, then you can start reviewing other people's papers. It doesn't really matter what your degree is in, so long as what you say is useful. This doesn't mean that every good idea/paper gets the attention it deserves, but it keeps most of the crackpots out. Of course you need to start with a bunch of people you trust are experts of the given field, which can sometimes be a problem in very specialized fields. I don't see why you need to verify credentials beyond keeping track of identities.
Yeah, I know. You get a copy for each of your committee members (to do otherwise is rude) and maybe a couple for your advisor, and maybe a couple for yourself, and if anyone wants it you give them the pdf. My point was that it isn't published the same way that journal articles are; it doesn't get anywhere near that kind of circulation, and you don't expect it to. Like I said, no one reads these things (except for whomever continues the project you were on).
Oh I'm sure many do put it on their professional website, if they have one, but I'm also sure many don't bother. Personally, I have never found a thesis online; usually I go to the advisor and ask for a copy (pdf) if I'm interested. Besides, most of the useful information is published elsewhere (i.e. in journals) in easier to digest forms (i.e., not in a 150-page book). But maybe I'm completely wrong here, because I know this stuff is field-dependent, and I'm in a totally different field.
Crytek claims that only DirectX 10 allows the game to run as it was intended by the developers because the next-generation DirectX API, which will ship along with Windows Vista, allows more effects and more objects to be drawn on the screen with a smaller computational cost for the hardware.
Theses generally aren't published. Usually, only your committee reads those things. I imagine that the only way you'll get a copy is if you ask the author or the advisor for a pdf version of it, but that might get annoying if too many people do it.
Except that a cutoff that includes Pluto isn't sane. They might all be arbitrary, but it isn't useful if it's set so low as to be meaningless. The alternative is essentially to freeze the planets as they are because lay-people can't be bothered to remember that Pluto isn't a planet anymore. You're telling me that's less arbitrary than moving the threshold?
Having a PhD doesn't make you smart. It means that you're probably hardworking and not-dumb. But she doesn't have a Havard PhD. She is, however, a tenured professor at Havard (I am assuming that Havard uses the same nomenclature that most other schools use, in which "associate" refers to those tenured professors that have not yet achieved "full" status). I'm not sure if you read her response, but she seems like most top-tier professors I have talked to, which is to say, cogent even when I disagree with them -- the opposite of moronic.
From her response on Joystiq:
I believe that parents need to pay attention to their kids and to what their media experiences because all media are educational, whether intended or not. I will also note for you that the ESRB has assigned content descriptors for violence to games in the Pac Man series, which you can see for yourself by searching www.esrb.org. I am a huge advocate for self-regulation and for better parenting (I believe self-regulation means responsibility is required by all).
and also
Violence is part of life. I am comfortable deciding what is appropriate for me and my family, but I would not determine acceptability for anyone else. Our research seeks to help make parents aware of the violence and other content that may be of concern to them in video games and to make sure that they actually pay attention to their kids and their kids' experiences with games.
Now I don't know about you, but I completely agree with her. Her main bitch seems to be that the ESRB gives out ratings without playing the games. She wants there to be an adequate tool for deciding what her children are allowed to consume, not to keep you from playing violent games (or even keep you from letting your children play M-rated games). Her goal is for ESRB ratings to be
More comprehensive
More consistent
and this is not something I can really find fault with.
As for the study itself, I don't really think it contains useful information (yes, I've read it). The violence she calculates is undifferentiated, which means that cartoon violence against space invaders or centipedes is the same as any other kind of violence. At that point I could have told her -- without even playing the video games -- that there's tons of violence in E-rated games. With some notable exceptions, my video game experience is almost completely dominated by acts of senseless cartoon violence. I fail to see how it was in any way worse than your average episode of "Tom and Jerry". I haven't read the subsequent papers, though; perhaps this is fixed in those, since she explicitly mentions in the Joystiq interview that the type of violence is important (more important that the quantity of violence, in fact). Lastly, I hate papers that just compile statistics (also, she included too many sigfigs in her percentages), so this is a paper I wouldn't put much credence in on general principles.
In short, I don't think she says anything moronic; I just think she doesn't say anything useful either (for similar, but much more explicit reasons [at least in my opinion] than Stanton).
What I don't understand is how it ever got modded insightful. You don't need opengl (or even X, for that matter) to get your ipod to work with linux. If it's sane, then it should mount like any other standard USB disk. My understanding was that every music player except for Rio's worked this way, but maybe I'm mistaken.
One can say, in general, that all theories are wrong in some way. To single out evolution in this way seems ludicrous to me. I'm a physicist, so I'll be taking my examples from physics. We literally have no good reason to believe any of the physical "theories" that are currently taught except for the fact that they work (experimentally, that is). The only "proof" we have that the laws of thermodynamics are true is the simple fact that we have never seen them violated. Ever. But still, it's just a theory. It could be wrong.
So should we teach alternatives to all fundamental science? Like newtonian gravity, for example. Should we teach general relativity to our high school students, because newtonian gravity is totally wrong? (And in this case, we really do know it's wrong, and we even have its replacement.) Of course, we also know that general relativity is wrong too, so perhaps we should go straight to... to what, exactly?
But this is all really beside the point, you see, because all of those theories are couched in a mathematical framework. It's really easy (in principle) to prove whether or not a physical theory is wrong or not, because there's an equation that tells you what to expect. Evolution isn't really like that. There aren't any equations. It's just an idea, or perhaps, a framework for understanding why certain things in biological systems are the way that they are.
For evolution to be "true" (for it to do what it claims to), you only need three ingredients
Total information detailing everything that is needed to produce an organism, and a mechanism for storage (i.e. DNA)
A method for changing that information randomly (e.g., sexual reproduction)
A non-random selection process (e.g., getting eaten by some other organism)
That's it. That's all you need for things to evolve. Whether or not you believe that a random walk will get you where you need to go is a completely different matter. More importantly, if you don't believe that a random walk is sufficient then you had better come up with a better idea that is also consistent with what we already know.
I have another quote, admittedly from someone with somewhat less intellectual stature than Albert Einstein.
I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
From here. I offer, as an example, the baker, George Green. He did not enter college until the age of 40, and yet we owe to him Green's functions. This man spent the majority of his life baking, and yet he discovered mathematical tools that probably upwards of 99% of the population have never even heard of (despite being extremely useful). I am sure that there are hordes upon hordes of people that have spent far more time and effort to become the next "Einstein" (hopefully, they don't cherish that dream), and yet have contributed far less than Mr. Green here did in his spare time.
The same can be said about gardening, reading, going to the church, playing golf, etc.
Perhaps you may have noticed that gardening, reading, going to church, and playing golf aren't playing video games. Playing a pirated video is playing a video game. The assumption here is that one spends some fixed amount of time gaming; one can use that time playing legally acquired games or playing illegally acquired games. A stretch, perhaps, but certainly no less a stretch than suggesting church attendance in lieu of playing games.
To get the parametric search on DigiKey, you need to start by searching. E.g., if you want a 1uF cap, search first for "capacitor", then click on the section you want ("ceramic", for example), and voila: parametric search of their ceramic caps. I like DigiKey's search better than Mouser's, and, for whatever reason, Newark has the dubious distinction in these parts of having the worst search evar (but they do ship overnight free to us, so sometimes it's still worth it to sift through their site).
Sorry for not being clearer; I agree with your point (that the suit is bull). I just think that requiring that they manufacture the patented product will create far more problems than it solves. I don't think you can fit a good solution into a slashdot post, though, so I'm not going to try.
So you're telling me that only companies big enough to sell things should be allowed to patent something? A guy can't just come up with a good idea and sell it to someone anymore? I think requiring intent to manufacture something results in a chicken and egg problem for "little people". Not that I don't think there is a serious problem with the USPTO; I just don't think that's the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that they had a left-hand mode in Guitar Hero, but I didn't think anyone used it. Seriously, who plays guitar like that?
I am so retarded. This is embarrassing. I guess that's what I get for trying to "be cool and use perl in my slashdot posts". I am such a douche-bag. No more posting for me today.
s/don't cheat/cheat/
As a graduate student, I was actually extremely surprised that the numbers are so high, and not because it implies a certain level of honesty. It was inconceivable to me that anyone would cheat at the graduate level; it doesn't make any sense. What do they have to gain (in the sciences, anyway). And then I remembered that grad students also include Master's students. Still, I'd like to know how exactly one can "cheat" to get a publication? While peer-reviewed publications in respected journals might not be important for getting a business degree, it's essential in any of the sciences (and it's kind of curious that they don't list chem or bio anywhere on there, or are those "physical sciences"?). None of the graduate students I know cheat. They don't do it because it doesn't achieve anything.
It's only true for things that get radio play. I assume that the guy went into this in his "mytho of radio-ready mastering" section and you just didn't get to that section (it's a long article, I understand), so if you did read it please bear with me. Often songs are mastered "hot" because, all else being equal, louder = better, and you want kids to go out and buy your stuff instead of Britney Spears'. This competition does not exist in the movie industry. Not that I'm particularly fond of the industry at the moment, but one thing they did right is figure out how to optimize the delivery of the audio experience. And one of the ways they did that is to normalize to 83 dB (don't ask me what they're using for 0 dB: I don't know). You will find a surprisingly uniform experience (wrt the audio, anyway) regardless of the venue. I assume, however, that they do compress dynamic range somewhat, since otherwise it could get hard to hear what the hell people are saying.
I don't understand where this comment comes from. The alleged "core gamer" demographic was stated to be 18--34, which includes most of us that started gaming 20--30 years ago (though obviously not all), and what the article is trying to say is that the "core gamer" (what they call "heavy gamers") are more closely clustered around 6--17 years-of-age (45% of "heavy gamers" fall into that demographic, specifically). The point---which is obvious if you've bothered to read the article---is that marketers have had it totally wrong all along.
What I found most interesting is that 21% of the "heavy gamers" are female, which suggests that either
I didn't say that kids playing music is, in principle, an awkward activity, but I, for one, would not bring my violin with me to launch rockets with. I rarely played outdoors, and when I did, it was always bothersome, even when provided with a chair and a decent music stand (that is to say, a stable one that wouldn't blow over, which is, generally speaking, not one that fits in the trunk of a car so well). There are instruments better and worse to bring along to a rocket-launching party, but just because a kid's playing her gameboy at a park doesn't mean she doesn't enjoy practicing piano at home (although it also doesn't suggest that, were she to practice piano at home, she would enjoy it). More generally, I don't understand why playing a gameboy while bored implies anything about what other activities one engages in while not bored.
As a child, I enjoyed running around outside, catching bugs, harrassing dogs, etc. In particular, going to the beach was a common site for these sorts of activities. I have never enjoyed singing, but I am a violinist, and as a child and high school student played in many state-wide ensembles. I am an avid bookworm, and as an elementary school student would read upwards of 30 books a year (those short, elementary-school-kid books). I also happened to really enjoy videogames, and I must confess that, had I found myself at a rocket launching site and with a gameboy, I would probably be playing the gameboy. You might try to argue that I'm an exception, but how many people do you know that
Because that's pretty much all you need to have someone that'll play a gameboy at some boring event, despite enjoying other non-gaming (outdoor) activities (nearly every gamer I know fits this description, in case you were wondering).
I could very easily be misinterpretting something here, but were the kids there of their own volition, or did someone (say, a father) drag them out there for some "fun outdoors"? Supposing that they were interested in playing musical instruments, singing, hiking, and playing baseball with neighboors, (and I am honestly curious here) what opportunities existed at the rocket launching site for engaging in such activities? Sure, I imagine it'd be fairly straight forward to sing or play music, but wouldn't that be a little awkward/embarrassing at a venue like that?
I was with you until that cookie thing. Even given an infinite supply of money, I don't think the parent ought to get the kid cookies. Does s/he need the cookies? If little Billy were tugging on my sleeve asking for his $4 cough syrup or something, yeah, but cookies? More directly, how is buying cookies for your kid not indulging them? I would have thought that giving one's kid everything it wanted would train it to expect satisfaction---resulting in an infantile adult. Speaking as a person who, as a child, got nearly everything he wanted, it's important to not give your child everything they ask for. Then again, it really isn't my place to tell anyone how to raise their children, so I think I'll just retract everything I just said.
Obviously we are in some disagreement here, since I am bothering to reply, but I really like having standards. I had thought that the slashdot crowd was with me on this, but maybe I was wrong. Just as would like all browsers to support web standards and all wordprocessors to support standard (well-documented) document formats, I would like everyone (when using English) to write in standard English. It just makes things easier.
Yes, I have seen enough people use "irregardless" and "rediculous" that I can parse it (it takes me awhile since I still parse it as "not regardless" on the first pass). I don't mind typos (or left-out words) or people who don't speak English as a first language. I don't even care if the mess up while talking to me. My bitch is with people that supposedly "speak" English, but for some god-forsaken reason can't manage to write a sentence without using fake words.
But what if a game has periods of jumping and shooting, separated by periods of thinking?
This is how I thought academic "cred" worked. "Cred" is what you get for producing works (that is, publishing articles) that a large number of people respect. Once you've established yourself by doing that sort of thing for awhile, then you can start reviewing other people's papers. It doesn't really matter what your degree is in, so long as what you say is useful. This doesn't mean that every good idea/paper gets the attention it deserves, but it keeps most of the crackpots out. Of course you need to start with a bunch of people you trust are experts of the given field, which can sometimes be a problem in very specialized fields. I don't see why you need to verify credentials beyond keeping track of identities.
Yeah, I know. You get a copy for each of your committee members (to do otherwise is rude) and maybe a couple for your advisor, and maybe a couple for yourself, and if anyone wants it you give them the pdf. My point was that it isn't published the same way that journal articles are; it doesn't get anywhere near that kind of circulation, and you don't expect it to. Like I said, no one reads these things (except for whomever continues the project you were on).
Oh I'm sure many do put it on their professional website, if they have one, but I'm also sure many don't bother. Personally, I have never found a thesis online; usually I go to the advisor and ask for a copy (pdf) if I'm interested. Besides, most of the useful information is published elsewhere (i.e. in journals) in easier to digest forms (i.e., not in a 150-page book). But maybe I'm completely wrong here, because I know this stuff is field-dependent, and I'm in a totally different field.
So I'm guessing that's a no.
Theses generally aren't published. Usually, only your committee reads those things. I imagine that the only way you'll get a copy is if you ask the author or the advisor for a pdf version of it, but that might get annoying if too many people do it.
Actually, the Penny Arcade Wikipedia page has it there.
Except that a cutoff that includes Pluto isn't sane. They might all be arbitrary, but it isn't useful if it's set so low as to be meaningless. The alternative is essentially to freeze the planets as they are because lay-people can't be bothered to remember that Pluto isn't a planet anymore. You're telling me that's less arbitrary than moving the threshold?
Having a PhD doesn't make you smart. It means that you're probably hardworking and not-dumb. But she doesn't have a Havard PhD. She is, however, a tenured professor at Havard (I am assuming that Havard uses the same nomenclature that most other schools use, in which "associate" refers to those tenured professors that have not yet achieved "full" status). I'm not sure if you read her response, but she seems like most top-tier professors I have talked to, which is to say, cogent even when I disagree with them -- the opposite of moronic.
From her response on Joystiq:
and also
Now I don't know about you, but I completely agree with her. Her main bitch seems to be that the ESRB gives out ratings without playing the games. She wants there to be an adequate tool for deciding what her children are allowed to consume, not to keep you from playing violent games (or even keep you from letting your children play M-rated games). Her goal is for ESRB ratings to be
and this is not something I can really find fault with.
As for the study itself, I don't really think it contains useful information (yes, I've read it). The violence she calculates is undifferentiated, which means that cartoon violence against space invaders or centipedes is the same as any other kind of violence. At that point I could have told her -- without even playing the video games -- that there's tons of violence in E-rated games. With some notable exceptions, my video game experience is almost completely dominated by acts of senseless cartoon violence. I fail to see how it was in any way worse than your average episode of "Tom and Jerry". I haven't read the subsequent papers, though; perhaps this is fixed in those, since she explicitly mentions in the Joystiq interview that the type of violence is important (more important that the quantity of violence, in fact). Lastly, I hate papers that just compile statistics (also, she included too many sigfigs in her percentages), so this is a paper I wouldn't put much credence in on general principles.
In short, I don't think she says anything moronic; I just think she doesn't say anything useful either (for similar, but much more explicit reasons [at least in my opinion] than Stanton).
What I don't understand is how it ever got modded insightful. You don't need opengl (or even X, for that matter) to get your ipod to work with linux. If it's sane, then it should mount like any other standard USB disk. My understanding was that every music player except for Rio's worked this way, but maybe I'm mistaken.
One can say, in general, that all theories are wrong in some way. To single out evolution in this way seems ludicrous to me. I'm a physicist, so I'll be taking my examples from physics. We literally have no good reason to believe any of the physical "theories" that are currently taught except for the fact that they work (experimentally, that is). The only "proof" we have that the laws of thermodynamics are true is the simple fact that we have never seen them violated. Ever. But still, it's just a theory. It could be wrong.
So should we teach alternatives to all fundamental science? Like newtonian gravity, for example. Should we teach general relativity to our high school students, because newtonian gravity is totally wrong? (And in this case, we really do know it's wrong, and we even have its replacement.) Of course, we also know that general relativity is wrong too, so perhaps we should go straight to ... to what, exactly?
But this is all really beside the point, you see, because all of those theories are couched in a mathematical framework. It's really easy (in principle) to prove whether or not a physical theory is wrong or not, because there's an equation that tells you what to expect. Evolution isn't really like that. There aren't any equations. It's just an idea, or perhaps, a framework for understanding why certain things in biological systems are the way that they are.
For evolution to be "true" (for it to do what it claims to), you only need three ingredients
That's it. That's all you need for things to evolve. Whether or not you believe that a random walk will get you where you need to go is a completely different matter. More importantly, if you don't believe that a random walk is sufficient then you had better come up with a better idea that is also consistent with what we already know.
I have another quote, admittedly from someone with somewhat less intellectual stature than Albert Einstein.
From here. I offer, as an example, the baker, George Green. He did not enter college until the age of 40, and yet we owe to him Green's functions. This man spent the majority of his life baking, and yet he discovered mathematical tools that probably upwards of 99% of the population have never even heard of (despite being extremely useful). I am sure that there are hordes upon hordes of people that have spent far more time and effort to become the next "Einstein" (hopefully, they don't cherish that dream), and yet have contributed far less than Mr. Green here did in his spare time.
Perhaps you may have noticed that gardening, reading, going to church, and playing golf aren't playing video games. Playing a pirated video is playing a video game. The assumption here is that one spends some fixed amount of time gaming; one can use that time playing legally acquired games or playing illegally acquired games. A stretch, perhaps, but certainly no less a stretch than suggesting church attendance in lieu of playing games.
To get the parametric search on DigiKey, you need to start by searching. E.g., if you want a 1uF cap, search first for "capacitor", then click on the section you want ("ceramic", for example), and voila: parametric search of their ceramic caps. I like DigiKey's search better than Mouser's, and, for whatever reason, Newark has the dubious distinction in these parts of having the worst search evar (but they do ship overnight free to us, so sometimes it's still worth it to sift through their site).
Sorry for not being clearer; I agree with your point (that the suit is bull). I just think that requiring that they manufacture the patented product will create far more problems than it solves. I don't think you can fit a good solution into a slashdot post, though, so I'm not going to try.
So you're telling me that only companies big enough to sell things should be allowed to patent something? A guy can't just come up with a good idea and sell it to someone anymore? I think requiring intent to manufacture something results in a chicken and egg problem for "little people". Not that I don't think there is a serious problem with the USPTO; I just don't think that's the solution.