What about simpler uses? How many basic tasks in the car require you to take your hands off the steering wheel?
Zero.
A very few may require taking a hand off the steering wheel, though well designed newer cars tend to solve even that by putting controls on the wheel.
Though to solve the major "hands off the wheel" problem I've seen in other drivers, I'm not sure how voice control would work, anyhow: are you proposing a voice-controlled makeup application system?
You are suggesting that it's not worth suing to learn whether Netflix holds this patent legitimately (as in "no prior art") because Netflix isn't actually using what it has patented?
A class action suit isn't going to find that out. It is going to end up either (a) dismissed, or (b) with a settlement in which Netflix will not admit wrongdoing but will give a pile of money to the lawyers and some token discount or payout to the class members.
Its more likely that Blockbuster v. Netflix will actually end up with a resolution of the validity of Netflix's patents, since the patent is both key to Netflix's business model and such a substantial barrier to Blockbuster that there is a good incentive for both sides to push the issue.
Actually, I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking right now, and it works very well. It actually works better if you speak quickly (as you normally would) and it's pretty good at inserting grammar along the way.
Of course, if we were voting with our heads instead of just for the incumbent (who is reelected 95% of the time, at least in congress) then perhaps we would have a better chance at it.
Since, generally, the people voting are the same people that voted for the guy 2 years ago, and the opponent is generally of a similar ideology to the opponent from 2 years ago, is it really surprising that, even if people were voting with their heads, the incumbent would be reelected in the vast majority of cases?
But it seems to me these lawyers have to prove that Netflix "knew something" about the prior art.
So unless they can subpeona some emails from WAY back when they got the patents talking about something like that, all Netflix has to do is claim ignorance.
Sure, direct evidence would be nice, but circumstantial evidence works to. And, in a civil case, the standard of proof is "preponderance of the evidence" (that is, the jury must merely be conviced that it is more likely than not that the charge is true), not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of criminal. Its quite possible to establish, to that standard, that someone "knew" something without producing a document in which they admit to knowing it.
I'm curious how this could be a class-action suit.
Probably because the lawyer filing the case is going to claim a wide range of potential victims constituting a valid "class" through the antitrust allegations.
I thought that's when a huge group of people band together to fight a company.
No, when people band together, you get a big direct action suit with lots of plaintiffs (like the one depicted in Erin Brockovich). A class action suit is when a lawyer and a small number of plaintiffs allege the existence of a vast number of victims that are similarly situated, and seek to claim the right to represent all of them.
This looks like Blockbuster v. Netflix.
Its related to the patent issues in Blockbuster v. Netflix, but separate.
160 Mbit/sec? That's about 33% of the speed of current hard drives, maximum.
And 600GB on a CD-sized disk is a lot higher data denisty than current hard drives, and its probably more resistant to shock, etc. With a write-once disk, you aren't looking to replace hard drives in regular day-to-day use, its a archival, backup, and perhaps high-volume distribution medium (where you fill several of them with data, jump in a car, and drive to where you want your data to end up). Now, admittedly, I don't have the kind of storage needs where the physial size of a many-terabyte backup is something I worry about, but I'm sure there are large scientific, corporate, and government applications where that might be very interesting.
Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?
To a certain extent, of course it will. Just like "the world wide web" itself has lots of "gated communities" of various types. Really, "the metaverse" is a lot like "the web" with a different UI metaphor.
Microsoft has used its annual hardware engineering conference to announce that Windows Vista and Server 2008 will be the last versions of Windows capable of booting on 32-bit CPUs such as Intel Pentium 4 and Core Duo.
So, given other recent Slashdot Microsoft news, we should expect that the successors to Vista and Server 2008 will only run on 64-bit or better mobile phones that split their screens to support multiple users on the same phone?
By keeping prices higher than they would be in the absence of a cartel.
Getting the highest profits does NOT result from arbitrarily high prices.
Not arbitrarily, no, nor did I claim they sought to keep prices arbitrarily high. But its not to keep prices down. OPEC is, contrary to GPs suggestion, much happier with high prices than oil consumers are.
But, when producers collaborate, the price at which profit is maximized is higher than where it would be if producers competed.
Its actually at exactly the same point, when you consider the aggregate profit of all producers.
The problem is that every individual producer has a dominant strategy of increasing production (and driving supply down) from that point where producers compete and have excess potential production capacity (increasingly, of course, OPEC is becoming irrelevant because of the absence of excess production capacity.) It ks (if you take the producers as the universe of analysis) a tragedy of the commons problem which the shared institution seeks to resolve.
THAT's the goal of a cartel - eliminate downward price pressure caused by competition.
Right, that's exactly what I was saying. I didn't miss anything.
And even if they are at the optimal short-term price point for maximizing profits, in the LONG term, if the short-term price is so high that other people start investing in technology that ultimately reduces the demand for oil, then again, OPEC loses out on profits because in 5 or 10 years, everyone's car runs Ethanol or Vegetable Oil and demand for oil plummets.
So what? If this was a concern, OPEC's best course of action would be to pocket the excess profits now and invest them in the same alternatives, so that when that occurs, they are reaping the profits from that. But its really not: the very few OPEC countries that have taken the long view (like Kuwait) have been doing essentially that (not investing in alternatives directly so much as investing throughout the economy in things that do well when oil prices are low), but for the most part OPEC countries haven't taken the long view at all.
"Microsoft has a research project called 'Fone+' that would allow the phone to work with a TV as a secondary display, and one that could allow video stored on the device to be played back on the television."
So, Microsoft has a "research project" that would allow a wireless phone to be used like my iPod can be used now: with a TV as a secondary display, including for stored video. Hmm. A phone, that could be used the same way an iPod can be now. And that might include even more of the features one expects in a general purpose computer? Hmm. Can't think of any of Microsoft's competitors that might be ahead in that direction. Nope, this must be pure Microsoft innovation at its finest.
Interstate commerce - which given case law, basically covers all commerce (not that it's right).
It actually, per the case law, covers all activities which might reasonably impact interstate markets; this includes activities not commercial in themselves (such as, at the outer extreme, growing wheat—the textbook example—or marijuana—from a more recent case—at home for one's own personal consumption).
So what then does roommates.com have to do with any of this?
Quite possibly nothing. Just because their active involvement in demanding that the information (which it is illegal for landlords to request) be provided excludes them from the safe harbor provisions under the CDA doesn't mean they are actually liable under the FHA.
Wait. The COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT? The act that was supposed to keep the kiddies away from Intarweb pr0n?
Wasn't that struck down, like, in the 1990s?
Some (but not all, IIRC) of the prohibitory provisions were either struck down or limited in applicability by the Supreme Court.
The safe harbor provisions, which provide a liability shield which extends to liability under other laws (pretty much all other laws that turn on the status of "publisher or speaker"), not just the prohibitory provisions of the CDA, were not.
But the CORRECT ruling (yea, good luck getting a sane ruling in CA) would have been to toss the case on the grounds that neither the "Fair Housing Act" nor the CDA pass Constituitional muster.
Unless a novel Constitutional argument was made, that would have been an incorrect ruling by the appeals court, since, any merits of the past Constitutional arguments that have been made and rejected by the Supreme Court aside, the most common Constitutional arguments against those acts have been made previously, and rejected by the Supreme Court, and all lower courts in the US are bound by those decisions.
The CDA fails on 1st and 10th Amendment grounds and the FHA on 10th.
Leaving aside the question of whether the Supreme Court ought to rule that, that is clearly, in both cases, contrary the precedent that is binding on the court that made this ruling. That being said, I think you are way off base in both cases, whether you go buy precedent or by any fair reading of what the Constitution likely "intends" ignoring "errors" inserted by the court (e.g., in the case of the FHA, on the one hand it is well within the clearly established, by precedent, parameters of the Commerce Clause, and on the other is within the intended vast sweep of the 14th Amendment grant of power to Congress that the Supreme Court narrowed to virtual nothingness—it being the only grant of power to Congress that the Supreme Court has essentially held gives Congress no more power or discretion to enforce the provision that it claims to give Congress the power to enforce than simply to do whatever the Supreme Court would command anyhow without Congressional action.)
While other provisions of the CDA may violate the Constitution, the safe harbor provision, when applied to insulate against liability under other laws, is clearly within the Commerce power.
Tolerence isn't allowing people you agree with to do things you approve of, it is permitting people you don't like to do things you disapprove of so long as they don't use force or fraud against others.
No, "tolerance" just means "permitting people to do things whether or not you approve of them". You apparently think that the proper boundaries of what people should be tolerant of is everything not involving force or fraud as you interpret those, but that is not a Constitutional command or universally accepted moral precept, just your personal opinion.
OPEC, on the other hand, doesn't like high gas prices any more than you do
This is not true. OPEC exists to keep oil prices high, that's what cartels are for—preventing each individual producer from pumping as much as possible because of their limited ability to affect global prices individually, so that the collective effect is low prices. While maybe a couple of OPEC members (certainly, Kuwait, at least before the Iraqi invasion) have, since the formation of OPEC, expanded their investments in other areas so much that now they favor lower prices because their other investments return more than they lose on oil sales, and others (the Saudi royals, for instance) are concerned about external and internal threats to their continuity in power enough that, while their financial interests are served by higher oil prices, their desire for security guarantees from the West leads them to weigh that against other interests, for the most part OPEC is still pro-high-prices.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that recently Valve Software's Doug Lombardi has stated his strong belief that user created content is a very important part of games in the near future.
In the near future? User created content has been important for quite some time. Maybe before big-name games first started linking to mod sites from their homepages, and bundling some of the best user-created content in expansion packs, this could qualify as a bold prediction. But now? Come on.
No! Despite the fact that we all heard about it on TV, the radio, newspapers, and magazines, and even though they taught it in every elementary school's earth science curriculum, it didn't really happen.
That one statement alone - that global cooling was never really widely believed - is enough to make me write off anything else a source has to say. I was there and it happened, and I don't care how much some people wish that it hadn't.
Its not that it was never widely believed, it was that it was never a scientific consensus the way global warming is, and thus is not a parallel.
Saying we shouldn't pay attention to the broad scientific consensus on global warming because of a popular media craze in the 1970s around a prediction made by a handful of scientists which many others found merely plausible is, well, rather spurious.
So, yes, "they predicted global cooling, but now they predict is global warming" is a myth. More precisely, it is equivocation. The "they" that predicted global cooling aren't the same "they" that predicts global warming.
The problem is the evidence for warming does seem to be selective. Everything "hotter" supposedly proves global warming (or anything colder, or anything unusual in any way), but any example to the contrary "doesn't disprove anything".
That's just because you aren't paying attention. Many local changes (including heating in some area, cooling in others, greater extremes of things that aren't particular hot or cold but other aspects of weather in other places) are in line with the theoretical predictions of the effects of the global warming, and are often pointed to in popular media as things that might be symptoms (or, sometimes sloppily, as things that are symptoms) of global warming.
They are not proofs of global warming. The proof of the fact of global warming is the measured increase in global average temperatures. The evidence for the causal models that suggest where global warming comes from is more varied, but is not the weather outcomes.
Some of the weather outcomes, when systematically studied and analyzed, may confirm some of the theoretical models of consequences of global warming, but the individual examples pointed to are not proofs of those individually, and certainly aren't proofs of warming itself.
It will be even more reason for developers of gtk apps to ignore that majority of their users who DON'T use gnome.
Given that GTK isn't limited to Linux, and many GTK apps are used by more Windows users than Linux (Gnome or otherwise) users, I don't think Dell bundling Ubuntu is going to make a big dent in that one way or the other.
This is a huge problem, particularly with the gimp (but also with others, such as Firefox), where there is no viable alternative.
How is this a "huge problem"? GIMP and Firefox works fine on KDE and Windows for me.
The gnome interface sucks, quit pushing it on the rest of us.
I'm not pushing anything on you.
It's making the Linux desktop just as bad as mac or windows.
The idea that, except for Gnome, the Linux desktop would be better than Mac or Windows is, to put it mildly, not particularly widely accepted.
The only people who think it doesn't matter are a) not Linux users or b) gnome users who can't see beyond their own tiny world.
I use Windows, Gnome, and KDE; as far as Linux is concerned, I prefer KDE. I think it doesn't matter. It is therefore clear to me that you are mistaken.
Exactly, the issue IS fossile fuels and my point is that we most likely will NOT be off them by 2020.
I would go further than "most likely" to say "obviously". But, if it was your point, that's not what you said.
You don't care about that?
"Don't care"? I wouldn't say that, any more than I "don't care" that I won't be completely out of debt tomorrow morning. I care about the pace of reduction of dependence on fossil fuels and our amount of greenhouse gas emissions; while I'd certainly like to be completely off of them by 2020 (or even 2008), I don't expect either is realistic, and I'm not going to go running around screaming because of that.
to program in C++ by manipulating graphical symbols
What does that mean ? In what sense would they be programming ?
How would it not? Characters displayed on a screen are "graphical symbols", after all.
The difference between using graphical symbols that happen to be linear text that are combined to make identifiers, etc., and graphical symbols where each block represents a whole command is analogous to the difference between a alphabetic written language and a ideographic one. Certainly neither is more real. Similarly, in the context of programming, neither is more "programming" than the other.
This is simply a case of the more your story is in the news, the better the results for you. MS will NEVER sue anybody using Linux because the consequences of MS losing that case would be disastrous. Instead they will simply try and make managers (who in most organizations outside the tech sphere are technologically illiterate) make the following connection:
Linux = Patent Violation = Unreliable
In the short run, it will probably work, and impede Linux adoption, particularly in enterprise domains that it has not yet penetrated. OTOH, since it is FUD, what will happen is that some people won't be fooled, and they will demonstrated that Linux has value. And Microsoft's FUD will be hard pressed to keep up with real world results.
Slashdot Mirror
Zero.
A very few may require taking a hand off the steering wheel, though well designed newer cars tend to solve even that by putting controls on the wheel.
Though to solve the major "hands off the wheel" problem I've seen in other drivers, I'm not sure how voice control would work, anyhow: are you proposing a voice-controlled makeup application system?
A class action suit isn't going to find that out. It is going to end up either (a) dismissed, or (b) with a settlement in which Netflix will not admit wrongdoing but will give a pile of money to the lawyers and some token discount or payout to the class members.
Its more likely that Blockbuster v. Netflix will actually end up with a resolution of the validity of Netflix's patents, since the patent is both key to Netflix's business model and such a substantial barrier to Blockbuster that there is a good incentive for both sides to push the issue.
What does "inserting grammar" mean?
Since, generally, the people voting are the same people that voted for the guy 2 years ago, and the opponent is generally of a similar ideology to the opponent from 2 years ago, is it really surprising that, even if people were voting with their heads, the incumbent would be reelected in the vast majority of cases?
Sure, direct evidence would be nice, but circumstantial evidence works to. And, in a civil case, the standard of proof is "preponderance of the evidence" (that is, the jury must merely be conviced that it is more likely than not that the charge is true), not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of criminal. Its quite possible to establish, to that standard, that someone "knew" something without producing a document in which they admit to knowing it.
Probably because the lawyer filing the case is going to claim a wide range of potential victims constituting a valid "class" through the antitrust allegations.
No, when people band together, you get a big direct action suit with lots of plaintiffs (like the one depicted in Erin Brockovich). A class action suit is when a lawyer and a small number of plaintiffs allege the existence of a vast number of victims that are similarly situated, and seek to claim the right to represent all of them.
Its related to the patent issues in Blockbuster v. Netflix, but separate.
And 600GB on a CD-sized disk is a lot higher data denisty than current hard drives, and its probably more resistant to shock, etc. With a write-once disk, you aren't looking to replace hard drives in regular day-to-day use, its a archival, backup, and perhaps high-volume distribution medium (where you fill several of them with data, jump in a car, and drive to where you want your data to end up). Now, admittedly, I don't have the kind of storage needs where the physial size of a many-terabyte backup is something I worry about, but I'm sure there are large scientific, corporate, and government applications where that might be very interesting.
To a certain extent, of course it will. Just like "the world wide web" itself has lots of "gated communities" of various types. Really, "the metaverse" is a lot like "the web" with a different UI metaphor.
So, given other recent Slashdot Microsoft news, we should expect that the successors to Vista and Server 2008 will only run on 64-bit or better mobile phones that split their screens to support multiple users on the same phone?
Stanford's "budding lawyers" are quite likely hoping to get jobs with firms that would represent the *AA's and similar big-money interests.
By keeping prices higher than they would be in the absence of a cartel.
Not arbitrarily, no, nor did I claim they sought to keep prices arbitrarily high. But its not to keep prices down. OPEC is, contrary to GPs suggestion, much happier with high prices than oil consumers are.
Its actually at exactly the same point, when you consider the aggregate profit of all producers.
The problem is that every individual producer has a dominant strategy of increasing production (and driving supply down) from that point where producers compete and have excess potential production capacity (increasingly, of course, OPEC is becoming irrelevant because of the absence of excess production capacity.) It ks (if you take the producers as the universe of analysis) a tragedy of the commons problem which the shared institution seeks to resolve.
Right, that's exactly what I was saying. I didn't miss anything.
So what? If this was a concern, OPEC's best course of action would be to pocket the excess profits now and invest them in the same alternatives, so that when that occurs, they are reaping the profits from that. But its really not: the very few OPEC countries that have taken the long view (like Kuwait) have been doing essentially that (not investing in alternatives directly so much as investing throughout the economy in things that do well when oil prices are low), but for the most part OPEC countries haven't taken the long view at all.
So, Microsoft has a "research project" that would allow a wireless phone to be used like my iPod can be used now: with a TV as a secondary display, including for stored video. Hmm. A phone, that could be used the same way an iPod can be now. And that might include even more of the features one expects in a general purpose computer? Hmm. Can't think of any of Microsoft's competitors that might be ahead in that direction. Nope, this must be pure Microsoft innovation at its finest.
It actually, per the case law, covers all activities which might reasonably impact interstate markets; this includes activities not commercial in themselves (such as, at the outer extreme, growing wheat—the textbook example—or marijuana—from a more recent case—at home for one's own personal consumption).
Quite possibly nothing. Just because their active involvement in demanding that the information (which it is illegal for landlords to request) be provided excludes them from the safe harbor provisions under the CDA doesn't mean they are actually liable under the FHA.
Some (but not all, IIRC) of the prohibitory provisions were either struck down or limited in applicability by the Supreme Court.
The safe harbor provisions, which provide a liability shield which extends to liability under other laws (pretty much all other laws that turn on the status of "publisher or speaker"), not just the prohibitory provisions of the CDA, were not.
Unless a novel Constitutional argument was made, that would have been an incorrect ruling by the appeals court, since, any merits of the past Constitutional arguments that have been made and rejected by the Supreme Court aside, the most common Constitutional arguments against those acts have been made previously, and rejected by the Supreme Court, and all lower courts in the US are bound by those decisions.
Leaving aside the question of whether the Supreme Court ought to rule that, that is clearly, in both cases, contrary the precedent that is binding on the court that made this ruling. That being said, I think you are way off base in both cases, whether you go buy precedent or by any fair reading of what the Constitution likely "intends" ignoring "errors" inserted by the court (e.g., in the case of the FHA, on the one hand it is well within the clearly established, by precedent, parameters of the Commerce Clause, and on the other is within the intended vast sweep of the 14th Amendment grant of power to Congress that the Supreme Court narrowed to virtual nothingness—it being the only grant of power to Congress that the Supreme Court has essentially held gives Congress no more power or discretion to enforce the provision that it claims to give Congress the power to enforce than simply to do whatever the Supreme Court would command anyhow without Congressional action.)
While other provisions of the CDA may violate the Constitution, the safe harbor provision, when applied to insulate against liability under other laws, is clearly within the Commerce power.
No, "tolerance" just means "permitting people to do things whether or not you approve of them". You apparently think that the proper boundaries of what people should be tolerant of is everything not involving force or fraud as you interpret those, but that is not a Constitutional command or universally accepted moral precept, just your personal opinion.
This is not true. OPEC exists to keep oil prices high, that's what cartels are for—preventing each individual producer from pumping as much as possible because of their limited ability to affect global prices individually, so that the collective effect is low prices. While maybe a couple of OPEC members (certainly, Kuwait, at least before the Iraqi invasion) have, since the formation of OPEC, expanded their investments in other areas so much that now they favor lower prices because their other investments return more than they lose on oil sales, and others (the Saudi royals, for instance) are concerned about external and internal threats to their continuity in power enough that, while their financial interests are served by higher oil prices, their desire for security guarantees from the West leads them to weigh that against other interests, for the most part OPEC is still pro-high-prices.
In the near future? User created content has been important for quite some time. Maybe before big-name games first started linking to mod sites from their homepages, and bundling some of the best user-created content in expansion packs, this could qualify as a bold prediction. But now? Come on.
Its not that it was never widely believed, it was that it was never a scientific consensus the way global warming is, and thus is not a parallel.
Saying we shouldn't pay attention to the broad scientific consensus on global warming because of a popular media craze in the 1970s around a prediction made by a handful of scientists which many others found merely plausible is, well, rather spurious.
So, yes, "they predicted global cooling, but now they predict is global warming" is a myth. More precisely, it is equivocation. The "they" that predicted global cooling aren't the same "they" that predicts global warming.
That's just because you aren't paying attention. Many local changes (including heating in some area, cooling in others, greater extremes of things that aren't particular hot or cold but other aspects of weather in other places) are in line with the theoretical predictions of the effects of the global warming, and are often pointed to in popular media as things that might be symptoms (or, sometimes sloppily, as things that are symptoms) of global warming.
They are not proofs of global warming. The proof of the fact of global warming is the measured increase in global average temperatures. The evidence for the causal models that suggest where global warming comes from is more varied, but is not the weather outcomes.
Some of the weather outcomes, when systematically studied and analyzed, may confirm some of the theoretical models of consequences of global warming, but the individual examples pointed to are not proofs of those individually, and certainly aren't proofs of warming itself.
Is a subset of the whole Earth. Implying that something must be true of the Earth because it is true of Eastern Canada is the fallacy of composition.
Given that GTK isn't limited to Linux, and many GTK apps are used by more Windows users than Linux (Gnome or otherwise) users, I don't think Dell bundling Ubuntu is going to make a big dent in that one way or the other.
How is this a "huge problem"? GIMP and Firefox works fine on KDE and Windows for me.
I'm not pushing anything on you.
The idea that, except for Gnome, the Linux desktop would be better than Mac or Windows is, to put it mildly, not particularly widely accepted.
I use Windows, Gnome, and KDE; as far as Linux is concerned, I prefer KDE. I think it doesn't matter. It is therefore clear to me that you are mistaken.
Clearly, that is your opinion. So what?
I would go further than "most likely" to say "obviously". But, if it was your point, that's not what you said.
"Don't care"? I wouldn't say that, any more than I "don't care" that I won't be completely out of debt tomorrow morning. I care about the pace of reduction of dependence on fossil fuels and our amount of greenhouse gas emissions; while I'd certainly like to be completely off of them by 2020 (or even 2008), I don't expect either is realistic, and I'm not going to go running around screaming because of that.
How would it not? Characters displayed on a screen are "graphical symbols", after all.
The difference between using graphical symbols that happen to be linear text that are combined to make identifiers, etc., and graphical symbols where each block represents a whole command is analogous to the difference between a alphabetic written language and a ideographic one. Certainly neither is more real. Similarly, in the context of programming, neither is more "programming" than the other.
In the short run, it will probably work, and impede Linux adoption, particularly in enterprise domains that it has not yet penetrated. OTOH, since it is FUD, what will happen is that some people won't be fooled, and they will demonstrated that Linux has value. And Microsoft's FUD will be hard pressed to keep up with real world results.