He doesn't even address the question about soul, he addresses the question of consciousness. Not the same thing. His answer presupposes that there is no such thing as a soul, no creative spark, only emerging properties of complex systems. That is a very narrow and pessimistic view. A person with that sort of view might as well just crawl away to die, what would be the point of going on?
Heh. My credit card company hasn't made a cent off me. Unless, perhaps, you count the 8.5x3" advertisement they insert into my monthly bill, but since I bank online I don't really look at the paper they send me anyway.
Actually, the card companies make about 2 cents on every dollar you charge as a processing fee.
Why is it that people keep naively quoting Hanlon's Razor as if it *isn't* just a codification of the kind of foolish trust that is eminently vulnerable to Hanlon's Bane?
"Never *admit* to malice which can be explained as stupidity.'
This being the main reason malice 'data points' are harder to come by.
You make an excellent point. One must also remember that malice and stupidity are not mutually exclusive. See, e.g., Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. But I think that here on Slashdot, we have an established record of simple ignorance.
I call bull poop. All you need is to download eight 1.36GB scene pr0n releases and you are over 130GB. This can easily be done in less than a day.:-p
Two points:
If you are watching 8 pr0n releases a day, you have bigger problems than whether your bandwidth is capped. You are going to get callouses where you don't want them, and your mom will be coming down to the basement to do your laundry at some point in the day. You know she never knocks.
Why is it that every patent story on slashdot always obfuscates the fact that patents cover methods of implementation, and not all encompassing ideas? Is it naive to think that this isn't a purposeful ommission?
The only part of a patent that matters are the claims. So, no this patent does not cover all PgUp / PgDn, but only paging that is carried out according to the formula in the claims. Still, it seems that paging through a document as if it were a book with fixed pages and always showing the same part of the page would have been obvious.
Indeed, this is an old feature on my XP system. My (perfectly legal) copy of XP changes the the theme everytime I reboot (or it reboots itself after the increasingly frequent BSOD's). I've started to wonder if Microsoft is intentionally degrading XP with every update in order to nag me to pay for an "upgrade" to Vista.
2. Defendant put the files in a shared folder on his HDD. There is no news in this story. Their argument is not contradictory. The RIAA alleges that he put his MP3's in a Kaaza shared folder, not just a folder that he and his wife share. The fair use defense for making copies only protects you if you stay within the bounds of fair use. The RIAA does not think it is fair use to make one copy of a CD available to share with the whole world.
Note that this argument does NOT require that he actually distributed any of the songs, or even connect to another computer. I think the last bit of that statement went too far, as it is a Kaaza shared folder that has been alleged. As a matter of law, I think that the RIAA is not stretching. Once you go beyond fair use, your original act of making copies is indefensible. Stay within fair use, and you can still rip to your ipod.
The parent is quite right. The claims of the patent describe a method for minimizing distribution costs across a network of distribution centers by statistically predicting future orders. In some embodiments, the method actually considers the possibility of losing customer goodwill as a cost.
That is, the claimed method implicitly recognizes that bad customer service can cost a business more than might be saved by minimizing distribution costs. That seems like a fairly insightful and customer oriented view.
The article might be better titled, Amazon patents providing good customer service whenever possible.
So what? This is like people saying "Oh no, when they installed the new indoor plumbing, they carted off the outhouse. What if the sewer clogs? Now were trapped into higher cost sewer service."
Get with the program people. The copper network is a dinosaur and cutting it off slowly as people willingly convert is the least disruptive way to let it die. Sooner or later everyone will have to convert. Don't like your FIOS, there are plenty of other options for everyone involved.
I believe that making intentional misstatements asserting patent rights that the owner knows to be invalid for the purpose of wrongfully suppressing competition is a violation of antitrust laws. But, IANAATL, if you have a particular concern that Microsoft's FUD affects you, then you should see an antitrust lawyer.
Did you read the proposed legislation or just the inflamatory headline? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot, so I will point out that the proposal of life in prison applies to those who sell counterfeit products (like rat poison pressed into little pills and sold as Viagra) that recklessly or intentionally result in death. So this is for your safety. You should be glad.
35 USC 101 requires that patents be awarded only for useful inventions.
35 USC 112 requires that the disclosure of a patent enable a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention (without undue experimentation).
So, if a patent has been issued that claims something that does not work (is completely useless) or would require undue experimentation to figure out from the patent, then the patent is invalid. Many patents are invalidated on this basis. Contact your friendly local patent counsel for a real legal opinion.
With this system a user will have the added delay and distration of processing a stimulus that the system provides after the system processes the signals that would have lead to recognition of the threat except for the fact that the user's attention is being diverted to process the stimuls generated by the system.
Wouldn't it be more useful to simply provide better training to enhance the soldiers' awareness and response to instinctual signals?
Of all my friends, I know not a single person who's built a "homebrew video server," nor have I ever met anybody who's had a problem with scratching a DVD. You don't have a two year old kid. I have two kids under three years old. I put all our Little Einstein disks and Elmo disks away after the first got destroyed. Now the kid's videos are streamed to a media player in the basement or quickly burned onto a cheap disposable disk as needed for viewing elsewhere. We have all the videos that we bought, plus a bunch of stuff recorded off of TV available at any time without worrying about the disks.
"The cure to bad speech is more speech,"
can anyone say 'flamewar' ?
That's all fine and lovely if all that is at stake is hurt feelings in a Usenet forum. An honest discussion and debate on matters relevant to a person's fitness to practice law might also be appropriate, if the accusers would make their complaints openly. But that is not what's happening here.
Here, as the article points out, because employers use Google to check on all candidates, and employers just won't touch anyone who stands out in any negative way, the slander and libel is causing real damages to the lives and careers of the victims of this sort of juvenile posting.
As another poster has pointed out here, there are ethics rules for lawyers that prohibit this sort of behavior. But the problem is not about lawyers; this sort of anonymous libel and slander can harm doctors, teachers, plumbers. The posters in the Autoadmit forum probably do not yet have an appreciation of the seriousness of this behavior. They think, what can a little flamewar hurt?
The people running the forum seem unwilling to provide even the barest amount of self regulation. That is a shame. Its not about feelings, its about people's lives and careers. Freedom of speech exceeds its limits when it impinges on the liberty of the victims to pursue their own lives in peace.
Libel and slander laws exist so that people do not have to resort to self-help solutions. (Historically, flamewars led to dueling with pistols at dawn. Ah, the good old days?) If the forum and the posters cannot regulate themselves to control the libel and slander, then they will be regulated by more laws, to the detriment of us all.
Its about "discovery" and "production." When a lawsuit is filed, the plaintiff gets the right to go on a fishing expedition in the defendant's files, emails, factories and to depose personnel. It is a burdensome and ridiculously expensive process for the defendant, who has to "produce" all the discovery material. And who knows what they might find? Even with a bogus claim, if the plaintiff's lawyers can survive long enough to force discovery, the cost and burden alone may make it worth Nintendo's money to just pay the plaintiff lawyers' "fees" to go away and send all Wii owners a $5 coupon for a Wii accessory in a "settlement" that is really a marketing campaign. That is at the heart of this game.
Of course, the cost of settlement is simply passed along to those poor saps that are represented by these lawyers in the higher cost of Wii games and accessories. Only the lawyers win.
Generally, all extradition treaties have provision where country A will not extradite a person to country B unless the offense with which he is charged is a crime in country A.
For AU to extradite him to the US, the act he is charged with must be considered a crime by AU.
Fair?? Reporting prices simply levels the playing field between consumer and retailer, preventing the retailer from profiting from consumer ignorance.
IANAL, but I have studied the subject of copyright law.
Prices are facts. Facts are not copyrightable subject matter. An advertisment and its layout might be copyrightable, but a listing of the prices that are, or are expected to be, offered is not copyrightable.
The DMCA simply provides a mechanism for notice and removal of copyrighted subject matter. That process takes a few days to go through. The companies are well aware of what is copyrightable and what is not.
BestBuy may just hope that they can buy a few days of consumer ignorance because of the time it takes to go through the removal, consult a lawyer, and reinstatement of content process. They only need a few days for this strategy to be effective. After black friday, it doesn't actually matter much whether a court would find that the posted material constituted a copyright violation.
According to: http://www.msnbc.com/news/978433.asp?0cv=CB20 "
Future versions of the SunnComm software would include ways that the copy-protecting files would change their name on different computers, making them harder to find, Jacobs said. Moreover, the company will distribute the technology along with third-party software, so that it doesn't always come off a protected CD, he added. "
Slashdot Mirror
I know it is too much to ask for Slasdot not to repeat old ideas as news, but doesn't anyone else remember the best invention of 2001? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=slug+eating+robot&aq=f&oq=
He doesn't even address the question about soul, he addresses the question of consciousness. Not the same thing. His answer presupposes that there is no such thing as a soul, no creative spark, only emerging properties of complex systems. That is a very narrow and pessimistic view. A person with that sort of view might as well just crawl away to die, what would be the point of going on?
Heh. My credit card company hasn't made a cent off me. Unless, perhaps, you count the 8.5x3" advertisement they insert into my monthly bill, but since I bank online I don't really look at the paper they send me anyway.
Actually, the card companies make about 2 cents on every dollar you charge as a processing fee.
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Why is it that people keep naively quoting Hanlon's Razor as if it *isn't* just a codification of the kind of foolish trust that is eminently vulnerable to Hanlon's Bane?
"Never *admit* to malice which can be explained as stupidity.'
This being the main reason malice 'data points' are harder to come by.
You make an excellent point. One must also remember that malice and stupidity are not mutually exclusive. See, e.g., Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. But I think that here on Slashdot, we have an established record of simple ignorance.
I call bull poop. All you need is to download eight 1.36GB scene pr0n releases and you are over 130GB. This can easily be done in less than a day. :-p
Two points:
If you are watching 8 pr0n releases a day, you have bigger problems than whether your bandwidth is capped. You are going to get callouses where you don't want them, and your mom will be coming down to the basement to do your laundry at some point in the day. You know she never knocks.
8*1.36GB=10.88GB
Why is it that every patent story on slashdot always obfuscates the fact that patents cover methods of implementation, and not all encompassing ideas? Is it naive to think that this isn't a purposeful ommission?
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
The only part of a patent that matters are the claims. So, no this patent does not cover all PgUp / PgDn, but only paging that is carried out according to the formula in the claims. Still, it seems that paging through a document as if it were a book with fixed pages and always showing the same part of the page would have been obvious.
Indeed, this is an old feature on my XP system. My (perfectly legal) copy of XP changes the the theme everytime I reboot (or it reboots itself after the increasingly frequent BSOD's). I've started to wonder if Microsoft is intentionally degrading XP with every update in order to nag me to pay for an "upgrade" to Vista.
The parent is quite right. The claims of the patent describe a method for minimizing distribution costs across a network of distribution centers by statistically predicting future orders. In some embodiments, the method actually considers the possibility of losing customer goodwill as a cost.
That is, the claimed method implicitly recognizes that bad customer service can cost a business more than might be saved by minimizing distribution costs. That seems like a fairly insightful and customer oriented view.
The article might be better titled, Amazon patents providing good customer service whenever possible.
File a provisional patent application using the USPTO provided form as a cover sheet online. This preserves your patent filing date for one year. You can do it yourself. But, if its worth anything to you, you should get the help of a registered patent attorney or agent.
The inventor describes the device in technical detail here:
P TO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=Rubtsov.IN.&OS=in/ Rubtsov&RS=IN/Rubtsov
u rl=http%3A%2F%2Fappft1.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-P arser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1% 2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv .html%2526r%3D1%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPG01% 2526S1%3DRubtsov.IN.%2526OS%3Din%2FRubtsov%2526RS% 3DIN%2FRubtsov&PageNum=&Rtype=&SectionNum=&idkey=7 688A41C1A69
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=
If you have a TIFF plugin, you can see the images showing a cool looking ray gun:
http://aiw2.uspto.gov/.aiw?Docid=20060119483&home
So what? This is like people saying "Oh no, when they installed the new indoor plumbing, they carted off the outhouse. What if the sewer clogs? Now were trapped into higher cost sewer service."
Get with the program people. The copper network is a dinosaur and cutting it off slowly as people willingly convert is the least disruptive way to let it die. Sooner or later everyone will have to convert. Don't like your FIOS, there are plenty of other options for everyone involved.
Fresh new patent lawyers with science and engineering degrees are getting $160,000 and up right out of law school.
0 5
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=11750726392
I believe that making intentional misstatements asserting patent rights that the owner knows to be invalid for the purpose of wrongfully suppressing competition is a violation of antitrust laws. But, IANAATL, if you have a particular concern that Microsoft's FUD affects you, then you should see an antitrust lawyer.
Did you read the proposed legislation or just the inflamatory headline? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot, so I will point out that the proposal of life in prison applies to those who sell counterfeit products (like rat poison pressed into little pills and sold as Viagra) that recklessly or intentionally result in death. So this is for your safety. You should be glad.
Actually:
35 USC 101 requires that patents be awarded only for useful inventions.
35 USC 112 requires that the disclosure of a patent enable a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention (without undue experimentation).
So, if a patent has been issued that claims something that does not work (is completely useless) or would require undue experimentation to figure out from the patent, then the patent is invalid. Many patents are invalidated on this basis. Contact your friendly local patent counsel for a real legal opinion.
With this system a user will have the added delay and distration of processing a stimulus that the system provides after the system processes the signals that would have lead to recognition of the threat except for the fact that the user's attention is being diverted to process the stimuls generated by the system.
Wouldn't it be more useful to simply provide better training to enhance the soldiers' awareness and response to instinctual signals?
That's all fine and lovely if all that is at stake is hurt feelings in a Usenet forum. An honest discussion and debate on matters relevant to a person's fitness to practice law might also be appropriate, if the accusers would make their complaints openly. But that is not what's happening here.
Here, as the article points out, because employers use Google to check on all candidates, and employers just won't touch anyone who stands out in any negative way, the slander and libel is causing real damages to the lives and careers of the victims of this sort of juvenile posting.
As another poster has pointed out here, there are ethics rules for lawyers that prohibit this sort of behavior. But the problem is not about lawyers; this sort of anonymous libel and slander can harm doctors, teachers, plumbers. The posters in the Autoadmit forum probably do not yet have an appreciation of the seriousness of this behavior. They think, what can a little flamewar hurt?
The people running the forum seem unwilling to provide even the barest amount of self regulation. That is a shame. Its not about feelings, its about people's lives and careers. Freedom of speech exceeds its limits when it impinges on the liberty of the victims to pursue their own lives in peace.
Libel and slander laws exist so that people do not have to resort to self-help solutions. (Historically, flamewars led to dueling with pistols at dawn. Ah, the good old days?) If the forum and the posters cannot regulate themselves to control the libel and slander, then they will be regulated by more laws, to the detriment of us all.
Ummm...
360 kWh / bulb
--------------- = 10 gal. gas [saved] / bulb (not 30 gal.)
36 kWh / gal gas
unless your math is different from the math I learned.
Its about "discovery" and "production." When a lawsuit is filed, the plaintiff gets the right to go on a fishing expedition in the defendant's files, emails, factories and to depose personnel. It is a burdensome and ridiculously expensive process for the defendant, who has to "produce" all the discovery material. And who knows what they might find? Even with a bogus claim, if the plaintiff's lawyers can survive long enough to force discovery, the cost and burden alone may make it worth Nintendo's money to just pay the plaintiff lawyers' "fees" to go away and send all Wii owners a $5 coupon for a Wii accessory in a "settlement" that is really a marketing campaign. That is at the heart of this game.
Of course, the cost of settlement is simply passed along to those poor saps that are represented by these lawyers in the higher cost of Wii games and accessories. Only the lawyers win.
No.
Generally, all extradition treaties have provision where country A will not extradite a person to country B unless the offense with which he is charged is a crime in country A.
For AU to extradite him to the US, the act he is charged with must be considered a crime by AU.
when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Fair?? Reporting prices simply levels the playing field between consumer and retailer, preventing the retailer from profiting from consumer ignorance.
IANAL, but I have studied the subject of copyright law.
Prices are facts. Facts are not copyrightable subject matter. An advertisment and its layout might be copyrightable, but a listing of the prices that are, or are expected to be, offered is not copyrightable.
The DMCA simply provides a mechanism for notice and removal of copyrighted subject matter. That process takes a few days to go through. The companies are well aware of what is copyrightable and what is not.
BestBuy may just hope that they can buy a few days of consumer ignorance because of the time it takes to go through the removal, consult a lawyer, and reinstatement of content process. They only need a few days for this strategy to be effective. After black friday, it doesn't actually matter much whether a court would find that the posted material constituted a copyright violation.
According to: http://www.msnbc.com/news/978433.asp?0cv=CB20
Future versions of the SunnComm software would include ways that the copy-protecting files would change their name on different computers, making them harder to find, Jacobs said. Moreover, the company will distribute the technology along with third-party software, so that it doesn't always come off a protected CD, he added.
"
"